Explorez tous les épisodes du podcast The Honest Take
| Titre | Date | Durée | |
|---|---|---|---|
| LIVE — Surviving October 7th: The Nova Festival Massacre and What Comes After It | With Shahar Horovitz | 08 oct. 2026 | 00:58:04 | |
Recorded live on October 7, 2026, three years to the day. Shahar Horovitz was 22 and had just come home from nine months of backpacking in South America when she went to the Nova music festival with about 30 of the friends she'd made on that trip. At 6:29 a.m. the music stopped. By 7:30 there were gunshots, and when she asked a police officer what to do, the officer told her: you have to run, I can't help you. She ran for hours through the fields of the Gaza envelope, lost her friends, and joined three strangers she found catching their breath under a tree. They hid in a greenhouse, called the police and were told to hide, and finally reached a farm run by a Bedouin farmer named Yunus. When terrorists came into the farm, they crawled under his office and lay there while armed men walked inches away. Yunus, hiding under a tractor, was found and told them the survivors had left. He saved eight people that day, and was later honored at the President's Residence. Shahar talks about thinking of her great-grandparents, Auschwitz survivors, while she lay under that building; going to five or six funerals in the first week; the guilt survivors carry; and why she gave herself and her friends new names in her book but kept the real names of the five friends who were killed. She also talks about recovering in New York, the stranger who called her book "biased" without reading it, the therapist who told her "you're not finished," and the text a friend sent her the day after: "You fought yesterday and you won. Keep winning." SHAHAR HOROVITZ Surviving October 7 (published in Hebrew as We Were the Sun), on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FV2SG227 We Were the Sun: https://www.wewerethesun.com/ THE HONEST TAKE Podcast: https://podcast.honestreporting.com Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-honest-take/id1896315802Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1pCnClcM4jiggKP46YZGjG YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLuF-lEHTGTw_RrfN9EP6pdWhgjMX7Fg5HonestReporting: https://honestreporting.com HonestReporting on X: https://x.com/HonestReporting The Honest Take is HonestReporting's weekly long-form interview show, hosted by Ben Chertoff. Every episode at podcast.honestreporting.com. If this conversation stayed with you, please leave The Honest Take a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the single biggest thing that helps new listeners find the show. | |||
| I Can't Believe You Fell for It: Why Antisemitism Is a Lie, Not a Prejudice | With Dara Horn | 06 oct. 2026 | 01:30:37 | |
A rabbi picks Dara Horn up at the airport and tells her what she's walking into. Someone had been posting online about murdering children on the playground of the town's Jewish day school, and then their parents in the carpool line. The horrible part, her host says, isn't the plot. It's who was behind it: the school's own security guard. After People Love Dead Jews, stories like that came to her by the hundreds, and one of her sisters started calling her the antisemitism Lorax. So October 8 didn't shock her. The speed and the organization of it did. Her new book, The Final Solution to the Jewish Question: A Love Story for the Living, argues that we've been fighting the wrong thing. We treat antisemitism as a prejudice, something you cure by building empathy. Horn says it works more like a con. "The lie is always the same. Jews are destroying what you value the most." Only the value changes. To capitalists the Jews are communists, and to communists they're capitalists. To racists they're race polluters, and to anti-racists they're racists. To human rights advocates, the world's only Jewish state is the world's worst violator of human rights. That changes the answer. Instead of debunking claims one at a time, which she compares to taking the stand in a show trial, Horn turns the question back on the people spreading the lie and asks who profits from it. When campus hecklers hand her a slogan, she answers it as if they meant the question, and she says the conversation usually ends right there. Her advice to students is that "you don't need a PhD to defeat an argument that's three words long." What they need is courage, and the discovery that far more people are standing behind them than they knew. Horn also talks about what she saw from inside the antisemitism advisory group Harvard's president convened after October 7, and why the student complaints there were about harassment, not slogans. She covers the 2001 UN conference in Durban, where crowds were already chanting what you hear on campus today. And she remembers the week a fact checker asked her to document pogroms from a century ago while the same paper put Hamas's account of the al-Ahli hospital blast in a banner headline. She closes on what the book's title means. Every Jew alive today is descended from someone who made a costly, countercultural choice. And for the young people chanting at her talks, she now feels something closer to sympathy than fear. Also in this episode: "kill the Jews, save the turtles"; the Z word and the J word; why antisemitism inside an institution is the tail end of its collapse, not the canary; the Talmud's Rabbi Yochanan and Resh Lakish, and why a study partner who agrees with you is useless; the Passover story as a story about burning down the palace; pre-bunking and the eight-lesson curriculum at The Tell Institute; the Muslim allies risking their lives, and the Pakistani journalist Imtiaz Mir; and New York City's new antisemitism plan ("Wait, how is it something?"). DARA HORN Dara Horn: https://www.darahorn.com The Final Solution to the Jewish Question: A Love Story for the Living (Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster): https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Final-Solution-to-the-Jewish-Question/Dara-Horn/9781668090169 Buy it at Bookshop: https://bookshop.org/a/1688/9781668090169 The Tell Institute: https://www.thetellinstitute.org REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE Bret Stephens, "For America's Jews, Every Day Must Be Oct. 8," The New York Times, Nov. 7, 2023: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/07/opinion/us-jewish-israel-sept-11.html American Muslim Multifaith Women's Empowerment Council (AMMWEC): https://ammwec.org NYC Mayor's Office, "Mayor Mamdani Unveils New York City's First Strategy to Combat Antisemitism," Sept. 29, 2026: https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/09/mayor-mamdani-unveils-new-york-city-s-first-strategy-to-combat-a Ben M. Freeman on The Honest Take, "The Broken Mirror": https://podcast.honestreporting.com/episodes/the-broken-mirror-internalized-antisemitism-the-non-jewish-gaze-and-why-jews-are-the-only-ones-who-get-to-define-what-jewish-means-ben-m-freeman Hillel Neuer on The Honest Take, on Durban and the genocide charge: https://podcast.honestreporting.com/episodes/a-verdict-waiting-for-a-trial-where-israel-is-committing-genocide-came-from-decades-before-gaza-with-hillel-neuer THE HONEST TAKE Podcast: https://podcast.honestreporting.com Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-honest-take/id1896315802 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1pCnClcM4jiggKP46YZGjG YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLuF-lEHTGTw_RrfN9EP6pdWhgjMX7Fg5 HonestReporting: https://honestreporting.com HonestReporting on X: https://x.com/HonestReporting The Honest Take is HonestReporting's weekly long-form interview show — 60 to 90 minutes, recorded remotely, hosted by Ben Chertoff. Every episode at podcast.honestreporting.com. If this one gave you something to argue about at your own table, please leave The Honest Take a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the single biggest thing that helps new listeners find the show. | |||
| What Really Happened After October 7: Inside Israel's War Room, and the Press That Got It Wrong | With Elliot Kaufman | 29 sept. 2026 | 01:08:07 | |
"If you are Hamas, you have to be laughing at how easily you can play the international and American news media." For Elliot Kaufman, the coverage turned ten days in, when the blast at al-Ahli hospital was reported around the world as an Israeli strike that had killed hundreds. He points out that it was a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket that landed in the hospital's parking lot. From there, he argues, the war was told as if Hamas weren't in it: not in the footage, not in the casualty counts, not in the story of the aid. He's just as blunt about Israel's own failures. On aid, he says, "I don't think Israel messed up on the PR there. I think Israel messed up. Period." Kaufman is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board, and he writes about Israel and Iran. With Yonah Jeremy Bob of The Jerusalem Post, he wrote In the War Room: The Inside Story of Israel's Fight Against Hamas and the Iranian Axis. The two reported it while the war was still going on. They interviewed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Benny Gantz, who made up the original war cabinet, along with Jake Sullivan, Steve Witkoff and more than a hundred Israeli military officials. The Netanyahu in the book is not the one most coverage describes. Kaufman argues that in the opening weeks he was the brake. He held back Gallant's plan to hit Hezbollah first. On October 11, 2023, Israeli warplanes were already in the air to strike Hezbollah when radar picked up what looked like paragliders crossing from Lebanon; they turned out to be geese, and the planes were called back. Kaufman says the whole war could have turned on that one misreading. Netanyahu then spent the 20 days between October 7 and the October 27 ground invasion holding back the push into Gaza. Kaufman says the IDF had no plan on the shelf for a full invasion of Gaza at all. His verdict on the war that followed is that Israel didn't go too far in Gaza. "I think it fought for too long," he says, because under a raid-and-leave strategy troops had to fight for the same neighborhoods again and again. Then the conversation comes home to Brooklyn. In 2021 Kaufman went back to the 1991 Crown Heights riot for the Journal. For three nights, Jews in the neighborhood hid in their homes while rioters threw bricks through their windows, and Yankel Rosenbaum was stabbed and killed. His argument is that the police stood back and the press filed the violence as a racial clash, when the actual story was antisemitism. He closes on hope, and on a warning. He argues that the practical, interest-based case for Israel as an ally has never been stronger. He's worried about the right as well as the left: "The subtext of, say, the Tucker Carlson Show isn't that all Jews are evil. It's that all evil is Jewish." Also in this episode: the joke Kaufman heard from the Prime Minister's Office about a "two-state solution" (Michigan and Nevada); the Students for Justice in Palestine toolkit sent to campus chapters on October 8, 2023; the advice Gallant got from General David Petraeus; what Netanyahu's own 2022 memoir predicted about invading Gaza; a documentary's claim about civilian-casualty approvals, set against the strike on Mohammed Deif; and how the war looks from Tehran. ELLIOT KAUFMAN Elliot Kaufman at The Wall Street Journal: https://www.wsj.com/news/author/elliot-kaufman Elliot Kaufman at Simon & Schuster: https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Elliot-Kaufman/260068537 REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE Elliot Kaufman, "Could the Crown Heights Riots Recur?" The Wall Street Journal, Aug. 20, 2021: https://www.wsj.com/opinion/crown-heights-riot-hasidic-jews-black-chabad-dinkins-giuliani-brooklyn-new-york-11629481962 WSJ Opinion, "'Get the Jew': The Crown Heights Riot Revisited" (documentary): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpjLx-8xyJQ Matti Friedman on The Honest Take, "The Familiar Villain": https://share.transistor.fm/s/5f71c087 THE HONEST TAKE Podcast: https://podcast.honestreporting.com Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-honest-take/id1896315802Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1pCnClcM4jiggKP46YZGjG YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLuF-lEHTGTw_RrfN9EP6pdWhgjMX7Fg5HonestReporting: https://honestreporting.com HonestReporting on X: https://x.com/HonestReporting The Honest Take is HonestReporting's weekly long-form interview show — 60 to 90 minutes, recorded remotely, hosted by Ben Chertoff. Every episode at podcast.honestreporting.com. If this episode changed how you think about the first draft of this war, please leave The Honest Take a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the single biggest thing that helps new listeners find the show. | |||
| A Is for Apple, M Is for Martyr: How Schoolbooks Teach The Next Generation to Hate Israel | With Marcus Sheff | 22 sept. 2026 | 01:01:43 | |
A fourth-grade math textbook asks Palestinian children to add the number of martyrs killed in the First Intifada to the number killed in the Second. A physics lesson teaches Newton's second law using a boy with a slingshot aimed at an Israeli soldier. A first-grade Arabic book introduces the letter ha with two words: attack, and martyr. Marcus Sheff runs the institute that found all of it. He was a political reporter, then an editor at The Jerusalem Post, then a foreign correspondent, and then he ran a communications firm — and now he is CEO of IMPACT-se, the Jerusalem-based research institute that reads school textbooks across the Middle East and Europe line by line and grades them against UNESCO's own standards on peace, tolerance and non-violence. His analysts go through every line of every book of every subject of every grade; one country can mean 350 textbooks in a year. The Syrian report is 300 pages. His central claim is not that the books are offensive. It is that they are predictive. "Textbooks are remarkable political predictors," Sheff says. "What children are taught today in classrooms all over the world is a pretty good indication of what the country is going to be like in ten years' time." A fourteen-year-old reading a physics problem about throwing rocks is twenty-four in a decade, and a fully formed member of a society. What a regime prints is what it intends. Sheff walks through what IMPACT-se found in the Palestinian Authority curriculum and why he reads it as strategy rather than accident: the peace agreements that used to be in the books — Israel and Egypt, Israel and Jordan, the Wye Accords — were taken out when the curriculum was rewritten between 2016 and 2018, leaving only a dismissive account of Oslo, along with the letter Yasser Arafat wrote to Yitzhak Rabin renouncing violence, which was doctored. None of that, he argues, happens by accident. It was done at the top, in the open, with the international community in the room. Then there is UNRWA — the UN agency that runs most of the schools in Gaza, teaches the Palestinian Authority curriculum in them, and has produced some of its own supplementary material besides, one piece of which describes an attack on a bus full of Israeli civilians as a barbecue party. Sheff testified to the committee the UN set up to investigate the agency after October 7; IMPACT-se was the only nonprofit asked. He describes what the committee recommended and what happened next, which was very little. The obvious objection gets its turn: does any of this actually change anyone, and isn't the whole thing impossible to fix anyway? Sheff's answer is the most useful thing on the tape. Changing a curriculum is not hard. These are thin, magazine-format books, reprinted constantly, and the world has two billion children in school — it is not short of experience in producing textbooks. The refusal is not technical. "This is not a pedagogical question," he says. "This is a political question." He also turns the same standards on Israel — IMPACT-se examines the Israeli curriculum, he says, more comprehensively than any other — and describes what the Ministry of Education's civics textbook actually teaches Israeli children about 1948, including the Palestinian account of it. And there is a genuinely hopeful half to this. The Palestinian Authority curriculum is not the regional norm; it is the outlier. The United Arab Emirates rebuilt its textbooks first. Saudi Arabia has been reforming its curriculum since 2020. Morocco's books, built on the country's 2011 constitutional reform, treat the Jewish community and the Amazigh as part of the Moroccan tapestry, right down to a photograph of a Muslim family at a Jewish Friday night table. Central Asia is doing better on antisemitism than much of Western Europe, where Sheff calls the picture a mixed bag and puts Ireland at the bottom of it. Also in this episode: what the analysts physically do with a stack of several hundred textbooks; why UNESCO doesn't conduct this kind of country-level review itself; the fact that Hamas, on taking Gaza, did not change a word of the curriculum Fatah wrote in Ramallah; why the US withdrew its UNRWA funding after IMPACT-se testified in Congress; what Sheff would say if he had one sentence in front of the UN General Assembly; and where his hope comes from after a career spent reading the worst material anyone produces. MARCUS SHEFF AND IMPACT-se IMPACT-se: https://www.impact-se.org/ All IMPACT-se reports and research: https://www.impact-se.org/blog/ Marcus Sheff, Washington Institute expert bio: https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/experts/marcus-sheff-0 IMPACT-se team page: https://www.impact-se.org/about-us/team-impact/ REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE Sheff's written testimony to the US House Foreign Affairs Committee, "UNRWA Exposed," Jan 30 2024: https://chrissmith.house.gov/uploadedfiles/2024-1-30-_witness_testimony_of_marcus_sheff.pdf IMPACT-se, "Analyzing UNRWA's Response" — the July 2 2026 review of UNRWA's compliance with the Colonna Report, including the eighth-grade Arabic textbook: https://impact-se.org/publication/analysing-unrwas-response-to-the-un-independent-review-colonna-report/ IMPACT-se, "Review of the 2025-2026 Palestinian Authority School Curriculum, Grades 1-12," November 2025 — 290 textbooks and 71 teacher guides: https://www.impact-se.org/wp-content/uploads/Review-of-the-2025-2026-Palestinian-Authority-School-Curriculum-v2.pdf IMPACT-se, "Review of UNRWA Schools Headed by Hamas Principals," Nov 10 2024: https://impact-se.org/publication/review-of-unrwa-schools-headed-by-hamas-principals/ IMPACT-se, "When Peace Goes to School: The Emirati Curriculum 2016–21": https://www.impact-se.org/wp-content/uploads/When-Peace-Goes-to-School_The-Emirati-Curriculum-2016%E2%80%9321.pdf IMPACT-se, "Review of Saudi Textbooks 2024–2026," July 2026: https://impact-se.org/publication/review-of-saudi-textbooks-2024-2026/ IMPACT-se, "In Syria, the Real Foreign Policy Is Written in the Classroom," July 21 2026: https://impact-se.org/publication/in-syria-the-real-foreign-policy-is-written-in-the-classroom/ IMPACT-se, "Review of the Jordanian Curriculum 2025–2026," Aug 11 2026: https://impact-se.org/publication/review-of-the-jordanian-curriculum-2025-2026/ US Government Accountability Office, GAO-26-107708 — gaps in State Department reporting on UNRWA textbook content, Jan 8 2026: https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-26-107708 Dr. Charles Asher Small on The Honest Take, "Follow the Money: How the Muslim Brotherhood Bought a Seat in America's Schools": https://share.transistor.fm/s/a2cab... | |||
| Who Are We, and What Do We Owe? A Chagim Special on Jewish Pride and Memory | With Ben M. Freeman, Yossi Klein Halevi & More | 17 sept. 2026 | 00:34:45 | |
"The greatest achievement of the Jewish people is not Israel. The greatest achievement of the Jewish people is the Jewish people." That's Ben M. Freeman, and that's where this episode starts. Most weeks on The Honest Take, we spend an hour with one guest. This week is different. We're in the Ten Days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the stretch when you're supposed to sit down and take an honest accounting of yourself. So we went back through the conversations on this show and pulled the moments that had nothing to do with the news cycle. Nobody in this episode is going to tell you what's being done to us. You already know that. Instead, nine people take on a harder question: Who are we? What do we actually know about ourselves? And what do we owe the people who handed this to us? Ben M. Freeman, founder of the Jewish Pride movement, explains why Jews are a people, a nation and a civilization, not only a religion, and why "religions don't have homelands." Rawan Osman grew up in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley and spent seven years reading her way out of what she was taught about Jews. She describes what she found when she finally walked into a synagogue, and tells young Jews that being born a Jew "is like winning the lottery." Yossi Klein Halevi of the Shalom Hartman Institute names the failure: "We have the most compelling national story out there… And we're not telling it." Dr. Henry Green, founder of Sephardi Voices, turns the same charge inward. Nearly every Jewish community marks Yom HaShoah, and almost none mark Yom HaPlitim, the day that honors the Jews who left the Arab world. Author Meg Keene says the community is going to have to build its own institutions, and pay for them. Brigadier General Amir Avivi argues that security starts with spirit and purpose, and that a nation that has been around for thousands of years should be able to think a thousand years ahead. Alana Newhouse, founder and editor-in-chief of Tablet, says Zionism is "not something that we picked up at Walmart 20 years ago," and lays out four survival tests that, she argues, only Israel in the West currently passes. Shai Davidai, who was teaching at Columbia Business School on October 7, explains what he decided to do after getting punched in the face. And Arnold Roth, whose daughter Malki was murdered in the 2001 Sbarro bombing in Jerusalem, answers the question of what still gives him hope: "I'm a Jew. I'm a proud Jew." From all of us at HonestReporting, g'mar chatima tova. If this episode was worth your time, send it to someone who needs it, and leave a rating and a review. It genuinely helps other people find the show.
Every guest in this episode sat down with Ben for a full-length episode of The Honest Take.
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| A Verdict Waiting for a Trial: Where 'Israel Is Committing Genocide' Came From, Decades Before Gaza | With Hillel Neuer | 15 sept. 2026 | 00:39:49 | |
"Israel is committing genocide." It's a sentence heard every day since October 7, and it is far older than the war. Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch in Geneva, returns to The Honest Take to trace where the charge came from, and how it was in circulation decades before the war it is now used to describe. Neuer traces the vocabulary back to Soviet propaganda that he says probably began in the 1950s, and to the UN's 1975 "Zionism is racism" resolution, which was repealed in 1991. A decade later it was revived at the UN World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, which the United States and Israel walked out of 25 years ago this month. As Neuer puts it, "a conference that was supposed to be against racism became a conference that promoted racism." Marchers equated Zionism with Nazism. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were handed out as literature. A parallel NGO Forum adopted a declaration accusing Israel of "acts of genocide," "Israel's brand of apartheid" and "racist crimes against humanity." At the time, Human Rights Watch's Reed Brody, while accusing Israel of "serious crimes against Palestinian people," told CNN that "it is simply not accurate to use the word genocide." Congressman Tom Lantos, the only Holocaust survivor ever to serve in Congress, called the conference "the most sickening and unabashed display of hate for Jews I had seen since the Nazi period." Neuer argues that the charge never went away. The same accusation now comes from UN mechanisms, including the Human Rights Council's commission of inquiry and Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese. The UN is still marking the anniversary. On Monday, September 28, the General Assembly holds a high-level meeting to commemorate 25 years since the adoption of the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action. The resolution setting it up passed in July, 142 to 3 with 13 abstentions; Argentina, Israel and the United States voted no. Ten countries pulled out of the 2009 Durban Review Conference in Geneva, and 38 boycotted the General Assembly's 20th-anniversary meeting in 2021. UN Watch is asking democracies to stay away again. Also in this episode: Secretary-General António Guterres telling the Financial Times that many UN special rapporteurs are "totally out of control, from the point of view of the Secretariat," and his spokesman's clarification days later; Deborah Lipstadt's account that Guterres privately called Albanese "a horrible person"; and Neuer's answer to Albanese's defamation charge: "Please go ahead and sue me. Make my day." SIGN THE PETITION UN Watch — Durban 25 petition: https://unwatch.org/petition-pull-out-of-uns-antisemitic-durban-25-meeting/ UN Watch — Durban 25 campaign and boycott history: https://unwatch.org/durban-25/ HILLEL NEUER AND UN WATCH UN Watch: https://unwatch.org Hillel Neuer on X: https://x.com/HillelNeuer UN Watch on X: https://x.com/UNWatch REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE UN High-Level Week 2026 (the September 28 Durban meeting): https://www.un.org/en/high-level-week-2026 UN press release GA/12774 — the July 28, 2026 vote, 142–3–13: https://press.un.org/en/2026/ga12774.doc.htm Resolution text, A/80/L.93: https://docs.un.org/A/80/L.93 US Mission to the UN — explanation of vote: https://usun.usmission.gov/explanation-of-vote-for-unga-resolution-scope-modalities-format-and-organization-of-the-high-level-meeting-of-the-general-assembly/ Durban 2001 NGO Forum Declaration (full text): https://www.adalah.org/uploads/oldfiles/eng/intladvocacy/ngoforumdecl.htm CNN, Sept. 2, 2001 — the NGO Forum declaration, and Human Rights Watch on the genocide charge: https://edition.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/africa/09/02/durban.racism/index.html CNN, Sept. 3, 2001 — the US and Israel walk out: https://edition.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/africa/09/03/racism.reaction/index.html UN Watch — Tom Lantos and other voices on the 2001 NGO Forum: https://unwatch.org/leading-international-voices-on-the-2001-durban-ngo-forum/ UN Watch — 25 Years After Durban (Feb. 2026): https://unwatch.org/25-years-after-durban-antisemitism-repackaged-as-human-rights/ James Loeffler, Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Yale): https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300217247/rooted-cosmopolitans/ NGO Monitor: https://ngo-monitor.org Guterres: Hamas attacks "did not happen in a vacuum" (Fortune, Oct. 2023): https://fortune.com/2023/10/25/un-secretary-general-says-hamas-attack-did-not-happen-in-vacuum-guterres-israel/ UN Watch — Guterres on rapporteurs "totally out of control," and Lipstadt's account: https://unwatch.org/un-chief-guterres-admits-special-rapporteurs-are-totally-out-of-control-after-privately-calling-francesca-albanese-a-horrible-person/ Jerusalem Post — the UN spokesman's clarification: https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-906973 UN Watch — Albanese tells Middle East Eye the Secretary-General never spoke to her: https://unwatch.org/francesca-albanese-says-un-chief-never-spoke-to-her-and-expects-he-never-will/ Hillel Neuer's first Honest Take episode (March 24, 2026): https://honestreporting.com/the-un-is-broken-how-hillel-neuer-is-fighting-the-uns-anti-israel-machine-from-the-inside/ THE HONEST TAKE Podcast: https://podcast.honestreporting.com Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-honest-take/id1896315802 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1pCnClcM4jiggKP46YZGjG YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLuF-lEHTGTw_RrfN9EP6pdWhgjMX7Fg5 HonestReporting: https://honestreporting.com HonestReporting on X: https://x.com/HonestReporting If this episode changed what you hear when someone says "apartheid" or "genocide," please leave The Honest Take a rating and review o... | |||
| "Israel Probably Did 9/11": How a Settled Conspiracy Came Back | With James B. Meigs & Michael Shermer | 08 sept. 2026 | 01:31:05 | |
"'Yeah, Israel probably did 9/11. I wouldn't put it past them.' That is one more thing people can put in their knapsack of arguments for why Israel is a uniquely evil country. And I'm just not sure how we're going to argue these people out of it." That's James B. Meigs, and he has been arguing with these people for twenty years. In 2005, Popular Mechanics did what almost no newsroom was willing to do: it took the 9/11 truther claims seriously enough to test them one at a time, and it published what it found. Meigs was the editor-in-chief. He spent the next two decades being told he was part of the cover-up. Twenty-five years after the attacks, the same claims are circulating again — with one substitution. "The government did it" has become "Israel did it." Same anomalies. Same absence of evidence. New target. Ben Chertoff, who managed the reporters on that Popular Mechanics investigation and ran its fact-checking, is joined by Meigs and by Michael Shermer — founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, a Scientific American columnist for eighteen years, and the author of Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational, Denying History, and Truth: What It Is, How to Find It, Why It Matters. They take the machinery apart. Proportionality bias — the intuition that an enormous event must have an enormous cause, and that nineteen men with box cutters cannot be the whole story. Anomaly hunting, and why a handful of loose threads feels more persuasive than a mountain of settled evidence. The Gish Gallop, and why a claim you can make in one sentence takes three thousand words to refute. And the part that should trouble everyone: how material that originated with Holocaust deniers and professional antisemites — a full-page New York Times ad in 2004, a seismic-spike claim traced to the American Free Press — ended up circulating among people who considered themselves liberal, progressive and open-minded, because they liked where it pointed. Also in this episode: what happened to Tucker Carlson between 2012 and 2025. Why thermite and Building 7 refuse to die. How the goalposts moved from "made it happen on purpose" to "let it happen on purpose." Why every new story now routes through the Mossad. What it would actually cost to pay off everyone who would have to stay quiet. And what you say to a family member who believes this, without sounding condescending. Guests: James B. Meigs, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, columnist for the Wall Street Journal's "Free Expression" newsletter, and former editor-in-chief of Popular Mechanics, where he ran the 2005 "Debunking 9/11 Myths" investigation. He also writes for City Journal and Commentary. Michael Shermer, founding publisher of Skeptic magazine and author of Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational. If this episode was useful, a rating and a review genuinely helps other people find it.
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| BONUS: They Counted Terrorists as Journalists — Then Quietly Removed Them | Erin Molan, Salo Aizenberg, Leslie Kajomovitz, Gabriel Epstein | 04 sept. 2026 | 00:46:32 | |
"CPJ has dozens of names where they claim the journalist died on a dangerous assignment, while the description says they died in their home. So use a little bit of logic and tell me — how can a journalist be on a dangerous assignment while they're in their own home?" That is Leslie Kajomovitz, near the end of this panel. On June 25, the Committee to Protect Journalists announced it was reviewing its own database of journalists killed since October 7. The reason was not an outside investigation. It was that Hamas and Islamic Jihad had begun publishing obituaries for their own fighters — and some of those fighters were already on CPJ's list. CPJ has since removed eight people for taking part in hostilities, and another seven for not meeting its own definition of a journalist. The review cost the organization a board member: Nika Soon-Shiong, publisher of Drop Site News, was ousted as the audit went forward. The International Federation of Journalists quietly dropped eight terrorism-linked names from its own list and has still offered no explanation for why. HonestReporting's research puts it further than CPJ has been willing to go: over half of the people on CPJ's October 7 War database are operatives or carry a documented affiliation with a terrorist organization. And the number that gets least attention is CPJ's own. In its 2025 annual report, CPJ counted 52 journalist deaths in Gaza — and determined that only 18 of them were targeted by Israel. The other 34, by CPJ's own finding, were killed in the course of the conflict and not specifically targeted. Of the 86 deaths CPJ attributed to Israel worldwide that year, 31 worked for the Houthi public relations department's newspapers in Yemen. Erin Molan puts it to the panel: why did so many organizations reach for the "Israel is hunting journalists" narrative, how did so many combatants get counted as press, what does it cost real journalists when the label is handed out this cheaply — and why has almost no newsroom that ran the original story gone back to correct it. Panel: Salo Aizenberg, author and researcher and a HonestReporting board member; Leslie Kajomovitz, twenty-plus years in international news; and Gabriel Epstein, Senior Policy Associate at the Israel Policy Forum. Moderated by journalist and broadcaster Erin Molan. Recorded live on August 5, 2026, as part of HonestReporting's Let's Get Honest series.
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| Someone Should Give Soros a Shower: How Antisemitism Learned to Hide From the Keyword Filters | With Dr. Matthias Becker | 01 sept. 2026 | 01:15:45 | |
When most of us picture antisemitism online, we picture a swastika, a slur, a guy in a dark room. Matthias Becker will tell you that's the part that barely matters. He's not a political scientist. He's a linguist. For more than a decade he has been reading the comments — not on fringe platforms, but under the BBC, The Guardian, Le Monde. His project, Decoding Antisemitism, has now been through 300,000-plus comments across Britain, France and Germany, and what it found is that roughly 80% of the antisemitism in those mainstream spaces never uses a slur at all. It hides in a joke. In a rhetorical question. In a name dropped like a password. Below an article about George Soros, someone writes: someone should give George Soros a shower. No slur, no threat, nothing a keyword filter will ever catch — and everyone who needs to understand it, does. Which means, as Becker puts it, that nearly every statistic you have read about online hate is built on sand. This conversation covers what actually changed on October 7 — the shift from demonizing Israel to openly celebrating the murder of Israelis, and the overlap with misogyny he had never seen before. It covers his event studies of Charlie Kirk, the Capital Jewish Museum, the White House Correspondents' Dinner attack, and Dan Bilzerian's congressional run — where the single video that pushed back on him drew the most antisemitism of any in the set, over 50%. It covers why he thinks surveys can't measure this and comment sections can. And it covers what he now tells the AI companies, whose guardrails he is trying to help build. He is, after ten years in the worst of it, not a cynic. His argument is that the same technology that lets one person manufacture a wave of propaganda is the first tool we've had that is powerful enough to read the flood back. Related episode: Ashley Rindsberg, "Garbage In, Gospel Out: Wikipedia, Reddit, and the Battle Over Truth" — Becker names Wikipedia and Reddit on tape as the stumbling block feeding these models. Rindsberg's episode is how that pipeline got poisoned; Becker's is what it costs downstream — https://share.transistor.fm/s/cdb2fdb2
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| The Soviet Factory That Built Modern Anti-Zionism | With Izabella Tabarovsky | 25 août 2026 | 01:37:16 | |
In 2018, Izabella Tabarovsky walked past a protest on an American campus and recognized the signs. Not the sentiment — the sentences. She called her father in Russian and read them out. His answer: we've heard all of this before. She grew up in Soviet Siberia, in a Jewish city with no synagogues, where the word "Jew" was a line on an internal passport and Jewish applicants to math departments were handed problems known as "coffin problems," because they would bury you. So she went looking for the paper trail — and found one. The Soviet Union didn't merely dislike Israel. It assigned the problem to research institutes and told them to build a scientific-sounding case against Zionism. The volumes they produced look like scholarship. They have footnotes, endnotes, citations to Hannah Arendt and to Herzl. Tabarovsky sat in the National Library of Israel and checked those citations one at a time. They're fake. Real quotes turned to mean the opposite of what they meant. From there the trail runs out of Moscow and into a UN resolution, into Mahmoud Abbas's Soviet dissertation, and into an American Communist Party book that a successor organization quietly serialized "for our young readers" one month after October 7th. A conversation about where the vocabulary came from, why it outlived the state that built it, and what a nineteen-year-old is supposed to do about it now. Her book is Be a Refusenik: A Jewish Student's Survival Guide, with a foreword by Natan Sharansky. Related episode: Shai Davidai, "Elite, Educated, Antisemitic: How Academia Fosters Jew Hate." Tabarovsky traces where this vocabulary was manufactured; Davidai traces how the American university taught a generation to hear it as justice. The guest
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| BONUS: The Storming of Al-Aqsa: The 1928 Lie, the Hebron Massacre, and When the Reporting Got It Right | With Yardena Schwartz | 23 août 2026 | 00:49:03 | |
In 1928, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was a man in trouble — dogged by accusations of corruption and nepotism. So he told a story: the Jews praying at the Western Wall were coming for Al-Aqsa. It worked. The criticism dissolved, and a year later 67 Jews were murdered in Hebron, ending a Jewish presence there that had lasted millennia. Journalist Yardena Schwartz spent years tracing that lie — from a box of letters in a Memphis attic, to the Mufti's wartime estate in Berlin, to October 7th, when Hamas named its attack the Al-Aqsa Flood. Her book is Ghosts of a Holy War. This week marks 97 years since the Hebron massacre. In 1929, The New York Times reported it plainly as a massacre of unarmed Jews, and New Yorkers marched in protest. Those articles are still sitting in the paper's archive. Almost nobody has gone back to read them. A re-release of the conversation that opened this show. The guest
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| A Failure of Imagination: Why the West Keeps Betting its Enemies will Come Around| With Cliff May | 18 août 2026 | 01:04:45 | |
A sixth-grade teacher in an American public school gets flown to Doha. First class, five-star hotel. Nobody asks her for anything — they just send her home with some curriculum, some textbooks and a few maps. Cliff May founded the Foundation for Defense of Democracies one week before 9/11. He'd spent a decade at the New York Times before that, so he knows how a story gets built. In this conversation he traces one lie from Soviet disinformation desks to "Israel pushed us into Iraq" to "Israel is dragging us into Iran" to whatever version is in your feed tonight — and argues it isn't a rumor problem, it's a purchase. An influence operation doesn't need you to say nice things about Qatar. It only needs you talking about somebody else. A week before the towers came down, two people walked into Cliff May's office to tell him the country was asleep. Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ronald Reagan's ambassador to the UN, and Jack Kemp, the former congressman and Housing and Urban Development secretary, had a thesis and nobody to test it. America, they said, was taking a holiday from history — the Wall was down, the Soviet Union was gone, and the country had decided it no longer had enemies. Then they read him a list: Beirut in 1983. New York in 1993. Saudi Arabia in 1996. Two embassies in Africa in 1998. The USS Cole in 2000. "Is anybody looking at these and trying to connect the dots?" He took the assignment. Nine days later he had an answer he hadn't gone looking for, and the rest of his career — he quit the New York Times and built the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. This conversation is about what he's watched since. Not only the conspiracy theories that trail every American war — the Jews were warned about 9/11, Israel pushed America into Iraq, Israel is dragging America toward Iran — but the habit underneath them: a West that keeps betting its adversaries will eventually come around. Iran in 1979 and China after the WTO already ran that experiment and already returned the result. And then the part that costs money. May's argument is that the deflection is bought, not merely believed — and that an influence operation doesn't have to purchase silence about itself, only a different subject. He describes the offer made to junior people around Washington, the reach of that money into American K-12 classrooms, and why "don't talk about us, talk about the Jews" is the cheapest line item on the menu. In this episode: • Kirkpatrick, Kemp, and the memo that became FDD — written the week before 9/11 • Why he says the 1979 revolution in Iran was Islamic, not Iranian, and how al-Qaeda grew out of it • Misinformation versus disinformation, and why a platform now does for free what the KGB needed a service to do • Mearsheimer and Walt went looking for foreign influence over US policy — and walked past the largest source of it • What hundreds of billions of dollars actually buys in Washington • The sixth-grade teacher who flew first class to Doha, and the curriculum she brought home • Carlos the Jackal's prison book, and the coalition it argued for • 1979: the Iranian communists who joined the revolution and were jailed and executed by the state they helped build • Twelver Shiism, the Mahdi, and what "reconcile competing interests" means when the interest is death to America • Why letting China into the WTO was, in his words, a noble experiment that already returned its result • The cognitive war Israel is winning on the ground and losing on the screen • Yahya Sinwar: "I don't want a villa. I don't want a Mercedes." • Why he thinks the K-12 finding is more disturbing than the campus one Guest: Clifford D. May is the founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the host of the Foreign Podicy podcast. He spent a decade at the New York Times as a city reporter, a foreign correspondent in Africa, a Washington correspondent and an editor of the Sunday magazine. His essay "Know Thine Enemy" was published in April 2026. More at https://www.fdd.org Mentioned in this episode: • Martin Kramer, Ivory Towers on Sand — https://iupress.org/9780253045041/israel-denial/ (note: link is a placeholder — see production notes) • John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, "The Israel Lobby" • Matt Pottinger, chair of FDD's China Program • FDD, Mapping Qatar's Footprint in the United States — https://www.fdd.org/qatarmoneyusa The Honest Take is HonestReporting's interview show — going past the headlines to find out what's actually true about Israel and about the people covering it. Hosted by Ben Chertoff. 🎧 All episodes: https://podcast.honestreporting.com 🍏 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-honest-take/id1896315802 🟢 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1pCnClcM4jiggKP46YZGjG ▶️ Watch on YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLuF-lEHTGTw_RrfN9EP6pdWhgjMX7Fg5 If this gave you something to think about, do us a favor — leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the single biggest thing that helps other people find the show. Follow HonestReporting on Instagram, X, TikTok and Facebook. | |||
| The Jews Are Not the Target. The West Is. Can Zionism Save It? | With Alana Newhouse | 11 août 2026 | 00:58:38 | |
Alana Newhouse founded Tablet Magazine in 2009 and has spent the years since arguing that the things holding modern life together have quietly come apart. Her 2021 essay "Everything Is Broken" gave that condition a name — flatness — and her March 2026 essay "Zionism for Everyone" turned the diagnosis outward: Zionism, she argues, is not a slogan or a grievance but a technology for national renewal, and the reason it enrages people has less to do with Jews than with what its success implies about everybody else. Ben Chertoff sits down with her for a conversation that runs from why Gen Z readers demanded a print edition, to the line about envy that lit up Jewish Twitter, to whether the word "Zionism" should be retired, to what she'd tell a 25-year-old journalist trying to build something real in a collapsing media landscape. Her answer to the last one is the same as her answer to the first: figure out what is distinct about you, build a vision around it, and jam on it every single day. Alana Newhouse is the founder and editor-in-chief of Tablet Magazine, which she launched in 2009 and which relaunched in print in 2025 on the strength of demand from its youngest readers. She grew up in Lawrence, New York, and was educated at the Hebrew Academy of the Five Towns and Rockaway, Barnard College, and the Columbia Journalism School. Before Tablet she covered religion and then edited the culture section at The Forward, and edited Nextbook. Her 2021 essay "Everything Is Broken" introduced the idea of flatness and gave rise to what's since been called brokenism; her March 2026 essay "Zionism for Everyone" argues that Zionism is a technology of national renewal available to any people willing to use it.
Links 🎧 Listen and subscribe: https://podcast.honestreporting.com 🎧 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-honest-take/id1896315802 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1pCnClcM4jiggKP46YZGjG Guest: • Tablet Magazine — https://www.tabletmag.com • "Zionism for Everyone," Alana Newhouse, Tablet, March 2026 — https://www.tabletmag.com/feature/zionism-for-everyone • "Everything Is Broken," Alana Newhouse, Tablet, January 14, 2021 — https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/everything-is-broken • Alana Newhouse on 18Forty — https://18forty.org/podcast/alana-newhouse/ • Alana Newhouse on The Unspeakable with Meghan Daum — https://www.theunspeakablepodcast.com/p/alana-newhouse-flatness-broken-systems-tablet-magazine Referenced in this episode: • Daniel Gordis's response to "Zionism for Everyone" — https://danielgordis.substack.com/p/i-think-israelis-would-have-a-hard • Irwin Kula's response, via Shaul Magid — https://shaulmagid.substack.com/p/irwin-kulas-response-to-alana-newhouse • "Is jealousy the root of anti-Zionism?", Jerusalem Post — https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-893186 • Gil Troy on the argument for retiring "Zionism," Jerusalem Post, June 18, 2026 — https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-899675 • Columbia Journalism Review on the American Jewish press after October 7, January 2025 — https://www.cjr.org/world/front-row-seat-polarization-american-jewish-press-october-7-hamas-israel-zionist-coverage.php | |||
| What "Globalize the Intifada" Actually Means, From Someone Who Lived It | With Arnold Roth | 09 août 2026 | 01:04:10 | |
Twenty-five years ago, sixteen people were murdered at the Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem. One was Arnold Roth's fifteen-year-old daughter, Malki. The woman who planned it is free in Jordan, wanted by the FBI with a $5 million reward on her head — and has never once said she's sorry. Arnold Roth on what the intifada actually was, why "suicide bomber" is the wrong phrase, and the thing he built in his daughter's name that is still doing good every single day. On August 9, 2001, a young man walked into a pizzeria in the center of Jerusalem carrying a guitar case. It was a school holiday. The restaurant was full. A few minutes before two o'clock he pressed a button on his chest, and sixteen people were murdered — one of them Malki Roth, fifteen years old, a flautist who spent her holidays volunteering with severely disabled children because her own little sister was one. Her father Arnold spent the next twelve hours not knowing where she was. He has spent the twenty-five years since trying to bring the woman who planned the attack to justice, and he is still trying. Ahlam Tamimi was twenty-one. She was Jordanian, from a comfortable family, and she chose the target. She was sentenced to sixteen life terms, released in the 2011 Gilad Shalit exchange, and returned to Jordan to a hero's welcome — where she has lived openly ever since. She is on the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists list. The United States has a five-million-dollar reward out for her. She has never expressed regret; she has said publicly that her only disappointment is that she didn't kill more. In this conversation, Ben asks Arnold to do something he says he doesn't get asked to do often: not to make the legal case — he's made that a thousand times, and he makes it here too — but to describe what the Second Intifada actually was, for the benefit of people who chant its name and could not tell you a single thing that happened during it. More than a thousand Israelis were killed between 2000 and 2005 in a country of six million. Also in this episode: the phone call from the BBC on the Sunday after the funeral, offering to pair him with the bomber's father for "contrasting views"; the four and a half years Tamimi spent hosting a weekly television program on Jordanian soil while already under US indictment; the AP crew that interviewed her in her own home; and why Arnold says he would simply walk away from the student at Columbia in a keffiyeh — not because he's given up, but because he thinks the entire problem has been misdiagnosed and the real fix is generational, unglamorous, and hasn't been invented yet. And then the part he saves for the end. Asked what has kept him going, he doesn't talk about extradition. He talks about the seven days of mourning, sitting in his own house with his children, deciding to build something. What they built helps families keep severely disabled children at home instead of surrendering them to an institution. It is now in its twenty-fifth year. It is named after her. Arnold Roth is an Australian-born lawyer in Jerusalem and co-founder of the Malki Foundation, which helps families keep severely disabled children at home rather than in institutions — the work Malki herself was doing the week she was killed. He has spent a quarter of a century campaigning to extradite Ahlam al-Tamimi, who is under US indictment, sits on the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists list with a $5 million reward attached, and was released in the 2011 Gilad Shalit exchange alongside Yahya Sinwar. 🎧 Listen and subscribe: https://podcast.honestreporting.com 🎧 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-honest-take/id1896315802 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1pCnClcM4jiggKP46YZGjG From this episode: • The Malki Foundation (Keren Malki) — https://kerenmalki.org • "A Beautiful Life" — the family's own account of who Malki was — https://kerenmalki.org/a-beautiful-life/ • FBI Most Wanted Terrorists: Ahlam Ahmad al-Tamimi — https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/wanted_terrorists/ahlam-ahmad-al-tamimi • Rewards for Justice: up to $5 million — https://rewardsforjustice.net/rewards/ahlam-ahmad-al-tamimi/ • Times of Israel, June 2025 — the Roths deliver a 30,000-signature petition to the US Embassy in Jerusalem — https://www.timesofisrael.com/parents-of-sbarro-bombing-victim-urge-us-to-demand-hamas-terrorists-extradition/ • Times of Israel, June 2023 — the sixteenth victim, Chana Nachenberg, dies after 22 years — https://www.timesofisrael.com/woman-critically-injured-in-palestinian-terror-attack-22-years-ago-dies-of-wounds/ If this episode gave you something, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify — it genuinely decides who else finds the show. And follow HonestReporting on YouTube, X, Instagram, TikTok and Facebook. | |||
| Why Is the Jew the Enemy? How Arab Antisemitism Is Built — And How It Breaks | With Rawan Osman | 04 août 2026 | 01:04:46 | |
She ran out of a Strasbourg grocery store so fast she left her purse in the shopping cart. Rawan Osman was in her mid-twenties, newly arrived from Lebanon, and had just seen four Orthodox Jewish men for the first time in her life. Then she went back down to face the shopkeeper — who smiled, helped her with her bags, and, as she puts it, "converted me from an enemy to an ally." She grew up in Hezbollah country in the Beqaa Valley and never met a Jew; with more than 850,000 Jews uprooted from the Arab world, she argues, there was nobody present to contradict what school, television and Al Jazeera taught her. She joins Ben Chertoff to trace how that machinery works and where it breaks: the Ramadan dramas, her cousins' khaki school uniforms, the seven years of reading it took before she could walk into a synagogue, why she thinks expecting Hamas or Hezbollah to disarm is "laughable" — and why she is nonetheless optimistic. "I cannot bring millions of Arabs. But we can bring Israel to them."
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Rawan Osman is a Syrian-born, Lebanon-raised researcher at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs. She founded Arabs Ask, an Arabic-language forum where Arabs can ask the questions about Jews and Israel they cannot ask at home, and she is a central voice in the documentary Tragic Awakening. She has addressed the UN Human Rights Council twice, describes herself as an "Arab Zionist" and a recovered antisemite, and is converting to Judaism.
🎧 Listen and subscribe: https://podcast.honestreporting.com 🎧 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-honest-take/id1896315802 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1pCnClcM4jiggKP46YZGjG Guest: • Arabs Ask — Arabic-language forum (Instagram) • Times of Israel blog — https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/author/rawan-osman/ • Jerusalem Center, "Can Erbil Inspire a New Syria?" — https://jcfa.org/can-erbil-inspire-a-new-syria/ • UN Watch testimony — https://unwatch.org/testimony/speaker/rawan-osman • Tragic Awakening (2024, dir. Rabbi Raphael Shore) If this episode gave you something, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify — it genuinely helps people find the show. And follow HonestReporting on YouTube, X, Instagram, TikTok and Facebook. | |||
| The Familiar Villain: Gaza, Activist Journalism, and the Unspoken Rules of Reporting on Israel | With Matti Friedman | 28 juil. 2026 | 01:08:35 | |
Matti Friedman spent five years inside the AP's Jerusalem bureau. He explains the staffing anomaly, the peace offer that was ordered killed, and the Hamas censorship AP readers were never told about. We throw around the phrase "media bias" as though it means a bad headline here, an unfair paragraph there. Matti Friedman is describing something much larger — and he's describing it from the inside. From 2006 to 2011, Friedman was a reporter and editor in the Jerusalem bureau of the Associated Press: the biggest international bureau of the world's biggest news organization, feeding copy, photos, and footage to roughly 10,000 outlets worldwide. He came in from the left of the Israeli political spectrum with no particular critique of the press. It took him about two years to conclude that what the bureau produced wasn't really coverage. The first thing that struck him wasn't ideology. It was arithmetic. The AP had around 40 full-time staffers covering a country that is one one-hundredth of one percent of the world's surface — more reporters than it had in China, and more than it had in all of sub-Saharan Africa. In this conversation with Ben Chertoff, Friedman walks through what that machine actually did:
Friedman's diagnosis isn't a conspiracy. It's a bubble, an incentive structure, and a professional identity that changed: reporters who, in his words, "didn't want to cover the circus — they wanted to be dancing bears in the circus." Guest: Matti Friedman is a Canadian-born Israeli journalist and author. He wrote the widely discussed 2014 Tablet essay "An Insider's Guide to the Most Important Story on Earth," and he is the author of five books — The Aleppo Codex, Pumpkinflowers, Spies of No Country, Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai, and, new this year, Out of the Sky: Heroism and Rebirth in Nazi Europe, the story of the Jewish parachutists — Hannah Senesh among them — who escaped Nazi Europe for British Mandate Palestine and then volunteered to go back in. He writes from Jerusalem for The Free Press.
🎧 The Honest Take: https://podcast.honestreporting.com 📺 Full episode playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLuF-lEHTGTw_RrfN9EP6pdWhgjMX7Fg5 If this conversation gave you something to think about, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify — it's the single biggest thing you can do to help more people find the show. And follow HonestReporting on Instagram, X, TikTok, and Facebook. | |||
| No One Wants a Jewish Protagonist: Inside Publishing's New Blacklist | With Meg Keene | 21 juil. 2026 | 01:05:32 | |
PEN America — the country's oldest and most prestigious free-expression organization — put out a report documenting how Jewish and Israeli writers are being frozen out of publishing. Within 24 hours, its own president had resigned over it. Not because the report went too far, but because it suggested, gently and with footnotes, that boycotting Jews might be a form of discrimination. Author Meg Keene wrote the Wall Street Journal piece that took the whole thing apart — and she's the most-quoted voice in the report itself. For fifteen years she wasn't a political writer at all: she built one of the most-read wedding blogs in the country, A Practical Wedding, with two books that sold well over 150,000 copies passed hand-to-hand between brides who'd never met. She was, in her own words, "the dream author." Then Charlottesville happened. Then Tree of Life. And after October 7, she sat down and wrote an achingly Jewish novel in seven days. The Big Five wouldn't touch it. One agent said the problem was a single word — Zionist. Another said the book could survive if she renamed a character from Yael to Sue. So Meg made a choice: if they weren't going to publish her anyway, she'd tell the truth out loud, and light her own fiction career on fire to do it. In this conversation: the free-speech paradox at the heart of the PEN resignation; how the industry's blacklist works without anyone ever having to write it down; the St. Martin's Press boycott and the rise of influencer-driven publishing; and the moment Meg went hunting for a 2024 blacklist in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency archive — and pulled up three articles she couldn't tell apart from the present, all dated 1939, all about the blacklisting of Jewish authors in Germany. Her argument isn't to shrink. It's to write more, document more, and build our own institutions the way we always have — because, as she puts it, "we are not a people for whom culture is the icing on the cake. It's the cake." Meg Keene
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| There Is Nowhere Else: Israeli Security, Zionist Pride, and the Doctrine That Broke on October 7 | With Brig. Gen. Amir Avivi | 14 juil. 2026 | 01:01:47 | |
Every American of a certain age remembers exactly where they were on September 11th. For Israelis, that morning was October 7th. Brigadier General Amir Avivi — a thirty-year IDF veteran, former deputy commander of the Gaza Division, and founder of Israel's largest movement of security professionals — saw it coming. Two years before the war, his organization wrote a national-security assessment describing the attack that was coming; six months before it, he published a book about it. Nobody in power acted on it. Ben Chertoff sits down with Avivi to understand how that happened, and what it means going forward. They get into the Cold War doctrine Israel quietly adopted and why it failed; what it's actually like to defend a country forty-five miles wide, where you can see your enemies from the airport; the real history of the Gaza withdrawal and why Avivi says Israel can never repeat it in the West Bank; and his blunt, uncomfortable answer to the question of rising global antisemitism — that the only long-term future for the Jewish people is in Israel. Some of it is hard to hear. That's the point.
Brigadier General (res.) Amir Avivi is a thirty-year veteran of the Israel Defense Forces. He served as deputy commander of the Gaza Division and as aide-de-camp to the Chief of the General Staff, among other senior commands. In 2020 he founded the Israel Defense and Security Forum (IDSF / Hebrew: "Habithonistim"), a security-establishment movement that has grown to roughly 55,000 members, including dozens of reserve generals and senior defense officials. He handed the chairmanship to Brig. Gen. (res.) Erez Wiener on June 1, 2026. He is the author of No Retreat: How to Secure Israel for Generations to Come, whose Hebrew edition appeared about six months before October 7th and which he frames as having foreseen the war and its aftermath.
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| Broken Mirror: Internalized Antisemitism, the Non-Jewish Gaze, and Why Jewish Pride is the Answer to Jew Hate | With Ben M. Freeman | 07 juil. 2026 | 01:14:58 | |
The founder of the Jewish Pride movement says Jews have spent so long fighting for the right to exist that they've forgotten how to be proud that they do. Ben M. Freeman — a gay Jewish kid from Glasgow who had to come out twice, first as gay and then as an unapologetic Zionist — joins Ben Chertoff to make the affirmative case: that Jews are not a religion but a people, an ancient civilization indigenous to the Land of Israel, and that pride, not defense, is the real answer to Jew-hatred. Along the way: internalized antisemitism and his "three D's," the "non-Jewish gaze," why he reframes "Eastern European Jews" as "Jews who lived in Eastern Europe," the UN's own criteria for indigeneity, and why he says anti-Zionism is antisemitism — no asterisk.
📚 Ben M. Freeman — the Jewish Pride trilogy: • Jewish Pride: Rebuilding a People(2021) — https://www.amazon.com/Jewish-Pride-Rebuilding-Ben-Freeman/dp/1913532135 • Reclaiming Our Story: The Pursuit of Jewish Pride (2022) — https://www.amazon.com/Reclaiming-Our-Story-Pursuit-Jewish/dp/1915036321 • The Jews: An Indigenous People (2025) — https://www.amazon.com/Jews-Indigenous-Ben-M-Freeman/dp/1916797474 ✍️ His Substack, The Jewish Pride Press — https://ben126.substack.com/ | |||
| Garbage In, Gospel Out: Wikipedia, Reddit, and the Battle Over Truth | With Ashley Rindsberg | 30 juin 2026 | 00:43:04 | |
Episode Description When you ask ChatGPT, Google, or Gemini a question, where does the answer come from? Increasingly, it traces back to Wikipedia — and Wikipedia, investigative journalist Ashley Rindsberg argues, has been captured. In this episode, Rindsberg walks through how a small, coordinated network of editors — a "gang of 40" — has reshaped the way Wikipedia presents Israel, Zionism, and the war in Gaza, and how those edits flow downstream into the AI systems the world now treats as neutral arbiters of fact. He breaks down the tactics: swarming, the 500-edit barrier, severing Jewish historical ties to the land, weaponizing arbitration, and laundering terror-linked content through Reddit and into the models. It's a tour of the machinery behind the "narrative engines" — Wikipedia, Reddit, Google, and AI — and a sober look at what media literacy actually requires when the encyclopedia itself has a point of view. The Honest Take
HonestReporting
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| The Most Hated Man at the UN: How the United Nations Turned Against Israel | With Hillel Neuer | 23 juin 2026 | 00:38:24 | |
What does it feel like to walk into a room run by dictators and state sponsors of terror — and tell them the truth to their faces? Hillel Neuer has done it for twenty years. As executive director of UN Watch in Geneva, he's become, by his own account and several media outlets', "the most hated man at the UN." In this conversation with Benjamin Chertoff, he explains the machinery behind the headlines: who actually writes the resolutions, how the "automatic majority" of 56 Muslim-majority states plus the dictatorships works, why Western democracies go along to get along, and how the Human Rights Council went from its founding chair Eleanor Roosevelt to a representative of Gaddafi's Libya. They get into the Iran moment — the UN's near-silence on the massacre of Iranian protesters, followed by its sudden fury once the US and Israel struck the regime — and the case of Francesca Albanese, the Special Rapporteur condemned by France, Germany, Canada, the US and others for "Holocaust inversion" and antisemitism, who remains effectively unaccountable. Neuer breaks down the disinformation feedback loop (NGO → UN statement → "the UN says" → global press), the meaning of the Council's Israel-only "Agenda Item 7," and whether the institution can ever be fixed. Guest: Hillel Neuer — Executive Director, UN Watch. Host: Benjamin Chertoff. From HonestReporting. | |||
| The Second Exodus: How 850,000 Jews Were Erased From the Arab World | With Dr. Henry Green | 16 juin 2026 | 01:13:36 | |
In 1948 there were 38,000 Jews in Libya. Today there are none. Across the Arab world, some 850,000 Jews — communities that predated Islam by a thousand years — were driven out, dispossessed, and denationalized in barely three decades. Most of the world has never heard the story. Dr. Henry Green, founder of Sephardi Voices and emeritus professor at the University of Miami, has spent more than fifteen years recording the testimonies of those who lived it. In this conversation with Ben Chertoff, he traces how the Jews of Baghdad, Benghazi, Cairo, Casablanca, Aleppo and beyond went from flourishing — at one point Jews were 35–40% of Baghdad — to gone: the Farhud, the rise of the Mufti, Nazi propaganda in Arabic, the great rescue operations, the ma'abarot transit camps, and the long erasure of an entire refugee history. Henry explains why this exodus was left out of the textbooks, what justice might look like, and why his new work puts a forensic dollar figure on what was taken — work he carried to the UN in Geneva in September 2025. And he closes with the story of a young Hillel president who found her own grandparents in the Sephardi Voices archive and wept. Guest: Dr. Henry Green — founder, Sephardi Voices; emeritus professor of Religious & Judaic Studies, University of Miami. Co-author of Sephardi Voices: The Untold Expulsion of Jews from the Arab Lands (2021, with Richard Sternberg) and author of new work, The Forgotten Exodus of Arab Jews, presenting a forensic valuation of seized Jewish assets.
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| Pride and Prejudice: How Antisemitism Captured LGBTQ+ Spaces | With Eve Barlow | 09 juin 2026 | 01:13:57 | |
It's Pride Month, and at a queer women's sauna night in Barcelona, two married Jewish women — wearing Stars of David — were surrounded, interrogated, and thrown out to chants of "Free Palestine." Not in Tehran. Not in Gaza. In a room built on the promise that no one gets turned away for who they are. Journalist Eve Barlow knows these spaces from the inside. She was deputy editor of NME — the biggest weekly music magazine in the world — broke bands, wrote the cover stories, and built LGBTQ+ coverage from scratch at GQ. She was at the beating heart of progressive culture. Then, around 2019, she said one thing out loud: that the anti-Zionism rising around her was antisemitism wearing a new coat. The world that let her in turned on her. She named her newsletter after what they did to her — Blacklisted. In this conversation, Eve and host Ben Chertoff go past the headlines on:
Eve's argument: Pride began as a celebration of how far people had come in a single generation. Somewhere along the way it inverted — from celebrating victory into a contest over who is most oppressed. The moment a people succeeds, it gets recast as the oppressor. Her answer isn't to shrink. It's to refuse the trade. Eve Barlow's links
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The Honest Take goes past the headlines to find out what's actually true about Israel and the people covering it. Hosted by Ben Chertoff for HonestReporting. ▶️ Watch on YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLuF-lEHTGTw_RrfN9EP6pdWhgjMX7Fg5 🎧 Listen everywhere: https://thehonesttake.transistor.fm If this conversation made you think, do us one favor: leave a rating and a reviewwherever you're listening — it's the single biggest thing that helps new people find the show. And follow HonestReporting on Instagram, X, TikTok, and Facebook. | |||
| Follow the Money: How the Muslim Brotherhood Bought a Seat in America's Schools | With Dr. Charles Asher Small | 02 juin 2026 | 01:05:58 | |
In 2012, Dr. Charles Asher Small pulled an all-nighter at Stanford, started googling a Yale administrator, and stumbled onto a money trail that became one of the most consequential antisemitism research projects in the West. The founder of ISGAP — which he launched in 2003 alongside Elie Wiesel — joins Ben Chertoff to lay out what he found: an estimated $100 billion in undisclosed Qatari money flowing into American universities, $10 billion to Cornell, $1.3 billion to Texas A&M, a K-12 curriculum in 8,000 American classrooms that erased Israel from the map, and a campus-to-City-Hall pipeline that runs all the way to the mayor of New York. We also press him on the hardest question: where the documented paper trail ends and connect-the-dots begins.
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| Weaponizing Identity Politics to Demonize Israel and Jews | With David Christopher Kaufman | 26 mai 2026 | 01:04:14 | |
What happens when the very system built to protect minorities leaves Jews out entirely - and then gets turned against them? David Christopher Kaufman is a journalist, a Black man, and a Jew. That combination gives him a lens on American identity politics that almost no one else has. In this conversation, he argues that October 7th didn't just expose antisemitism - it exposed the structural failure of the DEI framework to account for Jews at all. The result: Jews now have the highest hate crime rate of any group in America, and yet they're the only minority expected to argue for their own victimhood before anyone will believe them. We talk about Zohran Mamdani's rise and what it tells us about where the DSA and the progressive left are actually headed. We talk about the word "Zio" - which Kaufman says hit him the same way the N-word does. And we talk about why he believes Jewish safety is the defining civil rights issue of this moment - and why American Jewish leadership is failing to say so out loud. David Christopher Kaufman is opinion editor at the Daily Mail, former editor at the New York Post, and author of the Substack Counterintuitive. Follow David: davidkaufman.substack.com --- HonestReporting is a media watchdog holding the press accountable on Israel coverage. Website: honestreporting.com YouTube: youtube.com/@honestreportingvideo | |||
| The Lawfare War Against Israel: Why the West Is Next | With Natasha Hausdorff | 19 mai 2026 | 01:04:29 | |
British-Israeli barrister Natasha Hausdorff has spent years inside the world's most powerful international courtrooms — the ICJ, ICC, and UN — watching the legal case against Israel get built in real time. She joins Ben Chertoff to take the genocide accusation apart, piece by piece. The ICJ never said Israel committed genocide — so why does every headline say it did? The ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant on a legal standard that inverted the burden of proof. And right now, three countries are quietly trying to rewrite the Genocide Convention itself — to eliminate the intent requirement that separates genocide from ordinary warfare. If they succeed, no Western democracy will ever again be able to fight a non-state actor without facing genocide charges. Israel is the test case. Hausdorff explains who's running the play — and what comes next. Natasha Hausdorff is a British-Israeli barrister and Pro Bono Legal Director of UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI). She holds a BA/MA from Oxford and an LL.M. from Tel Aviv University in international law and the law of armed conflict. She was a Fellow at Columbia Law School's National Security Law Programme and clerked for Chief Justice Miriam Naor, President of the Israeli Supreme Court. Her family has lived in Israel for eight consecutive generations since 1847. Hausdorff is the founding director of the Centre for International Rule of Law and appears regularly on BBC, Sky News, Fox News, CNN, and Times Radio. She has briefed parliaments across Europe and addressed the UN Security Council.
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| Kristof's Unbelievable Tale | With Rachel O'Donoghue *Live Broadcast May 12, 2026* | 13 mai 2026 | 00:33:46 | |
On May 11, Nicholas Kristof published a column in the New York Times titled "The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians" - a 1,500-word piece alleging systematic sexual violence by Israeli security forces, grounded in anonymous testimonies and sources with documented histories of fabrication. Ben went live the next evening with HonestReporting's Rachel O'Donoghue, who had spent 48 hours pulling the piece apart from the ground up. In this episode: • The dog rape claim: where it originated (Euromed Human Rights Monitor, Geneva), why it's scientifically impossible, and why it passed through a Times editor anyway • Euromed Monitor's track record: organ harvesting libel, denial of Hamas infrastructure at Al-Shifa, a single-witness foundation for its most grotesque claims • Sami Al-Sai - Kristof's primary named source: arrested by Israel for incitement (celebrating Oct 7, coordination with terrorist groups), with a documented history of claims made, recanted, and then re-recanted • Issa Amro - second named source: "threatened with rape" in his Washington Post account; "raped" in Kristof's account. A significant discrepancy Kristof did not address • Kristof's defense on Twitter: cited medical journals to prove dogs can rape humans - journals that were actually about bestiality in the other direction. As Rachel put it: "He read it backwards." • The Israeli Civil Commission report, released the same day: two years in the making, 300+ pages, 10,000+ photographs, 1,800 hours of visual material, 430 testimonies across 52 nationalities - documenting systematic sexual violence by Hamas on October 7th. The Times reportedly declined to publish it in advance. • What the NYT's muted headline for the Civil Commission report (*"Israeli report examines sexual violence during and after Hamas-led attack"*) says about editorial priorities • The pattern: when the Times gets Israel wrong, it always cuts the same way Links: • Rachel's full rebuttal in the Wall Street Journal: "Kristof's Unbelievable Tale" • HonestReporting's original X thread debunking the piece: honestreporting.com / @Honest.Rachel • Israeli Civil Commission report on Oct 7 sexual violence: civilc.org Guest: Rachel O'Donoghue, senior writer and researcher at HonestReporting. Follow her at @Honest.Rachel on Instagram. | |||
| The Other Side of the Nakba: The Forgotten History of 1948 | With Yossi Klein Halevi | 11 mai 2026 | 01:01:44 | |
Yossi Klein Halevi grew up the son of Holocaust survivors in Brooklyn. As a teenager, he joined Meir Kahane's Jewish Defense League. Then he moved to Israel, broke with extremism, and wrote a book called Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor - released free in Arabic - asking Palestinians to see Jews as an indigenous people returning home, not colonizers. Today, on college campuses across America, the answer is: you're colonizers. The Nakba proves it. With Nakba Day approaching, Ben sits down with Halevi for an honest, unflinching conversation about what actually happened in 1948 - the partition vote, the Arab invasion, Deir Yassin, the Hadassah convoy massacre, the 850,000 Jews expelled from Arab countries that nobody talks about. And then: how a legitimate historical grievance became a weapon of delegitimization. Halevi is not a denialist. He openly names the Nakba as a real catastrophe. He has criticized Israeli education for refusing to teach it. But he also argues that collapsing 1948 into a "narrative of total innocence" - and using it to erase Jewish indigeneity - is something categorically different from honest historical reckoning. This is the conversation about 1948 that most people never get to have. In this episode: 00:00 — Cold Open (Deir Yassin / Hadassah convoy quote) 00:22 — Intro: Ben introduces Yossi Klein Halevi and the episode 00:53 — The Real Story of 1948 — episode framing 02:43 — Growing up in Brooklyn, joining the JDL 04:12 — Breaking with Kahana and moving to Israel 05:25 — Living with the partition wall in Jerusalem 07:42 — Two overlapping geographies: Land of Israel vs. Land of Palestine 08:02 — The UN Partition vote (1947) — Arab rejection and the pattern of refusals 12:07 — The Palestinian maximalist frame vs. the Israeli counter-narrative 14:08 — When does land become about existence? 14:55 — The Israeli center: head vs. heart on two states 16:33 — Why two states feel impossible after October 7th 16:54 — The six months between partition and war (Nov '47–May '48) 18:50 — Ethnic cleansing on both sides — flight vs. expulsion 20:58 — The 850,000 Jewish refugees from Arab countries 25:20 — Why Arab countries kept Palestinians as permanent refugees 27:34 — Inversion: Nazi collaboration accusations flipped 30:35 — Plan Dalet: ethnic cleansing blueprint or defensive plan? 34:04 — Deir Yassin vs. the Hadassah convoy massacre 36:06 — Acknowledgment vs. apology — teaching the Palestinian Nakba 41:13 — Settler colonialism goes mainstream: Al Jazeera, Jacobin, the Oscars 47:01 — Why 'indigenous' and 'no metropole' arguments aren't landing 48:13 — The language war: genocide, apartheid, settler colonialism as weapons 49:03 — Myths & Facts doesn't work anymore — it's about narrative now 53:00 — Has dialogue survived October 7th? 58:02 — Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor — the German edition and new intro 01:00:59 — Outro About the guest: Yossi Klein Halevi is a Senior Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. He is the author of Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor (Harper Collins, 2018), a New York Times bestseller released free in Arabic at letterstomyneighbor.com. His previous books include Like Dreamers (National Jewish Book Award winner) and Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist. Follow him on X: @YKleinHalevi Hosted by Ben Chertoff @ben.chertoff The Honest Take is produced by HonestReporting - rebuilding trust in media. | |||
| The Honest Take: TRAILER | 11 mai 2026 | 00:01:30 | |
Welcome to The Honest Take, the new long-form interview podcast from HonestReporting. For 25 years, HonestReporting has been the global watchdog on media bias against Israel — monitoring newsrooms, calling out distortion, and forcing corrections from some of the world's most powerful outlets. The Honest Take is where we go beyond the rapid response and sit down with the people who understand what's really happening: journalists, scholars, lawyers, diplomats, and activists. Hosted by Ben Chertoff, every episode is a sustained conversation about the stories the mainstream keeps getting wrong — antisemitism, the war in Gaza, the UN, campus politics, the future of Jewish life, and the fight for truth in an information war. Subscribe now. New episodes weekly. Featuring voices including Hillel Neuer (UN Watch), Shai Davidai, Yardena Schwartz, Yossi Klein Halevi, and many, many more. | |||
| Elite, Educated, Antisemitic: How Academia Fosters Jew Hate | With Shai Davidai | 05 mai 2026 | 00:45:57 | |
What happened on American campuses after October 7 did not come out of nowhere. In this episode of The Honest Take, Shai Davidai joins HonestReporting to trace the intellectual roots of the antisemitism now shaping elite universities. From Edward Said’s Orientalism and the rise of the activist professor, to moral relativism, postcolonial theory, and the normalization of anti-Zionism as virtue, Davidai explains how decades of academic ideas helped create a culture where Jew hatred is repackaged as justice. The conversation also explores Columbia’s long history with antisemitism, the role of groups like Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, and why so many students and faculty cannot even recognize their own bigotry. Davidai argues that this is not just campus radicalism. It is a broader moral and intellectual failure with real consequences for Jews, for higher education, and for American society. Shai Davidai is a social psychologist, former Columbia Business School professor, and host of Here I Am with Shai Davidai. His forthcoming book, American Intellectual Antisemitism, is scheduled for release on October 6, 2026. | |||
| The Lie That Lit the Match: Hebron, Nazis, and the West's Vanishing Memory | With Yardena Schwartz | 05 mai 2026 | 00:47:37 | |
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often thought of as a protracted political dispute based on two peoples fighting over one land. Often, they place the start date at 1948. Sometimes 1967. But for a real understanding, it is necessary to reach back to the pre-State era, and realize the religious nature of the conflict, and one man who played a pivotal role in shaping it: The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. We speak to Yardena Schwartz, author of "Ghosts of a Holy War," about Hajj Amin al Husseini, his surprisingly close relationship with Adolf Hitler, the 1929 Hebron massacre, and how reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has changed over the course of the century that followed. | |||