Sari Bashi’s life was already complicated, as a Jewish Israeli human rights lawyer defending Palestinian freedom of movement. Then she fell in love with a Palestinian man trapped in Ramallah by the occupation. Her book, Maqluba: Upside-Down Love, tells what happened next.

Tel Aviv Review

Love, Occupied

Dr Itay Lotem, Senior Lecturer in French Studies at the University of Westminster, discusses his new book The Memory of Colonialism in Britain and France: The Sins of Silence. In both countries, though in different ways, memory is more about issues of the present than about the past.

The Spoils of Empire

Dr Radu Ioanid, Romanian Ambassador to Israel and historian of Romanian Jewry, discusses his book The Ransom of the Jews: The Story of the Extraordinary Secret Bargain between Romania and Israel detailing how, over decades, hundreds of thousands of Romanian Jews were exchanged for money, livestock and goods. This episode is made possible by Tel Aviv University’s Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism.

From Romania, For Cash

Philosopher and cultural critic Susan Sontag spent a lifetime thinking about the mysterious space between reality and representation, becoming one of the most influential public intellectuals of the 20th century. Benjamin Moser’s acclaimed biography, Sontag: Her Life and Work captures her story with photographic complexity, leaving only a longing for Sontag’s perspective on life today.

What Would Susan Sontag Say?

Batya Ungar-Sargon believes woke culture has created a smokescreen of racial identity politics that obfuscates the real force tearing American society apart: class inequality. But it took the liberal media to exponentially amplify the problem. Her new book Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy explains why.

The Broke Woke

Quarantine wasn’t invented for corona. At the start of statehood, Israel encouraged mass immigration while seeking to prevent mass disease by putting immigrants through a quarantine camp called Shaar Ha’aliya. Rhona Seidelman, a historian of medicine and public health, examines the camp’s legacy both remembered and forgotten, in Under Quarantine: Immigrants and Disease at Israel’s Gate.

Israel’s Ellis Island, Behind Barbed Wire

Dr Laura Wharton, a Jerusalem City Council member for Meretz and an adjunct lecturer at the Hebrew University’s Department of Political Science, discusses her book Is the Party Over? How Israel Lost its Social Agenda, analyzing the ideological and institutional decline of the Labor Party up until the 1970s.

Labor’s Love’s Lost

Prof. Daniel Statman, head of the Philosophy Department at the University of Haifa and a senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, where he is the director of the Human Rights and Judaism program, discusses his new co-authored book State and Religion is Israel, a joint legal and philosophical attempt to conceptualize the role of religion in democratic regimes. This episode is made possible by the Israel Democracy Institute, an independent center of research and action dedicated to strengthening the foundations of Israeli democracy.

Religiously Democratic?

In Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America, Eyal Press takes a tough look at the people squeezed in the middle of America’s moral pyramid. Neither dishwashers nor bond traders, these are the prison guards, drone operators and poultry packers doing jobs we would all prefer to forget.

But Somebody Has to Do It

Although he came to prominence in Israel, as the undisputed emblem of the far-right, Rabbi Meir Kahane was a quintessential American Jew, claims Prof. Shaul Magid in a new book, Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish radical.

Kahane Lives On

One of the most controversial questions about the Holocaust is whether it should be seen as a universal human problem, or a unique horror perpetrated by Germans and Jews. At the heart of this question lies the work of Christopher Browning, author of numerous books on the history of the Holocaust, survivors, the Final Solution, and the story of a German auxiliary police battalion - Ordinary Men - who became killers. This season of the Tel Aviv Review is made possible by The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, which promotes humanistic, democratic, and liberal values in the social discourse in Israel.

Creating Killers (Rerun)

After reporting on the cruelest wars of the late 20th century, journalist and cultural critic David Rieff concluded that remembering history was no defense against repeating it, and could even be a culprit. His book, In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies, explains why.

The Past Is Never Dead – But Maybe It Should Be

Dr Yair Wallach, Senior Lecturer in Israel Studies at SOAS, University of London, discusses his new book A City in Fragments: Urban Texts in Modern Jerusalem, which focuses on the changing nature and meaning of text – from stone inscriptions to street names to business cards – in Jerusalem of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

A City in Text

Timothy Brennan, Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, has published a new biography of Edward Said, the feted Palestinian-American scholar and public intellectual, and his former PhD advisor at Columbia University. Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said explores the different aspects of a quintessential 20th-century intellectual.

The Many Faces of Edward Said

Dan Rabinowitz, Professor of Sociology at Tel Aviv University, discusses his new book The Power of Deserts: Climate Change, the Middle East and the Promise of a Post-Oil Era, analyzing the role of the Middle East as both a major generator and a primary victim of climate change, the dashed and renewed hopes for a coherent climate policy, and the role of social science in policy-making.

Climate Change: A Middle Eastern Perspective

Showcasing the latest developments in the realm of academic and professional research and literature, about the Middle East and global affairs. We discuss Israeli, Arab and Palestinian society, the Jewish world, the Middle East and its conflicts, and issues of global and public affairs with scholars, writers and deep-thinkers.

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