How Hollywood Sees Israel + Free-Speech Absolutism in Practice

Two great, recent interviews, one by me and one of me.

Me with Yael Bar Tur (left) and Chaya Leah Sufrin (right), hosts of Ask a Jew.

I’m happy to share two recent interviews, one by me and one of me.

Let’s start with the latter: I recently appeared on

Ask a Jew

, an excellent podcast hosted by Yael Bar Tur, a secular Israeli and crisis p.r. professional who emigrated to the United States a few years ago, and Chaya Leah Sufrin, an Orthodox Jew who lives in Long Beach and works for Hillel in Southern California.

We talked about a ton of things, including how Hollywood depictions of Israel, Jews, and Arabs have changed over the years; how Israeli depictions of that country’s history have changed over the years; how anti-capitalism and anti-Semitism have been entwined for hundreds of years; whether college students are more illiberal/stupid/awful now than in the past (I’m not convinced); why the late, great literary and cultural critic Leslie Fiedler, whom I went to SUNY-Buffalo to study with as a Ph.D. student, is a voice from the grave that speaks deeply to contemporary America; and much more.

It’s a wild, freewheeling conversation by turns serious and funny. Take a listen right now by clicking below.

The other Q&A I want to flag for you is my recent Reason Interview with Jamie Kirchick, author of Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington and a couple of recent fantastic pieces on campus speech restrictions and other attempts to restrict free expression in the name of disinformation, sensitivity, or whatever justification powerful people reach for when they want to shut us up. He not only identifies as a free-speech absolutist, he makes sure to speak up for free speech, even (especially) in uncomfortable situations.

Here’s my writeup of our conversation for Reason:

"If the problem with campus speech codes is the selectivity with which universities penalize various forms of bigotry," wrote James Kirchick recently in The New York Times, "the solution is not to expand the university's power to punish expression. It's to abolish speech codes entirely."

Kirchick was writing about widespread outrage at the deeply nuanced and deeply hypocritical defense of speech offered by the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania at a congressional hearing about antisemitic and anti-Zionist campus reactions to the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel.

Although Kirchick, the author of Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington and The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age, is an ardent defender of Israel, he is also a self-described free-speech absolutist who is disgusted by calls to restrict expression, whether on or off-campus. He says that instead of clamping down on speech, we should be arguing more openly and publicly, even when it's deeply uncomfortable, as it was when he raised novelist Alice Walker's antisemitic views during a literary conference at which they were both speaking.

We talk about how identity politics has overwhelmed the left's traditional defense of free speech, why so many younger journalists seem lukewarm at best to the First Amendment, and how to muster the courage to speak up for first principles in uncomfortable and hostile situations.

Who are people I should be talking to for The Reason Interview podcast? Please let me know in the comments.