The Official ISCA Podcast

Monday, March 31, 2025. In this episode, Ilan Troen discusses, "The October 7th Massacre and Its Aftermath: A Personal Account."Beginning with the personal losses of family who lived on a kibbutz in the Gaza "envelope," Professor Troen will share issues involved in remembrance and recovery in the midst of an ongoing war whose character and terms for conclusion divide Israelis amongst themselves as well as Israelis from many observers well beyond the zones of combat. Ilan Troen is professor emeritus of both the Stoll Family Chair in Israel Studies (Brandeis, 2017), and the Lopin Chair of Modern History (Ben-Gurion University, 2007. He has served as founding director of the Israel Studies centers at both institutions and dean of Humanities and Social Sciences at Ben-Gurion University. He is past president of the Association for Israel Studies and received in 2023 its "Lifetime Achievement Award." In 2024,  Professor Troen was a recipient of the Bernard Lewis Prize for his book, "Israel/Palestine in World Religions: Whose Promised Land?" Music: "Pleasant Porridge" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 

Sunday, March 30, 2025. In this episode, Ilan Troen discusses, "The Religious Dimensions of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.""In 1922, the League of Nations endorsed Britain’s Balfour Declaration (1917) that proposed the establishment of “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. This proposal challenged a reality that had been in force since the Muslim conquest in the seventh century and the conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine to Christianity three centuries earlier.  It forced reconsiderations by all three main monotheisms and has shaped the politics of the Arab/Israeli conflict for more than a century.  After considering the adjustments made by Jews and Christians to the revolution in the common Holy Land, this lecture will focus on Islam and challenges it faced in resetting its relationship to Jews from their theologically assigned status as dhimmis (a non-Muslim subject in an Islamic state) to potential equals and to a Jewish state as a legitimate possibility.  This analysis will describe the historic Muslim relationship to both Jews and Christians and assess to what extent change has taken place and how it can be accomplished." Ilan Troen is professor emeritus of both the Stoll Family Chair in Israel Studies (Brandeis, 2017), and the Lopin Chair of Modern History (Ben-Gurion University, 2007. He has served as founding director of the Israel Studies centers at both institutions and dean of Humanities and Social Sciences at Ben-Gurion University. He is past president of the Association for Israel Studies and received in 2023 its "Lifetime Achievement Award." In 2024, Professor Troen was a recipient of the Bernard Lewis Prize for his book, "Israel/Palestine in World Religions: Whose Promised Land?" Music: "Pleasant Porridge" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 

Wednesday, March 12, 2025. In this episode, PhD student Daniel Freitag discusses, "Christian Antisemitism on Social Media: Russian-Orthodox, Lutheran, and Catholic Narratives on Jews and Israel."Through a detailed content analysis of Facebook posts and comments (2012-2021) on prominent Roman Catholic, Lutheran World Federation, and Russian Orthodox Church pages, Daniel Freitag examines how these confessional online spaces — encompassing both official media and private commentary — discuss Judaism, Jews, and Israel. His research reveals both anticipated and surprising antisemitic themes.One of the more surprising findings comes from the social media account of the Russian Orthodox Church. Not only does it revive the conspiracy theory of Jewish Bolshevism as a threat to Russia's Christian identity, but also spreads narratives depicting Israel and the United States — alongside the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople — as secret puppet masters responsible for the independence of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine. Meanwhile, in the discourse space of the Lutheran World Federation, some reductive and one-sided interpretations of the Middle East conflict emerge, with post-colonial thought patterns being theologized in ways that are hostile to Israel.This research contributes to the broader study of theological antisemitism, which grapples with the persistent legacy of Christian anti-Judaism and its influence on contemporary antisemitic discourse. While acknowledging the historical roots of Christian antisemitism, this talk explores how traditional tropes are being reconfigured and disseminated in digital spaces today. Daniel C. Freitag (Mag. theol.) is a PhD student and research assistant at the Institute for Ethics and Related Social Sciences at the Faculty of Protestant Theology at the University of Münster (Germany). He studied Protestant Theology in Münster, Jerusalem, and Heidelberg. He was also a member of the Graduate School of the Cluster of Excellence “Religion and Politics” at the University of Münster and worked for the interdisciplinary “Centre for Religion and Modernity”. Currently, he is a visiting affiliate of IU’s Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism. His dissertation project explores contemporary manifestations of Christian antisemitism on the social media platform Facebook. For more information and contact details, please click here.Music: "Pleasant Porridge" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 

Sunday, March 09, 2025. In this episode, Yaron Gamburg discusses, "Back to the Origins of Antisemitism: Attitudes Towards Jews and Israel in Contemporary Russia."Yaron Gamburg is a Research Associate at the Institute for National Security Studies of Tel Aviv University and a PhD student at the Institute of Geopolitics at Paris 8 University. His academic research focuses on antisemitism and the discourse of the Holocaust in post-Soviet Russia. During his diplomatic service, he served at the embassies of Israel in Moscow, Paris, Washington D.C., and as Deputy Chief of Mission to the OECD, Council of Europe, and UNESCO. Born and raised in Zhytomyr, Ukraine, he immigrated to Israel in 1990. He completed his BA in Economics and MA in Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.Yaron has also published a piece for the ISCA Beinner Family Research Series on Antisemitism, "The Antisemitic Discourse of a 'Friend of the Jewish People': Why Putin's Russia Slides Again into the Trap of Antisemitism."Music: "Pleasant Porridge" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Sunday, February 16, 2025. In this episode, Norman JW Goda discusses "The Genocide Libel: How the World Has Charged Israel With the Crime of Crimes, 1982-2024."Norman J.W. Goda specializes in the history of the Holocaust, war crimes trials, and twentieth century diplomacy. He teaches courses on the Holocaust and Nazi Germany from historical and interdisciplinary perspectives. His single authored books include Tales from Spandau: Nazi Criminals and the Cold War (2007) and The Holocaust: Europe, the World, and the Jews (2nd ed 2022). He has also co-authored, with Richard Breitman, US Intelligence and the Nazis (2005) and Hitler’s Shadow: Nazi War Criminals, US Intelligence and the Cold War (2010). He has edited two volumes of international essays titled Jewish Histories of the Holocaust: New Transnational Perspectives (2014) and Rethinking Holocaust Justice: Essays Across Disciplines (2018). He served a lead editor on To the Gates of Jerusalem: The Diaries and Papers of James G. McDonald, 1945-1947 (2014), which concerns Holocaust refugees and the question of Palestine in those years, and Envoy to the Promised Land: The Diaries and Papers of James G. McDonald, 1948-1951 (2017) which concerns McDonald’s work as the first US ambassador to Israel and the initial years of the new state. Goda has published articles in various journals including the Journal of Modern History, The International History Review, The Journal of Contemporary History, and Antisemitism Studies, and his work has been the subject of stories by the The New York Times, the Associated Press, US News and World Report, and other major news outlets. Goda has served as a consultant to the US and German governments, as well as for various radio, television, and film documentaries in the US, Europe, Australia, and Israel. He is currently working on a monograph concerning the 1987 Trial of Klaus Barbie in Lyon for crimes against humanity, and, with Ed Kissi of the University of South Florida, an edited volume on the universalization of the Holocaust.Music: "Pleasant Porridge" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 

December 8, 2024. In this episode, Yfat Barak-Cheney, Dr. Matthias Becker, and Tal-Or Cohen, discuss "Trends, Research Gaps, and Future Directions in the Study of Online Antisemitism." Yfat Barak Cheney is the Director of International Affairs and the Executive Director of WJC's Technology and Human Rights Institute. Yfat earned an LL.M in International Legal Studies from New York University where she was a Transitional Justice Scholar and an International Law and Human Rights Fellow. She also holds an LL.M (with honors) from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she also received her L.L.B and a B.A in International Relations, receiving an award for outstanding international law student. She previously worked with the Ministry of Justice Unit for Combating Human Trafficking and in several NGO’s. Yfat is a co-founder of ALMA – Association for the Promotion of International Humanitarian Law in Israel. She is a member of the New York Bar and the Israeli Bar Association.  Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor, Adv., is the founder and Executive Director of CyberWell – the first ever open database dedicated to fighting online antisemitism. Tal-Or is an expert in digital social platforms, hate speech and extremism. She focuses on online antisemitism and social media hate speech policies, alongside hate crime reporting and legislation. Mrs. Cohen Montemayor has led a variety of open-source intelligence research projects, providing analysis and consulting services to the Institute of National Security Studies, the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs and the Jewish Agency. A Reichman University (IDC Herzliya) magna cum laude graduate of Government and Law and a member of the Israel Bar Association, prior to launching CyberWell, Tal-Or worked in the business and web intelligence space at a boutique consulting firm in Tel Aviv. Dr. Matthias J. Becker is an expert in cognitive linguistics, discourse analysis, and social media studies, with a particular focus on the study of hate speech within the political mainstream. His doctoral dissertation, Antisemitism in Reader Comments, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2021, analyzes antisemitic stereotypes and historical analogies in British and German online discourse related to the Middle East conflict. Since 2020, he has been leading the international, transdisciplinary research project Decoding Antisemitism. In this context, he serves as co-editor of a comprehensive 40-chapter Lexicon that offers systematic guidance for deconstructing both explicit and implicit antisemitism on social media. Music: "Pleasant Porridge" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 

Sunday, November 24, 2024. In this episode, Matthias Küntzel discusses "October 7th and the Shoah." Matthias Küntzel is a political scientist and historian based in Hamburg, Germany. Between 2004 and 2015, he was an external research associate at the Vidal Sassoon International Centre for the Study of Antisemitism (SICSA) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Dr. Küntzel is the author of several books, including Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism, and the Roots of 9/11 (Telos 2007), Germany and Iran: From the Aryan Axis to the Nuclear Threshold (Telos 2014) and Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism, and the Middle East: The 1948 Arab War against Israel and the Aftershocks of World War II (Routledge 2024). Küntzel’s essays on Islamism, antisemitism and Iran have been published inter alia in The Wall Street Journal, The Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs, Fathom and Die ZEIT and they have been translated into fourteen languages. See for additional information www.matthiaskuentzel.net. Music: "Pleasant Porridge" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 

Sunday, November 17, 2024. In this episode, Dr. Aaron Hagler discusses "Who is 'The Jew' in Early and Later Islamic Texts?" Dr. Aaron (Ari) Hagler has a PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Pennsylvania (2011) and an MA in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2005). He is the author of two books: Owning Disaster (Routledge, 2024) and The Echoes of Fitna (Brill, 2022). Previously, he has served as Associate Professor of History at Troy University. Currently, he is a history educator at Geffen Academy at UCLA. Music: "Pleasant Porridge" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 

Wednesday, October 30, 2024. In this episode, Adam Kirsch discusses "The Ideology of Settler Colonialism and the Response to Oct. 7." Adam Kirsch is the author of numerous books of poetry and criticism, including The People and the Books: 18 Classics of Jewish Literature. His latest, just recently published, is On Settler Colonialsm: Ideology, Violence, and Justice. The recipient of a 2016 Guggenheim award, he is an editor at the Wall Street Journal’s Review section and frequently writes for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Tablet, and other publications. Music: "Pleasant Porridge" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 

Sunday, October 27, 2024. In this episode, Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove discusses "For Such a Time as This: Being Jewish After October 7." Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove, PhD, a leading voice of American Jewry, has been the rabbi of New York’s Park Avenue Synagogue since 2008. He was ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1999 and earned his PhD at the University of Chicago Divinity School. The author of the recently published book, For Such a Time as This: On Being Jewish Today, Rabbi Cosgrove is the editor of Jewish Theology in Our Time: A New Generation Explores the Foundations and Future of Jewish Belief. His essays and op-eds appear frequently in a variety of national Jewish journals and periodicals. Among his many professional activities, Rabbi Cosgrove sits on the Chancellor's Cabinet of JTS, where he is adjunct faculty, and is on the Editorial Board of Conservative Judaism. A member of the Executive Committee of the Rabbinical Assembly, he is also an officer of the New York Board of Rabbis and a member of the Board of UJA-Federation of New York. He serves as Rabbinical Advisor on Interfaith Affairs for the ADL and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Rabbi Cosgrove was honored to represent the Jewish community at the National September 11 Memorial Museum during the visit of Pope Francis to New York in September 2015. Music: "Pleasant Porridge" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/