Tel Aviv Review

Amalia Sa'ar, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Haifa, discusses her co-authored book (together with Dr. Hawazin Younis) Diversity: Palestinian career women in Israel, reviewing the professional and personal experiences of female doctors, lawyers and engineers in the Jewish state.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.