Van Leer Institute Series on Ideas

This is the story of organ transplantation, told from the organ’s point of view.Organs for transplantations come from two sources: living or post-mortem organ donations. These sources set different routes of movement from one body to another.Postmortem organ donations are mainly sourced and allocated by state agencies, while living organ donations are the result of informal relations between donor and recipient. Each route traverses different social institutions, determines discrete interaction between donor and recipient, and is charged with moral meanings that can be competing and contrasting.The political economy of organs for transplants is the gamut of these routes and their interconnections, and this book explains what such a political economy looks like: its features and contours, its negotiation of the roles of the state, market and the family in procuring organs for transplantations, and its ultimate moral justifications.Drawing on Boas’ personal experiences of waiting, searching and obtaining organs, each autobiographical section of the book sheds light on a different aspect of the political economy of organs – post-mortem donations, parental donation, and organ market – and illustrates the experience of living with the fear of rejection and the intimidation of chronic shortage.Boas combines a rigorous academic analysis of the political economy of organ supply for transplantation with autobiographical narratives that illuminate the complex experience of being an organ recipient.The author, Hagai Boas invites your comments and questions. Contact him at Hagaib@vanleer.org.ilRenee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il. She's on Twitter @embracingwisdom. She blogs here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/van-leer-institute

For as long as humans have existed, we have struggled when a loved one dies. Poets and playwrights have written about the dark cloak of grief, the deep yearning, how devastating heartache feels. But until now, we have had little scientific perspective on this universal experience.In The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss (HarperOne, 2022), neuroscientist and psychologist Mary-Frances O’Connor, PhD, gives us a fascinating new window into one of the hallmark experiences of being human. O’Connor has devoted decades to researching the effects of grief on the brain, and in this book, she makes cutting-edge neuroscience accessible through her contagious enthusiasm, and guides us through how we encode love and grief. With love, our neurons help us form attachments to others; but, with loss, our brain must come to terms with where our loved ones went, or how to imagine a future that encompasses their absence.Based on O’Connor’s own trailblazing neuroimaging work, research in the field, and her real-life stories, The Grieving Brain does what the best popular science books do, combining storytelling, accessible science, and practical knowledge that will help us better understand what happens when we grieve and how to navigate loss with more ease and grace.Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il. She's on Twitter @embracingwisdom. She blogs here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/van-leer-institute

Should everyone have privacy in their personal lives? Can privacy exist in a public place? Is there a right to be left alone, even in the United States?The battle between an individual’s right to privacy and the public’s right to know has been fought for centuries. You may be surprised to realize that the original framers were sensitive to the importance of privacy interests relating to sexuality and intimate life, but mostly just for the powerful and the privileged.The founders demanded privacy for all the wrong press-quashing reasons. Supreme Court jus­tice Louis Brandeis famously promoted First Amend­ment freedoms but argued strongly for privacy too; and presidents from Thomas Jefferson through Don­ald Trump confidently hid behind privacy despite the public interest in their lives.Today privacy seems simultaneously under siege and surging. And that’s doubly dangerous, as author Amy Gajda argues. Too little privacy leaves ordinary people vulnerable to those who deal in and publish soul-crushing secrets. Too much means the famous and infamous can cloak themselves in secrecy and dodge accountability. Seek and Hide: The Tangled History of the Right to Privacy (Viking, 2022) carries us from the very start, when privacy concepts first entered American law and society, to now, when the law al­lows a Silicon Valley titan to destroy a media site like Gawker out of spite. Muckraker Upton Sinclair, like Nellie Bly before him, pushed the envelope of privacy and propriety and then became a privacy advocate when journalists used the same techniques against him. By the early 2000s we were on our way to today’s full-blown crisis in the digital age, worrying that smartphones, webcams, basement publishers, and the forever internet had erased privacy completely.Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il. She's on Twitter @embracingwisdom. She blogs here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/van-leer-institute

Micha Odenheimer is the founder and director of Tevel B’Zedek, an Israeli NGO that aims to create Israeli and Jewish leadership passionately engaged in Tikkun Olam – fixing the world – locally and globally. Tevel B’Zedek provides community development support for sustainable agriculture in remote rural areas.Odenheimer is an activist and former journalist who reported from worldwide locations including Somalia, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Bangladesh and India. Born in California and educated at Yale, Odenheimer is an ordained Orthodox rabbi for whom reducing global poverty is a religious imperative.Around the world, more than enough food is produced to feed the global population—but hundreds of millions of people still go hungry. After steadily declining for a decade, world hunger is on the rise today, reportedly affecting nearly 10% percent of people globally. The growing food crisis is driven largely by wars, the COVID-19 pandemic, and climate change.Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il. She's on Twitter @embracingwisdom. She blogs here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/van-leer-institute

Suicide has been on the rise in recent years, most frighteningly among young people. Suicide is second leading cause of death for people ages 10-14 and 25-34. Gay, lesbian, and transgender youth are at particular risk.Every year in the U.S., more people die by suicide than in car accidents, and more suicide deaths occur than homicide and AIDS deaths combined.In this episode Renee Garfinkel and Hannah Rothstein discuss the myths and facts about suicide, its warning signs, and how friends and family, teachers and others can help.Hannah Rothstein, Ph.D. is Professor Emerita of Management at Baruch College, City University of New York, Crisis Counselor for the Trevor Project.If you’re thinking about suicide or you’re in crisis right now,In U.S. call or text 988 or contact 988lifeline.org to talk with someone online.In Israel: call suicide hotline *1201 (press 3 for languages, then select English).Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il. She's on Twitter @embracingwisdom. She blogs here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/van-leer-institute

Why do some scholars sacrifice truth and logic to political ideology and peer acceptance?With courage and intellectual integrity, queer scholar-activist Corinne Blackmer stages a pointed critique of scholars whose anti-Israel bias pervades their activism as well as their academic work. In contrast to the posturing that characterizes her colleagues’ work, this work demonstrates true scholarship and makes an important contribution to the field of Israel studies.In Queering Anti-Zionism: Academic Freedom, LGBTQ Intellectuals, and Israel/Palestine Campus Activism (Wayne State UP, 2022), Blackmer demonstrates how the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement that seeks to delegitimize and isolate Israel has become a central part of social justice advocacy on campus, particularly within gender and sexuality studies programs. The chapters focus on the intellectual work of Sarah Schulman, Jasbir Puar, Angela Davis, Dean Spade, and Judith Butler, demonstrating how they misapply critical theory in their discussions of the State of Israel.Blackmer shows how these LGBTQ intellectuals mobilize queer theory and intersectionality to support the BDS movement at the expense of academic freedom, open discourse, and intellectual integrity.Send comments and suggestions to: reneeg@vanleer.org.il Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/van-leer-institute

“Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”― George Orwell, 1984How do people change? How does someone living in a closed and oppressive society develop insights and a worldview at odds with everything around them and everyone they know?This is the journey of change for one such person.Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, born in 1989 in Cairo, Egypt received a conservative Muslim education and grew up religiously devout, originally wanting to become a jihadist. While witnessing the creeping radicalization of society, he developed his own personal beliefs, pursuing with strength and determination the right to live freely.He participated in the Arab Spring protests in 2011 and soon afterward sought political asylum in the United States which was granted in 2014. Hussein has since served as an Assistant Professor of Hebrew Language at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, become a U.S citizen in 2017, served in the U.S Army Reserve, and is currently a public speaker, a blogger and an advocate for peace and education.Through a very circuitous route, Hussein Aboubakr grew to challenge the all-pervasive propaganda in his native Egypt, driving its citizens to hate the West and all Infidels, in particular The United States, the state of Israel and the Jewish people. His deeply inquisitive intellect led him to suffer interrogations, imprisonments and torture, until finally being granted political asylum in the U.S.Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/van-leer-institute

We live in a time of food paradox. In a world of historically unprecedented abundance, many don’t have enough to eat.Life-limiting obesity coexists with malnutrition - at the same time, sometimes in the very same place.Food is the complex and critical subject that we will talk about today with Joseph Gitler who works to address the issue at a local, concrete level. He feeds the hungry.Back in 2003 Joseph Gitler was moved to act when he saw significant food waste in Israel at a time of rising poverty. He founded the nonprofit organization Leket, that has since become the largest food rescue organization in the country.Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/van-leer-institute

The health care sector frequently emphasizes “Cultural competence”, an elastic concept that stretches from the simplest recognition of diversity of patient populations, to include policy implications of patients’ overall worldviews re the body, health, and decision-making.The issue, highlighted again in the recent U.S. Supreme Court abortion decision, gained prominence during Covid-19 pandemic, with the challenge of so-called marginal groups’ access to and compliance with vaccination programs.Legislation for equality impacts minority health care. It has brought both benefits and unintended consequences.We will talk about these important issues with today’s guest, Ben Kasstan, Ph.D., an anthropologist at the University of Bristol and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. His research explores public health, specifically, what health protection means and according to whom. Ben’s published works on public health issues include maternity care, childhood vaccinations, and sexuality education. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/van-leer-institute

“Narcissism” is truly one of the most important words of our time―ceaselessly discussed in the media, the subject of millions of online search queries, and at the center of serious social and political debates. But what does it really mean?In The New Science of Narcissism (Sounds True, 2020), Dr. W. Keith Campbell pulls back the curtain on this frequently misused label, presenting the most recent psychological, personality, and social research into the phenomenon.Rather than pathologizing all behaviors associated with the label, Campbell reveals that not only does narcissism occur on a spectrum, but almost everyone exhibits narcissistic tendencies in their day-to-day behavior. Drawing from real-life incidents and case studies, The New Science of Narcissism offers tools, tips, and suggestions for softening toxically selfish behaviors both in yourself and others. Here you will discover:· An exploration of personality disorders connected with and adjacent to narcissism· Why minor narcissistic tendencies are common in most people· The foundational difference between grandiose and vulnerable narcissism· The “recipe” of mental and emotional traits that combine into narcissism· How to identify when you’re in a relationship with a narcissist and what you can do about it· Why the 21st century has seen the rise of a “Great Fantasy Migration” into evermore insular subcultures· The connection between narcissistic tendencies and leadership· Why “the audience in your pocket” of social media has exacerbated culture-wide narcissistic tendenciesThough narcissism looms large in our cultural consciousness, The New Science of Narcissism offers many different options for understanding and treating it. With Campbell’s straightforward and grounded guidance, you’ll not only discover the latest and best information on the condition, but also a hopeful view of its future.Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/van-leer-institute