The Official ISCA Podcast

Sunday, April 30, 2023. In this episode, Ruth Cohen-Dar explores the topic "What is Israel's Role in the Fight Against Antisemitism?" Ruth Cohen-Dar was born in the Negev to a mother who was a third generation Jerusalemite and a father of Greek descent. They were a family of pioneers, who established a village near Ashkelon. She served in the Israeli Army for three years as an officer, after a year of volunteering as a community worker in a rural community in the Negev. Cohen-Dar holds a B.A. and M.A. in Political Science from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She has worked at the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs since 1986 and was posted abroad on three occasions, the last time as Deputy Ambassador in Poland. Since 2020 she has served as the Director of The Department for Combating Antisemitism and Holocaust Remembrance, as well as the Co-Chair of Israel's delegation to the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance).  Music: "Pleasant Porridge" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Sunday, April 23, 2023. In this episode, Meron Medzini discusses "Anti-Semitism and Philo-Semitism — Their Role in the Birth of Israel." Professor (Emeritus) Meron Medzini was born in Jerusalem in 1932. After high school, he served as an infantry officer in the Israeli army and then traveled to the United States to obtain university degrees. He holds a BA from City College of New York (1957), MA from Georgetown University (1960), and Ph.D. from Harvard (1964) in Asian Studies. Between 1962 and 1978, he served as director of the Israel Government Press Office and in that capacity was spokesman for Prime Ministers Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir, and Yitzhak Rabin. He has pursued an academic career, teaching for four decades at the Hebrew University School for Overseas Students and in the Department of Asian Studies. He also taught at Tel Aviv University and lectured in various universities abroad. He is the author of nine books. His Golda – A Political Biography (De Gruyter Verlag, Berlin, 2016) won the Israel Prime Minister's Prize. His book on Japan and the Jews during the Holocaust was translated to English and Japanese. He also authored some 100 articles in academic publications in Israel and abroad. In 2016, the Japanese Government awarded him the Order of the Rising Sun for promoting Israel-Japan Cultural relations. He resides in Jerusalem. Music: "Pleasant Porridge" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License⁠http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Sunday, April 16, 2023. In this episode, Jarrod Tanny discusses "Antisemitism in the Academy and the Fate of Jewish Studies: An Insider's View." Jarrod Tanny is Associate Professor of History and the Charles and Hannah Block Distinguished Scholar in Jewish History at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Between 2008 and 2010 he was the Schusterman post-Doctoral Fellow in Jewish Studies at Ohio University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, focusing on Russian and Jewish history. Originally from Montreal, Canada, he completed an M.A. at the University of Toronto and a B.A. at McGill University. His monograph, City of Rogues and Schnorrers (Indiana University Press, 2011), examines how the city of Odessa was mythologized as a Jewish city of sin, celebrated and vilified for its Jewish gangsters, pimps, bawdy musicians, and comedians.  In 2012, Dr. Tanny published an essay called “Between the Borscht Belt and the Bible Belt: Crafting Southern Jewishness through Chutzpah and Humor,” in the journal Southern Jewish History. Most recently, he published “Curb Your Orgasm: Larry David and the Schlimazel as Sexual Deviant,” in Jewish Film & New Media: An International Journal. He is currently working on a larger study on Jewish humor in post-World War II America and its place within the larger context of the European Jewish past. Tanny just completed writing a book tentatively titled The Babylonian Seinfeld, a satiric take on the hit TV series, in which the great rabbis of the Talmudic era sit gathered in the Yeshiva to discuss and debate the issues raised in each Seinfeld episode. He has also published numerous opeds on antisemitism in The Forward, Tablet Magazine, The Times of Israel, The Jewish Journal, and The Jewish Review of Books. Tanny’s growing concern over the rise of antisemitism on college campuses and the seeming indifference of faculty led him to establish the Jewish Studies Zionist Network, an association for Jewish Studies scholars who are pushing back against the demonization of Israel and its supporters in the academy.  Music: "Pleasant Porridge" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Tuesday, April 4, 2023. In this episode, Walter Russell Mead discusses the subject "The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People." Walter Russell Mead is the Ravenel B. Curry III Distinguished Fellow in Strategy and Statesmanship at Hudson Institute, the Global View Columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College in New York. He is also a member of Aspen Institute Italy and board member of Aspenia. Before joining Hudson, Mr. Mead was a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations as the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy. He has authored numerous books, including the widely recognized Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004). Mr. Mead’s latest book is entitled The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Future of the Jewish People. Music: "Pleasant Porridge" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Sunday, March 26, 2023. In this episode, Tammi Rossman-Benjamin discusses "Antisemitism and the Politics of Ethnic Studies of California's K-12 and Higher Education Classrooms." Tammi Rossman-Benjamin is co-founder and director of AMCHA Initiative, a non-profit organization that investigates, documents, and combats antisemitism at institutions of higher education in America. She has written numerous articles about academic anti-Zionism and antisemitism and has lectured widely on these developments and the growing threat they pose to the safety of Jewish students on university campuses. She was a faculty member in Hebrew and Jewish Studies at the University of California Santa Cruz from 1996-2016. Music: "Pleasant Porridge" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Sunday, March 5, 2023. In this episode, Linda Maizels discusses "The American Political Left's Response to Antisemitism." Linda Maizels is an independent scholar who earned her PhD from the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. Her article on campus antisemitism appeared in the book Contending with Antisemitism in a Rapidly Changing Political Climate, edited by Alvin H. Rosenfeld and published by Indiana University Press in November 2021. Her most recent book, What is Antisemitism? A Contemporary Introduction, was published by Routledge in September 2022.  Music: "Pleasant Porridge" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Sunday, February 26, 2023. In this episode, Gideon Botsch discusses "Current Developments of Antisemitism in Germany's Far-Right." Gideon Botsch studied political science at the Free University of Berlin and earned his diploma in 1997 with a thesis on the continuity of National Socialist concepts of Europe in early right-wing extremism in the Federal Republic of Germany. In 1999, he received a doctoral scholarship from the Hans Böckler Foundation. In 2003, he was employed at the Otto Suhr Institute for Political Science with the dissertation "Political Science" supervised by Peter Steinbach and Johannes Tuchel. From 2000 to 2004, he was a lecturer at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the Free University of Berlin. In 2004/05, he was a research associate at the Wannsee Conference House Memorial and Educational Site, where he helped design a new permanent exhibition. Since 2004, he has been a lecturer at Touro College Berlin. Beginning in 2006, he has been a research associate for antisemitism and right-wing extremism research at the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies, which is affiliated with the University of Potsdam, where he also worked as a lecturer. In 2007, he became managing editor of the Journal for Religious and Intellectual History. Since 2010, he has been a tutor of the Hans Böckler Foundation. In 2012, he presented a comprehensive overview of the history of the extreme right in the Federal Republic. Botsch has been an adjunct professor at the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences at the University of Potsdam since 2018. He is a member of the German Association for Political Science (DVPW), the Society for Intellectual History (GGG), and the Association of Historians in Germany (VHHD). Music: "Pleasant Porridge" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Sunday, February 19, 2023. In this episode, Jan Gross discusses the subject "Neighbors: Twenty Years Later." Jan T. Gross studies modern Europe, focusing on comparative politics, totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, Soviet and East European politics, and the Holocaust. After growing up in Poland and attending Warsaw University, he immigrated to the United States in 1969 and earned a Ph.D. in sociology from Yale University (1975). His first book, Polish Society under German Occupation, appeared in 1979. Revolution from Abroad (1988) analyzes how the Soviet regime was imposed in Poland and the Baltic states between 1939 and 1941. Neighbors (2001), which was a finalist for the National Book Award, reconstructs the events that took place in July 1941 in the small Polish town of Jedwabne, where virtually every one of the town’s 1,600 Jewish residents was killed in a single day. Using eyewitness testimony, Professor Gross demonstrates that the Jews of Jedwabne were murdered by their Polish neighbors, not by the German occupiers, as previously assumed. The shocking story occasioned an unprecedented reevaluation of Jewish-Polish relations during World War II and touched off passionate debate. In 2004 many of the Polish voices in this debate were published in translation in a collection, The Neighbors Respond. Professor Gross is also the author of several books in Polish, the coeditor of The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and Its Aftermath (2000), and the coeditor with Irena Grudzinska-Gross of War Through Children’s Eyes (1981), which uses school compositions and other documents written by children to study how children experience war and deportation. He joined the Princeton History Department in 2003 after teaching at New York University, Emory, Yale, and universities in Paris, Vienna, and Krakow. Professor Gross is the Norman B. Tomlinson ‘16 and ‘48 Professor of War and Society, emeritus.  "Pleasant Porridge" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Sunday, February 12, 2023. In this episode, Gallia Lindenstrauss explores the topic "Smooth Sailing or Rough Seas: Turkey, Israel and the Jews in Turkey After the 2022 Normalization." Dr. Gallia Lindenstrauss is a Senior Researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies and specializes in Turkish foreign policy. Her additional research interests are ethnic conflicts, Azerbaijan’s foreign policy, the Cyprus issue, and the Kurds. She has written extensively on these topics. Her commentaries and op-eds have appeared in all of the Israeli major media outlets, as well as in international outlets such as National Interest, Hurriyet Daily News, Turkey Analyst and Insight Turkey. Dr. Lindenstrauss completed her Ph.D. in the Department of International Relations at Hebrew University. She formerly lectured at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute for International Relations at the Hebrew University, and a visiting fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center. "Pleasant Porridge" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Wednesday, January 25, 2023. In this episode, Suzanne Brown-Fleming explores the subject of "'Love and Mercy' After the Holocaust: The Vatican's Postwar Clemency Campaign." Dr. Suzanne Brown-Fleming is Director of the Division of International Academic Programs at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies and a former Mandel Center Fellow (2000). She received her Ph.D. in modern German history from the University of Maryland-College Park in 2002. Dr. Brown-Fleming’s most recent publication, ‘May Your Holiness Act in the Interest of Protecting Those who Remain Morally Thinking People:’ Vatican Responses to Antisemitism, 1933, was part of the Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem’s Search and Research Series (2017). Her most recent book, Nazi Persecution and Postwar Repercussions: The International Tracing Service Archive and Holocaust Research (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016, paperback 2019) was named a 2016 Choice Outstanding Academic Title. Her first book, The Holocaust and Catholic Conscience: Cardinal Aloisius Muench and the Guilt Question in Germany, was published in 2006 by the University of Notre Dame Press in association with the Museum and was a 2006 University Press Book Selected for Public and Secondary School Libraries (Category of Religion) by the American Association of University Presses. Her book chapters, essays, and articles have appeared in the New Catholic Encyclopedia, the Lessons and Legacies volumes, H-German daily internet forum, and the scholarly journals Holocaust and Genocide Studies, German Studies Review, Journal of Ecumenical Studies, Contemporary Church History (Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte), Jewish Historical Studies: Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England, and Religion in Eastern Europe. She sat on the Executive Council of the American Catholic Historical Association (2012 to 2014 Term) and currently sits on the Editorial Board for the Contemporary Church History Quarterly (CCHQ). Dr. Brown-Fleming is Adjunct Professor on the faculty of Georgetown University’s Center for Jewish Civilization in Washington, D.C. Dr. Brown-Fleming’s work has been featured in the Catholic News Service (CNS). She has appeared on Cable News Network (CNN), EWTN Global Catholic Television Network, and several documentaries, including Holy Silence (2019), which premiered nationwide on PBS television in 2020. Her current research project, “Il Papa Tedesco (The German Pope): Eugenio Pacelli and Germany, 1917–1958,” is a study of Pope Pius XII’s relationship to Germany and its bishops, leaders, and people during the Weimar era, the Third Reich, and the Holocaust. Her second project, “Opa War Ein Nazi (Grandpa Was a Nazi): Eduard Geist and the Crimes of the Third Reich,” is Dr. Brown-Fleming’s first attempt to research and write as both a decades-long scholar of the Holocaust and as the biological granddaughter of a devout and locally prominent Nazi.  "Pleasant Porridge" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/