Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I am the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs Magazine. I am joined today by Peter Beinart, professor of journalism and political science

at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism

at the City University of New York,

editor at large at Jewish Currents

and contributing opinion writer at the New York Times.

He is the author of the new book

Being Jewish after the destruction of Gaza,

a reckoning.

Peter Bynard, welcome to current affairs.

Thank you.

Peter, it is safe to say, I think, at this point,

that much of your writing career,

much of your published work is about changing your mind on things,

whether it's the war in Iraq or whether it's

about contemporary Zionism. If you look back at the Peter Beinart who worked at the New

Republic under Martin Peretz, for example, can you tell us what that, Peter Beinard, someone

who still held the original views that you may have held about Israel,

how he would have interpreted the destruction of Gaza first?

Well, I mean, the truth is that at that time my career, I wasn't writing very much about Israel at all.

It wasn't the focus of my writing until after I left the Republic.

So I'm not, and honestly, I'm hard for me to exactly imagine even how the new republic itself,

the institution, would have responded because it was a very different moment.

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