Welcome to the Quillette podcast, hosted on alternate weeks by me, Jonathan Kay, and by Iona Italia.

Quillette is where Freethought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

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This week, our podcast is brought to you courtesy of Honest Reporting Canada, a Toronto-based

organization that promotes fairness and accuracy

in Canadian media coverage of the Middle East and the Jewish community, and which regularly

calls out what it regards as anti-Israeli bias among journalists and other public figures.

Last month, I was invited to host an honest reporting webinar on the subject of anti-Semitism, featuring

New York Times columnist Brett Stevens, a strong supporter of Israel. And this week's Pullett

podcast is adapted from that presentation, which honest reporting has kindly allowed us to broadcast.

Brett's views on anti-Semitism have been in the news this year, because of remarks he

delivered on the subject back in February, when he was the featured speaker for the

annual State of World Jewery Talk at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan.

In that speech, Brett urged Jews to stop playing victim and said that educational initiatives

and outreach efforts aren't really that

useful for fighting anti-Semitism because most anti-Semites, as well as strident anti-Zionists

for that matter, don't really lack for information and aren't really interested in listening

to their opponents.

In our conversation, we talked about how modern forms of progressive social justice ideology

now overlap somewhat with hatred of the Jewish state, and I asked whether the war in Iran had encouraged thinkers, such as John Meersheimer,

who see Israel and its supporters as puppet masters leading the West, the United States in particular, toward ruin.

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