Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest for January 3rd, 2013, The Three Jews, Two and a Half Opinions.

Edition, I'm David Plotz, the editor of Slate.

And that was the best pre-show discussion we ever had. I wish we could do more topics.

We had a great pre-show discussion. It would be so much fun.

That's so tantalizing. Did you have the tape running, Mike? You should put, is any of it running? None of it was never put that at the end.

It wasn't back great, let me just say. All right, we're back from winter break, and we have a special guest here in the Washington studio. It's Emily Bazelon down from New Haven. How is your holiday? It was great, although I feel happy to be here as well. I shared your conundrums, your Lyra conundrums answer with lots of people this week and everyone said that was the best answer.

Which, oh, my, Lyra. Lyra. Lyra. You wouldn't want to be Lyra.

Right.

As opposed to other answers I gave, which have been led to me being called morally monstrous in various ways, shape, and form.

Will, if you had been there, you would have been more monstrous than me, I'm sure.

That is Will Sautan, nodding.

I own monstrous.

John Dickerson is AWOL. John Dickerson is so, he was so troubled by the conundrum show. He's still out in the wilderness pondering conundrums, so he's not here. Hopefully he'll be back. He's

at a nice lush ski lodge. But he is pondering conundrums, probably. So Will Salatanslate Senior

Under. Hello, Will. Welcome back to the Gavest. I had to be here because Emily's here. Exactly. Why did you have to be here? Because she's here in person. So it was happening. It's the draw. I'm honored. Okay. This week's GabFest, the first of 2014, we will talk about the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, which is poised to make a ruckus and the question of whether

the minimum wage can become a winning issue for Democrats in this coming election.

Then is violence going to ruin the Sochi Olympics?

Emily is going to learn how to pronounce the word Sochi during that segment.

And then we'll have a discussion about a fascinating fight among Jewish college students about

how much criticism of Israel or any criticism of Israel should be tolerated by Jewish

organizations, especially on college campuses.

And of course, we will have cocktail chatter.

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