"Why Gaza is Genocide" with Israeli Holocaust Historian Prof. Amos Goldberg

Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

Josh Szeps

Comedy Interviews, Self-improvement, Society & Culture, Education, Comedy

4.6 • 863 Ratings

🗓️ 26 May 2025

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Terms like "genocide" and "apartheid" are thrown around a lot by anti-Israel activists. But when a leading Israeli Holocaust historian declares his own country to be a genocidal apartheid state, we ought to listen.

Born and raised in Israel, Dr Goldberg is a professor in the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was the head of the university's Research Institute of Contemporary Jewry until last year.

Goldberg is a world-renowned expert on the cultural history of Jews during the Holocaust, in particular in the Warsaw Ghetto. He's been a visiting scholar at many of the top institutes for the study of genocide all over Europe and America, including at Cornell University and at The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

These bona fides give Goldberg the authority to level devastating accusations against his homeland. He recently went viral after co-authoring an opinion piece in the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, entitled "There's No Auschwitz in Gaza. But It's Still Genocide".

Professor Goldberg made time for Josh from his office in Jerusalem.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Gahey, humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. And it's one of the most
0:08.0	dangerous questions that has plagued international geopolitics and really the morality of
0:13.7	activists all over the world for the past 19 months. Is a Western liberal democratic country,
0:19.9	an ally of ours, a country that we provide weapons
0:24.1	and funding to, Israel, undertaking a genocide right in front of our very faces?
0:31.4	I've spent a lot of time on this show and in newspaper columns trying to encourage people
0:36.3	to understand the complexity of the issue in Gaza, trying to encourage people to understand the complexity of the
0:38.2	issue in Gaza, trying to have people not fall for the images that they might see on social
0:43.9	media that are algorithmically fed to them by canny entities, the provenance of which we do not
0:49.7	know, could be Iran, could be China, could just be the mindless AI is grinding away in Silicon Valley.
0:55.9	And for us to step back and try to learn about the conflict, try to put it in a historical
0:59.9	context. If you want to hear some of those conversations, I spoke with the incredible British
1:05.7	comedian, Jewish activist comedian, I suppose, David Bedele on the 3rd of January 24. On February 13th, I did an
1:14.1	editorial called The Rise of Woke Snitchers, which was about people dobing each other in for being
1:19.0	either pro or anti-Israel. On the 18th of April, 24, there's a recording of me in conversation
1:26.8	with Douglas Murray, the staunch defender of
1:29.5	Israel live in Sydney. We did a national tour together. On June 19th, 2024, there's an editorial
1:34.8	that's interesting to listen to, which is about protesters at a Seinfeld show that I was at,
1:40.6	pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel, really anti-Semitic protesters. I did an editorial called
1:46.3	Josh on Trump on Gaza on February 7th of this year. I interviewed Senator Sharma, who is the
1:52.1	former ambassador to Israel, called Trump, Gaza and Liberalism. That episode is called on March 11th.
1:58.7	On March 12th, I released an editorial called Josh on Israel-Palestine coverage.
	...

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