Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps20 Mar 2025

PREVIEW: "Two Jews Debate Israel" with Antony Loewenstein

How should moderate, secular Jews feel about Israel? How brutalising must Israel’s Gaza policy be before more Jews denounce it? Is Israel a well-intentioned country hijacked by right-wing leaders from its true purpose of peace? Or is it intrinsically committed to destroying Palestinians? Was a Jewish ethno-state a mistake from the start? Or is Israel an island of democracy in a sea of Islamist dysfunction?

No group debates these questions more vehemently than Jews themselves. After the October 7th Hamas attack, one book in particular shot up the bestseller list in the West. "The Palestine Laboratory" detailed how the technologies which Israel developed to control Palestinian populations have been exported for ugly purposes to regimes all the world. The book won Australia's most prestigious journalism award, a Walkley.

Its author, Antony Lowenstein, is an anti-Zionist Jew. He lived in East Jerusalem from 2016 to 2020 and has been published in The Guardian, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times.

Josh felt it's time to invite Antony back for another argument, as Jews are wont to have, about the state of the Jewish state.

You’re missing out on tons of exceptional content if you haven’t hit up the Uncomfy Convos Substack page at https://uncomfortableconversations.substack.com/subscribe

http://youtube.com/@JoshSzeps_

http://twitter.com/joshzepps

http://instagram.com/joshszeps/

http://tiktok.com/@uncomfyconversations

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(514)

But where are the young capitalists?

Here she is! Reem Ibrahim started out as a run-of-the-mill British pro-Corybn social democrat. Then she went to the London School of Economics and Political Science, passed through a phase of anarcho-...

5 Nov 31min

ELECTION 2026: What Everyone’s Missing

Trumpism is over. The Republican coalition is in tatters. What’s next? Democrats have a massive new congressional majority, including in deeply Republican areas. The last time they got this large a sh...

5 Nov 17min

JUST JOSH: How to Survive the A.I. Zombie Apocalypse

As the US midterms unfold, take a moment to reflect on the bigger picture. While voters protest data centres and politicians quibble about A.I. regulations, you and I are left with a few questions. Wh...

4 Nov 51min

Heretics’ Andrew Gold: Is Multiculturalism a Cult?

Is independent thinking sustainable for humans? Or will people always collapse into tribes, mandating beliefs and excommunicating heretics? Is Josh a delusional optimist for believing in humanism, lib...

3 Nov 1h 33min

Comedy Kingmaker on Speaking Fearlessly & Living Well

Noam Dworman is the owner of comedy’s most revered venue, the Comedy Cellar, sometimes referred to as the "Harvard” of comedy clubs. He transformed it from a single 1980s room in Greenwich Village int...

29 Okt 25min

What Israeli Election?

As we hold our breath to find out whether Israelis will finally spurn Netanyahuism, Yael Bar Tur joins Josh to definitely NOT discuss the Israeli election. Yael majored in counterterrorism in Israel a...

27 Okt 58min

Stephen Fry on Love, Trump and Learning Not to Care

This episode is part of The Best Of series and was originally posted in 2024. Few Britons are as iconic as Stephen Fry. On TV, he’s an Emmy-winning comedy legend immortalised in shows like A Bit of F...

26 Okt 1h 14min

Midterms! France! Josh is in DC! Yayyy

Is the exhausted majority stuck choosing between two extremes that can’t be satisfied, and what happens when the far left and far right go head to head? Josh chats with comedy writer and author of I M...

22 Okt 24min