A Public Affair Douglas Haynes, Ali Muldrow, Carousel Bayrd, Allen Ruff, & Esty Dinur

On today’s show, host Allen Ruff discusses Israel’s military complex with author and political activist, Jeff Halper. They cover Israeli armaments, including F35s and training programs in the US, like the one at Georgia State University. Halper has written about instruments of population control and the use of Gaza as a “laboratory” to create “permanent pacification.”

Halper argues that you have to understand settler colonialism to understand what’s happening in Gaza right now. He defines settler colonialism as what happens when one population arrives in a place with the intent to take over. The occupying group then invents a narrative about why they’re entitled to the land rather than the indigenous population. In combination with ethno-nationalism, narratives of entitlement form the basis for Zionism. 

Settler colonialism is a “unilateral” project, says Halper, who adds that we have to adopt an anti-colonial language. That means getting rid of the idea that there are “two sides.” 



Jeff Halper is an anthropologist, Israeli anti-occupation activist, and founder and director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions. He is also the author of multiple books including, War Against the People: Israel, the Palestinians and Global Pacification (2015).

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The local partisan primary election is coming up on August 13, 2024. And in the second episode in our series of interviews with candidates for Dane County Executive, we’re joined by Wes Sparkman who entered the race in February. 

News Director, Chali Pittman, spoke with Sparkman about his experience in leadership and management, including his work with Dane County, participation on several local advisory boards, and over 10 years working for the Madison Police and Fire Commission. 

Sparkman says he’s running to ensure that “Everyone in the county gets an opportunity to grow and thrive.” This is a big task that he says will require lots of listening, helping communities throughout Dane County sustain their growth, developing social service programs for mental health and addiction, and finding more opportunities for subsidized and “fair” housing. 

Wes Sparkman has worked in local government for over two decades. He’s the director of the Tamara D. Grigsby Office for Equity and Inclusion, where he works to implement equal employment, civil rights, racial and social justice, and organizational change to establish equity in public service. 

Photo by Chali Pittman for WORT.

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REAP Food Group was founded in the late ’90s, and officially registered as a nonprofit in 2002. For the past two and a half decades, it’s worked to connect the community with local food producers.

You might know REAP best through the Farm Fresh Atlas, a directory that helps consumers find local food in Wisconsin.  A print edition of the Atlas might be hanging on your fridge. It’s also now a web database, and the 2024 edition details over 400 farms, farmers’ markets, and producers.

The Farm Fresh Atlas is one example of REAP’s collaboration and understanding of regional food systems. Now, REAP is heading up a new, USDA-funded collaborative to create a food systems action plan for the Dane County region.

The action plan is dependent on input from local farmers, food retailers, institutional buyers, food banks and pantries, community organizations, and local residents. Our guests today liken the project to putting together a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle in order to build a more complete picture of our local food system.

REAP’s Executive Director Phil Kauth and Events Coordinator/Farm Fresh Atlas Cooardinator Noah Bloedorn join us in the studio for more on the action plan. Bill Warner, of Snug Haven Farm and the Dane County Food Council, also joins us for a conversation about growing south-central Wisconsin’s food systems.

We also talk about other new projects from REAP, including “Mosaic Dinners,” a storytelling and community-building project in partnership with Dane County Food Collective and UW-Madison Art Department Artist-in-Residence Marlon F. Hall.

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“I’ve never felt more Jewish than I do nowadays,” says A Public Affair host Esty Dinur near the end of an hour with radical ideas about combating antisemitism and divorcing it from Zionism. We start the show with Professor Omer Bartov who explains his personal journey from writing about the Holocaust to writing on Israel-Palestine and how the actions of Israel has led to an increase in antisemitism.

Then Esty talks with Ben Lorber and Shane Burley about their brand book Safety through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism. Ben and Shane will be doing a book talk at A Room of One’s Own on Tuesday, June 25th at 6pm.



Omer Bartov is Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies in the Department of History at Brown University. His many books include Israel-Palestine: Lands and Peoples (2021), a  novel titled The Butterfly and the Axe, which was published in January 2023 and Genocide, The Holocaust and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis

Ben Lorber is senior research analyst at Political Research Associates, a social movement think tank, where he studies and publishes on antisemitism and white nationalism (analyst Chip Berlet was s guest on this show). He previously worked as national campus organizer with Jewish Voice for Peace, supporting justice driven young Jewish communities across the country, and has written extensively on antisemitism, Israel/Palestine and Jewish identity. 

Shane Burley is the author of several books on the far-right and social movements, and has contributed to NBC News, Jewish Currents, Al Jazeera, The Baffler, The Daily Beast, Haaretz, In These Times, Yes! Magazine, Tikkun, and The Oregon Historical Quarter.

Image of Bartov by Bildungsstätte Anne Frank, CC BY 3.0, Link

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On June 4th and 6th, the U.S. Air Force and Space Force conducted tests of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). The weapons were launched from the Vandenberg base in California and were pointed toward the Marshall Islands.





In a piece for Jacobin, Emma Claire Foley writes that the ICBMs “are not only strategically impractical but a threat to the lives of millions.” Foley is a specialist on nuclear-weapons policy issues with RootsAction.org. RootAction is a member of Defuse Nuclear War, a coalition dedicated to reducing the risk of nuclear war. Defuse Nuclear War has condemned ICMBs, and called the tests a “wasteful, dangerous step backward for peace.”



Foley joins A Public Affair host Allen Ruff to discuss the tests, the global state of nuclear weapons, and the pushback against nuclear war.











Emma Claire Foley is a writer and filmmaker based in New York. Her writing and commentary has appeared in Newsweek, NBC, the Guardian, and elsewhere.

Image by The Nation Museum in the Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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William Freeman was a 15-year-old in the the early nineteenth century who was convicted of a crime he insisted he didn’t commit. He was sentenced to five years of hard labor in Auburn prison in New York State. He, and the rest of the prisoners, worked without pay, and when Freeman challenged the system, it had violent repercussions.

In her latest book Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder that Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit, Robin Bernstein uses Freeman’s story to lay out the twisted history of anti-Black racism in the prison for profit industry. Robin joins host Ali Muldrow to talk about the book and the way the North invented profit-driven prison labor.



Dr. Robin Bernstein is the Dillon Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies and Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. She is the author of Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, which won five awards. Her latest book is Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit (University of Chicago Press, May 2024).

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