The Honest Take

HonestReporting
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The Honest Take is HonestReporting's long-form interview series bringing together leading voices to examine how Israel and the Middle East are covered — and what goes into creating and feeding the narratives that target Israel. Each episode features leading experts, analysts, researchers, and journalists who work on media bias, terrorism, NGO accountability, foreign influence, antisemitism, and international institutions. These are professionals directly involved in investigating how narratives are shaped, amplified, and protected across global newsrooms. The conversations go beyond breaking news to unpack: • Media bias and misinformation about Israel • How terrorist organizations exploit humanitarian and civil society frameworks • The role of NGOs and international bodies in shaping public perception • Foreign state influence on Western media and education • Why context disappears in reporting on Israel and the Palestinians This series is for listeners seeking in-depth analysis, evidence-based discussion, and accountability in journalism on Israel and the Middle East.

  1. 21h ago

    The Familiar Villain: Gaza, Activist Journalism, and the Unspoken Rules of Reporting on Israel | With Matti Friedman

    Matti Friedman spent five years inside the AP's Jerusalem bureau. He explains the staffing anomaly, the peace offer that was ordered killed, and the Hamas censorship AP readers were never told about. We throw around the phrase "media bias" as though it means a bad headline here, an unfair paragraph there. Matti Friedman is describing something much larger — and he's describing it from the inside. From 2006 to 2011, Friedman was a reporter and editor in the Jerusalem bureau of the Associated Press: the biggest international bureau of the world's biggest news organization, feeding copy, photos, and footage to roughly 10,000 outlets worldwide. He came in from the left of the Israeli political spectrum with no particular critique of the press. It took him about two years to conclude that what the bureau produced wasn't really coverage. The first thing that struck him wasn't ideology. It was arithmetic. The AP had around 40 full-time staffers covering a country that is one one-hundredth of one percent of the world's surface — more reporters than it had in China, and more than it had in all of sub-Saharan Africa. In this conversation with Ben Chertoff, Friedman walks through what that machine actually did: The peace offer that never ran. In 2008, two AP reporters had Ehud Olmert's far-reaching two-state offer to Mahmoud Abbas — one of them had seen the map. They were ordered to drop it, because the story would have subverted the narrative the bureau was already committed to. Reporter Mark Lavie later called it the worst journalistic scandal of his fifty years in the business.The editor's note that never was. During Operation Cast Lead, the AP's correspondent in Gaza reported that Hamas fighters were dressing as civilians and being counted in the civilian death toll. Friedman put it in the story. Then came the phone call, and the detail came out. When Friedman proposed that AP disclose it was conforming to Hamas censorship — exactly as it discloses Israeli military censorship — he was overruled. Readers were never told.Why every outlet lands on the same story by the end of the day, without anyone coordinating anything.Why "the Israeli-Palestinian conflict" is the wrong name for the thing, and how the reframing away from "the Arab-Israeli conflict" quietly flipped who looks outnumbered.The Gaza bookshelf — the new literary genre in which Gaza becomes the lens for feminism, the climate, and everything else, and what it means that a very old idea is finding a very new audience.Friedman's diagnosis isn't a conspiracy. It's a bubble, an incentive structure, and a professional identity that changed: reporters who, in his words, "didn't want to cover the circus — they wanted to be dancing bears in the circus." Guest: Matti Friedman is a Canadian-born Israeli journalist and author. He wrote the widely discussed 2014 Tablet essay "An Insider's Guide to the Most Important Story on Earth," and he is the author of five books — The Aleppo Codex, Pumpkinflowers, Spies of No Country, Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai, and, new this year, Out of the Sky: Heroism and Rebirth in Nazi Europe, the story of the Jewish parachutists — Hannah Senesh among them — who escaped Nazi Europe for British Mandate Palestine and then volunteered to go back in. He writes from Jerusalem for The Free Press. Mentioned in this episode Matti Friedman, "An Insider's Guide to the Most Important Story on Earth" (Tablet, 2014) — https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/israel-insider-guideOut of the Sky: Heroism and Rebirth in Nazi Europe (Spiegel & Grau, 2026) — https://www.spiegelandgrau.com/out-of-the-skyDavid Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western TraditionThe Free Press — https://www.thefp.comThe Times of Israel — Friedman's pick for a daily news wrapLinks 🎧 The Honest Take: https://podcast.honestreporting.com 📺 Full episode playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLuF-lEHTGTw_RrfN9EP6pdWhgjMX7Fg5 If this conversation gave you something to think about, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify — it's the single biggest thing you can do to help more people find the show. And follow HonestReporting on Instagram, X, TikTok, and Facebook.

    The Familiar Villain: Gaza, Activist Journalism, and the Unspoken Rules of Reporting on Israel | With Matti Friedman

  2. Jul 21

    No One Wants a Jewish Protagonist: Inside Publishing's New Blacklist | With Meg Keene

    PEN America — the country's oldest and most prestigious free-expression organization — put out a report documenting how Jewish and Israeli writers are being frozen out of publishing. Within 24 hours, its own president had resigned over it. Not because the report went too far, but because it suggested, gently and with footnotes, that boycotting Jews might be a form of discrimination. Author Meg Keene wrote the Wall Street Journal piece that took the whole thing apart — and she's the most-quoted voice in the report itself. For fifteen years she wasn't a political writer at all: she built one of the most-read wedding blogs in the country, A Practical Wedding, with two books that sold well over 150,000 copies passed hand-to-hand between brides who'd never met. She was, in her own words, "the dream author." Then Charlottesville happened. Then Tree of Life. And after October 7, she sat down and wrote an achingly Jewish novel in seven days. The Big Five wouldn't touch it. One agent said the problem was a single word — Zionist. Another said the book could survive if she renamed a character from Yael to Sue. So Meg made a choice: if they weren't going to publish her anyway, she'd tell the truth out loud, and light her own fiction career on fire to do it. In this conversation: the free-speech paradox at the heart of the PEN resignation; how the industry's blacklist works without anyone ever having to write it down; the St. Martin's Press boycott and the rise of influencer-driven publishing; and the moment Meg went hunting for a 2024 blacklist in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency archive — and pulled up three articles she couldn't tell apart from the present, all dated 1939, all about the blacklisting of Jewish authors in Germany. Her argument isn't to shrink. It's to write more, document more, and build our own institutions the way we always have — because, as she puts it, "we are not a people for whom culture is the icing on the cake. It's the cake." Meg Keene Substack — "Field Notes for the Brave": https://megkeene.substack.comInstagram: https://instagram.com/megkeeneX: https://x.com/megkeeneSite: https://megkeene.comReferenced in the episode PEN America — "A Silent Moratorium" (July 9, 2026): https://pen.org/a-silent-moratorium-interviews-with-israeli-and-jewish-writers/Dinaw Mengestu resigns as PEN America president (NYT): https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/arts/pen-america-dinaw-mengestu-resigns.htmlMeg Keene's Wall Street Journal op-ed on PEN and cultural boycotts (July 2026): https://www.wsj.comJewish Telegraphic Agency archive: https://www.jta.org/archive

    No One Wants a Jewish Protagonist: Inside Publishing's New Blacklist | With Meg Keene

  3. Jul 14

    There Is Nowhere Else: Israeli Security, Zionist Pride, and the Doctrine That Broke on October 7 | With Brig. Gen. Amir Avivi

    Every American of a certain age remembers exactly where they were on September 11th. For Israelis, that morning was October 7th. Brigadier General Amir Avivi — a thirty-year IDF veteran, former deputy commander of the Gaza Division, and founder of Israel's largest movement of security professionals — saw it coming. Two years before the war, his organization wrote a national-security assessment describing the attack that was coming; six months before it, he published a book about it. Nobody in power acted on it. Ben Chertoff sits down with Avivi to understand how that happened, and what it means going forward. They get into the Cold War doctrine Israel quietly adopted and why it failed; what it's actually like to defend a country forty-five miles wide, where you can see your enemies from the airport; the real history of the Gaza withdrawal and why Avivi says Israel can never repeat it in the West Bank; and his blunt, uncomfortable answer to the question of rising global antisemitism — that the only long-term future for the Jewish people is in Israel. Some of it is hard to hear. That's the point. ABOUT THE GUEST Brigadier General (res.) Amir Avivi is a thirty-year veteran of the Israel Defense Forces. He served as deputy commander of the Gaza Division and as aide-de-camp to the Chief of the General Staff, among other senior commands. In 2020 he founded the Israel Defense and Security Forum (IDSF / Hebrew: "Habithonistim"), a security-establishment movement that has grown to roughly 55,000 members, including dozens of reserve generals and senior defense officials. He handed the chairmanship to Brig. Gen. (res.) Erez Wiener on June 1, 2026. He is the author of No Retreat: How to Secure Israel for Generations to Come, whose Hebrew edition appeared about six months before October 7th and which he frames as having foreseen the war and its aftermath. LINKS & RESOURCES Israel Defense and Security Forum (IDSF / Habithonistim):https://idsf.org.il/en/Book — No Retreat: How to Secure Israel for Generations to ComeGuest on X: @AmirAvivi1THE HONEST TAKE — SUBSCRIBE & FOLLOW Podcast (all platforms): https://podcast.honestreporting.comWatch on YouTube: The Honest Take — full episodes playlistApple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-honest-take/id1896315802Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1pCnClcM4jiggKP46YZGjGFollow @HonestReporting on X, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok.If this episode gave you something to chew on, subscribe wherever you're listening, and leave a rating and a review on Apple or Spotify — it genuinely helps new people find the show.

    There Is Nowhere Else: Israeli Security, Zionist Pride, and the Doctrine That Broke on October 7 | With Brig. Gen. Amir Avivi

  4. Jul 7

    Broken Mirror: Internalized Antisemitism, the Non-Jewish Gaze, and Why Jewish Pride is the Answer to Jew Hate | With Ben M. Freeman

    The founder of the Jewish Pride movement says Jews have spent so long fighting for the right to exist that they've forgotten how to be proud that they do. Ben M. Freeman — a gay Jewish kid from Glasgow who had to come out twice, first as gay and then as an unapologetic Zionist — joins Ben Chertoff to make the affirmative case: that Jews are not a religion but a people, an ancient civilization indigenous to the Land of Israel, and that pride, not defense, is the real answer to Jew-hatred. Along the way: internalized antisemitism and his "three D's," the "non-Jewish gaze," why he reframes "Eastern European Jews" as "Jews who lived in Eastern Europe," the UN's own criteria for indigeneity, and why he says anti-Zionism is antisemitism — no asterisk. Key Takeaways Pride, not defense, is the point. Freeman's whole project is affirmative: "Jewish pride is the root to fighting Jew-hatred." You can't fight antisemitism, he argues, unless you're first proud to be a Jew.Jews are a people, not a religion. His "hill to die on": Judaism is equivalent to Jewishness — an Am, a civilization with a religion — and defining Jews only as a faith is a Christian import that creates endless contradictions.Internalized antisemitism has three forms. Diminishment (making yourself smaller — "I'm Jewish, but…"), denial (disowning your Jewishness), and deployment (weaponizing it, as anti-Zionist Jews do). Diminishment is the most common.Only Jews define Jewish identity — the "non-Jewish gaze." Because the non-Jewish world both isn't Jewish and has been structured against Jews, its definitions of "palatable" Jewishness are illegitimate; allies should amplify Jewish perspectives, not speak over them.The indigeneity case. Applying the UN's criteria (he discards the "non-dominant group" one as post-colonial nonsense), he argues Jews meet them — continuous connection to the land, a land-rooted calendar and festivals, Hebrew beneath every diaspora language, Jews buried with soil from Jerusalem. Reframes "Eastern European Jews" as "Jews who lived in Eastern Europe."He won't litigate Palestinian indigeneity. "I'm a Jew telling a Jewish story." He notes questions about when a collective Palestinian national identity emerged, but says it ultimately doesn't change the reality: "they are still here and we need to deal with that."Anti-Zionism is antisemitism — no asterisk. Criticism of Israeli policy is legitimate; the line, per Sharansky's 3D test, is delegitimization, demonization, and double standards. "Israel purposely kills Palestinian children" or "harvests organs" isn't policy critique — it's blood libel.Head, Hands, Heart. A proudly Jewish next generation needs knowledge (head), practice (hands), and — the hardest — cultivated pride (heart), taught from kindergarten on.Notable Quotes "The greatest achievement of the Jewish people is not Israel. The greatest achievement of the Jewish people is the Jewish people, and Israel is a major manifestation of that.""I was failed in an essay because I would not say that Israel was the worst country in the world — and that was direct feedback given to me by a professor.""Jews are not a religion. We're a people with a religion. The idea that we're a religion comes from Christianity.""We're in an abusive relationship with the non-Jewish world… you try, you try, you try — and then the goalposts move.""You've given me such space to define my own identity — but with my Jewishness, you feel comfortable telling me what I am. That's the progressive world right there.""Grow up. Stop being so entitled. You as an individual do not get to change a 3,000-year-old civilization."📚 Ben M. Freeman — the Jewish Pride trilogy: • Jewish Pride: Rebuilding a People(2021) — https://www.amazon.com/Jewish-Pride-Rebuilding-Ben-Freeman/dp/1913532135 • Reclaiming Our Story: The Pursuit of Jewish Pride (2022) — https://www.amazon.com/Reclaiming-Our-Story-Pursuit-Jewish/dp/1915036321 • The Jews: An Indigenous People (2025) — https://www.amazon.com/Jews-Indigenous-Ben-M-Freeman/dp/1916797474 ✍️ His Substack, The Jewish Pride Press — https://ben126.substack.com/

    Broken Mirror: Internalized Antisemitism, the Non-Jewish Gaze, and Why Jewish Pride is the Answer to Jew Hate | With Ben M. Freeman

  5. Jun 30

    Garbage In, Gospel Out: Wikipedia, Reddit, and the Battle Over Truth | With Ashley Rindsberg

    Episode Description When you ask ChatGPT, Google, or Gemini a question, where does the answer come from? Increasingly, it traces back to Wikipedia — and Wikipedia, investigative journalist Ashley Rindsberg argues, has been captured. In this episode, Rindsberg walks through how a small, coordinated network of editors — a "gang of 40" — has reshaped the way Wikipedia presents Israel, Zionism, and the war in Gaza, and how those edits flow downstream into the AI systems the world now treats as neutral arbiters of fact. He breaks down the tactics: swarming, the 500-edit barrier, severing Jewish historical ties to the land, weaponizing arbitration, and laundering terror-linked content through Reddit and into the models. It's a tour of the machinery behind the "narrative engines" — Wikipedia, Reddit, Google, and AI — and a sober look at what media literacy actually requires when the encyclopedia itself has a point of view. The Honest Take Podcast (all platforms): https://thehonesttake.transistor.fmYouTube playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLuF-lEHTGTw_RrfN9EP6pdWhgjMX7Fg5Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-honest-take/id1896315802Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1pCnClcM4jiggKP46YZGjGHonestReporting Web: https://honestreporting.comX / Instagram: @HonestReporting

    Garbage In, Gospel Out: Wikipedia, Reddit, and the Battle Over Truth | With Ashley Rindsberg

  6. Jun 23

    The Most Hated Man at the UN: How the United Nations Turned Against Israel | With Hillel Neuer

    What does it feel like to walk into a room run by dictators and state sponsors of terror — and tell them the truth to their faces? Hillel Neuer has done it for twenty years. As executive director of UN Watch in Geneva, he's become, by his own account and several media outlets', "the most hated man at the UN." In this conversation with Benjamin Chertoff, he explains the machinery behind the headlines: who actually writes the resolutions, how the "automatic majority" of 56 Muslim-majority states plus the dictatorships works, why Western democracies go along to get along, and how the Human Rights Council went from its founding chair Eleanor Roosevelt to a representative of Gaddafi's Libya. They get into the Iran moment — the UN's near-silence on the massacre of Iranian protesters, followed by its sudden fury once the US and Israel struck the regime — and the case of Francesca Albanese, the Special Rapporteur condemned by France, Germany, Canada, the US and others for "Holocaust inversion" and antisemitism, who remains effectively unaccountable. Neuer breaks down the disinformation feedback loop (NGO → UN statement → "the UN says" → global press), the meaning of the Council's Israel-only "Agenda Item 7," and whether the institution can ever be fixed. Guest: Hillel Neuer — Executive Director, UN Watch. Host: Benjamin Chertoff. From HonestReporting.

    The Most Hated Man at the UN: How the United Nations Turned Against Israel | With Hillel Neuer

  7. Jun 16

    The Second Exodus: How 850,000 Jews Were Erased From the Arab World | With Dr. Henry Green

    In 1948 there were 38,000 Jews in Libya. Today there are none. Across the Arab world, some 850,000 Jews — communities that predated Islam by a thousand years — were driven out, dispossessed, and denationalized in barely three decades. Most of the world has never heard the story. Dr. Henry Green, founder of Sephardi Voices and emeritus professor at the University of Miami, has spent more than fifteen years recording the testimonies of those who lived it. In this conversation with Ben Chertoff, he traces how the Jews of Baghdad, Benghazi, Cairo, Casablanca, Aleppo and beyond went from flourishing — at one point Jews were 35–40% of Baghdad — to gone: the Farhud, the rise of the Mufti, Nazi propaganda in Arabic, the great rescue operations, the ma'abarot transit camps, and the long erasure of an entire refugee history. Henry explains why this exodus was left out of the textbooks, what justice might look like, and why his new work puts a forensic dollar figure on what was taken — work he carried to the UN in Geneva in September 2025. And he closes with the story of a young Hillel president who found her own grandparents in the Sephardi Voices archive and wept. Guest: Dr. Henry Green — founder, Sephardi Voices; emeritus professor of Religious & Judaic Studies, University of Miami. Co-author of Sephardi Voices: The Untold Expulsion of Jews from the Arab Lands (2021, with Richard Stern­berg) and author of new work, The Forgotten Exodus of Arab Jews, presenting a forensic valuation of seized Jewish assets. The scale of the exodus: From 150,000 to 3 Jews in Iraq, 38,000 to 0 Jews in LibyaIndigeneity and antiquity — the Talmud written in Babylon; "I'm a Babylonian Jew"Life as dhimmi under Islam vs. persecution in Christian EuropeThe Farhud (1941 Baghdad pogrom) and Nazi reach into the Arab worldBaghdad's golden age — Jews 35–40% of the city; the Zilkha banking familyThe rescue operations: Magic Carpet (Yemen) and Ezra and Nehemiah (Iraq)The ma'avarot transit camps and the dominant Ashkenazi diaspora narrativeAntisemitism vs. anti-IsraelThe Abraham Accords and Morocco's reckoningRecognition, justice, and reparations; the case taken to the UN in Geneva, September 2025Notable quotes "Libya in 1948 had 38,000 Jews. Today there are zero.""I'm a Babylonian Jew." / "How can I deny that I'm Iraqi? I've been there for 3,000 years.""I have no Jews. I only have Moroccans." — the King of Morocco"Why would a million people leave in 30 years? That is ethnic cleansing.""You can't talk about one refugee story without the other."

    The Second Exodus: How 850,000 Jews Were Erased From the Arab World | With Dr. Henry Green

  8. Jun 9

    Pride and Prejudice: How Antisemitism Captured LGBTQ+ Spaces | With Eve Barlow

    It's Pride Month, and at a queer women's sauna night in Barcelona, two married Jewish women — wearing Stars of David — were surrounded, interrogated, and thrown out to chants of "Free Palestine." Not in Tehran. Not in Gaza. In a room built on the promise that no one gets turned away for who they are. Journalist Eve Barlow knows these spaces from the inside. She was deputy editor of NME — the biggest weekly music magazine in the world — broke bands, wrote the cover stories, and built LGBTQ+ coverage from scratch at GQ. She was at the beating heart of progressive culture. Then, around 2019, she said one thing out loud: that the anti-Zionism rising around her was antisemitism wearing a new coat. The world that let her in turned on her. She named her newsletter after what they did to her — Blacklisted. In this conversation, Eve and host Ben Chertoff go past the headlines on: The Barcelona sauna incident — and why the perpetrators were elites (a university sociologist, a lawyer, a teacher), not the ignorantWhere "Queers for Palestine" actually comes from — the queer-theory and post-colonial lineage that turned a civil-rights movement into an oppressor/oppressed morality playWhy marginalization became a political identity the movement can't put down — and the eerie parallel to how Jews went from "oppressed" to "oppressor"The "as-a-Jew" anti-Zionists — Matt Bernstein, Zach Polanski — and the market that rewards themThe pinkwashing smear, flipped on its head: Israel's real LGBTQ+ record vs. the rest of the regionReleased hostage Emily Damari, and the particular vulnerability of being openly gay in captivityAnd a closing message to the queer Jewish kid who's been told to choose between their people and their prideEve's argument: Pride began as a celebration of how far people had come in a single generation. Somewhere along the way it inverted — from celebrating victory into a contest over who is most oppressed. The moment a people succeeds, it gets recast as the oppressor. Her answer isn't to shrink. It's to refuse the trade. Eve Barlow's links 📰 Blacklisted (Substack): https://evebarlow.substack.com✍️ "Queers for Zion" (SAPIR Journal): https://sapirjournal.org/aspiration-ii/2026/queers-for-zion/𝕏 https://x.com/Eve_Barlow📸 Instagram: https://instagram.com/evebarlowChapters (00:00) Cold open(00:18) Welcome — who is Eve Barlow(02:08) The Barcelona sauna incident(06:52) An outlier, or an epidemic?(11:34) From NME and GQ to fighting Jew-hatred(20:35) The writing on the wall: BDS, London, and leaving the UK(28:09) Where "Queers for Palestine" comes from: queer theory & post-colonialism(35:36) Marginalization as political pathology(42:26) Moral superiority and the activist "cult"(48:22) Building a new closet: "take off your Magen David"(52:42) The "as-a-Jew" anti-Zionists: Matt Bernstein & Zach Polanski(57:19) Pinkwashing — and Israel's real LGBTQ+ record(1:02:17) Most rights in the region — and still room to grow(1:04:13) "Queers for Zion" and Emily Damari in captivity(1:08:52) To the queer Jewish kid told to choose(1:12:04) Where to find Eve's work(1:12:41) Ben's final reflectionThe Honest Take goes past the headlines to find out what's actually true about Israel and the people covering it. Hosted by Ben Chertoff for HonestReporting. ▶️ Watch on YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLuF-lEHTGTw_RrfN9EP6pdWhgjMX7Fg5 🎧 Listen everywhere: https://thehonesttake.transistor.fm If this conversation made you think, do us one favor: leave a rating and a reviewwherever you're listening — it's the single biggest thing that helps new people find the show. And follow HonestReporting on Instagram, X, TikTok, and Facebook.

    Pride and Prejudice: How Antisemitism Captured LGBTQ+ Spaces | With Eve Barlow
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The Honest Take is HonestReporting's long-form interview series bringing together leading voices to examine how Israel and the Middle East are covered — and what goes into creating and feeding the narratives that target Israel. Each episode features leading experts, analysts, researchers, and journalists who work on media bias, terrorism, NGO accountability, foreign influence, antisemitism, and international institutions. These are professionals directly involved in investigating how narratives are shaped, amplified, and protected across global newsrooms. The conversations go beyond breaking news to unpack: • Media bias and misinformation about Israel • How terrorist organizations exploit humanitarian and civil society frameworks • The role of NGOs and international bodies in shaping public perception • Foreign state influence on Western media and education • Why context disappears in reporting on Israel and the Palestinians This series is for listeners seeking in-depth analysis, evidence-based discussion, and accountability in journalism on Israel and the Middle East.

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  • Creator
    HonestReporting
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    16
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 HonestReporting
  • Show Website
    The Honest Take

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