Deborah Lipstadt: Is Israel really the cause of surging antisemitism?

Welcome to “A Mandatory Listen,” a new weekly podcast in which The Times of Israel deputy editor Amanda Borschel-Dan asks the big questions facing Israel and the Jewish people.

In this episode of the new series, we speak with Emory University Prof. Deborah Lipstadt, the former US Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism.

WATCH the full episode here:

Lipstadt is in Israel to accept Bar-Ilan University’s Jonathan Sacks Institute Prize for Outstanding Achievement as a Public Intellectual, in Memory of Samuel Gewurz z”l.

In an era of rising global antisemitism, Borschel-Dan has received dozens of emails pointing fingers at Israel and the war in Gaza as the sources of the hatred.

In a no-holds-barred conversation, Lipstadt assesses the nature of contemporary Jew-hatred and weighs in on whether Israel’s actions indeed may be contributing to its rise.

We hear her thoughts on whether “anti-Zionism” is a new form of antisemitism or its own distinct hatred and what the proverbial Venn diagram looks like.

But to start with, we return to 1967, when university student Lipstadt was here in Jerusalem during the Six Day War and hear her firsthand account of life in the newly unified capital.

A Mandatory Listen podcast episodes are available for download on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was produced by Yitzchak Ledee.

Check out last week’s episode:

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