1:51 How Israelis think about civilian casualties in Gaza
20:47 Is the war spawning a new generation of terrorists?
34:39 Explaining versus justifying bad behavior
49:39 Can Hamas and other extremist groups be moderated?
1:03:12 Is the world biased against Israel?
1:14:45 Cognitive biases that inflame tribal tensions
1:26:09 The “river to the sea” Rorschach test
1:41:03 On the precipice of World War III?
In listening to this conversation I was reminded of a recent post, Jews and the historical imaginary of half the world’s peoples, where I was talking about the fact that Jews were banned from England between 1290 and sometime late in the 16th century and yet anti-Semitism flourished in that period.
The fact that there were no Jews in Shakespeare’s England was thus no impediment to writing a play about a Jew, one who was a moneylender. Shakespeare had the cultural imaginary of Jews to draw upon and, in so doing, he gave it new force and energy. His moneylender was named “Shylock,” a name which has since served as a token and touchstone for usury.
Jews began returning to England in the middle of the seventeenth century, during the rule of Oliver Cromwell.
As for the Jews in the cultural imaginary, that exploded in Germany and Austria in the middle of the previous century. Those reverberations remain with us to this day.
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