Unreasonable
Feeling overwhelmed by the relentless attack on American Democracy by the Religious Right? Welcome to Unreasonable: sane conversations for a country that's lost its friggin' mind. But Unreasonable is more than a podcast. It’s the start of a movement to reverse the inexorable rise of religious fanaticism taking over our government and our lives, on issues from public education, to women’s reproductive health, to the mainstreaming of loud-and-proud racism. Here we not only learn together what in the world's going on with our country, we develop an action plan to move America forward. It’s time for all of us who believe in the Separation of Church and State to unite — as the majority of Americans we are — in the name of democracy, common sense and kindness. Is that really so unreasonable?
Unreasonable
"Is Israel A Theocracy?" with Bernard Avishai
Whatever your position is on Israel, on Zionism, on Hamas' attacks on October 7, 2023 or Netanyahu’s prosecution of the war in Gaza, it's undeniable that Israel had an outsized influence on our recent presidential election.
And it's ironic that our greatest ally in the Middle East, that tiny state described as the only functioning democracy in the region, may well have been a major contributor to the undoing of American democracy.
How did the promise of Israel become the problem of Israel?
Unreasonable executive producer and this episode's guest host, Bennett Windheim, spoke with political economist, educator and author Bernard Avishai and asked: Is Israel a theocracy, and are there cautionary lessons for America to learn?
Avishai is the Visiting Professor of Government at Dartmouth and former adjunct Professor of Business at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He’s taught at MIT and Duke. A Guggenheim fellow, he is the author of several books including 'The Tragedy of Zionism,’ 'A New Israel,' and 'The Hebrew Republic.'
He is a former editor of the Harvard Business Review and contributes regularly on matters of political economy and Israeli affairs to the New Yorker, The New York Review, The Nation, the New York Times Magazine, and Harper's, for which he wrote last year’s captivating report entitled “Israel’s War Within: On the Ruinous History of Religious Zionism.”
