ANCHOR POINT

Erielle Reshef’s journey from Israeli TV to MS NOW

Reshef, an Oklahoma native, said her time growing up in the close-knit Oklahoma City Jewish community played a major part in her identity

Courtesy

Erielle Reshef

Haley Cohen

September 17, 2026

MS NOW anchor Erielle Reshef never planned to become a television journalist. After completing a master’s degree in diplomacy and conflict studies in Israel in 2010, she happened to be watching an English-language news program whose anchors were about to go on maternity leave. Her husband wrote down the email address on the screen and pushed her to apply.

Reshef, who had never worked in a newsroom or even read from a teleprompter, went in for a screen test. She was hired by the now-shuttered IBA English News, Israel’s Channel 1, the next day.

That chance opportunity launched a career that has taken Reshef from her hometown of Oklahoma City to local television, international news and eventually ABC News, where she spent eight and a half years, including as a national correspondent. Already accomplished in her career — having been one of the first reporters on the scene at the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh — Reshef made another major leap last June.

She left the relative comfort of a network news reporting job to join MS NOW, formerly known as MSNBC, where she is now a fill-in anchor for daytime cable news shows for the first time. Along the way, her upbringing in a small but tight-knit Jewish community, her Israeli family ties and her years living in Israel have remained central to how she understands both the world she covers and her role as a journalist.

For Reshef, 42, those identities don’t conflict with journalism but are part of what she brings to the job. In an interview with Jewish Insider, Reshef said her Jewish values — particularly curiosity, rigorous debate and a commitment to understanding people on the margins — are the “scaffolding” of her journalism.

Reshef began reporting in Israel after she received a master’s degree from Reichman University in Herzliya. In her first newsroom job at IBA English News in Israel, where she covered the upheavals of the Arab Spring, Reshef reported from the Gaza border and anchored the night Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was deposed.

But before she lived in Israel, where her father is from, her roots were planted in Oklahoma City, where Reshef was raised and where she later returned to report (reporting that won her a Heartland Emmy in 2017). Living in Oklahoma — and being part of a smaller Jewish community — deeply shaped her identity as a journalist, Reshef told JI.

“There’s nothing quite as special as being able to come back to your hometown and be a local journalist,” said Reshef. “I felt incredibly fortunate to be able to dig into the stories that really matter to the people that I grew up with. As far as being a Jew in Oklahoma City, it’s a small but mighty community. My mother was the head of the Jewish federation for several decades. I felt like the fact that it was a small Jewish community set me up to really understand my own faith and traditions in order to be able to explain those to my friends around me who had never been exposed to Jewish life.”

Those instincts now inform how Reshef approaches her newest professional chapter at MS NOW, a network whose audience skews progressive at a moment when such spaces have become increasingly critical of Israel. Since joining MS NOW last year, Reshef has sat behind the anchor desk across many of the network’s programs, including anchoring “Money, Power, Politics with Stephanie Ruhle,” “On The Line with Alicia Menendez,” “MS NOW Reports” and “The Moment with Katy Tur.”

Reshef does not view her background as something she needs to soften or hide. Instead, she told JI that her intimate knowledge of the region is an asset in a newsroom — while emphasizing that her ultimate obligation is to facts, rather than to a particular political or national perspective.

“I won’t hide my identity,” she said. “It’s a benefit in a newsroom to have someone like myself who has intimate knowledge of the conflict through my education and through living in the Middle East, living in Tel Aviv, and experiencing the realities on the ground and forging friendships with not only Jewish Israelis but Palestinians and Arab Israelis. The most important thing to me in the pursuit of journalism is truth and fact. Any concerns that I may have had post-Oct. 7 with editorial approaches or coverage, whether it be at my previous network or current, have not been because I’m Israeli or Jewish — it has to do with being a journalist that’s committed to facts.”

“I will allow the values of Judaism and the traditions and familial ties to guide my humanity in this business but ultimately I’m a journalist that’s committed to fact and truth,” she continued.

Reshef arrived at MS NOW as the network underwent a name rebrand last year under its president, Rebecca Kutler. Kutler said at the time that the network’s focus on news and commentary with a liberal perspective would remain intact.

“I find MS NOW to be a place where — yes, there are progressive voices — but a place that’s tethered to facts,” Reshef said. “Separate from that idea, I think it’s vital that we stay in the room and don’t retreat from places where we think we don’t have favor.”

“It’s fun to be part of a dynamic, ever-changing company in the context of a shrinking media landscape,” she added.

Reshef said her reporting has been met with broad audience approval.

“There’s a preconceived notion that people are inherently adversarial. What I’m finding is people want to find common ground. Part of my job is to challenge assumptions that are widely held but are not rooted in fact. When I do that, I have never experienced direct pushback in the newsroom.”

Online, her experience has sometimes been different. “For instance I covered the terror attack [in March] on a school and synagogue in Michigan — and in the week of that, I experienced vitriol online labeling me with all kinds of stereotypes, solely on the basis of who I am. That is an online reality so many journalists, and so many industries, face.”

Reshef has also earned strong praise from her colleagues. Scott Matthews, SVP of newsgathering for MS NOW, told JI, “Erielle is a natural storyteller. Her roots in local journalism show in the care she brings to each assignment, she gets close to the story, listens carefully, and never loses sight of the people at its center.”

Since the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attacks in Israel, Reshef has not only balanced her identity in the newsroom but also had to navigate the realities of raising two Jewish boys, ages 11 and 7, in New York City. A self-described “fiercely protective Jewish mom,” Reshef said she feels a responsibility to “raise my boys to develop the mental fortitude to be true to who they are, to do what is right and stand in their convictions, but they also have to have the knowledge to back up their beliefs and practices.”

“That’s a metaphor and parallel to how I see my responsibility in journalism,” she added. “It should be a net benefit to bring Jewish values and a Jewish voice to the newsroom, while also keeping an open mind and recognizing that we can all stand to learn from each other.”

Reshef describes her career story as a “tale of being nimble”: starting with covering the World Cup on Israeli television without ever having watched soccer, to now anchoring on cable news.

“It’s been great, at my career stage, to be tackling a steep learning curve and to be constantly absorbing more information and to be voraciously consuming news again in a unique way,” she told JI.

“Personally, I could have been very comfortable staying where I was,” Reshef said. “I was appreciated at ABC News. I had a great job. But I sensed in myself the fire to keep growing and to overextend myself. I’ve never been one to shy away from challenges. But it was tough to jump ship from a place that was comfortable after eight and a half years. The risk was well worth it, it has been incredibly rewarding.”

TRANSITIONS

Yair Rosenberg joins The New York Times

Rosenberg is joining the religion desk covering American Jewish life, the Times announced, amid criticism of its coverage of antisemitism and Israel

Avalon/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

New York, United States of America - July 8, 2017. The New York Times building in the west side of Midtown Manhattan.

Haley Cohen

June 29, 2026

Yair Rosenberg, a longtime journalist and commentator on American Jewry, is joining The New York Times as a reporter covering Jewish American life, the Times announced on Monday.

Rosenberg joins the Times following 15 years covering Jewish life, antisemitism and the intersection of politics and religion, including writing for Tablet Magazine and authoring The Atlantic’s Deep Shtetl newsletter since 2021.

“Yair will bring that boundless energy and deep expertise to a new religion beat on National focused on Jewish American life, chronicling a period of extraordinary tension but also possibility and reinvention,” New York Times Editor Nestor Ramos said in an announcement about the move.

Rosenberg joins The New York Times amid criticism from some over its alleged bias in covering antisemitism and Israel, including during its war with Hamas. Last month, the paper was condemned by the Israeli government and American Jewish organizations over an opinion column by Nicholas Kristof accusing Israel of systemic sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners — including training police dogs to rape prisoners — which some critics called a “modern day blood libel.”

“Yair brings a deep understanding of American Judaism and the vast, diverse and multifaceted community that falls under that big umbrella,” said Ramos. “His reporting and writing are rich with nuance, speaking clearly to Jews and everyone else at the same time. It’s a perspective that can only come from real experience.”

Ramos recalled, “When I first met Yair for coffee, he left mid-conversation; a group in the next room was one short of a minyan, and he’d agreed to be their 10th — even if it meant stepping away.”

TOP HONOR

Amir Tibon wins Sami Rohr Prize for dramatic chronicle of Oct. 7

The book details the Tibon family’s experiences on Oct. 7 and examines the history of Israel’s Gaza policy

courtesy

Amir Tibon/The Gates of Gaza

Christina Sher

June 16, 2026

Israeli journalist Amir Tibon was awarded the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature on Tuesday for The Gates of Gaza: A Story of Betrayal, Survival, and Hope in Israel’s Borderlands, his harrowing account of survival on Oct. 7.

The Gates of Gaza is Tibon’s first-person account of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attacks and Israel’s Gaza policies as a resident of the border’s region. On the day of the attack, he, along with his wife and their two young daughters, spent 10 hours hiding in the safe room of their home in Kibbutz Nahal Oz, less than a mile from Gaza, as terrorists rampaged through the community.

In the book, Tibon details efforts by his father, a retired major general in the IDF, traveled from Tel Aviv by car to rescue the family, stopping numerous times along the war to assist others and fight groups of terrorists. The Gates of Gaza intersperses Tibon’s accounting of the day, his parents’ experiences and Israeli government policy regarding Gaza over the years.

“The mission of the Rohr Prize has never been more important,” Tibon, a reporter for Haaretz, said, “as we confront a rising tide of antisemitism around the globe and its unique ripples within the world of books and literature.”

The book also received the 2024 National Jewish Book Award, the Wingate Prize and the Bernstein Prize.

After evacuating the kibbutz, Tibon and his family have lived in northern Israel since the attacks.

The awards ceremony, to be held at the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem on July 28, will mark the 20-year anniversary of the prize, which comes with a $100,000 award.

The Rohr Prize honors emerging contemporary writers whose work shows promising continuing contribution to literature in the Jewish sphere. The award annually alternates between fiction and nonfiction.

Nonfiction authors Laura Hobson Faure, Shaul Kelner and Jordan Salama were on the shortlist of finalists for this year’s prize. Winners from previous years include Sasha Vasilyuk for her novel Your Presence is Mandatory, and Oren Kessler for his Palestine 1936.

BOOKSHELF

21-year-old author Theo Baker says he feels more Jewish as a result of antisemitism at Stanford

Discussing his new book 'How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University,' Baker revealed to JI details about his turbulent and impactful college years

Haley Cohen

May 29, 2026

Theo Baker describes himself as “an accidental journalist.” But at just 21, his writing has already sent shockwaves through the academic world.

As a freshman at Stanford University in 2022, he exposed then-President Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s decades-long pattern of manipulated data and research in scientific papers he co-authored or supervised, ultimately leading to his resignation. Baker, the son of New York Times reporter Peter Baker and New Yorker columnist Susan Glasser, became the youngest recipient of the George Polk Award for his reporting on Tessier-Lavigne.

During his sophomore year, Baker published a much-discussed essay in The Atlantic called “The War at Stanford,” exploring campus culture following the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks in Israel. He called college “a factory of unreason” and argued that anti-Israel demonstrations and rhetoric had created a pervasive climate of fear, accusing Stanford of failing to adequately condemn the attacks or protect Jewish students, all while training the next generation of tech and industry leaders.

Baker reflects on his turbulent college years in his new memoir and exposé, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University, published earlier this month. The book lays bare an elite university corrupted by Silicon Valley’s pursuit of power, all while Stanford saw a historic rise of antisemitism.

Whether it was navigating the release of ChatGPT or grappling with the impact of the Oct. 7 attacks, Baker said every year of his experience at the elite Palo Alto, Calif., university presented a unique challenge. Weeks away from graduation, Baker spoke with Jewish Insider about his past four years on campus, the role that technology plays in rising antisemitism — and what the future might hold for universities.

Jewish Insider: You’ve described yourself as coming from a home with “just a tiny bit of cultural Judaism.” How has covering antisemitism changed your Jewish identity? What about your relationship with Israel?

Theo Baker: In fall 2022, I went home for Thanksgiving and said, “There’s so much antisemitism at Stanford.” I was shocked by that. It’s not something I really countered growing up. As soon as I arrived at Stanford — even in the first week — someone asked me, “why are all Jews so rich?”

By the end of that year — and this is before Oct. 7 —- someone in my dorm, a kid who was Jewish, talked about being Jewish for the first time and someone put a bunch of swastikas and an image of Hitler on his door later that day.

So Jewishness is an identity and not one I would have placed much investment in prior to coming to college. It was something that I knew about myself but was not particularly salient. Certainly, I, like many college students in the last few years, have been made to feel more Jewish just by the circumstances around us. It was certainly interesting to be here on campus as a reporter when the biggest story happening was something that also intersected with my own background.

I have not taken trips to Israel [in college] but I lived in Israel briefly when my dad was the Jerusalem correspondent for The New York Times. I’ve tried to center my reporting on the things I have expertise on. Stanford is 7,000 miles away from Israel. It’s so fascinating that it became such an important issue for people, and then disappeared seemingly so quickly from the public conversation.

JI: You wrote that extremism had made it “normal for students to be harassed and intimidated for their faith, heritage, or appearance.” You described a campus environment where to get into a party you had to say things like “f**k Israel” at the door. Do you think campus culture has improved since then? Do you expect other issues to eventually overshadow the fixation with Israel on campuses? How come the Iran war didn’t spark as many protests?

TB: Certainly the focus has shifted dramatically. Stanford has not been a real hub of activism. It’s been a place where people have been more focused on their dorm-based startups. For one year, things were very different. Pretty quickly that [anti-Israel protests] dissipated come fall 2024. The tensions are still there, yet they’ve become far less visible. This all-consuming fixation with Israel is still certainly a thing for some quadrants of campus but is no longer the dominant narrative.

Many of the protests were fashionable because you could join them as a pregame to a party — literally. The vast majority of students didn’t come into 2023 with the Middle East being their focus and at this point I don’t think it is either for most of them.

Higher ed and academia perceives itself as under attacks from the federal government at the moment. A lot of attention has been focused on that, obviously a closer-to-home thing than Israel. But I also think people became less interested.

JI: Do you think elite universities can fix this problem and what would it take? Has the threat of losing federal funding has actually changed anything?

TB: Universities have become so sprawling that they’ve lost a sense of cohesive identity.

Yes [the threats made an impact but] it’s a mixture of things.

JI: Your Atlantic piece on Stanford antisemitism made you a target — you’ve described receiving death threats and messages saying you should be “cooked alive.” Are you expecting similar backlash from this book or do you think the current moment is less tense?

TB: There are a range of reactions, as you might expect. I’m grateful that both with that piece and this book there are people who care about these conversations and reasonable people can have differing interpretations.

Sophomore year I had events canceled because of “security threats.” I did an event at Stanford for the book [last week] and no one shouted at me. So that’s a little different. I haven’t gotten as many death threats. Higher ed right now, though, is a very charged landscape so people have different reactions to things they perceive as a critique.

JI: What reaction have you gotten from the Jewish community to the book? Who is the target audience? What should Jewish students reading this book take away from it?

TB: I hope different people can find different things of value in this book. The Jewish community on campus is very engaged. A lot of organizers belong to the Jewish community and some of them have opened up to me about their own experiences in relation to the book.

What I’m describing at Stanford is an inner world that is necessarily exclusive, necessarily kept obfuscated from the rest. That matters because these are the future masters of the universe who are going to assume their rightful place among the tech masters of the world. So understanding how they are being trained — all too frequently trained to cut corners to get ahead — that has a real salience for all our lives given the sheer dominance of technology.

JI: Your reporting on President Tessier-Lavigne, which led to his resignation, demonstrated the power of students holding institutions accountable. Do you believe student journalists have generally succeeded in covering campus antisemitism fairly and making a meaningful impact since Oct. 7, or have they fallen short?

TB: The student journalism community is a wonderful one. The past few years have been really tough for student journalists, the same we’ve seen for professionals doing this work in the “real world.” Sometimes that’s magnified on campus because you’re reporting on your peers. The number of threats and doxxing that has been targeted at journalists just doing their jobs is horrifying.

Institutions have arrested journalists just for covering college protests. A lot of student journalists have done important work in the last few years to document this important cultural story from the ground, from the campuses where these fights are breaking out.

JI: Your book describes Stanford as a place training kids to “rule the world.” What does it mean for American Jewish life — and American values in general — that so many future tech and political leaders are being educated in environments where antisemitism is largely unchecked?

TB: In addition to antisemitism, one of the major trends we’ve seen on college campuses in the last few years is a lack of engagement with high-quality information. This is a huge problem. The way students have come to grapple with the world is often filtered with unreliable sources that are intentionally distorting the facts and events of the world. One of the results of that is the rising surge of antisemitism, clearly prevalent among my generation. The overt antisemitism, expressed explicitly in polls, is significantly higher among people my age than even 10 years older. A big part of that technology and social media.

The people building those echo chambers are the same ones who are being trained on this campus to learn that getting ahead at any cost means putting yourself first.

JI: Do you think this is a Gen Z problem specifically, or is it more about the ideological framework that’s taken hold on elite campuses that your generation inherited?

TB: Our [Gen Z’s] manifestation of antisemitism is unique. So much of antisemitism is the denial of antisemitism, like Holocaust reductionalism and the anti-victim narrative refusing to allow Jews to be victims of a hate crime because they are somehow seen as a category you’re punching up at. That’s a big thing on college campuses. Part of that is how people grew up on the internet.

JI: A 2024 report from a Stanford committee focused on addressing antisemitism stated that although antisemitism manifested itself in classrooms, campus protests and among friend groups, “no venue has provided a wider and more uninhibited berth for the expression of hostility toward Jews and Israelis than social media.” How have you seen social media and AI exacerbate antisemitism — especially at Stanford which is a leader in technology?

TB: ChatGPT arrived two months after [my freshman year class arrived]. Already there’s a huge gap between what the freshmen coming in now who had ChatGPT throughout high school are like versus the kids who were seniors when we were freshmen.

Stanford is a vanguard of a lot of trends we see sweeping higher education — the same way Silicon Valley trends tend to filter out into broader society, the same thing is true for Stanford. It was true of the patent licensing program and corporate partnership programs. One of the biggest trends we’ve seen here in the last few years — and certainly we’ve seen filter out into the rest of higher ed — is this corporatization of the university, where students are no longer just people or teenagers, but they’re commodities that have to be both protected and buttered up. Something you can make your riches off of.

JI: The book examines how power operates at elite universities, particularly regarding who receives institutional protection and who is left vulnerable. Based on your reporting, did you find a direct link between the donor and venture capital influence you document and how these schools manage concerns raised by Jewish students?

TB: The most important thing to understand is that the attitudes of these institutions are shaped by their relationship to money and power. Stanford likes to think of itself as an underdog institution, a place where renegade outsiders build for the sake of it and that is what has created all the innovation and fortune that has followed. Stanford is very far from an underdog right now. It’s annual budget is higher than [more than 100] countries. The result of that is governance by corporate structure — this is a place with more administrators than undergraduate students.

You see that reflected in all facets of student life [including how] the administration is going to respond to antisemitism. Everything is filtered through the lens of donors and protecting the ability to fundraise at the level of billions of dollars Stanford has historically been at. Everything is filtered not as seeing students as going through a formative experience, but as commodities that have to be protected and preserved just as products of any business are seen.

JI: Jewish Insider spoke with you in 2024. Now that you’re about to graduate and have the perspective of all four years — what has changed for you? Do you think what happened at Stanford after Oct. 7 was unique in any ways or just part of a broader and systemic trend across elite institutions?

TB: Certainly very few of the things that happened at Stanford after Oct. 7 are unique to Stanford. Individual circumstances and behaviors may be, but the broader trends are all completely reflective of what we saw at basically every major institution.

Now with a couple of years of perspective, it’s still a hard thing to explain to some degree.

Everything was intense and quickly faded to the background. Universities got themselves into trouble by setting a standard for themselves that they weren’t equipped to hold onto when it came to the Middle East. They adopted the path of least resistance. In that sense, nothing has changed even if the words being uttered are different ones. The primary motivation isn’t an ideological one for why these universities were making statements on political causes routinely that aligned with the liberal perspective in the past, or why they are making statements now that appear to be in favor of academic freedom. For the most part, all of that is still guided by political expediency regardless of what the actual politics are.

JI: What would you advise a Jewish student considering attending Stanford or another elite university today?

TB: Universities for the most part are about finding your people. It’s still very much possible to do that. It’s important to keep your eyes open and observe the things happening around you because so much of what we’re seeing on college campuses right now is a representation of these broader national trends in terms of our politics, culture and technology that are important to understand and reckon with. I don’t think we properly understand the implications of having such a rancorous political climate, what it looks like to have these new technologies like ChatGPT taking on such an important role in our lives.

Every person going to college right now is well positioned to observe things that are important for our society going forward, and the lessons we draw from that have a huge impact and influence on everything.

I hope Stanford is a hyperconcentrated version of the modern university. It takes everything and turns the dial up to 11. It’s an interesting sociological experiment to look at what is happening here and see how that is reflected in what is happening in the rest of higher ed.

Daily Kickoff

As Neom stumbles, Saudi antisemitism surges

Plus, Jason Zengerle on Tucker's transformation

Chesnot/Getty Images

PARIS, FRANCE - JUNE 16: Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) poses prior to a working lunch with French President Emmanuel Macron at the Elysee Presidential Palace on June 16, 2023 in Paris, France.

JI Staff

January 26, 2026

👋 Good Monday morning!

In today’s Daily Kickoff, we talk to journalist Jason Zengerle about his new book about Tucker Carlson’s political evolution, and look at the wave of antisemitic and anti-Israel messaging coming from Saudi Arabia in recent weeks. We spotlight White House advisor Josh Gruenbaum’s position as a key player in U.S. diplomacy, and look at the role that the United Auto Workers union is playing in anti-Israel activist efforts. Also in today’s Daily Kickoff: Jennifer Mnookin, Morris Katz and Marc Shaiman.

Today’s Daily Kickoff was curated by JI Executive Editor Melissa Weiss and Israel Editor Tamara Zieve, with assists from Danielle Cohen-Kanik and Marc Rod. Have a tip? Email us here.

What We’re Watching

Ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day tomorrow, Meta, UNESCO and the World Jewish Congress are convening a discussion at the U.N. today in New York focused on the role that technology can play in Holocaust preservation efforts.
Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs is hosting the second annual International Conference on Combating Antisemitism in Jerusalem. Speakers at the two-day confab include Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli, the Department of Justice’s Leo Terrell, Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama, former New York City Mayor Eric Adams and Jewish Federations of North America CEO Eric Fingerhut.
Elsewhere in Jerusalem, Israeli President Isaac Herzog will host the annual lecture of the Jabotinsky Institute at the President’s Residence tonight, delivered this year by U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee.
The IDF, acting on new information from Hamas, is conducting an operation in northern Gaza to locate the remains of Ran Gvili, who was killed during the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks.
The Saudi Real Estate Future Forum kicks off today in Riyadh. Former Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and John Kerry are slated to speak, as is far-right commentator Tucker Carlson.

What You Should Know

A QUICK WORD WITH JI’S LAHAV HARKOV

Anti-Israel and antisemitic messages from Saudi regime mouthpieces and state-sanctioned media have increased in recent weeks, as Riyadh has pivoted away from a more moderate posture to an alignment with Islamist forces, such as Qatar and Turkey.

Over the weekend, prominent Saudi columnist Dr. Ahmed bin Othman Al-Tuwaijri wrote an article in a Saudi news site attacking the United Arab Emirates, with whom Saudi Arabia has been at odds in recent weeks, as “an Israeli Trojan horse in the Arab world … in betrayal of God, His Messenger and the entire nation.” He also wrote that “Israel is on a path to a rapid downfall and the umma [community of Muslims] will remain, God willing.” The column, published after weeks of anti-Israel and antisemitic messaging from Saudi-backed channels, sparked an uproar from Western voices, including the Anti-Defamation League, which condemned “the increasing frequency and volume of prominent Saudi voices … using openly antisemitic dog whistles.”

Hussain Abdul-Hussain, a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said on the “Ask A Jew” podcast earlier this month that the Trump administration needs “to have a serious talk with” the Saudis. “I’m ringing the alarm; I’m breaking the glass,” he said. “I’m saying, listen, these guys are changing.”

In the past, “you only got these crazy terrorist clerics, the al-Qaida types … would be inciting against the Jews,” Abdul-Hussain said. “But this week, the [Saudi] state-owned media was inciting against the Zionist plan to partition the region and to divide the region. This is very new.”

One possible reason for the turn in Saudi messaging is that Riyadh is “very afraid of Israel,” Edy Cohen, a research fellow at the Israel Center for Grand Strategy, told Jewish Insider, noting that it views recent Israeli actions as going against Saudi interests.

Cohen noted that “the Saudis and the Qataris led a campaign for Trump not to strike Iran. …[The Saudi leadership] heard [exiled Iranian Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi] said the new Iran will normalize relations with Israel, and this drove the leadership crazy. Imagine Iran and Israel together … It’s their biggest nightmare.” Riyadh and Jerusalem are also at odds on Syria and Somaliland.

Read the rest of ‘What You Should Know’ here.

NEW ON THE SCENE

Josh Gruenbaum’s rapid rise from overseeing federal contracting to dealmaking on the world stage

Russian President Vladimir Putin welcomes White House Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner and Commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service Josh Gruenbaum during a meeting at the Kremlin in Moscow on January 22, 2026. (Alexander KAZAKOV / POOL / AFP via Getty Images)

Josh Gruenbaum’s Thursday started in Davos, Switzerland, at the signing ceremony to inaugurate President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace. Gruenbaum walked onto the World Economic Forum stage where Trump sat, surrounded by world leaders, to hand the president the board’s first resolution — focused on the demilitarization and reconstruction of Gaza — for him to sign. Hours later, Gruenbaum’s day ended at the Kremlin in Moscow, alongside White House Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and advisor Jared Kushner. Gruenbaum is a relatively new figure on the diplomatic scene. He started working with Witkoff and Kushner soon after the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas took effect in October, Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch reports.

Trajectory: Since then, Gruenbaum has been spotted in meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Earlier this month, hewas named a diplomatic advisor to the new Board of Peace, which the Trump administration is reportedly envisioning as a replacement to the United Nations. It’s a somewhat surprising turn for Gruenbaum, whose expertise is not diplomacy or foreign policy but investment banking. But with his business background, Gruenbaum fits in with Witkoff and Kushner, both of whom come from the real estate world. His rise underscores how the Trump administration is reshaping the machinery of government by elevating loyalists with private-sector backgrounds and expanding their portfolios far beyond traditional lanes.

Read the full story here.

BOOKSHELF

Inside Tucker Carlson’s transformation, according to his chronicler

New Yorker reporter Jason Zengerle’s book, ‘Hated By All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling on the Conservative Mind,’ comes out Tuesday

Courtesy/Andrew Kornylak

Book cover/Jason Zengerle

Matthew Kassel

January 26, 2026

In his richly reported new book, Hated by All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind, Jason Zengerle tracks the evolution of the mainstream conservative journalist for The Weekly Standard, CNN and FOX News into a prominent figure in the far-right media ecosystem whose commentary increasingly descends into open antisemitism.

Zengerle, a veteran political reporter, ruminates over Carlson’s troubling transition from magazine writer to cable news pundit to his current position as a widely followed podcast host whose credulous interviews with Nazi sympathizers and Holocaust deniers, among others, have done little to dampen his influence in the MAGA movement he helped build.

In a recent interview with Jewish Insider, Zengerle, whose book will be published Tuesday, warned that Carlson’s efforts to smuggle antisemitic views into mainstream discourse should not be taken lightly.

“Tucker has credibility, and he comes across as a credible person,” Zengerle said. “That he’s giving voice to these really pretty fringe and dangerous sentiments is not to be underestimated, because people trust him.”

Whether Carlson personally believes the “awful things” he promotes, Zengerle writes in his book, “matters less than that he says them at all, and that millions of people — members of Congress, titans of industry, the president and just everyday Americans — listen to and take their cues from him.”

“What matters is that by saying these things, Carlson has finally achieved the fame, power and influence that for so long eluded him,” he adds.

Zengerle, 52, was recently hired as a staff writer for The New Yorker, and has previously contributed to The New York Times Magazine, GQ and The New Republic, among other publications. His book on Carlson is his first.

Speaking with JI last week, Zengerle discussed Carlson’s professional ascent, his motivations for demonizing Israel and why conservative Jews are so frightened by his potential role in shaping the future direction of the Republican Party after President Donald Trump leaves office, among other topics.

The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Jewish Insider: This book has been in the works for a while. How did the idea initially come about?

Jason Zengerle: It’s been a bit of a roller coaster. The initial idea sort of came from a conversation I was having with my agent about a book I didn’t want to write, about the Republican civil war that was about to unfold. This is not long after [the] Jan. 6 [2021 Capitol riot]. The people who are going to be vying to inherit Trump supporters, because Trump was obviously a finished product, would never be coming back. And I was sort of talking to my agent about the various characters, and explaining why I didn’t think, no matter how many positions [Sens.] Josh Hawley (R-MO) or Ted Cruz (R-TX) or Tom Cotton (R-AR) took that would seem to appeal to Trump’s base, there was no way they’re ever going to inherit those voters, because they just lacked the charisma and entertainment value that Trump obviously has.

Offhandedly, I said something like, ‘You know, the only guy who really can do that is Tucker Carlson.’ That was the genesis of the idea. Then, obviously, when I started the book, Tucker was at the height of his powers. He had the highest-rated show on Fox. Trump had kind of exited the stage. And Tucker, in a lot of ways, had sort of replaced Trump, just in terms of the headspace he was occupying among both liberals and conservatives. You had this weird Tucker economy of liberal journalists and people on Twitter who would clip his show, sort of like outrage bait.

For the first couple years I was working on the book, Tucker was sort of occupying that space. And then he got fired from Fox, and everyone was predicting that he would basically suffer the same fate all Fox stars suffer when they leave Fox, which is irrelevance. Like, who thinks about Bill O’Reilly these days, right? But I thought that wasn’t going to happen. I thought Tucker was going to stay in the picture. That might have been some motivated self-reasoning on my part, because I wanted the book to be relevant. My original publisher definitely thought he was going to fade away because they canceled my contract.

JI: It certainly seems you were right in suspecting that he would continue to be not only relevant, but extremely influential during the campaign and in influencing hiring decisions for key roles in the Trump administration, as you detail in the book. He’s had a circuitous and occasionally rocky career from print journalism to cable news and now to an independent podcast. How do you view his evolution? Is there a moment where you see a clear turning point toward the type of demagogic commentator he would become, or do you think it was more gradual?

JZ: I think there are definitely inflection points in his career, and you can point to a number of them. I think one was certainly the war in Iraq. I think that had a pretty profound impact on his thinking. You know, I think he harbored some private doubts about the wisdom of going to war there, but was not really comfortable expressing them publicly, for a couple of reasons. Today, he talks a lot about how Bill Kristol and all these guys kind of misled him, and that’s why he hates them so much. At the same time, his best friend and now business partner was Neil Patel, who was working for Scooter Libby [chief of staff to former Vice President Dick Cheney]. And if you want to look at the disinformation that was put out into the world that supported going into Iraq, that was coming from Dick Cheney’s office. And I think Neil played a role in that. The fact that his best friend was sort of making the case for war, I think, made it difficult for him to oppose it. Two, the job he had at CNN at the time, on “Crossfire,” was to represent the right and the Bush administration — so just from a practical standpoint, he had to kind of support the war.

But anyway, the fact that things went so badly for Tucker at CNN, I think, made him reexamine a number of his priors and a lot of his time in his early career, when he was at The Weekly Standard and even after he had started writing for Talk and Esquire. There was such an effort among people like Kristol to excommunicate Pat Buchanan from the conservative movement. I think what happened with Iraq made Tucker reconsider Buchanan a bit, and he sort of saw that, ‘OK, well, I actually think this guy was right about foreign policy, and maybe he’s right about some other stuff as well.’ I think that led him to become much more hawkish on immigration.

I think that what happened with Jon Stewart and CNN was a pretty big inflection point in the sense that the public humiliation he suffered, obviously, was difficult for him. But I also think he felt that his friends in the elite D.C. political and media circles didn’t come to his aid the way he would have liked. That started to breed a certain resentment he felt toward them that really grew as his career limped along. It made it a lot easier for him, when Trump came on the stage and started attacking the swamp and D.C. elites, to join in on those attacks, because I think he still nursed a grudge. So you can see things gradually, but you can also point to these crossroads moments, as well.

JI: You write that, while you didn’t know Carlson well, he often served as an “eager interview” subject and source for your stories over the years. Still, he didn’t agree to any interviews for your book. Why do you think that was?

JZ: I think it really is that Robert Novak expression: “a source, not a target.” I think he plays that game.

JI: There’s an interesting recollection in the prologue about your occasional interactions with Carlson when he would stop by the New Republic offices back in the late ’90s during your time as an intern there. You describe him then as a “hotshot young writer for The Weekly Standard,” and say he “seemed so much older, wiser and worldlier than we were.”

JZ: Maybe it didn’t take much to impress me. But the thing about him back then — and the thing I think others admired about him and looked up to him for — was that he was really courageous. The targets he picked, whether it was Grover Norquist or George W. Bush — it took guts to do that as a conservative journalist, and that was admirable.

JI: You write in the book that Carlson has “come a long way from the days when he described himself as a pro-Israel, Episcopalian neocon.” On his show now, he regularly promotes antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories, incessantly attacks Israel and hosts neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers for friendly interviews. Do you have insight into what sparked this openly antisemitic streak?

JZ: It’s funny, someone who’s close to him was telling me that they thought this basically started with his conclusion that all the people who were opposed to him and Trump, post-2016, were big Israel supporters. So Tucker’s like, ‘Alright, I’m just going to piss these people off by going after Israel,’ and that’s kind of where it started. I don’t know if that’s the case.

I mean, Bill Kristol looms so large in his mind and in his own story. The story that he tells people, and the story I think he tells himself, is he was misled and used and kind of exploited by the neocons, that he was this young, naive, innocent writer who got just basically used to get us into a war and support free trade deals and do all these things that hurt the white working class in America, and that what he’s doing now is his penance. And I think that’s not a true story. I don’t think that’s what happened.

Kristol is just such a huge figure in his own mythology. Even before Tucker went in this direction, he was really close to Kristol. He really looked up to him. He was his first boss, and I think he had a real impact on Tucker’s career. But now, Tucker wants that all to be a negative impact. He did an interview recently with his brother, Buckley Carlson, where he talked about how Kristol hates Christians. Bill Kristol, who hired Fred Barnes and took vacations with Gary Bauer. He’s recast all this stuff.

JI: Do you think Carlson’s hostility toward Israel and descent into nakedly antisemitic vitriol, such as when he called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “ratlike” and “a persecutor of Christians,” is motivated by more than just resentment of those he believes have spurned him? There’s been a lot of attention recently about a generational turn away from Israel on the right, which raises a question of whether he’s opportunistically tapping into that or directly influencing it.

JZ: I guess it’s both. I do think he’s making the calculation that that is where the energy is, and therefore he wants to make sure he stays out in front of it. He has a very good political radar and good professional radar. I think the Nick Fuentes episode was him recognizing he was in this feud with this guy, and he was losing, and him sort of deciding you cannot be successful in conservative media or conservative politics these days unless you have the support of these neo-Nazis. Unfortunately, it’s not going to work for you, and so he needed to get back on their good side. I think that’s part of the calculus.

At the same time, I think he is influencing some of these people, maybe not the hardcore Nick Fuentes supporters, but young conservatives who, you look at what happened or what’s happening in Gaza and had questions and qualms and concerns. And then Tucker is out there — and Fuentes is out there as well — making the argument about how Gaza is wrong, but taking it so much further than that, and going into these really ugly corners of anti-Israel sentiment and taking them to those places.

Now, I don’t want to get too far afield here, but that JD Vance talk at Ole Miss, where the frat boy asked that question about Israel persecuting Christians — that was a real light bulb moment for me. That this stuff had penetrated that deep that you have this guy who appears to be your regular old SEC frat boy saying this stuff. And I think Tucker is responsible for a lot of that, because that’s something he did at Fox, and he continues to do. He’s really good at taking ideas and arguments and even just stories from extreme, far-right fringy areas, often on the internet, and smuggling them into the mainstream. I think he’s doing that with the Israel stuff and with the Jewish stuff.

JI: His interview in 2024 with Darryl Cooper, the self-proclaimed podcast historian and Holocaust revisionist who has described Winston Churchill as the “chief villain” of World War II, seems an early instance of that effort.

JZ: That’s a perfect example. You have to be really steeped in this stuff to see what this individual is saying and doing and the rhetorical tricks they’re playing. Tucker just brings and vouches for these people, and I think that’s pretty dangerous. Tucker has credibility, and he comes across as a credible person. The fact that he’s giving voice to these really pretty fringe and dangerous sentiments is not to be underestimated, because people trust him, and it validates them.

JI: There’s been some intermittent speculation about whether Carlson will run for president. Do you have any thoughts on that?

JZ: I don’t think he just wants to be a podcaster. I don’t think that’s his goal here. I think he has a real vision for what he wants this country to be, and he wants to achieve that vision, and if it turned out that running for office was the way to do that, I could see him doing it. I don’t think it’d be his first choice. I think right now, he has a nice, nice setup where he obviously has a president who listens to him. Maybe even more importantly, he has a vice president who I think he’s even closer to and more in alignment with. Just sort of thinking through the steps, as long as he thinks JD Vance and he are on the same page ideologically, and as long as he thinks JD Vance is capable of being elected president, that he has the political talent to pull that off, I can’t imagine him doing anything on his own.

But if one of those two things changes, and I think it’s quite possible that the latter becomes a sticking point — if Tucker at some point were to conclude that JD Vance actually isn’t capable of being elected president and that his his ideological project is in jeopardy — I could certainly see him taking a shot at it. The way you would run for president now, it’s so different from how you had to do it before. He could probably do a lot of it from his podcast studio. But I think what’s more important is just understanding why he would do it, which is sort of the bigger point. He really does have a project he’s working on, and I think he’ll do what he thinks is necessary in order to bring that project to fruition.

JI: How would you characterize that project?

JZ: He wants the United States to look like it did in the 1950s. I think he’s very much in alignment with Stephen Miller. Beyond the immigration stuff and us being a much whiter country, I think he wants to return to traditional gender roles.

JI: While some Republican lawmakers have spoken out against Carlson, it seems notable that Trump and Vance have both so far refrained from explicitly distancing themselves from him.

JZ: There’s this weird thing going on where certain Jewish conservatives feel like, as long as Trump’s there, everything’s going to be fine. You know, his grandchildren are Jewish, he might say some stuff, he might do some things, but at the end of the day, the worst-case scenario will never occur. They view Tucker as this bad influence on Vance, and if they can just get rid of the bad influence, Vance will be OK. But they’re really terrified of Tucker. They’re really terrified of what comes after Trump. And they’re terrified that Tucker will have a major influence on whatever comes after Trump. They’re worried about the influence he has on Vance. They want to believe that Vance would be OK, left to his own devices. They think Tucker is leading him in a bad direction, and therefore they need to take out Tucker.

I think it goes beyond Israel. I think it’s genuine fear about what it would mean to be Jewish in the United States. I’ve been talking to some of these folks recently. I think it’s a real, deep-seated fear about, in Tucker Carlson’s America, what would it be like to be Jewish here?

Book shelf

In debut book, Yardena Schwartz links past and present horrors in Hebron and the Gaza envelope

“It I felt as if I was living the pages of testimony that I had spent years reading and researching for this book,” journalist and author Yardena Schwartz told JI

Courtesy

Yardena Schwartz

Melissa Weiss

December 11, 2024

Journalist Yardena Schwartz had nearly finished the manuscript for her first book, focused on the 1929 Hebron pogrom in which dozens of Jews were killed and a community was destroyed, on the morning of Oct. 7, 2023.

As reports emerged in the following days of the atrocities that took place across southern Israeli communities and the Nova music festival, “it I felt as if I was living the pages of testimony that I had spent years reading and researching for this book,” Schwartz told Jewish Insider in a recent interview about her book, Ghosts of a Holy War: The 1929 Massacre in Palestine That Ignited the Arab-Israeli Conflict. “It felt like they were coming to life. I felt like it was exactly what happened in Hebron occurring today. And it was so chilling.”

Schwartz intended to write a book based on the letters and diaries written by a young Jewish American man named David Shainberg, who, inspired by his faith, moved to Hebron to study at a renowned yeshiva, when he was killed on Aug. 24, 1929. A niece of Shainberg’s found the writings in the family’s home in Tennessee, where they had been collecting dust, and reached out to author Yossi Klein Halevi, who in turn suggested Schwartz take on the challenge of giving life to the story of a young man whose life was cut short.

What Schwartz found was extensive, if scattered, documentation of the 1929 pogrom and its aftermath. There was no English-language compendium focused on the massacre that killed nearly 70 Jews and left more than 100 wounded.

“I felt that if I’m going to write the first book in English that really goes into detail about the massacre and its causes and its aftermath,” Schwartz, a former NBC News journalist, told JI, “I need to do justice to those victims by detailing in as much detail as I can what what happened to them, not only for future generations to know about it, but so that it can’t be denied.”

It was an unintentionally prescient concern that was validated last year, when denials about the extent of Hamas’ atrocities on Oct. 7 began to emerge in the days and weeks that followed. It was through that lens that Schwartz finished the final chapters of her book, which took on a new direction in the wake of last year’s attacks, to weave together the stories, separated by a century, of Jewish pain and resilience.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Jewish Insider: You had not been planning to write a book, certainly on Hebron, and this story was just dropped on you. What was your first reaction when finding out about David and the letters?

Yardena Schwartz: So I had always dreamed of writing a book, but it always seemed like this fantasy. I had this hope in the back of my mind that something would just find me, but I never expected it would be this. I never expected it would be about Hebron, especially since I had only been to Hebron once before I was introduced to this family. I woke up on New Year’s Day in 2019 with an email from Yossi Klein Halevi, who was not yet my mentor, but would become my mentor. And it was very simple. [He said], ‘I met this family who found this box of letters in their attic. It’s a treasure trove of history, of Hebron and the massacre, and I think it would make a great book, but I can’t do it. Are you interested?’

JI: What was it like piecing together the history of Hebron?

YS: So much of the research involved going to Hebron itself and interviewing Israelis, settlers and Palestinians who live both on the Israeli side of Hebron and on the Palestinian side of Hebron. I spent hundreds of hours interviewing Palestinians and Israelis about life today in Hebron to understand, and also their stories of their families in Hebron, and then for the history part of it, hundreds of hours reading archival materials, reading books that were written by people who’d lived in Hebron at the time that David lived there, survivors of the massacre, eyewitness testimony from the massacre by survivors and victims, by British officials who testified before the Shaw Commission, which came to Palestine after the riots to investigate. I read the testimony of the British police chief who was in charge of Hebron, testimonies of people who stood before the trials that the British conducted after the riots, newspaper articles that were published in 1928 and 1929 about the lead-up to the massacre, [which] was actually a whole year of propaganda that was disseminated by the Grand Mufti, and not just propaganda, but also this campaign of trying to limit Jewish access to the Western Wall. So there was a lot of newspaper coverage of that, not just in publications like the Palestine Post, which would eventually become the Jerusalem Post, but also The New York Times, JTA, The Times of London. There was a lot of both primary source material from people who were living in Palestine at the time, and also newspaper reports from the time.

JI: What most surprised you over the course of your research and your interviews?

YS: Wow, there were so many moments in researching this book that I was just flabbergasted by how shocking some of these details were, yet so little known. First, the massacre itself, just the atrocities were so brutal and so hauntingly similar to the atrocities that were committed on Oct. 7. And yet I was shocked that such a massive event that made such an impact on the trajectory of Palestine, of Zionism, of the State of Israel, of the Jewish community in what was then Palestine — it had such a lasting impact on not just that land itself, but also the entire region, and yet we still know so little about it.

The fact that this conflict has been going on for a century, and yet so little has changed over the course of a century. One hundred years ago, when the Jews were massacred in what was then Palestine, that massacre was followed by widespread denials by Arab leaders and by the Arab populace. At the same time, the perpetrators of the massacre were celebrated as heroes, and at the same time, their attacks were blamed on their Jewish victims.

If that wasn’t mind boggling enough, after Oct. 7, I saw these same patterns emerge. When I was researching and writing about this massacre, I never once, not even once, for a second, imagined that something even remotely similar to that massacre could happen again on that scale — and that it happened again on a scale far greater than what happened in 1929 and was also being met by denials. And not just denials, but in 1929 the denials came from the Arab leadership. The victim-blaming was from the Arab leadership. And today, not only are those denials and victim-blaming coming from the Arab leaders, but from academia, from media, every respected avenue of society is denying that those atrocities were carried out, and simultaneously blaming the victims.

JI: Where were you in the book process on Oct. 7?

YS: I was pretty close to finishing the book. I was about three-quarters through, maybe two-thirds of the way. I was supposed to submit my manuscript in April of 2024, so I still had some time to finish the manuscript. After Oct. 7, I was pretty incapacitated. I would try to continue writing these chapters as I imagined them looking and I just couldn’t. It just didn’t make sense anymore. The plan I had for how these chapters would look, it just didn’t make sense anymore. The book before Oct. 7 was very much focused on Hebron itself and how it went from being this beacon of coexistence to the antithesis of peaceful coexistence that it is today, through the lens of this massacre and all the forces that it accelerated or galvanized. So when I sat down and tried to write based on that theme, the words weren’t flowing. So I took a break for a few months to go back to reporting because I had taken a long break from reporting to write this book, and I was reporting primarily on the hostage crisis and interviewing hostage family members, families who had lost loved ones and been in the kibbutzim on Oct. 7. And when I came back to writing the book, I understood that I had to just throw away entire chapters.

JI: I want to flip it, you just talked about the way that Oct. 7 influenced the book. When you wrote about the Hebron massacre, you got into the details. How did having just researched and written so deeply about the atrocities of 1929 affect how you experienced Oct. 7 and the weeks after?

YS: Of the chapters that I had finished writing, and I had considered final, the massacre chapter was the most polished. I had worked on that most. I had finished it long before Oct.7, and I was pretty far into writing the rest of the book when Oct. 7 happened. So when I woke up on Oct. 7, it was the most disorienting feeling, because I felt as if I was living the pages of testimony that I had spent years reading and researching for this book. It felt like they were coming to life. I felt like it was exactly what happened in Hebron occurring today. And it was so chilling. And I think the way that I wrote about the massacre of 1929, in this very detailed way, giving life to the people who were killed. I didn’t just mention the numbers of people killed, I really wanted to bring them to life and give them justice, give their lives justice by naming them, describing who they were before the massacre and what their lives were like before they were killed. And I think that helped inform the way I wrote about the atrocities on Oct. 7. I named the people. I went into great detail, how they experienced it, and what that day was like for them, from morning to night and both before the massacre and after, in both cases, both in 1929 and with the massacre of Oct. 7.

I did that because, in the case of 1929, when I was writing this chapter long before Oct. 7, I understood that so few people know about this massacre, including myself. And that’s because there has been so little written about it in English. In Hebrew and in Israeli culture, everybody knows about the massacre of 1929 and I think people know not just that it happened, but the scale and the brutality. And that’s because in Hebrew, there are so many books written. So I felt that if I’m going to write the first book in English that really goes into detail the massacre and its causes and its aftermath, I need to do justice to those victims by detailing in as much detail as I can what what happened to them, not only for future generations to know about it, but so that it can’t be denied. And that’s also why I sourced the book so extensively.

JI: It’s interesting that you bring up that there’s not an English-language accounting of what happened. But it seems like with your book and with Oren Kessler’s book last year, there has been kind of this renewed focus on how Israel’s pre-state years have shaped so much of what we see today. And so I wonder what other stories there are to be told.

YS: My hope is that this book, as well as Oren Kessler’s fantastic book, that this will help inform what has increasingly become this really disinformed conversation around the conflict. And I think a lot of it is because people’s attention spans are so short, and it’s very easy to just look at this conflict through the lens of what’s happening now. And if you look at what’s happening now, it’s a very simple story, there’s a right and a wrong, and when you look at just what’s happening today, it’s easy to come to conclusions, like maybe Ta-Nehisi Coates would like people to come to but you can’t erase the history of this conflict. It will never be solved either, if that history is ignored and if the context of this conflict is just brushed aside. Maybe it’ll be easier for you to make sense of it, or wrap your head around it, but it’s only going to push peace further into the distance if the true sources of this conflict are ignored, and the true sources of this conflict are very clear if you look at the history going back the last century.

JI: You had written very early on in the book, when you were talking about the propaganda that preceded the massacre, that the “truth had become irrelevant.” And as I read that sentence, I thought we could just as easily say this today.

YS: It’s the exact same playbook. And of all the things that have not changed over the last century, one very important thing has changed, and not for the better. If you look at the international media’s coverage of the riots of 1929, you see that the media was playing the role it needed to play, which was doing reporting and giving to readers a story that shows them what is the truth. That is the essential role of journalism: to get to the truth and give the truth to your readers. And today we look at the coverage of a massacre that was even larger, even worse, and yet that role is nowhere to be found. One hundred years after that massacre, we see the media not portraying these denials and victim-blaming for what they are, as lies, or these absurd claims of, for instance, the Al-Ahli Hospital, just parroting claims by terrorist organizations that are clearly false and and not portraying them as false or as lies, but giving them the same weight as truthful claims, or claims of the IDF, or of Israeli officials or of Israeli citizens. It’s all just portrayed as this, ‘He said, she said,’ rather than, ‘This is what happened.’ Why even publish these absurd claims? Because you’re giving truth to it when you publish it, and the media is leaving readers to decide what’s true and what’s false. Whereas, in 1929, 100 years ago, you think that over 100 years, the media would improve in its role — It’s only failed the true test of journalism.

I often wonder if the massacre of 1929 were to happen today, when Arab leadership put out those statements saying, ‘No atrocities were carried out in Hebron,’ the media in 1929 portrayed those denials as outright lies. The media in 1929 covered these wild claims that the atrocities were carried out by Jewish students, [but] they portrayed them as wild lies. It was very clear that these were lies, and yet today, I’d imagine that publications like The New York Times would publish those denials and victim-blaming as if they were true. And that is, I think, one of the greatest drivers of this conflict — the media’s failure to call out disinformation for what it is and to even recognize disinformation for what it is. I think a lot of journalists perpetuating these lies don’t even know their lies.

JI: In the book, when you go back to Hebron on a media tour and you’re in a meeting with the mayor, you observe that you are probably the only foreign journalist in that room who knew that he took part in the 1980 attack [in which six Jewish men, including two Americans, were killed in Hebron walking home from Shabbat services]. I’ve seen so many foreign correspondents who parachute in with no understanding about this conflict. I think it underscores the issue that we’re seeing with not just the big stuff, like the hospital, but the everyday reporting.

YS: I’m so glad you brought that up, because that’s such a great example of why knowing this history and having this contextual framework when you approach reporting on this conflict, why it’s so important. Because imagine I’m sitting in that room with this mayor who I have no idea perpetrated a deadly terror attack on civilians in 1980, the same terror attack that led the Israeli government to actually approve the renewal of the Jewish community in Hebron. And I’m sitting in this room and I hear him say, ‘The creation of this new Jewish residential building is a terrorist attack on the Palestinian people, and it will lead to the whole Palestinian population being evicted from this area,’ and I just take him at face value, I just publish what he says. But I don’t do that because I know that he actually served time for a terrorist attack. So it’s mind-boggling for him to call a building a terrorist attack. And I know that his claims of mass Palestinian evictions from this area are absolutely false, because I know that this building is being built on lands where no one lives, it’s an abandoned space. And I also know that when he tells this room full of journalists that already there’s been this mass exile of Palestinians from the Israeli side of Hebron, I know also that that’s false, because I know that the difference in the Palestinian population on that side of Hebron has decreased by maybe 1,000 over the course of 30 years, and that also, the Jewish population of that same area has remained stagnant since 1929. The people sitting in that room are just going to publish what he says without checking the facts. I don’t know if I blame journalists, because I think the reason there was this ability to discern fact from falsehood was because journalists had more time to report and to speak to people and to get the historical context into their stories. And I think today, journalists are churning out multiple stories a day. I’m not excusing their laziness or their failure to understand that you need the historical context and reporting on such an important issue like this, but I think that has a lot to do with it. There is no time, I think, for many journalists to do this historical research before publishing their stories, and so they just get lazy and report what they’re told without checking it themselves to make sure it’s accurate.

JI: What can we take from 1929 and from 2023? When you think about the Jewish future and in Israel, what lessons are there to take as you look to how the Jewish community reinvents and grows itself and rebuilds itself in the wake of such a catastrophe?
YS: Well, I think that my greatest lesson in writing this book, and I hope it’s clear to anyone who reads it, is that peace has always been possible, and I think that the only reason why we haven’t had peace for the last century is because leaders — corrupt leaders who benefit from disinformation and propaganda — have hijacked the future of Israelis and Palestinians to their own benefit and to the detriment of all of us, and too many innocent Palestinian lives and Israeli lives have suffered as a result of corrupt Arab leaders perpetuating the same propaganda and the same lies and weaponizing Islam and weaponizing Al Aqsa. I think that reversing that and ending that disinformation and that propaganda is the only way we will have peace. And I think that we see that going back to 1929, through today, moderate peace-seeking voices among the Arabs of Palestine and among Palestinians today have been silenced by intimidation or by assassination. People who are calling for peace today among Palestinians are labeled as collaborators, and if not silenced by intimidation, they’re killed. And I think that the only way we will have peace is if peace-seeking, moderate voices among Palestinians and the Arab public no longer have to fear for their lives, and those people need to be empowered, and those people need to be able to speak out without fearing for their lives. And if the people who seek peace continue to fail to see that and continue to allow Arab leaders to perpetuate the same disinformation and lies that have led to so much death, so much needless death and destruction, then we’re just going to be destined for another century of massacres. The people who are protesting against the war and for Palestinian lives, and in defense of Palestinian lives, they need to understand that Hamas and Hezbollah are only going to bring more destruction and more death and more wars, and if they really want peace, as all of us do, then it’s these peace-seeking voices within the Palestinian people who need to be elevated and empowered, not groups like Hamas and Hezbollah.

MCC vs. AOC

From CNBC to Congress: How Michelle Caruso-Cabrera intends to challenge Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

'The district deserves someone who's actually interested in their issues and what they need'

Courtesy

Michelle Carusa-Cabrera

Jacob Kornbluh

March 19, 2020

A print and television journalist for the past three decades, Michelle Caruso-Cabrera has covered topics ranging from education and crime to the financial market and global events. “As a reporter I was always calling people, and you listen,” the first-time congressional candidate explained to Jewish Insider during a recent interview in midtown Manhattan. “A lot of politicians like to talk a lot.”

Details: Caruso-Cabrera, most recently an anchor and correspondent for CNBC, announced a primary challenge last month to prominent progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) in New York’s 14th congressional district. Three other Democrats have already filed to challenge Ocasio-Cortez in the June 23 primary; while eight Republicans have filed to run in the GOP primary.

Listen > Lecture: Ocasio-Cortez “is always lecturing” constituents, “telling them what they should want,” Caruso-Cabrera, 53, said. “I like to listen to what they want and what they need.”

Bio: Caruso-Cabrera, the granddaughter of Italian and Cuban immigrants, graduated from Wellesley College in Massachusetts in 1991. On her first summer home from college, she worked to help pay for her tuition and — as her father put it — to “understand how most of the world lives.” She waitressed at local restaurants and helped her father with his landscaping business. Following graduation, she began her journalism career in Miami as a researcher and special projects producer for Univision, and later as a general assignment reporter covering crime and hurricanes for WTSP-TV in St. Petersburg, Florida. In 1998, Caruso-Cabrera joined CNBC, where she most recently served as chief international correspondent and co-anchor of “Power Lunch.”

Small government advocate: Caruso-Cabrera is the author of You Know I’m Right: More Prosperity, Less Government, which calls for fiscal conservatism, limited government and personal accountability. The book, which came out in 2010, includes a foreword from Larry Kudlow, President Donald Trump’s top economic advisor. Caruso-Cabrera registered as a Democrat in 2016. She wouldn’t say who she voted for in the 2016 presidential election, but told JI that she plans to support the Democratic nominee in November.

Transition: Caruso-Cabrera told JI she found the transition from journalism to politics to be easier than she had expected. “I’m not afraid to talk to people. It’s very comfortable for me to walk into a room and start talking with people,” she explained, “I’ve done that all my life — because if you’re going to ever get interviews, that’s what you have to do. And then if I want to hear people, I have to be able to reach out to them.”

Uphill battle: Caruso-Cabrera is a longshot to unseat Ocasio-Cortez. Despite being heavily outspent in the 2018 Democratic primary, the freshman congresswoman defeated incumbent Rep. Joe Crowley, who held a top leadership position in the House Democratic Caucus. To date, Ocasio-Cortez has raised more than $5 million and has the backing of 2020 presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). Caruso-Cabrera is not deterred, telling JI that while she was a late entrant to the race, she spent “a lot of time” in the months prior to her announcement “making sure that it was winnable, making sure that I would be able to raise money and making sure that there would be enough people in Queens and the Bronx who wanted a fresh candidate.”

MCC vs. AOC: Caruso-Cabrera said she decided to go into public service and challenge the freshman congresswoman after watching Ocasio-Cortez’s vocal opposition to Amazon’s plan to build a major campus in Queens. A poll conducted by the Siena College Research Institute last year found that 38% of New Yorkers labeled the congresswoman “a villain” in Amazon’s forced pullout. “She threw away 25,000 jobs and she’s proud of it, she owns it,” Caruso-Cabrera said. “I just couldn’t stand by and watch that.” She added, “It’s obvious that Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t pay attention to her district or her constituents. She spends a lot of time on TV shows, in Hollywood, and she’s spending all this time on the campaign trail for other constituents that have nothing to do with her district,” a reference to Ocasio-Cortez’s stumping for Sanders. “The district deserves someone who’s actually interested in their issues and what they need.” Caruso-Cabrera pointed out that she announced her decision to run for the seat while Ocasio-Cortez was in New Hampshire campaigning with Sanders in an effort “to highlight where she wasn’t” — in her own district.

Ready for the challenge: The rookie politician insisted that she’s not afraid to take on a firebrand of progressive politics who has a national following. “What I know is that people would like to have a choice and they hadn’t been offered a choice,” Caruso-Cabrera explained. “When she campaigned in 2018, she campaigned on the fact that the previous occupant did not educate his children in the district and people didn’t like that. They didn’t realize that what they were getting with that was a jobs killer, somebody who also wouldn’t be present in the district, who would have very poor constituent services, who would help her goddaughter, her niece, get into a charter school and then march against charter schools — that they would get a hypocrite. So I am not afraid of her. I just know they need a choice and I want to give them that choice, because I didn’t see anybody else stepping up to make clear what that choice is.”

Stance against boycott: Caruso-Cabrera first spoke to JI outside the main ballroom of the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington D.C. while attending AIPAC’s policy conference in early March. She said that showing up to the annual gathering was meant to send a “clear message” that “I’m going to AIPAC, she isn’t — that I stand with Israel.”

Supporting an ally: Caruso-Cabrera said being supportive of the U.S.-Israel alliance is “certainly a differentiator” between herself and Ocasio-Cortez. “I stand with Israel, she stands with [Rep.] Ilhan Omar, someone who says terrible things, even about the United States,” Caruso-Cabrera said, adding that refusing to condemn Omar’s comments about AIPAC was “another thing that really bothered me [about Ocasio-Cortez], beyond the Amazon situation.” The candidate said that support for Israel must remain bipartisan, and that a two-state solution must come from both sides sitting down and negotiating a settlement without outside interference. She said she favors anti-BDS legislation and is opposed to any conditions on military aid to Israel.

Field trip: Caruso-Cabrera first visited Israel in 2011 on an assignment for CNBC. “It looked like it was possible that Israel might go to war with Iran, and so we were doing stories about how you maintain a strong economy, even in the face of wondering if you’re going to go to war,” she recounted. During her stay, she interviewed then-Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz and current MK Gabi Ashkenazi, who at the time was the chairman of Shemen Oil and Gas Resources, a natural gas company. “I loved it. It was fantastic,” Caruso-Cabrera said of her experience, which also included a tour along the country’s northern border with Syria.

Community relations: Data compiled by the Berman Jewish DataBank, a project of the Jewish Federations of North America, estimates that Jews in the district account for about 4% of the population. “I want them all to vote for me,” Caruso-Cabrera said with a laugh. She cited her support for Israel, commitment to fighting the rise in antisemitic violence, and ability to speak out in a clear voice against antisemitism and hate speech as reasons she thinks will appeal to the community.

Friendly support: New York City Councilmember Fernando Cabrera (D-Bronx), who withdrew from the race after a short bid, is now backing Caruso-Cabrera.

A campaigning shift amid coronavirus: “We continue to talk and listen to the people of the Bronx and Queens. That has not changed. Rather, technology has become our new best friend. Our campaign will always keep people before politics. It’s about producing results,” Caruso-Cabrera told JI on Wednesday. Her campaign pointed out that while the candidate has taken the initiative to promote important information about the situation — publishing video clips, showcasing positive stories on social media, and distributing guidelines in emails to supporters – Ocasio-Cortez has continued fundraising using “COVID-19” in her emails. “People are dying, losing their jobs and retirements. It’s not a time to ask for money. It’s a time to unite and help one another,” a campaign official told JI.

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