Day: March 11, 2024

Have Israel’s Right Wing Supporters and the AIPAC Lobby Lost the Narrative on Israel in Popular Culture?

We begin with last night’s Academy Awards at which Jonathan Glazer, the winning international film director of The Zone of Interest, a movie about the banality of evil, portraying the family of the Commandant of Auschwitz living ordinary lives next door to the holocaust, said in accepting the award: “Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked, an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people, whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims, this dehumanization, how do we resist?”  Joining us to discuss the extent to which right wing supporters of Israel and the lobby AIPAC have lost, or are losing, the narrative in popular culture is David Klion, a journalist and cultural critic whose forthcoming book is about the legacy of neoconservatism. He joins us to discuss his article at The New York Times, “The Oscar Contender Who Won’t Let Us Look Away.”

What Will it Mean to Have Orban, Putin’s Puppet in NATO, the Rotating Head of the EU in July?

Then, with Orban, Hungary’s kleptocratic and authoritarian leader, revealing after his Mar a Lago meeting with his fellow champion of illiberal democracy, that “Trump will not give a penny” to Ukraine, we speak with Charles Kupchan, who was director for European Affairs on the National Security Council during the Clinton administration. He is now a professor of International Affairs in Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, and spent the last three years of the Obama administration as Special Assistant to President Obama for National Security. He is the author of Power in Transition: The Peaceful Change of International Order, and How Enemies Become Friends: The Sources of Stable Peace, and his latest, Isolationism: A History of America’s Efforts to Shield Itself from the World. We discuss what it will mean to have Orban, Putin’s puppet in NATO, the rotating head of the EU starting in July.

Haiti’s Rapid Descent Into Anarchy

Then finally we assess the dire situation in Haiti as the country rapidly descends into anarchy. Joining us is Garry Pierre-Pierre, a Haitian-born Pulitzer-prize winning multimedia and entrepreneurial journalist who left the New York Times in 1999 to launch The Haitian Times, a New York-based English-language weekly publication serving the Haitian Diaspora. He is the Co-Founder of the City University of New York’s Center for Community and Ethnic Media.