Recent Episodes
Can We Inoculate Democracy From Populism?
Prof. Jan Werner Muller considers "militant democracy," when constitutions protect countries from populist injury, Christian democracy, conservatives and populism, and how communities of democratic countries can deal with members who stray.
It Is a Sighted Man’s World
Dr Gili Hammer, anthropologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, discusses her book exploring how visually impaired Israeli women grasp and perform the interface between blindness and gender.
About the Hosts
Gilad Halpern
Gilad is a journalist, broadcaster and media historian. He is also a founding co-editor of the Tel Aviv Review of Books magazine, an English-language online quarterly, and an Idit Fellow at the University of Haifa, researching the history of the Jewish press in Mandatory Palestine. Previously he was Managing Editor for Ynetnews and Assignments Editor for Haaretz English Edition. His work appeared on the BBC, Al Jazeera, Al Monitor, Time Out magazine, the Jewish Quarterly and the Jewish Chronicle.
Dr. Yael Berda
Dr. Yael Berda is Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Hebrew University, and a fellow at Middle East initiative at Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. She received her PhD from Princeton University; her MA from Tel Aviv University, and her LLB from Hebrew University faculty of Law. Previously a practicing Human Rights lawyer, representing clients in Military, District and Supreme courts in Israel, her most recent books are Living Emergency: Israel's Permit Regime in the West Bank and Colonial Bureaucracy and Contemporary Citizenship: Legacies of Race and Emergencies in the Former British Empire.
How New Conspiracy Theorists Undermine Democracy
A rival politician might be running child prostitutes from a pizzeria. Election results you dislike are rigged. In their new book “A Lot of People are Saying,” Professors Nancy Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead argue that new conspiracists in Donald Trump's America have no evidence and no argument - in essence, no theory at all.