Transcript: Israel and Palestine In The Classroom

Read my conversation with Bernard Avishai and Ezzedine Fishere of Dartmouth College.

I don’t make a habit of publishing interview transcripts, but the outpouring of appreciation for this week’s Unspeakable episode with Bernard Avishai and Ezzedine Fishere included several requests for just that. So here it is. I tried to clean up after the voice recognition software as much as possible, but it’s still an imperfect science, so bear with me. This is for paying subscribers.

If you are not a paying subscriber, this is a great week to become one so you can hear the entire 90-minute interview. Plus read this!

Bernard and Ezzedine were featured on an episode of 60 Minutes last month, which you can view here.

Transcript from January 8, 2024 edition

Meghan: Bernard Avishai and Ezzedine Fishere, welcome to The Unspeakable.

Ezzedine: Thank you.

Bernard: Thank you.

Meghan: You've been teaching a course together at Dartmouth, the Politics of Israel and Palestine for two years, I think. I wanna talk with you about what goes on in that class, who your students are, why you began teaching it. But first I want to talk with you about some of your recent media. It's part of the reason I have you on and I think that you've been doing more speaking publicly about this class, but let's just start here. You recorded an event on October 12th at Dartmouth College. This was a panel you were on. You were featured on a 60 Minutes segment on December 3rd. That seems like a long time ago now. The situation has escalated in Gaza. The death toll has been reported at around 22,000. I don't know how trustworthy those numbers are, but give or take. We're recording this now on January 2nd. If you could roll the calendar back to October 12th, when the crowd was sitting there very nicely, listening and asking questions, would you have been surprised by what we've seen since, both on campuses and on the city streets in the public square?