Beyond the Pale | Jewish Culture and Politics

BEYOND THE PALE explores cutting edge Jewish culture and offers local, national, and international political debate and analysis from a Jewish perspective.

Sundays, noon to 1 p.m., on WBAI/New York, 99.5 FM

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March 18, 2012 — Spying and Lying: as details of the New York City Police Department's secret anti-Muslim spying operation continue to leak out, we talk to three experts -- a veteran police reporter, a community organizer, and one of the people caught in the NYPD's surveillance net -- about the contours of the most aggressive spy program since COINTELPRO and its impact on Muslim communities throughout the city.

"Terror and shock" in Gaza: Raji Sourani, one of the foremost Palestinian Human Rights lawyers, describes life in Gaza during Israel's recent, four-day bombing campaign, while writer and analyst Yousef Munayyer reports on a study suggesting that Israeli bombs -- not Palestinian rockets, as the media have often suggested -- is the cause of cross-border eruptions.

The One-state Alternative: as the idea of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict slips further toward farce, we speak with Ahmed Moor, one of the organizers of a groundbreaking Harvard Kennedy School conference on the one-state solution -- a solution based on the notion of a single democratic state in historic Palestine.

March 11, 2012 — Violent crackdowns on student movements are just one aspect of a broader trend toward campus securitization. We talk with College of Staten Island Professor Saadia Toor about what this means for NYC.

Last month, Palestinian hunger striker Khader Adnan rose to international attention while being held without charges in Israeli administrative detention. We talk with Bill Van Esveld of Human Rights Watch.

Plus: author Nathan Englander discusses his new collection of short stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank.

March 04, 2012 — In the wake of the Arab Spring and, most immediately, the violence in Syria, we're beginning to see a number of significant realignments. Phyllis Bennis of The Institute for Policy Studies talks us through them.

The two sides of Rick Santorum: cultural warrior and Washington insider and professional pol. We talk with Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily News.

Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes continues to resist efforts to unmask child sexual abusers in Orthodox Jewish communities. Hella Winston of The Jewish Week and writer and attorney Michael Lesher bring us up-to-date.

February 5, 2012 — Today's show was a two-hour fund raising marathon special in collaboration with Janet Coleman and David Dozer of The Next Hour, which airs on WBAI in the hour just before Beyond the Pale. We talked with Erika Shefer, the author of Russian Transport, a family drama set in the Russian Jewish community of Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn that will be playing at the Acorn Theater on West 42nd Street until March 10th. And we rebroadcast an interview with David Bezmozgis about his latest novel, The Free World. Plus guest Shane Baker, executive director of the Congress for Jewish Culture publisher of the Yiddish language collector's item, Biographical Dictionary of Yiddish Writers in the Soviet Union talked with us about his upcoming performances of The Big Bupkis: A Complete Gentile's Guide to Yiddish Vaudeville.

Beyond the Pale will be preempted for the balance of the winter fundraising drive. We'll be back on Sunday, March 4th.

Click here to contribute to WBAI.

January 29, 2012 — Seth Freed Wessler on AIPAC's outreach to historically black colleges; Baylor University professor Marc Ellis on being Kenneth Starr's latest target; and historian Dan Katz on his book All Together Different: Yiddish Socialists, Garment Workers, and the Labor Roots of Multiculturalism.