FRDH Podcast with Michael Goldfarb

In June 2014, when ISIS swept into Iraq's second city Mosul, historian Omar Mohammed immediately began documenting the terrorist occupation of his hometown as and act of Resistance and Defiance. Now Mohammed has written a book, Mosul Eye: A Scholar's Clandestine War Against ISIS about his life and harrowing escape from ISIS. In this FRDH conversation he details the risks he took to get the story of daily atrocities out to the world. The city was shut off by the throat slitters of ISIS yet Mohammed successfully defied them with his dispatches. This is a compelling conversation about true resistance, as well as the implications for the United States in the future over its failed campaign in Iraq, a war most Americans would like to forget, but that people everywhere from Tehran to Beirut remember vividly. Give us 45:15 to tell you all about it.

Financial Times correspondent Sarah O'Connor talks about her new book We Are Not Machines: The Fight for the Future of Work which is about AI and the coming jobs apocalypse. In this wide ranging conversation with FRDH host Michael Goldfarb, O'Connor looks at ways machines have helped and hurt workers in the past and why people and their governments need to start planning now to avoid apocalyptic changes in society if AI's potential to make many jobs obsolete is anywhere near fulfilled.

In "And the Cello Came Too" former BBC news presenter Robin Lustig tells the story of his family and how fate determined who survived and who didn't the worst event of the twentieth century. But this conversation goes deeper, than just a family story of survival, we talk about how journalism inoculates those who practice it against the emotions we feel when observing and thinking about what history -- or fate -- can throw at us

The Anti-Vax movement is a morbid symptom of our time. Whoever writes the history of America's unraveling will have to pay attention to anti-vax and refer to Kira Kieffer's book Unvaccinated Under God a thorough study of its nearly 50 year history and its grounding in religion in the broadest sense of the word. In this FRDH podcast, Kieffer explains to anti-vax sceptic Michael Goldfarb how the movement went from legitimate concerns over flaws in a single vaccine to becoming a political cause exploited by Trump and Bobby Kennedy Jr. Give us 53 minutes to explain it all to you.

Man Booker-prize winning novelist Howard Jacobson 's new novel is about how the Hamas massacre on October 7th, 2023 shattered illusions for diaspora Jews and enabled anti-Semitism to come out of the shadows. And because it is by Jacobson there are some dark laughs along the way. In this frank podcast discussion with host Michael Goldfarb, Jacobson talks about the book, shares reminiscences with him about the anti-Semitism he encountered growing up and talks about the lies that underlie so much discourse on the Israel-Palestine conflict.