On antisemitism, the banality of evil, and the Israel-Palestine conflict, with Yakov Hirsch

A talk with Yakov Hirsch, who thinks that some Jewish people have exaggerated ideas about the amount of antisemitism in the world, and overly pessimistic ideas about the nature of antisemitism. This misunderstanding can make some Jewish people see disagreement, criticism, and conflict too often through the lens of antisemitism. Hirsch ties this into the Israel/Palestine conflict, and also relates this to a long-running debate about the “banality of evil” (which relates to, amongst other things, the motivations of Nazis during the Holocaust). We talk about Hirsch’s ideas in the context of conflict dynamics and conflict resolution: for example, the tendency in conflict for people to have distorted views of people on the “other side.”