This week on Unorthodox, Liel prepares for his role as honorary grand marshal at New York City’s Celebrate Israel Parade on June 3.
Our Jewish guest is Yossi Klein Halevi, senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem and the author of the newly released Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor. He tells us how he, as a religious Jew in Jerusalem, came to understand the Palestinian perspective; why he framed the book as a letter to an imagined interlocutor; and the crucial need to recognize that both sides have their own truths, and that respecting each of those truths is the first step toward any reconciliation. Our gentile of the week is Astead Herndon, who recently joined the New York Times as a national political reporter from the Boston Globe. He tells us about the challenges of covering the Trump administration, growing up as the son of two Pentecostal preachers, and the summer he spent working as a JCC camp counselor in Chicago.