Sticks and Stones

This week on Unorthodox: Name-calling at a high-school basketball game between a Catholic school and a heavily Jewish public school in a Boston suburb takes a weirdly dark turn.

Our Jewish guest is Jessamyn Hope, whose debut novel, Safekeeping, tells the intertwined stories of several strangers who find their way to a kibbutz in the summer of 1994. She tells us how her own stay on a kibbutz in her twenties inspired some of the characters and storylines and the surprisingly antagonistic responses she’s received at dinner parties for writing a novel set in Israel.

Our other Jewish guest (woops!) is Lawrence Douglas, professor of law, jurisprudence, and social thought at Amherst College, who has written extensively about the trials of high-ranking Nazi officials like Eichmann and Klaus Barbie. He chronicles the complicated legal battle to try another notorious former Nazi in his latest book, The Right Wrong Man: John Demjanjuk and the Last Great Nazi War Crimes Trial. He explains the dramatic twists in the Demjanjuk case and why Germany’s recent trials of Nazi war criminals, now in their eighties and nineties, hold both legal and emotional value.

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Unorthodox is a smart, fresh, fun weekly take on Jewish news and culture hosted by Mark Oppenheimer, Stephanie Butnick, and Liel Leibovitz. You can listen to individual episodes here or subscribe on iTunes.