We Still Haven’t Said “Never Again”

This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time: Friday at 1 PM. Our guest will be Darializa Avila Chevalier, who last month won the Democratic nomination for Congress in New York’s 13th district. Avila Chevalier has attracted controversy for her views on Israel-Palestine, among other issues. But the interviews with her that I’ve seen haven’t probed those views in depth. I want to ask what she saw while living in the West Bank and as an activist at Columbia University’s Gaza encampment. I want to better understand her views about October 7, about Zionism and Zionists, and about what she believes would constitute a just future in Israel-Palestine. This conversation will be 45 minutes long, not the usual one hour. Please join us. I’ll also be recording a conversation this week with California State Senator and congressional candidate Scott Wiener about the harassment he recently experienced at San Francisco’s Trans march, and about his views about Gaza and US policy towards Israel-Palestine. That conversation won’t include a live audience, but subscribers will receive it in the coming days. Cited in Today’s Video Bryan Stevenson’s conversation with Ezra Klein. Donald Trump says the Smithsonian museums focus too much on slavery. Israel’s law penalizing municipalities that acknowledge the Nakba. Israel’s defense minister says his government wants Palestinians to leave Gaza. Things to Read (Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.) In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), I argued that Zohran Mamdani’s influence could help Democrats win back the presidency. In the London Review of Books, Muhammad Shehada wrote about Marwan Barghouti and the Palestinian future. In Politico, Steve Bannon says a democratic socialist could win the White House. On July 9, I’ll be speaking in New York to the Halachic Left, a group of anti-occupation observant Jews. On August 23, I’ll be speaking in Sydney, Australia. See you on Friday, Peter VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: There’s been a ton of political commentary recently about the 250th anniversary of the United States, which was celebrated this weekend. And one of the things that I found most powerful was a conversation that Ezra Klein did for the New York Times with Bryan Stevenson. And Bryan Stevenson leads something called the Equal Justice Initiative. It’s an initiative that defends Black Americans and others who are discriminated against in the criminal justice system. And also, Stevenson created this extraordinary monument and memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, that, among other things, lists the names of 4,000 Black Americans who were lynched in the United States. And Stevenson said something to Klein that really struck me. Stevenson said that he went to Holocaust museums, and that by the end of a Holocaust museum, the moral imperative is very clear: never again. But Stevenson said that there wasn’t the equivalent in the United States of these kind of museums that had the clear moral imperative—never again—which is why he created this monument and museum in Montgomery. And I think he’s right, you know, it’s quite astonishing when you just step back and realize that there is no monument on the National Mall in Washington, DC to either slavery or to the genocide of Native Americans. It is true there are these museums, fairly recently constructed, one for the American Indian and one for African American history and culture. But even those are now under attack in the Trump administration for, as Trump said in the fall of 2025, for focusing too much on slavery. So, even the very kind of modest degree of memorialization that we have—which is nothing like what you see in Germany and in other countries where the Holocaust was perpetrated—was considered too much for the current President of the United States. And I think there is a direct line between this refusal to look America’s history in the face, America’s history of