Jon Stewart hosted writer Peter Beinart on “The Daily Show” Monday night, for a conversation in which the two Jewish liberals agreed that the war in Gaza was “horrific” and that Israel bore near exclusive blame for the suffering endured by Palestinians in the 22 months since the Oct. 7 attacks.

While the two discussed U.S. and Israeli policy, condemning both, the conversation was perhaps more significant for the way in which two American Jewish near-contemporaries (Beinart is 52, Stewart is 64) wrestled with the lessons of their Jewish upbringings on a popular late night TV show.

Picking up on a theme in Beinart’s latest book, “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning,” Stewart and his guest challenged the narrative of Jewish victimhood in justifying Israeli actions, and urged fellow Jews to acknowledge both Jewish history and Palestinian experiences.

“All of our holidays, the entire ethos for me of being Jewish — and I don’t doubt that there are people that have a radically different interpretation than I do — but it’s all about, like, we were about to be wiped out,” said Stewart, suggesting that the lessons of Hanukkah and Purim were being misused to justify a war that he called “so self-evidently inhumane and horrific.”

Beinart, an observant Jew, agreed, referring both to the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud.

“Part of recognizing us as human, as Jews, as fully human, is recognizing that we are capable of [being] the victims and … victimizers, and we have to recognize that in order to prevent us from falling into the trap of thinking that every single situation is the equivalent of what was happening in the Soviet Union, Czarist Russia or in Nazi Germany,” said Beinart, an editor-at-large at the leftist Jewish Currents magazine and a........

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