There are plenty of places left to hear people argue. There are far fewer places where people can actually talk.

That distinction is at the heart of Rabbi Michael Barclay’s The Rabbi’s Table, a weekly radio show and podcast built around a deceptively simple idea: “Dialogue, Not Debate.” In an era when political disagreement is increasingly treated as evidence of bad character, Barclay has created something increasingly unusual: a forum where difficult subjects can be discussed without requiring everyone at the table to begin from the same ideological position.

That matters because some of the most consequential questions facing America today are also the questions people seem least willing to discuss honestly. Israel. Antisemitism. Islam. Immigration. The transformation of the Democratic Party. The growing influence of democratic socialism. The future of America’s relationship with the Middle East. These subjects do not need less conversation. They need more of it.

Barclay is hardly pretending to be a neutral observer. He is an unapologetic defender of Israel, and his writings since October 7 have made that position unmistakable. His account of the war is rooted not only in politics but in his identity as a rabbi and his understanding of Israel as part of a 3,700-year Jewish story. Yet his defense of Israel does not require him to pretend that Israelis, Israeli politicians or the Israeli military are incapable of making mistakes.

In fact, one of the more revealing things about Barclay’s writing is his willingness to acknowledge those mistakes. When Israeli soldiers mistakenly killed three Israeli hostages during the war, he did not try to explain away the tragedy. He examined the moral and operational realities of fighting an enemy that deliberately embeds itself among civilians while still recognizing the horror of what had happened. That is a far more intellectually serious position than the increasingly common assumption that supporting Israel requires either blind allegiance or silence.

This is particularly important because, in my opinion, the American media’s coverage of Israel and the broader Middle East has become increasingly hostile to Israel in both tone and framing. That is an opinion, not a claim that........

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