Beyond Borders: Antisemitism, Islamophobia, and the Israel-Palestine Divide

Michelle Goldberg has been an opinion columnist at the New York Times since 2017. She was part of a team that won the Pulitzer Prize for public service for reporting on issues of workplace sexual harassment and has also won a Front Page Award from the Newswomen’s Club of New York for opinion/criticism and the Hillman Prize for opinion and analysis. 

Her first book, “Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism,” about religious authoritarianism in American politics, was a finalist for the Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism. After that, she traveled to countries including India, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, and Poland to write “The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power and the Future of the World,” a book about global battles over gender and reproductive rights, which won the J. Anthony Lukas Work-In-Progress Award and the Ernesta Drinker Ballard Book Prize. Then, in a detour from politics, she wrote “The Goddess Pose,” a book about wellness culture and the long Western fascination with Eastern spirituality as refracted through the story of the peripatetic Russian yoga evangelist Indra Devi. 

Goldberg is an on-air contributor at MSNBC, and her work has appeared in publications including The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Nation and many others. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and children. 

Samer Sinijlawi is a Palestinian political activist and founding chairman of the Jerusalem Development Fund. He was a head of the International and Israeli relations on Fateh Supreme Committee and oversaw relations between Fateh and major political parties in Europe and the Arab world as well as in Israel. 

As a writer and activist, he is the Palestinian with the most appearances in Israeli Media including TV channels 11, 12, 13, 14 and I24, radio and newspapers. His OP Ed's have been published in the New York Times, Newsweek and Haaretz, including: 

• Sinijlawi, S. (2023, December 21). Mahmoud abbas must go. New York Times. 
• Sinijlawi, S. (2024, November 4). My hope for Palestine. The Atlantic. 
• Sinijlawi, S. (2024, October 7). What I learned as a Palestinian at Kfar Aza, which was devastated on Oct. 7. Newsweek.
• Levi, Y. and Freedland, J. (Hosts). (2024, February 15th). The Day After Tomorrow – with Samer Sinijlawi and Michael Milshtein [Audio podcast episode]. Unholy.
• Sinijlawi, S. (2024, April 18). Palestinian’s Ideas for a Way Out of the Crisis. Haaretz.

Sarah Wildman is an op-ed page editor at the New York Times. She is the co-creator, producer, and host of Foreign Policy’s First Person podcast.

Prior to joining FP as a deputy editor, she was the global identities and borders writer at Vox, a position she originated. Sarah Wildman has lived in and reported from Paris, Vienna, Madrid, Washington, Jerusalem and Berlin. She was a Dart Center Ochberg fellow (a project of the Columbia School of Journalism) in 2015 and the 2014 Barach Non Fiction Writing Fellow at the Wesleyan Writers Conference. Wildman won the 2010 Peter R. Weitz Prize, from the German Marshall Fund, a prize awarded for "excellence and originality," in European coverage, a 2011 Rockower Award from the American Jewish Press Association for commentary, and a 2008 Lowell Thomas Award Winner for travel writing. 

Wildman has received numerous grants and competitve fellowships including an Arthur F. Burns Fellowship in Berlin, an American Council on Germany Fellowship in Berlin, a Milena Jesenská fellowship at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, Austria, and a Pew Fellowship in International Journalism (now called the International Reporting Project).  In March 2013 she received a Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting grant to report on the future of Jerusalem. Wildman wrote Paper Love, for Riverhead/Penguin, while a visiting scholar at the International Reporting Project at Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies.

Wildman is a regular contributor to the New York Times, Slate, and the New Yorker online. She has been on staff at The New Republic, a senior correspondent at The American Prospect and the Washington correspondent for The Advocate. Her stories have appeared in the Daily Beast, Newsweek, The Guardian, The Nation,The Washington Post, Travel and Leisure, New York, Departures, The Christian Science Monitor, Elle, Marie Claire, O the Oprah Magazine, Real Simple, Glamour, and Jerusalem Report, among others.  

She lives in Washington, DC with her partner and their two children.