This episode features the audio from a NJN webinar, originally recorded on January 15th, 2026, hosted by Noam Shelef.

• In this conversation, Peace Now's Hagit Ofran helps us understand:
  What to make of the recent headlines about E-1 and how this fits with other changes in the West Bank over the past year.
• How settler violence and government policy reinforce one another to drive Palestinians out of certain areas.
• Why these developments matter for Palestinians, Israelis, and the rest of us who care about what the future looks like.

Hagit Ofran is Israel's leading expert on settlements and the Israeli government's policies in the Occupied Territories. As co-director of Peace Now's Settlement Watch program, Hagit has spent decades documenting settlement expansion and tracking the legal and political mechanisms driving de facto annexation.

In this episode of PeaceCast, NJN's Maxxe Albert-Deitch is joined by Barak Sella, editor of Class of 95: A Literary Anthology on the Assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

Class of 95 presents, for the first time in English, Israel's poetic response to this national trauma. Originally published in Hebrew as Machzor 95, this anthology gathers diverse and powerful Israeli voices, including both renowned poets and a new generation of writers who gave words to a nation's shock, grief, and search for meaning. This English edition brings forty of those poems to new audiences, organized according to the five stages of Jewish mourning. Together, they move readers from the stunned immediacy of November 4, 1995, through grief and reckoning, to the recognition that Rabin's assassination is not only a personal or national trauma but a lasting chapter in Jewish history.

Learn more about Class of 95: https://www.theclassof95.com/

In this episode of PeaceCast, NJN's Maxxe Albert-Deitch is joined by author, internationally renowned human rights lawyer, and longtime activist Sari Bashi to discuss the new English translation of her book Upside-Down Love, originally published in Hebrew in 2021.

Told in alternating chapters by both Sari and Osama (a pseudonym), Upside-Down Love is a moving portrait of two ordinary people falling in love and navigating the regular pitfalls of a relationship, set against an extraordinary backdrop of the West Bank. The pair met when Sari represented Osama in petitions to Israel's Supreme Court to allow him to pursue his education overseas. Their story offers a new lens on current events in Israel-Palestine—experiencing the conflict in their day to day lives, raising their children, and coping with constant threats to themselves, their families, and loved ones. Osama and Sari's star-crossed romance—an intimate, vulnerable portrait of an astoundingly resilient Israeli-Palestinian relationship—has since become a beacon of hope in the aftermath of October 7, 2023. Now on its way to becoming an international sensation, Upside-Down Love speaks to the unique circumstances of this specific moment in history, while also illustrating a timeless truth: Love will triumph over bigotry and destruction.

Buy or pre-order the book (out in the US on January 20th, 2026)- https://bookshop.org/p/books/upside-down-love-sari-bashi/6b7db8d45024dc23?ean=9798228590052&next=t&