“Sometimes a flare goes up and you get to see exactly where everyone is standing.” – Douglas Murray

On October 7, a flare went up, and by October 8, it became clear exactly where Douglas Murray was standing – erupting into the world’s conversation about Hamas’ attack on Israel, pointedly, insistently and with utter moral clarity.

“If you don’t believe that Israel has the right to stop a group that has proposed repeatedly . . . that it wants to annihilate Israel . . ., then of course you don’t believe Israel has the right to live. You believe Israel has the right to die.”

Douglas Murray might not be Jewish. But, led by his guiding ethos that one truth can puncture a thousand lies, he is unwilling to accept the dishonest criticism being leveled at the Jewish state.

In his new book, On Democracies and Death Cults, the #1 international bestselling author and cultural commentator, reveals what he saw and learned reporting in Israel after October 7. Mr. Murray explains how many in the West are not only condemning Israel to perpetual attack but emboldening forces that seek to undermine democracy across the globe.

The Temple Emanu-El Streicker Cultural Center welcomes Douglas Murray to discuss why the conflict is not the simplistic leftist tale of oppressor versus oppressed but a clash between a thriving multi-racial democracy that values life and a death cult bent on its destruction.

A prominent reporter whose work has taken him not only to Israel, Gaza and Lebanon, but to Iraq, North Korea, northern Nigeria and Ukraine, Douglas Murray is the author of eight books. Mr. Murray is Associate Editor of The Spectator and a prolific debater; he is also a columnist at the New York Post and frequently writes for The Sun, The Telegraph, National Review and The Free Press. Over the past year, he has written scores of dispatches from Israel and spoken widely about the conflict.

Murray will be in conversation with Rabbi David Wolpe, a 21st-century sage who is widely considered among the very best Jewish teachers in America. He has taught Torah to Hollywood stars, scandalized his colleagues by opining that the Exodus didn’t happen the way we’ve been taught, caused a major stir when he quit Harvard’s Antisemitism Advisory Group and wrote a best-selling book optioned for a movie by Warner Bros.