The video of the sixth webinar in the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute’s Israel Initiative is now available and can be viewed here. Titled “Free Speech and Campus Antisemitism: Academic Freedom, to What End?,” the panel featured Michael S. Kochin, Geoff Shullenberger, and Jacob Siegel, and their conversation was moderated by Israel Initiative director Gabriel Noah Brahm.
The next webinar in the Israel webinar series will take place on July 7.
Participant Biographies
Panelists
Michael S. Kochin is Professor Extraordinarius in the School of Political Science, Government, and International Relations at Tel Aviv University. He received his A.B. in mathematics at 19 from Harvard and his M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago. He has held visiting appointments at Yale, Princeton, Toronto, and Claremont McKenna College. Through September 2025 Kochin is Visiting Scholar at the Hillsdale College Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship and at the Catholic University of America. He has written widely on the comparative analysis of institutions, political thought, politics and literature, and political rhetoric. Kochin is the author of three books: Gender and Rhetoric in Plato’s Political Thought (2002), Five Chapters on Rhetoric: Character, Action, Things, Nothing, and Art (2009) and (with the historian Michael Taylor) An Independent Empire: Diplomacy & War in the Making of the United States (2020). With Alberto Spektorowski he edited Michel Houellebecq, the Cassandra of Freedom: Submission and Decline (2021).
Geoff Shullenberger is managing editor at Compact. Previously, he was Clinical Associate Professor in the Expository Writing Program at New York University. He received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Brown University. He has contributed to publications including American Affairs, the Chronicle of Higher Education, First Things, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Tablet, UnHerd, and the Washington Examiner. He is the co-editor of COVID-19 and the Left: The Tyranny of Fear (Routledge, 2024).
Respondent
Jacob Siegel is senior writer at Tablet magazine. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Politico, the New York Daily News, Vice, and the Daily Beast, among other places. He co-hosts Manifesto! A Podcast with the novelist Phil Klay. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) at @Jacob__Siegel.
Moderator and Host
Our panel’s moderator is Gabriel Noah Brahm (aka Gabi Abramovich). Brahm is Director of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute’s Israel Initiative, Professor of English and World Literature at Northern Michigan University, and Visiting Researcher in Political Science at Tel Aviv University. A frequent contributor to such leading journals of thought and opinion as the American Mind, Fathom, Perspectives on Political Science, Society, and Telos, he is co-editor, with Cary Nelson, of The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel (2014). He received his B.A. from UCLA and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Cruz. As a dual Israeli-American citizen, he has double, not dual loyalties. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @Brahmski.
