FRDH Podcast with Michael Goldfarb

In this archive-sound based documentary for the BBC produced by FRDH host Michael Goldfarb , veteran reporter James Traub tells the story of how in the 1930s, radio priest Father Coughlin and President Franklin D. Roosevelt ruled America's air waves. They began as political allies, then became competitors and ultimately fell out over their vision of America.

In the 21st century, with climate change unleashed, the Arctic is the new geopolitical frontline, or is it the fault line? The arctic ocean is now navigable for months of the year, the more than 500 year search for a northern passage from Europe to Asia is over. This route cuts the time it takes to get goods from China to European markets in half. Who will control the Arctic ocean? In this podcast FRDH host talks to Humphrey Hawksley, who spent part of the summer in Greenland. He is a veteran of more than three decades reporting for the BBC many of them from China, and who spends a lot of time above the Arctic Circle researching and writing his Rake Ozenna thrillers set in the frozen world we will all have learn about in the 21st century.

Paul Schrader’s Blue Collar is one of the most prescient films of that superlative cinema decade the 1970s. It was a film that foresaw the coming of the Rust Belt, post-Civil Rights era racial animosity, and extraordinary wealth inequality. "They pit the lifers against the new boy and the young against the old. The black against the white. Everything they do is to keep us in our place." Schrader wrote that in 1978. In this FRDH podcast Paul Schrader talks about the film's origins, the difficult genius of Richard Pryor and much else. Warning of racial language some will find offensive . Give us 39:23 to tell you all about it.

Resisting Hamas during the twenty years the group has governed Gaza has been a dangerous exercise and since Israel began its Vengeance War following the October 7th Hamas atrocity even fewer Gazan voices have been raised against them. Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib is one person willing to speak up. Now he has written a short book detailing how Hamas maintains its power through its own ruthlessness and with the help of international organizations set up in theory to help Gazans. Alkhatib is the rare Gazan voice in public life and in this wide ranging conversation with FRDH host Michael Goldfarb he talks about his boyhood in Gaza, his family -- 30 of whom have been killed in the war -- Palestinian agency and the way forward out of the catastrophe of Oct 7th and the utter destruction of what was his home. Give us 52:51 to tell you about it.

In June 2014, when ISIS swept into Iraq's second city Mosul, historian Omar Mohammed immediately began documenting the terrorist occupation of his hometown as and act of Resistance and Defiance. Now Mohammed has written a book, Mosul Eye: A Scholar's Clandestine War Against ISIS about his life and harrowing escape from ISIS. In this FRDH conversation he details the risks he took to get the story of daily atrocities out to the world. The city was shut off by the throat slitters of ISIS yet Mohammed successfully defied them with his dispatches. This is a compelling conversation about true resistance, as well as the implications for the United States in the future over its failed campaign in Iraq, a war most Americans would like to forget, but that people everywhere from Tehran to Beirut remember vividly. Give us 45:15 to tell you all about it.