In his introductory remarks, Emmanuel Acho frames his participation in this project as a conscious departure from his primary identity as a television host and sports analyst, acknowledging that he had even resolved not to write another book. The contested nature of the Israel/Palestine debate also gave him pause. The impulse that ultimately drew him back, he explains, is the same one that animated his earlier Uncomfortable Conversations work: The conviction that genuine understanding of another person’s experience constitutes a moral act in itself, one that does not require full agreement to be meaningful or transformative.

Emmanuel situates this book within the lineage of his previous work on the Black American experience, drawing a sustained parallel between antisemitism and anti-Black racism as two distinct but structurally related forms of hatred, each demanding the same quality of sustained attention. He acknowledges the personal risk the collaboration carries, noting that segments of the Black community may read his advocacy for Jewish people as a form of betrayal—particularly against the backdrop of the heightened tensions between the two communities in the post-October 7th moment. He does not minimize those tensions, but does not accept them as a reason for silence. Understanding, he insists, not agreement, is the objective, and it is an objective he extends directly to the reader, “Because everything great, I believe, is birthed through discomfort” (xv).

Noa Tishby opens her introductory remarks with a direct statement of her central discomfort: The necessity of defending her right to be upset by antisemitism. She traces the history of anti-Jewish hatred from its first written documentation in 3rd-century BCE Alexandria through to the present day, making the point that despite society’s long awareness of the problem, antisemitism is far from extinguished. The apparent markers of Jewish acceptance in modern Western life—prominent Jewish figures in culture and politics, the defeat of Nazism, the erosion of formally discriminatory institutions—have not translated into safety, as the statistics bear out: Jews, constituting just over 2% of the American population, are the targets of 63% of religion-based hate crimes.

Noa catalogs the contemporary landscape of antisemitic expression, from physical attacks on Jewish people and the desecration of synagogues to the viral circulation of neo-Nazi slogans on social media and even the celebration, in certain quarters, of the October 7th massacres.

Against this backdrop, she introduces herself and her qualifications: Born and raised in Tel Aviv by a secular, liberal family, trained as an actress and producer in Los Angeles, and eventually appointed as Israel’s first Special Envoy for Combatting Antisemitism. Her Envoy role brought her into contact with leading figures in the field before she was dismissed by Prime Minister Netanyahu over her criticism of some of his policies, a dismissal she received with equanimity.

The section closes with Noa situating the book within the scope of her broader advocacy mission while carefully noting both what it is and what it is not: Not an exhaustive academic history, but an accessible and honest reckoning with “where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going” (xxi). That the conversation is being conducted alongside Emmanuel, she suggests, is precisely what makes it capable of reaching the audience it needs to reach.