While The Remnant has played host to many remarkable historians over the years, few have taken us on a more incredible ride than Simon Sebag Montefiore. As such, we’re proud to bestow on Simon our newly formed, not-really-endowed chair of Middle Eastern history. Tune in to hear Simon and Jonah Goldberg rove across time and space, covering Iran, Saudi Arabia, the 1979 revolution, the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Israel, antisemitism, moral hysteria, Western obsession with Jerusalem, colonialism, nationalism, ethnicity, modernization, Islam, historical perspective, and, most importantly of all, the proper pronunciation of Turkey.
Show Notes:
The Remnant is a production of The Dispatch, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a nonpartisan perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including the Saturday Ruminant, audio versions of all our articles and newsletters, and Jonah’s twice-weekly G-File—click here. Instructions on how to set up your members-only feed can be found here, and if you’d like to remove all ads from your podcast experience, consider becoming a premium Dispatch member by clicking here.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief and co-founder of The Dispatch, based in Washington, D.C. Prior to that, enormous lizards roamed the Earth. More immediately prior to that, Jonah spent two decades at National Review, where he was a senior editor, among other things. He is also a bestselling author, longtime columnist for the Los Angeles Times, commentator for CNN, and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. When he is not writing the G-File or hosting The Remnant podcast, he finds real joy in family time, attending to his dogs and cat, and blaming Steve Hayes for various things.
The podcast transcription below was generated using artificial intelligence and may include occasional errors or misspellings.
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[instrumental music] [groaning]
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Ladies and gentlemen.
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Could I please have your attention? Can you dig it? [crowd cheering]
Jonah Goldberg
Greetings, dear listeners. This is Jonah Goldberg, host of the Remnant Podcast, brought to you by The Dispatch and Dispatch Media. I cannot tell you how excited I am about today's guest. Sadly, it's somewhat, you know, like, normally when I have historians on, I like to talk about how it has nothing to do with what's going on on the news. Unfortunately, the Middle East is just simply constantly in the news, and rarely for wonderful reasons. And so I'm, I'm thrilled to have one of the foremost living historians in the English language, Simon Sebag Montefiore. He's a historian who's written many books. The ones I know well are about Stalin and, and, and Eastern Europe, but he's written histories of Jerusalem, which this is sort of a companion to. And his new book is The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East. He's written more books than most people have read, and he went to all those fancy schools where kids make fun of you in the cafeteria. He is here today to talk about his book and, and other things. So I'm gonna call you Simon, whether you like it or not. Simon, welcome to The Remnant.
Simon Sebag Montefiore
Thank you so much. Lovely to be, lovely to be on here with you, Jonah. Nice to meet you, too.
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