Judge Roy Altman is used to presiding over trials. This Sunday, he’ll come to Portland to discuss a different kind of trial.

Altman will present on his recently released book, “Israel on Trial: Examining the History, the Evidence, and the Law” Sunday, Aug. 2 at Congregation Neveh Shalom in Portland at 4 pm in an event sponsored by Israel360, StandWithUs Northwest and the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland.

A former assistant United States Attorney, Altman was appointed as a United States District Judge for the Southern District of Florida in 2019. Beginning after Oct. 7, he began speaking about Jewish history around the country. Later, he began a program to take fellow federal judges to Israel. From the conversations that often followed these trips, the idea for the book sprouted forth.

“These judges were not Jewish, never been to Israel before,” Altman said. “I’ve had thousands of conversations with people around the country about Israel, many of them see the world differently than I do, and that’s okay, and I came to recognize that the entire debate about Israel is driven by six claims that people believe.”

Those six claims each take up a chapter of the book: That Israel is a settler-colonial enterprise, that Israel was illegitimately founded, that Israel has been the primary obstacle to the creation of a Palestinian State, that Israel occupied the Gaza Strip on Oct. 7, that Israel is an apartheid state and that Israel committed genocide in Gaza.

“Why not just apply the same legal methodology that judges, lawyers, and jurors apply every single day in courtrooms and law offices across this country?” Altman asked himself. “It’s a time-tested methodology that we’ve developed and honed over hundreds of years and it’s a methodology that we know we trust because we use it where truth-telling matters the most, in the courtroom where someone’s life is at stake.”

The verdict? Not guilty on all counts.

“The good news is that when you look at the law on each of these claims, you see that the claims are preposterous on their face and that they’re actually not created because they’re true,” Altman said. “They’re created because they invert reality.”

Altman posits that accusations of genocide against Israel have little to nothing to do whether there’s an actual genocide (a particular term with a particular definition) occurring.

The accusation of genocide, he said, “has everything to do with minimizing Jewish suffering and saying, look, we don’t really need to care about Holocaust education anymore. We don’t need to care about protecting Jews. We don’t need to care about the guilt we feel about the creation of the state of Israel and how necessary it is because of what we did to the Jews, because the Jews are doing the same thing to everybody else.”

Unlike most courtroom trials, Altman’s book has found a wide audience. It’s been a New York Times and USA Today bestseller and is currently the number-one book on Amazon in its International Law category.

“The truth is you write a book and you think maybe your mother will read it,” Altman joked. “To have a book become this tremendously successful was a huge surprise.”

Registration for Altman’s appearance at Neveh Shalom is free. Copies of “Israel on Trial” are available to order at registration for $25 each and Altman will be signing books after the event. Learn more and register at members.nevehshalom.org/form/israel360-SwU-Altman-registration-2026.html.

PHOTO: Courtesy Judge Roy Altman