May 27, 2025 - Epoch Times
07:40
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| You know, every Friday night, Jews celebrate Shabbat. | |
| It's the day of rest, and Jewish holidays go from night to night instead of morning to morning. | |
| So it starts Friday night. | |
| I went to the JCC Jewish Community Center in Krakow. | |
| We'd be at a Shabbat dinner with, you know, 20 Muslims, a handful of Jews, and then the people from the JCC. | |
| So we had some Polish people there. | |
| We had a Ukrainian refugee who works there, a couple more Americans. | |
| Just a real coming together, and some Israelis, some Iraqi Jews. | |
| It was a really cool melting pot. | |
| And the joy that erupted there, like we broke into song and dance a number of times, both in Arabic and in Hebrew, and it was just an amazing expression of brotherhood. | |
| And joy and togetherness there. | |
| So that was a really beautiful way to end the trip. | |
| And how does this fit with the Abraham Accords? | |
| Maybe it's not obvious, right? | |
| Well, I mean, so, you know, Morocco, Bahrain, those are Abraham Accord countries. | |
| Syria, Lebanon, Pakistan. | |
| These are the kind of countries that we would hope would join this coalition. | |
| Hopefully Lebanon. | |
| It's soon to follow as well. | |
| But really, it's just about bringing Jews and Muslims together and creating that connection. | |
| And again, if those accords are really going to mean something, it can't just be the business-to-business side or the government-to-government side. | |
| There has to be the people-to-people. | |
| Otherwise, what's it all for? | |
| So it was really meaningful and I'm really grateful that I had the opportunity to be part of it. | |
| So the podcast that you got the award for, and presumably that's part of the reason why you were invited to come on the trip too, because you had this podcast. | |
| How did that come about? | |
| It's relatively new. | |
| I saw you had Van Jones on. | |
| That was the clip that they showed at the awards ceremony. | |
| Tell me about it. | |
| Yeah, so it came about really in the wake of October 7th. | |
| I was already doing... | |
| Mostly, my career has been in entertainment. | |
| I mean, entirely. | |
| Acting, writing, singing, all of those things. | |
| So I built somewhat of a platform for that, and I began using it to speak about Jewish things and Israel things and current event things and culture things within the last couple of years. | |
| But once October 7th hit, it went into overdrive. | |
| I often think of this Mark Cuban quote, don't follow your dreams, follow your efforts. | |
| And while in my head, my dreams were sort of Hollywood. | |
| I found that I was pouring all of my time and energy into Jewish advocacy and responding to October 7th, trying to provide. | |
| You know, October 10th, I did like a two-hour live Q&A on Instagram. | |
| Just bring me your questions. | |
| Let me help you understand what's going on here. | |
| I was surprised by how many people, especially within the Jewish community, were so uninformed about the big picture of what was happening. | |
| And I just wanted to get involved in that. | |
| And I was putting out fires in real life and online. | |
| All different kinds of things. | |
| Very reactionary. | |
| And a couple months into that, I was like, all right, I want to get back to sort of my preferred lane of Jewish advocacy, which is empowerment and celebration and normalization of taking up space in the public sphere as Jews and being proud of that. | |
| And so the podcast was my way to do that. | |
| I was able to expand on the ideas I'd already been discussing on social media in shorter off-the-cuff videos and posts. | |
| Now I can take as much time as I want to discuss. | |
| A different idea each week, which is how I open my episode. | |
| Just things I'm thinking about in the space, in the culture, mostly related to Jewish stuff, but sometimes not, just sort of where we are right now. | |
| And then I also wanted to normalize Jewish people, notable Jews and non-Jews who I have on the show, like Van Jones, having conversations about Jewish stuff and showing that we can do this. | |
| It's normal. | |
| uh... | |
| it's not scary does have to be controversial or political to have And it's not lame, it's not academic, it's not uncool, which I think a lot of Jews have that fear that, like, oh, it's not cool to talk about. | |
| Jewish stuff. | |
| So I wanted to model that. | |
| I wanted to provide an environment for these notable Jews and non-Jewish allies to talk about this stuff, because they don't usually get the opportunity to really be honest and go deep and have meaningful conversations about their own identity in this way. | |
| Usually if you're a... | |
| They're not getting asked, what did it feel like when you were shooting that movie in the wake of October 7th and having to navigate being on a cast with people who might have different views than you. | |
| Like, we get to get into that kind of stuff. | |
| There seems to be quite a schism in the Jewish community around the issue of October 7th and the response to it. | |
| I would say there is a schism. | |
| I don't know if I'd call it quite a schism because it still is a very small minority of the Jewish community that holds deep anti-Israel sentiment. | |
| Many of those who do do so mostly out of a lack of understanding and education and were already estranged from the community and didn't feel that Israel was They were already sort of outside, and so it sort of makes sense that their allegiance is to the community in which they spend their lives, which is not necessarily the Jewish community. | |
| But for the most part, the vast majority of Jews around the world are very much aligned in their support of Israel. | |
| And a lot of the anti-Israel sentiment, again, that you hear from Jews, is much more rooted in being anti the current government. | |
| Than it is necessarily about Israel itself. | |
| And when you sort of try to have the conversations about Israel itself, honestly, they don't really know enough of the details to have a meaningful conversation there. | |
| They just know they don't like seeing Gazan children getting bombed on their phones. | |
| Well, hopefully nobody likes to see that. | |
| Exactly. | |
| course nobody does but when you don't know anything else but that all you know is well whatever makes this happen And it seems like it's Israel's fault that this is happening. | |
| That has to stop. | |
| And they have been made to feel, or whether they've been made to feel or erroneously assume that this is sort of the requirement, they feel they can't criticize the government and still be accepted in the pro-Israel community, which is, of course, not true at all. | |
| I had a conversation recently with somebody who would probably put themselves in the anti-Israel camp. | |
| And they kept saying how there wasn't room for that conversation. | |
| And I kept asking, who have you tried to have that conversation with that wouldn't let you discuss that? | |
| Because I have anti-Netanyahu conversations with pro-Israel Jews every day. | |
| I mean, it's like the main topic of discussion. | |
| So I think it's really about disengagement. | |
| I mean, they're just sort of in their own echo chamber. | |
| What does that really mean? | |
| That means it's their community, and in their community, No one's trying to really have tough discussions because they're not equipped to, because they don't know enough about it. | |
| And so they just sort of go with the flow. |
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