All About Change - Noa Tishby - On Antisemitism

Episode Date: July 10, 2023

Noa Tishby is an actress, author, producer, and activist.  Born in Tel Aviv, Israel, Noa Tishby was born to a Zionist family that was involved in the establishment of Israel. Raised in a secular family in Israel she wasn’t really exposed to Anti-semitism, but that changed as she got older.  But when you moved to America she encountered a lot of misinformation about Israel and anti-semitism. Inspired, Tishby decided to take action. She became an advocate and founded the first Israel-focused online advocacy and rapid response organization, Act For Israel, becoming a powerful voice for Israel and the Middle East. After years of advocating for Israel, both publicly and privately. She decided to put her understanding and experience to pen in her first book: Israel: a Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth.   In this conversation with Jay, she talks about how dangerous misinformation and bias produce antisemitism and how both Jewish and non-Jewish people can fight antisemitism. Please find a transcription of this episode: https://allaboutchangepodcast.com/podcast-episode/noa-tishbySee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

If you have a subconscious bias against the Jewish people, it's going to affect your opinion about Israel. I'm Jay Rudiman, and welcome to All About Change, a podcast showcasing individuals who leverage the hardships that have been thrown at them to better other people's lives. This is all wrong. I say put mental health first because if you don't... This generation of Americans has already had enough. I stand before you not as an expert, but as a concerned citizen. Yes, we can! Yes, we can!

Yes, we can! And today on our show, Noah Tishbe. You grow up in Israel, you grow up with zero anti-Semitism. Like you just, you're the majority. Like you're not, you grow up with zero anti-Semitism. Like you just, you're the majority. Like you're not, you grow up with zero anti-Semitism, you learn all about the Holocaust, and you literally kind of like conclude that humanity must have moved on from this insanity. Noa Tishbe is an actress, author, producer, and activist. Raised in a secular family in Israel, she really wasn't exposed to anti-Semitism.

But a chance encounter on a trip to Greece offered her a rude awakening. That was the first time that I experienced Holocaust denial and distortion, right? I didn't know that there's a term for that. Inspired, Tishbe decided to take action. She became an activist and founded the first Israel-focused online advocacy and rapid response organization. Act for Israel became a powerful voice for Israel and the Middle East. There's a disproportionate obsession that people have with the state of Israel that is by far exceeding any obsession with any other country that is actually horrific.

After years of advocating for Israel, both publicly and privately, she decided to put her understanding and experience to pen in her first book, Israel, A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth. The more open we are, the more inclusive we are, the more, like the more love that's going to be out there, the less room for hate there will be. Noah Tishby, thank you so much for being my guest on All About Change. I'm really looking forward to this discussion. Obviously, it hits home for me and my family. Let me ask you first off about yourself. You were raised in a secular family with a deep history to Israel and including family members who are founders of the state of Israel, and you ended

up in entertainment. Can you tell us how that happened? I grew up in Israel, in Tel Aviv, in a very kind of like secular, liberal, super, super Zionist family. And it was one of those things that was in the backdrop of my life my entire time, but I didn't actually give it that much attention, honestly. It was kind of like the water I swam in. My grandmother was one of the founders of the first kibbutz in Israel, and therefore the first kibbutz in the world, Ganya, Aleph. My great-grandfather moved to Jerusalem in 1922 to start the Ministry of Industry and Trade. So he brought into Jerusalem, into the old Yishuv, like a lot of the industry, who's a huge proponent of there's never going to be a Jewish state without Jewish industry.

And my grandfather was Israel's, not only Israel's first ambassador to Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, he was literally the first ambassador, the first representative that the state of Israel sent to the entire continent of Africa. It was in 1956 before Ghana became Ghana when it was still Gold Coast. So it was one of those things that was just like, that was, these were the stories in the household. This is how I was raised. This is how I was, this is how I was brought up. And I didn't see it as anything unique at all. And I went into the entertainment industry and did really well. I went in as a, as a child actor, basically in musicals as a teen and did really well. And was like, to me, this was all about, this was who I was, right? I was like a liberal person of the world, actor and singer and,

and all of that. And it wasn't until I moved to America and started experiencing anti-Semitism and anti-Israel and anti-Zionist sentiments that I, as my mom says, my DNA kicked in and I just couldn't shut up. I just couldn't shut up. So I knew that this is the most important thing that I can do, fighting against anti-Semitism, fighting for the Jewish people and fighting for the state of Israel, like everything that I've done up until now prepared me for this. And two years ago, my book came out. It's called Israel, A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth. It's basically a simple explainer when people don't know anything about Israel or know a lot about it and want to kind of refresh themselves. It's the first book of its kind to make the story of Israel easy to understand. You've spoken about that when you were living in Israel, you didn't think that there

was such a thing as antisemitism, that it was gone, that maybe it went out with the Holocaust. Yeah. You grow up in Israel, you grow up with zero antisemitism. Like you just, you're the majority. Like you're not, you grow up with zero antisemitism. You learn all about the Holocaust and you literally kind of like conclude that humanity must have moved on from this insanity this mental illness called antisemitism um the first incident that i had was i was 17 years old and i was on a boat on my way to in greece on my way from athens to this islandos. And I was, there was a very kind of like cute young guy who started chatting me up. And we were like talking and walking on the deck

and midnight and this beautiful Mediterranean August moon. And we started talking and he says to me, he said, we say, you know, he's like, he asked me, where am I from? I said, from Israel. I said, where are you from? He said, Germany. And I saw his face change. And he kind of became, when said, we say, you know, he's like, he asked me, where am I from? I said, from Israel. I said, where are you from? He said, Germany. And I saw his face change.

And he kind of became, when he heard I'm from Israel, he kind of went quiet and went a little weird. And I'm trying to lighten things up. And I'm like, oh, are you being weird about our nation's past? Because I was like, you know, we've been through so much and we've learned so much from it. And like, look at how beautifully we've moved on and learned from what had happened to make sure that it doesn't happen again. And the guy looks me straight in the eye and he goes, well, you know, it's not a hundred percent certain that it actually happened. There are a lot of books that say

that it didn't. And even if it did, you guys took all the money that we gave you and you used it for your awards. Wow. And that was the first time that I experienced Holocaust denial and distortion. Right? I didn't know that there's a term for that. I was blown away. And remember, I'm 17 years old. I'm like just finished 11th grade. I have no idea how to respond to this. I just look at him like kind of shocked and I just walked away, extract myself. I went to my girlfriend and I'm like, this is insane. What is he, what is that? Again, not even knowing what this was. So that was the first thing that I've experienced. And the biggest thing that I've experienced in LA and specifically in Hollywood is anti-Israel or lack of understanding about Israel.

So it wasn't so much about anti-Semitism, because honestly, there are a lot of Jewish people that work in Hollywood, which is not to say that the Jews control Hollywood. It's a very different thing. But the lack of understanding about Israel is the thing that shocked me the most in Hollywood, which actually propelled me eventually to write my book. Sort of this benign, like, oh, do you guys ride on camels and, and, um, you know, live in tents or was it more like sinister? Like, you know, oh, well, aren't you guys oppressors in a colonial empire? All of the above, all of the above, all of the above, like, oh,

how come you don't have an accent oh how come you're modern and not wearing a headgear oh you guys are so horrible to the blah blah blah and like you know every single trope misunderstanding every single one when it comes to israel every single one and the thing that shocked me the most um was again the reason that i wanted to write this book is because because of the difference between like how little people knew about Israel and the strong opinions that they had about it. Right. You don't have to know anything about, like, I don't know anything about the Bali, right? Or Denmark governance system. Right. But I'm not going to be opinionated about it and tweet about it up a storm and pretend like I know

what I'm talking about. And when it comes to Israel, people allow themselves to not know what they're talking about, but for the sake of virtue signaling, they feel the need to talk about it. So how did you, like you're trying to establish yourself in the industry in Los Angeles, trying to establish yourself in the industry in Los Angeles. And how did you begin to respond to people when they were talking about the country you're from, but talking in ways that you knew were blatantly false? It's more than like a political calculation. It's where my family lives. You know what I mean? So it's like, I can't shut up. I can't just let it slide. Oh, people have this misconception about Israel. And they're saying these, you know, anti-Zionist tropes and I're not anti-Semitic. And I would just find myself, my Israeli attitude would take over my American attitude. And I'd be like slightly, there was one situation with one specific friend who's not a

friend anymore. And when the book was coming out and I was giving interviews and I said, anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. He texted me and he said, if you're going to continue saying that, I'm not going to be able, you're not going to be able to have me in your life anymore. And there was one specific discussion, heated discussion that we had in Utah. And he was talking about, it's a little vignette story that didn't make it to the book at the end. He was talking about, he just came back from the Dakotas and he planted himself with the tribes there that were fighting the pipeline, the oil pipeline. And he was talking about indigenous rights, right? Indigenous people's rights and being very

passionate about helping Native Americans, which I'm all for, and being extraordinarily passionate about this and like, you know, talking crap about colonialism and like you know talking crap about colonialism and you know whatever just like talking up indigenous people's rights and i just basically came up to him and i was like babe by the same token i was like what what how do you define indigenous indigenous indigenuity what's your definition and he's like well anybody that has history or like written or oral to a place you know and i'm I'm like, how many years are we talking about? Like 200, 500, 1000, 2000? How many years are we looking at? And he's like, well, as long as history, you know, for as long as we, you know, whatever, we can look back. And I just looked at him and I was like, then by the same token,

who are the indigenous people of the land of Israel? Right. And I think that that most Israelis are in favor of having Palestinian autonomy and a Palestinian state. If there would have been a sense within Israeli people that there's a partner for a state and we're not going to get Hamas instead of the PA, then no question this would have been solved by now. The problem is that the precedent had shown that up until now, it hasn't worked, but we're holding hopes high. So let me bring it very concentrated about anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism has been around as long as Jews have been around. It's the old form of hate and discrimination that's still being practiced today.

Right. How does anti-Semitism, which has always been with the Jewish people, and by the way, is not a Jewish problem, but is a non-Jewish problem. But how does that get transferred into anti-Zionism? I'm going to use an example given to me by, or that I saw my friend Yossi Klein-Halevi use. or that I saw my friend Yossi Klein-Halevi use. Yossi Klein-Halevi said in one of his talks, he said that throughout history,

the Jew, quote unquote, right, the Jew, was always used in order to describe whatever it is that's most loathsome in a society at any given moment. So in the early days of Christianity, the Jew was the Christ killer. Later on in the Nazism, the Jew was the ultimate race polluter. In the days of communism, the Jew was the capitalist killer. Later on in the Nazism, the Jew was the ultimate race polluter. In the days of communism, the Jew was the capitalist pig or the communist, depends on who you're asking,

right? So it was the Jew that was always like, whatever's bad in the world, who is it? It's the Jew. So it's like a changing kind of definition throughout history, but it's always pinged on the Jew. In recent years, what are the worst things to be in a polite society these days? It is to be racist, to be colonialist, and to be an apartheidist. And lo and behold, who is to blame for all these horrific traits, if not the Jewish state? The Jewish state became like the Jew of the world, and people don't understand that they're pegging on to Israel the same tropes that have been pegged on Jews for generations. So it's either a new trope, like, you know, being racist nowadays, it's the worst thing. And like, oh, Zionists are racists,

right? So there is that. And there's also like Israel's killing Palestinian children is the Jew killing Christian children of like a thousand years ago. It's literally the same. You just change the word Jew to the word Zionist and it's the same. A lot of people actually believe that and they don't see that they have conflated these two these two things. We have all we've all kind of seen our subconscious biases, right? We all know that we carry them and we have them about like the other, whatever the other is, we have them, you know, whether it's, you know, any kind of other ethnicity. We have kind of like an immediate respond to what we think about that ethnicity.

And people have the same subconscious bias when it comes to the Jewish people. They think that the Jews have, you know, it's Jewish power, Jewish control, Jews control Hollywood, and the banks and the money and blah, blah, blah, blah, right? So if you have a subconscious bias around against the Jewish people, it's going to affect your opinion about Israel, whether you know it or not, whether you acknowledge it or not. I want to take you back to the start of the explosion of social

media. And if you could just tell your experience of how that propelled you into really being the activist that you are today. So that was another pivotal moment in my activism. I was on, social media was just starting. So Twitter was just starting and I was, it was like the night and I was about to go to bed and I've kind of like went on Twitter for a second and on my desktop and browsing Twitter. And I suddenly saw that the word Israel was trending in like the Turkish language. So I'm like, this can't be good. What is happening here? I, so I read through this and I saw that there was a, an attempt at the time. There were a lot of rockets falling on Israel from Gaza as, as always.

And the Israeli government and the Egyptian government has enacted a blockade on Gaza in order to prevent from rockets from coming in and prevent them from throwing rockets on, on Israel. And there was a Turkish flotilla, a bunch of boats that were leaving a port in Turkey to break the blockade in Gaza. The Israeli government tried to stop them and ask them to. They were essentially saying that they're bringing goods into Gaza. The Israeli government said, it's fine.

There's still goods going into Gaza. We're not starving Gaza. The Israeli government said, it's fine. We're still, there's still goods going into Gaza. Like we're not starving Gaza. We're just basically trying to prevent rockets from going in and out and like cement and stuff like, so we're checking everything that's going in because they're building like attack tunnels and throwing rockets at us. They asked to check the goods. They refused. They asked to stop the boats at the Ashdod port. They refused. After a few attempts, they asked the boats to stop on the way. The boats didn't stop. And the Israeli command, the Marine command, aborted these boats. And they were greeted by PKK terrorists, basically, that are connected to Hamas that attacked the soldiers with iron rods and there was like a, and try to take their guns and all of

that. So they didn't, you know, they didn't come to like, you know, chill out. They came to fight. And nine activists were, or like terrorists, were killed at the time. The 10th one was killed later. But what was coming out on Twitter was that Israel just kind of out of the blue boarded the love boat

and started shooting people indiscriminately, right? And I'm looking at it and I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, this can't be the, this can't be the truth. This can't be what happened. And I'm realizing that a story was emerging about how Israel's killing people for no reason. And it's taking, like it's, it's catching on fire on social media. And that's when I realized that Israel's completely exposed when it comes to this new realm. And that's when I realized that Israel is completely exposed when it comes to this new realm. And that's where I found another group of activists like me online. And we formed the first online advocacy and rapid response organization dedicated to Israel and pro-Israel

truths, basically. And we started briefing NGOs and Jewish organizations and the Israeli, the IDF and the people in the government and had a bunch of meetings with a bunch of public officials andSemitism takes the form of anti-Israel hatred. Accusation that Israel is a bloodthirsty, genocidal state that must be destroyed are not just wrong and misguided. They are the modern day blood liable and we need to fight them accordingly. Why do you think that people who have very little knowledge about the conflict between Israel or the Jews and Arabs in the Middle East, why are they so vehement in their opinions when their knowledge base is so minimal? Again, Israel became some sort of a virtue signal. And to me, this is so frustrating because there's so many things that activists can do with their power

that would actually help the Palestinian people and help the Israelis and Palestinians reach a peace agreement. None of these things have to do with bashing Israel. And that's all that it is. It's like, I'm going to virtue signal that I'm a greatest person in the world and how I'm going to do this

is just by tweeting against Israel. And again, differentiating between criticizing Israeli government policies or politicians or whatever, which I know how to do very well as well, to denying Israel's right to exist, demonizing Israel, double standard about Israel and everything that kind of like sends you into like the anti-Semitic realms without knowing it. I think it's very funny that here, like in America, we may not like our political leadership, whether it be Trump or Biden or whoever it might be.

But you don't hear many Americans saying, oh, well, because of this leadership, I don't identify with the country. And also, I've never heard anyone say, like, for example, I live in Massachusetts. I've never heard anyone say, I should give up my house and move out of here because back before even the British came to America, this was Native American land and I should leave here. So people who are very quick to say, I think the Jews are colonialists. I think Israel is a colonial entity, which it's not. But they're saying, especially, we can talk about the BDS movement and people like saying, from the river to the sea.

BDS stands for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. And it is a movement that tries to isolate Israel from the international community by encouraging consumer boycotts of Israeli goods, sanctions by governments, and divestment by institutions in the West to basically pull their money out of Israel, not do business with Israel. No one's saying from the Atlantic to the Pacific, you know, we have to get out of here. Everyone, every American who's not a Native American, you don't hear that. So why Israel? That's the double standard that we're talking about. That's exactly it. There's a disproportionate obsession that people have with the state of Israel that is by far exceeding any obsession with any other country that is actually horrific.

And that disproportionate obsession is rooted in anti-semitic attitudes that could be subconscious for people as well. On the face of it, these tactics are a legitimate way to conduct non-violent legal political campaigns and they have a long tradition in not just left-wing politics of using boycotts to try and affect change in foreign governments. But as with everything in life, things are a little bit more complicated if you look beneath the surface. Once you start to look at who are the organisations behind this BDS strategy, who are the leaders of the movements, what do they say about Israel, what do they actually want, what

you find more often than not is that there is an overarching political vision that doesn't include Israel's existence in the future. BDS, the organizers, the heads of the movement, they don't hide the fact that they tried to dismantle Israel. So they say this, there are videos online of the founder of BDS that's saying flat out, like, yes, we don't want a Jewish state in any parts of the land. So they want to dismantle a democratic Jewish state. Okay. But that's not

what they say on campus. So when they go to campus, they put a very sweet little table up and they start talking about freedom and justice. They don't talk about the fact that they want to dismantle democracy. And obviously if they would sit down at this tabling event at a college and say let's dismantle the single Jewish democracy in the world, they're not going to be as popular. So they are able to bring into the fold groups, people and organizations that don't really understand what it is that they are supporting. Most of people, for them to carry out acts of mass violence, they need an ideology. They're not psychopaths, only few humans are. So for people to be violent, to carry out a genocide, they need to believe that what they're about to do is

good. And there is no greater good in this world than the eradication of evil. If you create an intellectual mindset that says, Israel, Zionism, Star of David equals evil, you are basically creating a global invitation to mass violence. You are saying, look, there's an evil out there do whatever you can by whatever means necessary to eradicate this evil. Zionism is the stumbling block is the thing that stands between the world and utopia if only we didn't have Zionism. It's about an image creating an image where there is a world without

Israel. And then we can say, isn't it a much nicer world? Look, look at the UN, look at FIFA. Wouldn't they be so much nicer without Israel? And this is why this movement is so dangerous. It is a nonviolent movement for an extremely violent purpose. A big part of that is that they were able to infiltrate social justice organizations and use intersectionality in order to basically lie their ways into it and create a very powerful and painful rift between the Jewish and the black community that have never existed before. The Jewish people that have stood by the black community and vice versa for decades

and in recent years, there's a rift. We are working very hard to undo that. It was created in order to divide us because, you know, who's winning when the blacks and the Jews are divided? The white oppressors that they're trying to, you know, those win. And hopefully we'll be able to realign because it's crucial that we do that. For critics who will say to you or to others that anti-Semitism is being overused, that every time someone says something about Israel, they're accused of being anti-Semitic.

It's crap. It's like complaining about, you know, after Me Too, complaining about, I can't give a compliment to a woman. Yes, you can. We know the context. We understand. On the other hand, if somebody says, you know what, I don't like this Israeli government policy or that Israeli government policy, nobody's going to attack him and say that he's anti-Semitic. So we know the difference. We're smarter than that.

We know the difference. And we know that when there's like an anti-Israel or a BDS organization that is quote-unquote just criticizing Israeli government, we know where you're coming from. We know that you're anti-Semitic. We know that you want to dismantle the state of Israel. And if you want to dismantle the state of Israel, that's an anti-Semitic thing to do. I myself have recently criticized one specific proposed policy of the Israeli government.

Nobody is going to accuse me of anti-Semitism or anti-Zionism. Right, exactly. For those listeners, what advice would you give them to combat anti-Semitism, both Jewish and non-Jewish? What should they be doing in real time today? That's a great question as well. So I think that for the non-Jewish what what should they be doing in real time today that's a great question as well so I think that for the non-Jewish community it's important to reach out be an ally because one of the things that I sense with my friends and colleagues and family and all that is when there's like a spike in anti-semitism we don't get the support that we feel like we give sometimes or that we feel like we need. So I know that a lot of people are like legitimately freaked out by antisemitism that's out there. And it's very easy to just pick up

the phone and ask, how are you doing? And the second part for the Jewish community, I think that the only way for us to combat antisemitism is to be more rooted in our Jewish identity and more loud about it, more proud about it, more open about it. So I always say to communities when I talk to people, I'm like, the best thing that you can do is reach out to your community. Like literally you're like yoga friends and your colleagues at work at the office and like your, you know, and your mom's at school and like invite them for Shabbat. Be more, the more open we are, the more inclusive we are, the more, like the more love that's going to be out there and the less room for hate there will be. That's literally the only way to do it.

Such an important message. Well, Noah Tishby, thank you so much for being my guest on All About Change. I want to urge all my guests to pick up a copy of Israel, A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth, wherever you buy books or audiobooks. It's a must-read. Thank you for writing it. Thank you for your activism. And it was a pleasure talking to you.

Great to talk to you as well. All About Change is a production of the Ruderman Family Foundation. This show is produced by Yochai Meital and Mijon Zulu. As always, be sure to come back in two weeks for another inspiring story. I'll be talking to Genesis Butler, an environmental activist focused on animal rights. Genesis gave a TED Talk at only 10 years old and went on to found her own NGO. I found her energy truly inspiring and her passion filled me with hope. In the meantime, you can go check out all of our previous content live on our feed and linked on our website, allaboutchangepodcast.com.

Lastly, if you enjoy our show, please help us spread the word. Tell a friend or family member or consider writing a review on your favorite podcasting app. I'm Jay Rudiman and I'll catch you next time on All About Change.