Ask Haviv Anything - Episode 88: America's "24% problem" with young antisemitism, with Jonah Platt

Episode Date: February 7, 2026

Is American Jewish identity weakening before our eyes? Are American Jews, caught in a whirlwind of hatred directed both at Israel and at the Jews themselves, turning their backs on their Jewish identity?Jonah Platt joins the podcast to talk about the growing numbers of Jews moving in the opposite direction: From quiet assimilation to unapologetic, intentional pride. We confront the sobering data on the rise of antisemitism among Gen Z and discuss Jonah's defiant hope that the "switched-on" generation will reclaim its story -- both in Hollywood and beyond. A great deal depends not on the young, but on their parents. American Jews must move past defensive anxiety to become a "pillar of fire" for their children.--This episode is sponsored anonymously and dedicated to "all those who want a better understanding of the world," including our audience community. Thank you to our sponsors.--If you like what we do here, please join our Patreon community at https://www.patreon.com/c/AskHavivAnything. There you can ask the questions that guide the topics we cover on the podcast, join our great discussions where listeners share news and valuable resources, and take part in our monthly livestreams where Haviv answers your questions live.If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at [e-mail]⁠.Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.

Welcome to Ask Haviv Anything. I'm really excited to have Jonah Platt here. Jonah is an actor, singer, a Jewish advocate, and hosts a podcast literally called Being Jewish, which was started in October 2024 and really dives deep into this moment with all kinds of different American Jews and also non-Jews, but talks about the issues that American Jews deal with. He himself has credits on stage, film, television. He comes from an entertainment fan. family and also a family deeply involved in the Jewish community.

The, uh, this podcast being Jewish, it has won awards, uh, in the United States and you interview, you know, every sort of Jew there. I mean, and also as I said, non-Jews, uh, entertainers, writers, writers, uh, business people, artists, rabbis, um, all kinds of diverse people from all over. And I'm really excited to have you here to talk about, to talk about this moment with American Jews. I always have this sense that I really have this sense that I understand what's happening to American Jews because I keep meeting American Jews. I'm in the States probably every six weeks or so now. But I meet people who come to my talks. I meet people who invite me. I meet a self-selecting group of American Jews, which are, I think, hyper-aware,

knowledgeable about Israel. And I don't know how representative that is of what all the different parts of the American Jewish community feel and are experiencing American Jews as millions of people with very diverse cultures and political views, et cetera. So we're going to get into it. Before we do, I want to just tell you very briefly, this episode has a sponsor who has to remain anonymous and just very, very briefly dedicate the episode to all those who want a better understanding of the world. So to the audience itself, thank you very much to that sponsor. I really appreciate it. I want to invite everybody to join our Patreon. If you want to ask the questions that guide the topics that we talk about. We draw those from the Patreon community. The conversations and debates there

are very civil, really thoughtful. People bring real resources to the conversation. People come from within and outside the Jewish world, Jews and non-Jews from North America, Europe, the Gulf countries, all over the world. It's fascinating. You get to take part in the monthly live stream where I answer all your questions live. So I hope you join us there. Jonah, how are you? I'm fantastic, thank you. I'm excited to be here with you, somebody who I admire and who I've listened to quite a bit over the past couple of years. So I'm psyched to be in conversation with you today.

Thank you. Thank you so much for that. And I really appreciate what you do because you really are interviewing people who are just famous. And some of it is because when you're interviewing them, Cheryl Sandberg, you're accessing their Jewish soul. I never heard Jason Alexander talk about his Jewish feelings and experiences and whether or not he actually faced anti-Semitism and things like that until he sat down with you. So I guess my first question is, what made you start in October 2024, a podcast called Being Jewish that is very self-consciously about creating a space where people can have these conversations? Something was missing. You've talked about this on the podcast.

That's why I'm mentioning this. Something was missing. Tell us about that. Yeah. So, I mean, that's really what it was. Something was missing. I got the idea to do it a couple of months after October 7th, 2023. Immediately following October 7th, I was spending a lot of time online, which had been my primary platform to engage with Jewish advocacy and to engage with a wide audience. And I was, I found that I was spending all of my time and energy there, which is not how my life had been prior to October. 7th, where, as you mentioned, I'd been focused on a career in entertainment. And I'd been doing some Jewish advocacy online, sort of on an ad hoc basis for a number of years and speaking on some panels and stuff. But it was not my day-in, day out, full-time thing. October 7th happens.

I find it's the only place I'm spending my time in energy. And after a couple months of being very reactive in those early days, as so many people were, of course, just trying to put out fires and spend time online speaking to people and clarifying things, whatever. I was like, right, I want to get back to my sort of core advocacy mission and the things I really care about within this space. And I felt like the best way to do that was a podcast. And it actually took me, I don't know, eight months to before I was able to launch in October 24 with those first three episodes.

Well, because first I had to understand how to make a podcast and make sure that I set it up that I wouldn't crash and burn by episode 10 as I think something like 80% of podcasts do. But I really wanted to check a bunch of boxes. And so the first, as you sort of named, was actually, I wanted to create a space for these notable Jews to go deep on this stuff that I know is so critical to them and they're deeply connected to, but they never have the opportunity to really talk about. No one's asking them about it. And if they are, it's not in a safe, like, share your truth kind of way. they have to, rather they have their backs up or something going to, somebody going to clip something

that's going to make me look bad. And, you know, at a press junket for a film, they're not asking, so how does it feel to be a Jew since October 7th, right? But that's, they're people, just like all of us, and that's the things that really matter to them and that they're thinking about. So I wanted to create a space for folks like that. I wanted to really just normalize Jews talking about Jewish stuff. That wasn't academic necessarily. It wasn't rabble. It wasn't. buys all the time. It wasn't textual study. It was accessible. It was youthful. I mean, obviously, I am younger than the typical Jewish host of quote unquote Jewish programming. And the guests I have on are not the usual type that you would see on one of these shows. I wanted to normalize

like cool Jews talking about Jewish stuff. And that it's not lame. It's not controversial. It's not overly academic. It's not, you know, too Jewy, quote, unquote. It's just who we are. So I wanted to do that. I wanted to really highlight the diversity of the Jewish community. That's really important to me, an inclusive and diverse Jewish community, which is what we are. But, you know, naming that and honoring that is very important to me. And that's also not something I was seeing a lot of and something that was important to me. So you'll know if you follow my show, every episode you're getting a different gender, different geographical location, different ethnicity, different profession, different level of observance, like really trying to showcase all the different kinds of people that we are.

And I'm happy to say, you know, based on the feedback I get from my audience, I'm checking that box because I'll hear from an Orthodox rabbi and Israel who loves the show. And I'll hear from somebody who is the only Jew in their town in Iowa who likes the show and somebody who just found out their Jewish through DNA test a week ago, they liked the show. So really, everybody who wants to connect Jewishly in some way to, as you said, their Jewish soul, I think find something in this show to respond to. It feels like if American Jews really want to engage and be part and feel part and feel very tightly connected, one great advantage of being a Jew in Israel is that it's enveloping.

And it's enveloping in a way that disappears into the background. So, like, our calendar is just, the schools are out on Jewish holidays. Everything is, you know, the geography is, has no choice but to be biblical. I mean, if you're going to IKEA, you know, if you're, I don't know, living in the, in south of Jerusalem and you go to IKEA, IKEA, I think is in Emeka, Eilah, which is the valley of Eilah, where David fought Goliath. And it's, I mean, you're picking up IKEA furniture, you know what I mean? But what are you going to do?

That's the geography. And so it's so much easier. And by the way, of course, all the intra-Jewish conflicts are all so much more intense because that's our culture war. So take all the intensity of the Trump culture wars and the progressive culture wars and just make them all entirely Jewish. And you get how much Israelis can intensely fight, right? But American Jews, it feels like it's kind of hard to. to find that those kinds of thick connections and thick bonds. You'll have a synagogue and maybe it's a good synagogue and an active synagogue and not all of them are, but some of them could be and

you join them and and then what? So how much is there culturally that's like Jewish? You know, and you come from a particular part of the American Jewish community, but generally, obviously if you're ultra-Orthodox in Kiraeosioel in New York, that's that, you know, the answer will be different. But what else is there? Is there, do people connect if they're not going to a specific synagogue near them that's very strong and has a very tight-knit community. If they're living in suburban America, what do they do for, like, Jewish life on a daily basis? Maybe I'm just, this question reflects my own ignorance, but I'm super curious. No, I mean, you're basically hitting on the key difference between American Jews and Israeli Jews, which is, you know,

Israeli Jews can, as you said, it like goes into the background, they can take for granted being Jewish to where you get, you know, there are so many Israeli Jews who consider themselves secular and totally non-religious and then come to America. And they're actually a lot more observant than a lot of American Jews just by virtue of, as you said, like, they always got work and school off on the holiday. And they do Shabbat, but like everyone does Shabbat. But like they don't here, you know. So, you know, you get a lot of Israelis who move here and all of a sudden they realize

what it is to be an American Jew, which is it has to be entirely intentional. You have to say, I want this to be part of my life. and here are the various ways I'm going to ensure that it is. And, you know, having children, having a family makes it easier because then you can engage through a Jewish day school or even a preschool. You can engage through Jewish summer camp. These are other ways to not just instill Jewish identity in kids, but to provide community for the families and the parents.

There's the synagogue life, as you mentioned. And that's, you know, one of the big, you know, top-level strutely. struggles of American Jewry is keeping synagogues relevant in, in 2026, in the time of Netflix and chill, it's like, I got to get you out, I got to get you to my building, I've got to get you involved in the programs. And look, there is online streaming. There's, you know, millions of people who stream central synagogues services around the world or watch them on TV. And that gives people a sense of community. But it's, of course, not quite the same as being in real life. But so you have to seek it out and the people who don't find it get lost. Even if they are somebody who,

if it was handed to them, they would say, oh, yes, please, I do want this. They sort of forget a lot of people that they do want it because it's not readily available and it takes a lot of work and life is hard and we're busy and we're dealing with a lot of other stuff. But you'll find a lot of people who wake up a couple of decades down the road and they're like, man, I should of put a little more time and energy and, you know, some of my time and energy budget into something that was important to me, but I actually didn't live by that priority. And now here I am and I'm kind of disconnected and I don't have the sense of Jewish community and connection that I wish I had. We're seeing it now for sure since October 7th, the desire to be connected

has gone way, way up. I mean, the data has shown Jewish Federation calls it the surge that people immediately leapt to get more involved in synagogue, get more signed up for Hebrew classes, enroll more in day school, all of that stuff. It's pulled back a little bit, which is unfortunate, which means not everybody was having their needs met when they showed up. But there's definitely been a switch that's turned on for a lot of people. And so people look for all the different ways. I've learned. It's not why I what I set out to do, but my podcast for a lot of people is their sense of Jewish community. You mentioned, you know, people in random suburban areas. I mentioned, you know, I'm thinking of someone specific, this Jew in Iowa, who I message with online, who like does not have any other Jews around them and doesn't really have somewhere to go unless they want to drive really far to get to the nearest synagogue. So they have to live their Jewish life sort of internally and online. So, I mean, thank God. There's a lot of hybrid situations now, things that are online and in person or just online and we can connect in all these different ways. But people are hungry for it.

And if they don't take the initiative to really do something about it, it can get lost and fall away and becomes that thing they sort of wish they would have done. I hear a lot from folks who are like, what can I do? What can I do to get more involved? Like they're looking for guidance and leadership in this to make it easier for them to find because otherwise you really have to sit down in research and try things out. Like, is this congregation right for me? Is that where I'm going to feel at home?

this program where I'm going to feel, find my people. So it's tough and it's different for all different groups, right? So like younger singles and professionals are looking for different kinds of engagement than young parents who have young children versus, you know, unmarried, childless adults in their 60s and 70s who rely very heavily on the synagogue life and the programming that they have. But who else are they connecting with and are they being left out of other conversations? So it's a lot. there's a lot of work to be done and all the major Jewish organizations are working on it.

Like, this is the big thing. It's like, how do we reach people? How do we pull them in? How do we give them what they're looking for? I feel like my question is, how? Ordinary people, right? I don't know if they're going to synagogue as much. I don't know if they're used to that idea that there's an institution or finding that communal institution. The more observant you are, the easier it is, because the more expected. It's very hard to really do daily Judaism or we, Judaism without that communal institution. But what if you're the half, 60%, 70%, I don't know the numbers even, who really are not deeply enmeshed in thick ways in the Jewish community,

how do we get to you? What is that? I mean, everybody's trying everything. So it's, you know, one of the sort of important things to focus on is live events and making them really engaging and entertaining on their own merits. You know, it's not enough to say we're having a, you know, whatever, synagogue gala and everybody shows up and the gala is lame, right? Even if I got you there and we supported the community,

like you need to be doing things that people want to go to regardless. So you're seeing lots of interesting speaker series are very popular all over from JCCs and from synagogues and from different Jewish nonprofits, trying to bring people together around clarion voices. And then, you know, for younger Jews especially, young professionals, 20s, 30s, 40s, lots of different programming, events that are meant to be really fun, youth oriented, when I say youth, again, I mean 20, 30s, 40s, but, you know, communal cohort, mentorship,

professional leadership, all kinds of different programming. A lot of nonprofits. I just did a concert in Atlanta with a nonprofit called Naranana, which is a Jewish music nonprofit in Atlanta. And they try to bring people together around Jewish music stuff.

Whether that means someone like me who is Jewish and does music or it means somebody who is a musician who does everything in Hebrew, whatever it is, that's their way of trying to convene. and connect. So everybody's experimenting and trying things. There's things like one table, which is a nonprofit that will help you subsidize a Shabbat dinner. And also you can then sort of

post, hey, I'm hosting a Shabbat dinner. Anybody can come. Either of those two sort of paths you can try to encourage community. It's like a young 20 something in Manhattan can invite their fellow young 20 somethings of Manhattan without having to spend, you know, a billion dollars. They'll give you however many, I don't know what the stipend is. They'll give you whatever 100 bucks or whatever. And you can say, I'm hosting a Shabbat now, and I have the money to pay for it. So come on over.

And it's literally just about supporting Jewish community. Let me, let's dig into the entertainment industry. I have a question about that in the context of Jewish engagement. And it's a question I learned from you, because this is a critique you have. I once read a fascinating piece by a movie critic of some, some movie about Hollywood movie about, black gangsters. I forget the movie. I think it was Roger Ebert, but I hope I'm not

mistaking that, where his point was Hollywood is to a very significant extent responsible for no small amount of white fear of black men. Because for a couple of generations, the only version of the black man that Hollywood found interesting, I'm, please don't write me about this, I don't know anything about this. I'm telling you something I read. I'm just kidding. Feel free to write me about it, but I still will not know anything about it. But for about two generations, the main image that Hollywood's producing of black men was one of violence. And Hollywood writers fell in love with the authenticity of black male violence and black male street gangs, and black male camaraderie and black male cursing and black. And it was a kind of white

representation that wasn't it wasn't just dehumanizing. It was a little bit racist and dehumanizing, but it was at the same time as it was that bad thing. It was also a real appeal to authenticity and a sense that my life has lived in these very sort of waspy kind of politeness boxes and their life doesn't have to be. There was a kind of like a lot of zombie movies are aspirational. Everybody wants to live in an age where they matter and they're the world and they don't live as like an ant in a city that's essentially an ant-hill of millions and millions of people. And so there's all these complicated emotions that go into the production of these imageries and culture.

And you have said, and it can have a profound effect, negative and positive. Hollywood has also done tremendous positive things in changing imagery, but it's also done bad things. And maybe unintentionally, but nevertheless, you have said, you have pointed out. And until you did, I didn't notice because when I turn on a Hollywood comedy, I'm there for the comedy. When I turn on a Hollywood drama, I'm there for the drama. I'm never there for the Jews. But actually there's no there's no Jewishness in Hollywood movies and in writing and out of the Hollywood writing room. I mean actual serious Jewish identity. It is missing. It is

erased. It is empty. Sometimes it's the butt of a joke, which it's usually Jewish comedians. So fair enough. But yeah, there's really no other sense of Jewish identity or identification or that this is an important, important thing, or that this is a community anywhere in Hollywood. So two things. One, that's something I first thought of from hearing you talk about it. So tell us about that. And two, is that something changeable? Can you reach the broader American world that these Jews live in and help them find that kind of path to a kind of Jewish connection through culture production?

That's American culture production? That's Hollywood or other arena? Absolutely. So these are all great questions and something I think and speak a lot about, as you said. So let's go back to when Hollywood was founded, right? It was started by a bunch of Eastern European Jews who moved to America and wanted to become American, totally understandably so, and to immediately begin their new lives and join the fabric of this new society. And to do so, they had to erase their Jewishness, or at least they certainly felt they had to. That's why you have, you know, the very successful Samuel Goldwyn pictures and not Schmuel Goldfish pictures. And they very purposefully put the Jewish identity, you know, in the closet while the Jewish ethos was put into cinema. So, I mean, so much of sort of pop culture morality, Americana, comes from like the Jewish sense of morality of right and wrong and hero and redemption and all of those stories,

flawed characters, whatever, comes from us, but never named. And I get it when it happened then. The problem is that it's now sort of this inherited vibe of Hollywood, which is hide your Jewishness, don't dare, you know, spotlight or uplift Jewish stories or Jewish people or Jewish characters because they're going to say we run Hollywood. They're going to say that, you know, we only care about ourselves. They're going to say it's, there's a secret cabal controlling, you know, what, what you see and for the benefit of the Jews. Wait, I'm sorry.

One second. How much is that that? I mean, Jewish actors, Jeff Goldblum, name somebody who isn't over 50 because I don't know them. Jonah Hill. Jonah Hill, working in Hollywood, very, very, yes. identifiably Jewish. How much are they aware?

How much do they feel they need to be hyper aware of Jewishness and not let it get in the way? And don't be, even typecast is probably an issue. But also, what will they say? Is that, is that a little, like, do they really feel it? I don't know that people are necessarily walking around literally having the conversation every day of, it's too Jewish, it's too Jewy. I mean, those conversations do happen. But it's more like, it's inherited and unexamined.

and unquestioned that like it's just the way it's always been. And I think it's the way it continues to be. And I mean, we actually talked about it to mention Jason Alexander with him, where I asked him sort of what do you think this is about? And he said, well, I think, excuse me, he said, I think people are worried about what they're going to say, about the Jews controlling the media and blah, blah, blah. And my response was they say that anyway,

whether we do anything or not. So what we need to be doing is telling contemporary, humanizing, entertaining stories that happen to be about Jews so that we can let people see and understand who and what Jews are. Because the only, really, the only Jews that have ever sort of been allowed to exist in the pop culture are self-deprecating ones or ones who, you know, are, as you say, identifiably Jewish. I mean, Mel Brooks, Jerry Seinfeld, Larry David, like, we all know that they're Jewish and they

have a little, you know, they have the Jewishness to them, but it's, it's only through comedy, and it's all a very specific kind of Jewishness. And the rest of it, the sort of three-dimensional of it, the immigrant story of it, the Jews, they're just like us of it all, is missing. If you ask somebody, what's your favorite Jewish movie? Until the last couple years, there are a couple options now, and I'll talk about that in a second. But until then, it's like, which Holocaust movie are you going to name? I was just going to say, I can't think. Like if I step out of a Jerry Seinfeld special, I adore Jerry Seinfeld.

I'm just saying. If I step out of his special or Mel Brooks's Uvra, I'm down to Schindler's list. Exactly. Or the pianist or, you know, so what else is there? Exactly. So, you know, somebody who actually I think has done a lot for the culture for Jews and doesn't get enough credit as Adam Sandler. Mostly people like to ding Adam Sandler because he doesn't speak up overtly, you know, on social media or something. something for Israel. But really what he does is put Jewishness into the culture. I mean, a song

about Hanukkah, a cartoon film about Hanukkah. He made Happy Gilmore explicitly Jewish and Happy Gilmore too just for the hell of it and had Happy Gilmore's kids kissing him Azusa. He produced the movie, You're So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah, which I think is one of the, it's not my favorite movie, but it's one of my favorite Jewish movies because it's really about a contemporary Jewish family where the daughter takes the bat mitzvah seriously and wants to do well at it. It's not like, oh, this is so lame. I hate having to go to learn Hebrew stuff. It's, this is important. And her dad is yelling at her saying, this is important. This is who we are. And by the end, her big lesson is my party doesn't matter. What matter is my relationships and my integrity and

being a mature Jewish adult. Like, that's fantastic. There's the show, nobody wants this now on Netflix, which gets dinged for not being perfect. But for me, I'm, like, grateful for it, because we have a show with, you know, people who live in L.A. in 2026 and are celebrating HaVdala and talking about Jewish sleepaway camp and lighting Shabbat candles, even if they're in a restaurant and couldn't do it at the synagogue and, like, talking about, making jokes about, well, what do Jews actually look like? What does that mean to say you look like you don't look Jewish? Those kinds of conversations. That, to me, is incredible. And we, need to be supporting more and more of that kind of content. And I'm happy to say that I'm seeing

more people in Hollywood hip to that. The challenge is getting these things made. They have to really be, again, like, bulletproof on their own merits. It has to be, this is a really great TV show. This is a really great film. And it's starring a big movie star like Adam Sandler, so it's going to get made. And it happens to be about people who are Jewish. And you're seeing at the agent level, manager level, producer level, studio exec level, the engaged Jews in Hollywood, the ones who have always sort of cared about their Jewish identity, which is not the majority. The majority of Jews in Hollywood are like the majority of Jews in America disengaged in terms of like if you're talking a single block, like 40% I think of Jews in America are disengaged, don't really consider themselves part of anything. 60% do. So taken as a whole, there are more than are not, but that one group is the biggest.

And it's the same in Hollywood. So you have a lot of Jews who, quote unquote, run Hollywood, but do nothing Jewish, do nothing for the Jews, do not really think of themselves as being anything but Jewish in name. So it's not surprising that they're not doing anything for the benefit of the Jewish people within Hollywood. But the ones who do care and who have been engaged and do raise their kids Jewish and celebrate holidays and care about Israel, all this stuff, there's a sense of urgency now. And we need to play an active role in this now. And I see that all the time behind the scenes. I wonder, well, I've had an interaction with a senior Hollywood person.

I've been doing, as I said, speaking around the U.S. And some of my videos online, a small handful, but a few of them have gone a bit viral since October 7. And people have reached out here and there. And one of them is a very senior person. in Hollywood who made movies that people will know and doesn't want to talk publicly about any of it, but does want reading, this is true of many people in many different places, but I'm specifically talking about Hollywood, does want reading material, does want occasionally just to vent about one of their kids,

is, you know, has gone to a college campus and come back deeply radicalized. And I don't mean radicalized. hates the Gaza war and doesn't like the Netanyahu government. I mean radicalized. Maybe the Jews of Israel shouldn't, you know, exist. This person and many others like him in other places in American culture, in journalism, for example, I know quite a few, don't want to go public. And they don't want to go public. Look, Jerry Seinfeld, you know, he's too big to cancel and he feels this. And he doesn't care. He's just, he's that kind of courageous, what are you going to do to me? What are you going to, You're not going to shut me up, so what else can you do to me?

And he stands and he takes a position. But most people don't want to deal with the blowback. They don't want to defend the thing. You stand up for Israel and then Israel does something. This is something he specifically said to me. You stand up for Israel and then Israel does something terrible. That's entirely possible Israel will do something terrible. It's like, I will defend America.

Well, that right, a minute later, America's going to bomb something terribly for no good reason and you're all totally opposed to it. But you're kind of stuck holding the bag of having defended Israel's existence, right, that moment. So they don't want to deal with it. How much is that? Yes, absolutely. It's unfortunate, but it's a lot of that of people who either are okay doing things behind the scenes or even afraid to do that. But yeah, a lot of people are afraid to publicly stake their claim. And, you know, that, of course, bothers me. And it also bothers me when I see not non-Jews who are potential allies who don't even want to associate with Jews because they're afraid that they're going to have to defend something or say something or that it's akin to making a statement to even be seen publicly at an event that's Jewish or something.

So it's a real problem. It's a real issue. And it's look, people who are going to be radicalized, you know, the education system, social media, the peer pressure, those. Those could certainly all do it on their own, but it certainly doesn't help. You know, it doesn't make it harder for them to become radicalized if your parent is displaying for you that they don't even have the sort of fortitude or mental clarity or self-respect to stand up and be who they are proudly. You know, Jerry Seinfeld, yes, I don't think it's that he's too big to cancel. Maybe that's why what gives him the courage. But really what people respond to or don't respond to is that, you know, is that, you know, he says, this is what it is, and this is what I stand by, deal with it. And when anyone sort of does that

in any context, we respect that. You can't, you can't bully somebody who isn't going to allow themselves to be bullied because they're saying, I have self-respect and dignity. This is who I am. This is what it's going to be. If you have a problem, that's your problem. I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing. And I think so many people are just so afraid, the fear of the unknown, what's the blowback going to be when for most people the the blowback quote unquote is like negative comments from strangers on the internet and people are just terrified of the negative comments from strangers on the internet and i just don't you know it's that's i wish we could give more people the courage and the urgency to sort of you know if you're not going to stand up for yourself and your people in

this moment that we're in right now when are you ever doing it in your lifetime This is such an important point. I get people who ask me, what do I do about my kids? They're going to go off to these Ivy League colleges. They're going to go to these places. They're on TikTok. They're getting most of their information about geopolitics from TikTok. What do I do about keeping them?

And your point, I take your point. Maybe that's the single best piece of advice. Be that pillar of fire. Be that thing that stands before the camp, that guides them. they're going to have to deal with a torrent of, you know, Chinese disinformation. Never mind about Gaza war, about the next COVID epidemic, God forbid. They're going to have to deal with a world in which truth has long ago left the conversation.

And it's, it's a river. It's a torrent that's being pushed at them constantly into their brain stems. You need to solve a bigger problem for them right now than just the question of what do they think about Israel in the middle of this uncomfortable moment. So be that. You have to be able to stand up and say, this is what I believe, this is what I know. By the way, model complexity. I have a lot of concerns about what Israel's doing. I wouldn't vote for this guy in Israel. I'd vote for a different person in Israel. Model that as well. Model complexity, model integrity. What else can you give your kids? As we head into a world with AI slop and never, as we already are in a world of AI. We don't understand the scale of the lives that the kids live in. We just don't understand it. The Jews who are, are afraid. It is almost instinctive in progressive discourse to say, come on, come on, Jews. You're, you know, the richest, most powerful diaspora there's ever been.

Of all the Jews who've ever lived, you can't be afraid. And there's a lot of people in America worse off than the Jews. And yet the Jews are nervous. Now, I happen to know a little bit more about the Jews than the progressive anger at the Jews. If you live through the 20th century as a Jew and you did it in America, you know that American liberalism saved you because you know that everywhere else was not safe at all. I mean, physically, existentially dangerous. And if American liberalism is heading out the door,

whether in the progressive identitarian sort of hierarchies of legitimacy version of it or in some far right insanity, you're in real danger for the first time in the American Jewish experience. American Jews are worried because every, Everything depends on America being the liberal promise. What if that's going away? And we now have data. And I want to just put this one point about when these Jews come to me anxious. My first instinct, by the way, two years ago with family in the war with friends, people I knew, kidnapped in Gaza.

And American Jews said to me, we're so scared. And I'm like, okay, like, you know, you guys got this. Yeah. Right? Right. Right. But then I thought about it, and I'm like, you know what? I in Israel, in Hebrew, surrounded by my fellow Israelis, have so much agency to shape my world. I mean, the Israelis stood up, woke up, and completely reshape the Middle East. And you, by the way, maybe badly, maybe well, I don't know, but the sheer agency of it, the capacity of the Israelis to take out the IRGC's, you know, proxy system, something that everybody was convinced was invincible and powerful. And the Israeli, the Israeli, the are organized Jews who can shape their world. They feel agency.

And so they're less scared than people who are much safer, but not actually in control of their situation. Control is an enormous part of not being scared. That's really well said. And when we look at the polls, the bottom line of all these polls, the Yale Youth Poll, there's Pew data on this, young people in America are much, much more likely to be anti-Semitic.

anti-Semitic. In other words, not about Israel, about Jews. For example, in the Yale Youth Poll taken last year, three statements were given about Jews that people were asked to respond to. Respondents were asked to respond to. Statement one, Jews in the United States are more loyal to Israel than to America.

Flat statement. Jews are more loyal to Israel. Statement two, it's appropriate to boycott Jewish-owned businesses in America to protest the war in God. Gaza. Jews have to answer for the war in Gaza in America. Statement three, Jews in the United States have too much power. Those are the three statements. Sixty-five plus in American society, nine percent believed two of the three sentences, any two. It's something like six percent believed all three. And then when you drop down to 45, it's 11 percent. And when you drop

down to 30, you're at 17 percent. You drop down to 23, you're at 21. You drop down to 23. You're And by the time you get down to 18, the 18 to 22 cohort, it's 24% of 18 to 22s. And these are not questions about Israel or Gaza. These are questions about American Jews, their power, and whether it's appropriate to boycott them without any other data or information, and whether they're more loyal to Israel than to America, whether they're not actually loyal Americans. 24% of 18 to 22 year old Americans. If I was an American Jew, I think I would be worried. You sort of lay this on top of the stream of news, the data points, the Nick Fuentes,

suddenly being mainstreamed by the Tucker Carlson, the mainstreaming of what Tucker Carlson says nowadays. Candice Owens and her insane rants. and over in the progressive side, real anti-Semitism, forgive me. I know there's a difference between hating Israel and anti-Semitism. Actual, rabid, constant anti-Semitism that we're all supposed to pretend doesn't exist. I would be nervous as an American Jew. Yeah, I understand that. I guess there's a couple things that make me personally not so nervous.

I wouldn't use the word nervous. One is, if you take that number, that 24%, that means 70s,000. that means 76% of young people are not crazy. So it's still a vast majority. We're still talking about, you know, a quarter, which is, you know, the biggest group for sure, but it's not even close to everybody. There's still way more people.

And then you look at the population as a whole, there's still way more people who understand what hate is and what hate is not than don't. So I take comfort from that mass and those numbers, that we still are in a huge, huge majority of decent normal people in this country who have not been indoctrinated. But what about the trend? That 24 is going to grow and that 24 is going to be larger and larger part of the population. Unless we do something about it, which is, again, why I guess I'm not nervous, because to me the prescription is clear,

which is to start calling this stuff out and being locked in our sense of moral clarity, where we understand, what anti-Zionist hate looks like, and we call it out as such. And we don't allow these things to be normalized. We don't believe the mass manipulation techniques that are happening around us. We start to recognize them. We understand that propaganda works through repetition, and that just because people say these words over and over and over again, like apartheid or genocide or whatever it is, People through cognitive biases accept that as a fact just because they hear it a lot of the time. What we have to do is chip away at that and sort of, you know, steal everybody to be clear in that hate against Jews is wrong. And that no matter what Israel does or doesn't do in their government, A, that's not even the core issue of the conflict.

The core issue of the conflict is, at least the way I see it, is that the Palestinians don't want a Jews. Jewish state more than they want a Palestinian state. And that's intractable until that part gets solved, no matter what any, I mean, there's been a lot of governments in Israel. There's still no two states. Keep holding fixed to that, holding fixed to what hate against us looks like. And it's very difficult, not for you, who's like an encyclopedia brain, but for most people, it's difficult to hold on to all of the Israeli history and all of the this and the that and the

facts and the arguments. What's not difficult to do is to become an expert in what anti-Jew hate looks like. We've been seeing it for thousands of years. The patterns are very clear. It's super repeatable. Like I was reading a textbook. I'm getting a master's in anti-Semitism studies. And I was reading a textbook about the Holocaust.

And I couldn't tell you how many quotes from this book that are taken from firsthand sources could have just been conversations people were having today. The exact same conversations and the exact same things. The populace, we understand in the Holocaust times in the history, this is another cognitive bias. We can look at history and understand, oh, wow, look how propaganda worked on those people. Look how even the scientists and the doctors and the notable politicians, all we're saying, this horribly wrong thing that I would never say and is totally immoral and is obviously fake. And then the exact same thing happens today and we don't connect ourselves to it. And we go, well, I'm not getting it wrong.

I'm not getting caught by propaganda. It's true this time, even though it wasn't true all the other 700 million times since the beginning of time. But now, you know, I'm different. and we're not connecting it. And so we just have to like wake people up to this stuff. And it requires reinforcement and reminders until we get enough people from this majority of the country who are good, decent, knowledgeable people, getting them to feel stronger and more confident in knowing what's real, what's hate, what they can speak up against and, you know, what the situation is. Your source of optimism is that American Jews can wake up, stand up, organize, and get this done. What's your source of optimism?

Because to me, things are only getting the data. I mean, just in the data, things are getting worse. This 24% bothers me a lot more than when Joe Rogan platforms Ian Carroll and 15 million young men listen to insane psychopathic Jewish conspiracy theories. That's a data point. That's weird. That's entertainment. I don't think Joe Rogan believes that stuff. I know people who know him who tell me he doesn't believe that stuff. It's entertainment.

It's weird entertainment. But 24% tells me it's landing in fertile soil. And propaganda works. It does. And academia is captured. I mean, it is a monolith. I know Israel Studies professors at these universities at the Ivy League. I know personally they've given me their time.

I've read their books. who won't speak now because all of academia is captured by this one ideology and they'll ruin their careers and I'm wondering what if what if what if it's going to get bad

I mean how tell me why not my answer to that by the way I'm extremely optimistic but I'm optimistic because I have the fail safe of Israel like I'm optimistic because I grew up on Herzl like but that would be a that's a terrible answer

because American jury is the there's never been a diaspora like American Jewry. There's never been a community that was just accepted as part of the nation in which they lived, as part, literally, American Jews are just Americans. And they're so utterly Americans and for so long that they don't even remember that that's totally new in Jewish history and no Jew ever got to have, no Jew in Baghdad ever, not even under the most tolerant Muslim rulers. No Jew in Russia, again, among the most reformist Russian czars, ever got to be either, you know, Iraqi or, I don't know what, a Yubid Muslim, or, you know, or Russian.

They were always something else. They were always the Jew. And in America, Jews got to be Americans. My one source of optimism is catastrophe. Even in catastrophe, we can save you. I don't want to say that. I don't want to talk about that way. Why do you think America itself isn't going to go down this path?

It feels like it's already, you know, more than a couple of steps down this path. I guess I'll say two things. One is I get optimism from the fact that like the people who are the most ideologically captured are the people who are already sort of the dumbest because they're young and we're all dumb when we're young and we all grow up. You learn and you gain life experience and so much of what they are holding on to is held up, you know, by a house of cards that you, you know, you poke at once. The whole thing collapses.

It just hasn't been poked for them. So part of me is optimistic in the same way that so many young people come to be more mature and experience the world and learn more as they get older, that will be a factor. And then second, what I see that a lot of people don't get to see is I get to see through my work all of the people in all of the different fields who are working towards solutions to this problem. You know, people who are endowing professorships at universities in Jewish studies and are talking about how important that is. People who are revising curriculums to better teach who and what Jews are in Israeli history and the conflict in a more open way so that students aren't reaching college with either zero education on the topic or a sense that they weren't allowed to explore the topic or that they'd been lied to on the topic because they only got one side. of it. I'm seeing a lot of that in the academic world, both within Jewish schools and not Jewish

schools. You know, I mentioned the master's program. I'm in, there's a ton of educators who are in it, who are not Jewish, who are trying to teach these things to their classrooms. So I get to see that. As I mentioned, I see in Hollywood. I see all these Hollywood Jews switched on who are all trying to sort of act now for the first time. It feels like actually Jews are trying to work together to help uplift Jewish stories. And the fact that there are two octoberers. September 7th fictionalized series on major streaming platforms is amazing. And it only happened because a bunch of Jews along the path said, this is important.

We've got to make sure this goes through. So there's definitely like a new urgency. And at every level, I mean, you're seeing athletes who never really spoke about being Jewish publicly trying to talk about it a little bit more with my show. I mean, not like my show is the biggest platform in the world, but you have people who otherwise wouldn't be talking about how proud they are to be Jewish, starting to talk about how proud they were to be Jewish. And maybe that makes them

think about something more and take more steps. There's lots of innovation happening in the Jewish nonprofit space and people trying new things. And like, there's definitely an understanding from engaged Jews that, wow, we have been asleep. We really messed up. We've made a ton of mistakes. The traditional institutional Jewish world here in America is, you know, moves too slow and it's too fixed in its ways and it's too bureaucratic and we need to be more nimble. We need more flexibility. We need more new ideas. We need more young people to borrow Van Jones's verbiage when he was on my show. The scoreboard has been run up on us. It's like $3 billion to nothing. So we're never going to, we're not going to get up to $3 billion, but we can start

scoring some points. So I think, you know, digitally we're going to start scoring some points, equalizing the bot farms and creating technology that can authenticate stuff so you know that it's AI or fake as you're seeing it and not being duped, things of that nature. Security, we're seeing a lot of innovation and urgency. So, you know, that stuff makes me hopeful. Just seeing so many people rowing in the same direction on so many different levels definitely gives me some optimism. Maybe that's what the beginning of a movement looks like.

If things do get worse, then more American Jews wake up. And then eventually, you've woken up millions of Jews to go out there and fight. I hate that that's what it takes. I think, you know, Bondi Beach woke a lot of people up who had been asleep, not everybody, but certainly people in other parts of the world you saw right away, you know, in the UK, they immediately outlawed some of the speech they've been allowing at protests going, oh, this is actually violent and not going to be good for us.

So it takes bad stuff to wake people up. So I think we'll probably see some bad stuff before things really crystallized. I don't think we're at that tipping point. To your point, I hope we are at the beginning of a sea change. Ron Rod Reagan once famously said, there's nothing wrong with America that can't be fixed by what's right with America. Yeah, I think that's it. I love that.

That's a lot that we can depend on. I want to finish with, so reading a little bit about you, I came across a video of you and your brothers doing some Michael Pella music. So you're a family that's involved on the production side, of these things, but also very much artists. As I'm going through visiting America over the last two years, one of the things that really surprised me was that in various

conferences and various places, just meeting some of the younger crowds, there's a lot of Jewish music. I mean, I did not realize. Like, Nisim Black and Zusha and videos and people just doing stuff online with guitars

and TikTok videos and just stumbling across the video of you guys singing and some of it is very spiritual and some of it's very silly and it's all these different things and it's all out there and it's all American Jews you know when you when you come across this like intense creative thing

it's probably Americans I don't know what it is about Americans I don't know what that itch is but it's you know the inventors of the internet and the car and all these other stuff and the plane and so somehow Americans have this itch And American Jews are creating Klesmer Jazz now and all this stuff that it's good music. It's good. I mean, it's not just Jewish. It's also good music.

And Zusha's great to rock out too. I'm a foreigner looking in. I have a big window. I look in a lot, but I'm still looking in from outside. How much American Jewish culture is being built out now? Because it's hard to say for the 45 to 65 year olds in American Jewry today, if it's not religion, What is there to being Jewish? What actually is the content of it?

What is the culture of it? What is the, you know, they don't speak Hebrew by and large. They don't have Jewish languages. They don't have Yiddish. They don't have Jewish newspapers. Mostly, most of the newspapers have closed. There's a kind of a gap. And now we have suddenly this young generation, with all this music,

the entire Jewish religious bookshelf is translated in online on Separia. Is this a lot or is this just something that if we're really looking for it, we'll find it. do Jewish kids really have access now to more and more Jewish culture? Are they starting to? Darrah Horn, you had her on your podcast, I had her on mine. I've learned so much from her over the years. But she didn't begin with a kind of deep historical analysis that's like the stuff that my particular, like,

I'm that kind of nerd that loves that part. She begins with fiction novels, on Jewish themes, a woman who lives forever and has to deal with what that means for people and community and connection and the golems and things like that. is there a lot of Jewish culture being created right now that maybe we haven't noticed yet because not you, but I certainly are too old and just we're still in that emptiness of the older generations? Yes and no.

I mean, there's definitely a vibrant Jewish cultural thing happening. And you reminded me, one of the other things that gives me great optimism is the strength and excitement and engagement of young Jewishly. leadership and young Jews in the country that I've had the privilege to meet with and hear from and speak to and see them. You know, a common thread all here is it's the parent who says, you know, hide your Magh and David necklace when you go to school. And the kids like, no, I'm wearing three. So, you know, for every one of those, you know, ideologically captured young people, we've got incredible young Jewish leaders who are listening to Jewish music, who are hosting Shabbats at their house, who are the heads of the Jewish club in their high school. Like, I don't think I had a Jewish club when I was in high school.

And now my nephew at the same high school is the head of the Jewish club. And they hosted a big Shabbat for like 45 kids at my sister's house. So, you know, everybody is switched on. And the kids are coming up with a lot of Jewish pride. And as we've talked about within Hollywood, like there are more Jewish stories coming. You know, people are working on them. They're definitely getting written. They're not all getting made.

but people care about them and people are wanting to tell them and people want to help them get told. It's just about making it happen with the right, you know, the way in Hollywood, everything has to align perfectly, whether it's a Jewish film or not. But it's there. And I can't tell you, I'm sure it's the same for you, but, I mean, I'm getting sent Jewish books every week from that are Jewish fiction, Jewish this Jewish, Jewish, Jewish, all sorts of stories and graphic novels and, everything under the sun, just one after the other. People are engaged and Jewish food is another big one. There's so many Jewish chefs and Israeli chefs who are sort of coming to the fore and playing with that in new ways that make it culturally and contemporary, relevant a ton in L.A., for sure. So, yeah, absolutely.

Okay. So it's a slightly unnerving moment. something new is happening, something worrying is happening. And the Jews are responding by standing up and being louder. Right. That's it. And even if it's not louder on an individual basis, as each light turns on with a new engaged Jew, collectively, we're starting to get a little bit louder. Okay. Well, you've made me very optimistic.

I'm still going to go meet my nervous Jews. But they're going to hear this, or I'll tell them to listen to this, and, you know, and get to. their kids into the Jewish club. That's right. Get them in the Jewish club. Club Z they have now is like a thing for teens, like a Zionist club. There's something called Akla. That's all about Jewish pride. I mean, just new innovative programs popping up all the time because teens care and parents care and the community cares. Joan Platt, thanks so much for joining me. It was great having you here. Thank you so much for having me. It was a real pleasure. Thank you.