Noam: I wanna just say this as we start this conversation. This episode, our conversation right now is happening on October 31st on Friday. This episode, this is coming out on November 5th, which is the day after the New York City mayoral election. Did you know that there’s an election taking place in New York?
Mijal: My gosh, I am like, I am am dreading this week so much now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Noam: There’s a lot, there’s a lot, there’s a lot. So there’s a mayoral election taking place. Do you know the name of the mayor of my city?
Mijal: Where do you live again?
Noam: Exactly. But everyone around the world knows what’s going on in New York City, which is really interesting. And I don’t want to focus on the election, the election right now, but I want to take a pause with you. You and I have not hung out in a long time.
Mijal: Yeah.
Noam: In the last few weeks since you and I have last spoken, the following has happened, and a lot more than this, but the live hostages, the remaining live hostages in Gaza were returned from their Hamas terrorist captors in, that was a major moment.
Mijal: Together with a ceasefire deal.
Noam: Together with the ceasefire deal, correct. Since we last spoke, there is, the mayor election in New York City, that whole conversation has reached a whole new level. I would say a third thing that’s happened in the broader world that has a direct impact on the Jewish world is Nick Fuentes, the extreme right wing provocateur fringe personality has seemingly entered–
Mijal: Become mainstream.
Noam: Yeah, seemingly entered the mainstream, maybe in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, maybe there’s a relationship, maybe there’s not, I don’t know, but that is something that’s taking place.
Mijal: Could I maybe sharpen that last part?
Noam: Yeah. Sharpen away.
Mijal: Yeah, would say there has been like a battle over the direction of the right in America. And in the last few weeks, we saw more triumphs by Nick Fuentes and his ilk. That’s what I would say.
Noam: Yeah, okay, fair way to say it. And so I was gonna ask you where you are in the last few weeks. What is your feeling right now with all of that? The triumphs and the despair at the same point in time. What are you feeling right now?
Mijal: Yeah. So, so I mean, I think I’m not the only one that’s experiencing like a roller coaster of emotions. And it kind of depends at one moment in the day you catch me on what I have just read. But I’ll also add for me, Noam, I was really, really blessed to go to Israel. So I came back from Israel about three days ago at this point, I was there for a week, eight days. and that gave me, I think just, like a really, really strong sense of this moment in Israel. I came back from that trip ridiculously optimistic about Israel and Israelis, just so incredibly strengthened by the determination, conviction that I saw there. And now it’s funny, I feel like I’m in this funny place where I’m like, optimistic, inspired, hopeful. I feel like my reserves of resolve were strengthened during that trip. And also coming here to America and just thinking about our challenges. And yeah, I’m concerned about them.
So there’s like this funny thing about being a Jew in the world right now. There are so many different fronts and so many different aspects to it. And sometimes like the question is, how do you feel about a particular place right now?
Noam: Like you were in Israel when the hostages were released, is that right? Or right after?
Mijal: Right after, right after.
Noam: Right after. What was, can you tell me a story of what it was like to be in Israel? So you saw the euphoria, I would imagine. The experience here in the States for that day and the week after was, I would say, there was euphoria on a communal level, but we live in the US. So when you walk outside in the streets, unless you’re in a thick Jewish community, or that’s exclusively Jewish, let’s say, then you don’t walk out into the streets and feel that. Did you walk out into the streets in Israel and feel something?
Mijal: So I don’t know if I felt euphoria. I got there about a week after the live hostages came home, but I definitely, because I’ve been to Israel, thank God, several times since October 7th, but I definitely felt a certain lightness. Like it was, it was almost like that was like, like a burden that you couldn’t escape, you know, in every aspect of, of communal life, individual life. And it was almost like people were breathing a little bit better.
What I feel like I saw more than euphoria was just really strong determination and resilience. I was with a group for part of the time. We got to hear from a lot of people who work in different sectors from civic society to government to military to tech, different industries. And I was honestly, Noam, I was so blown away by the resilience. Just to meet so many people who are like, yeah, we’re facing these challenges. Yeah, things have been hard. And yes, look at what we’re building here and we’re excited to build more and we are ready for this.
Noam: Yeah, I can’t imagine. Yeah.
Mijal: I’ll just share one example of it. I visited a place called Brothers for Life. And I hadn’t visited that before. It’s this amazing compound outside of Tel Aviv that serves soldiers who were wounded in combat. And they serve about 2,800 soldiers a year, previous soldiers a year. I was there for maybe three hours and their attitude was just so amazing. So, forgive me for saying this, Noam, but un-American. But by an American, I mean, sometimes in America we have this, like, like there’s a big victimhood complex in our society. You know, we talk about our problems, we want everybody to feel bad for us. We think that almost having experienced certain things make us more morally virtuous or morally deserving.
And here the attitude was like, something really bad happened to you, but you can get to choose which life you’re going to have and you can become stronger. And there’s like nothing that’s standing before you if you actually want to accomplish something. And it was just like, it was amazing, it was really, really humbling.
Noam: That’s, I’m so happy you said that. When you were gone for Wondering Jews, we had Eli Sharabi on, had, you know, wrote Hostage and who was a hostage for 491 days. And that is, I would call a throughline throughout his entire book, his entire, every time he talks, he talks about the choice and the choice, you don’t get to choose the circumstances that you’re in. You get to choose how you react to the circumstance. That’s a distinctly Israeli, I want to say Zionist sort of approach to life.
And it reminded me of another book that I read a while ago, which totally changed my life, which is The Choice by Edith Eva Eger. And she writes about her experience in the Holocaust and how she’s made the choice to act in a certain way.
And it’s almost like, why do you have to have the resilience to make these choices? Like, I almost feel like, come on, why do we have to go through that to be in the position to make these choices? But there’s, on the other hand, there’s this something that’s remarkable and profound that I’m proud of, of the Jewish people that have taken on this cultural perspective, which is to say, we’re gonna make the choice to figure that, not everyone, not all the time, not gonna be like Pollyanna-ish about this.
But it is part of the culture. It’s part of the culture.
Mijal: Right, right. I did not hear an ounce of self pity from anyone I interacted with. And this is like so many people who’ve been through hell and back in the last two years. And I felt almost like ashamed, not ashamed, but like, you know, like I can I can do a good wallowing in self pity. You know, I’m good at it. It’s almost like it has, am I pronouncing this right? Like cache.
Noam: Cache.
Noam: It has a certain cache in our society to speak about certain things that happened. It’s virtuous. There’s a virtue to it. And it’s very seductive. Right. It’s virtuous. Mijal, do you think that— I know that you’ll never say anything negative about the Jewish Americans as a whole.
Mijal: Never.
Noam: But do you think that Jewish Americans, from your experience, are doing too much wallowing and self-pitying, compared to the Israeli experience? Like what’s the message?
Mijal: Yes. Yeah.
Noam: Yes? Okay, could you say more about that?
Mijal: I think that we have been so shaken in the last two years. And I still think that a lot of the way that we are responding is like, like, how dare they? This is terrible. We’re, you know what I mean? And almost expecting things to change around us. And I think that expectation can lead us to speak a certain way or act a certain way.
And I think because in Israel, they don’t have the expectation that their neighbors would suddenly change how they think about them. It’s a little bit of like a tougher skin attitude and like a little bit less like I’m trying to talk about how bad things are. It’s a little bit more like accepting. Like this is hard. So like, for example, I heard from this, a couple of people working in tech who’ve experienced significant, significant obstacles because they’re Israeli in the international market. Like it’s not easy to be an Israeli, you know, a person trying to build relationships with partners in Europe, for example.
But when they were speaking about it, they were like, yeah, okay, that’s what it is. And we’re trying this and this and this and this and this. I think that the, so it’s not like I’m blaming us American Jews. I just think that our experience, our love affair with the acceptance that we had in America has left us a little bit unprepared for this moment and has left us a little bit less resilient.
And I think that we need to just build up those muscles because I don’t think that things are going to get easier. I think they’re going to get harder.
Noam: So let’s pull in that thread.
Mijal: Not to be so dark on that, but like.
Noam: No, no, it’s fine. But I wanna pull in that thread with you. The way, I’m not gonna give imagery. I have imagery in my head that’s probably not something I should say on a podcast. But it feels like it’s coming out of both sides. What do I mean by that? It’s like there is this.
Mijal: Mamdani on my left, Fuentes on my right. Can I say that?
Noam: Yeah, you could say it like that. It feels like from the outside, from the external, it feels as though this is a moment in which I would want to have self-pity. I’d want to wallow. I want to be like, is this serious? You kind of want to look around. Here’s what I always want to do with my non-Jewish friends and the broader world.
I kind of want people to just see this. Do you see the way, you know, this is the self pity part of me talking right now. Do you see the way in which, I do it?
Mijal: Go for it. Yeah, you have three minutes.
Noam: Do you see the way, how much do you charge for this? So here’s the thing. Here’s what I would want to say. Do you not see a person, and I’m not talking about who should win or shouldn’t win a mayoral election. Okay, I’m staying away from making claims on that, but I want you to hear this, okay? Here’s one person who historically,has said the following, I don’t have a major problem with globalized intifada and it doesn’t just mean globalize the struggle. That’s not what it means. And he didn’t say I do or he didn’t just outright say, is this horrific thing to say? The intifada is something, specifically the second intifada, that the Jewish people and the Israeli people were killed, maimed in the most gruesome attacks possible, suicide bombs, going to restaurants, going to buses, etc, et So to not say something like, hey, that is an awful thing to say, just like be simple, don’t make this complicated. Yeah, don’t say globalize the intifada. Let’s not intellectualize something that doesn’t require intellectualism. Let’s save that for other things.
Or saying that the IDF trained the NYPD to engage in horrendous practices. Those sorts of things are to say, to not fully commit to the idea that a Jewish state should exist in the land of Israel, what those boundaries and borders should be, up for dispute, no problem. But to not simply say that, I believe that there should be a Jewish state in Israel. So that’s happening on one side, okay? And saying I shouldn’t be guided by the billionaires who tell me to believe in these things.
And then on the other side, you have the Dave Smiths, you have the Nick Fuentes.
Mijal: Tucker Carlsons.
Noam: You have the Tucker Carlsons, you have the Candace Owens, and I know, on the extreme left there, etc, et all as well. And they’re saying very similar things. They’re saying that Jews have too much, they signal it in different ways, but that Jews control too much. Jews have too much power. Israel has too much power, code word for Jews. Globalists have too much power, code word for Jews.
Mijal: I mean, Fuentes talks about Jews straight out. Yeah.
Noam: And Fuentes talks about Jews, but then the Heritage Foundation comes out.
Mijal: That was yesterday, right? my gosh.
Noam: And heroically says, that was yesterday, that was yesterday, heroically, heroically comes out and says, you know what? We’re not gonna distance ourselves from Tucker Carlson, okay? Sorry, was that more than three minutes? Okay.
Mijal: Well, maybe just say a word for those who might not know, can you just say a word about the Heritage Foundation and why they’re so important?
Noam: They are what I think the major conservative political think tank in the United States of America.
Mijal: Right, they’re viewed as like the intellectual backbone. Yeah.
Noam: Yeah, so that’s important. And they came out and publicly chose to say we are not distancing ourselves from Tucker Carlson. So like, okay, I don’t love that. But then they, then they did the whole line, we don’t stand for what Nick Fuentes says, we disagree and I’m horrified, but it’s within the, you know, blah, blah, blah. So I was just like, is this, as a Jew, as a Jew, as a Jew, okay, as a Jew, I felt like, do you not all see what is happening around us?
Mijal: So did you ever do that? Do you ever have these conversations in which you, because you said that you wanted to turn to like your non-Jewish friends or acquaintances and say like, do you not see, have you tried that?
Noam: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I tell you why? I think I don’t do it often. But I’ll tell you the reason I rarely do it. It’s because of the first part of what you and I just spoke about. I don’t want to have the way they think about me and my identity to be about being not seen because of how people are negatively talking about my people. I don’t want that to be part of my identity.
Mijal: Right, right.
Noam: So therefore I don’t bring it up. Often, maybe ever, I want people to view the Jewish story as one that is not a victim, and the one that is not wallowing in self-pity, the one that is doing what you’re talking about with Achim L’Chaim, with Brothers for Life. So that’s why I haven’t.
Mijal: Yeah, but just to be clear, I do want to make like a distinction between like the kind of like wallowing that paralyzes us.
Noam: And activism, right?
Mijal: Yeah, or like raising the alarm and saying we are seeing the following threats against the West, against America and figuring out what it means to strategically find partners for the fight. Do you ever get stuck in like rabbit holes on Twitter or the like following these things?
Noam: Yes. Yes. Yes. Tiktok is a dangerous rabbit hole and that’s where I have a lot of this content that I’m seeing and I’m always wondering, wait, do other people see this? Maybe they just never saw what Nick Fuentes has to say about the Jews. I actually showed, my…
Mijal: Right. But there’s so many views, I’m like, this just, are all these millions of views just the Jews and some bots?
Noam: I know, I know, I know, but then like last night, this is not the way I typically like to hang out with my wife, but I was like, Raizie, you got it, you got it? Actually, can I show you? She didn’t know who Nick Fuentes was. So I showed her who Nick Fuentes was, and she’s like, my God, this is, these people, she’s like, people are saying this out loud? This is crazy. I’m like, no, this is real.
Mijal: My gosh, I’m so jealous of not knowing who Nick Fuentes is. Wow.
Noam: She had no idea. She’s like, the name, wow, that’s vile. And then to know that that vile statements are actually, no, it’s within the Overton window.
Mijal: Right, yeah.
Noam: All right, so that is this combination, the way I’m feeling right now is on the one hand, not wanting to wallow in self-pity, and on the other hand, like you said, raising, I’ve heard this term from a lot of people right now, what is it called, a five alarm. But Mijal, let me tell you where I’m upset. Can I tell you where I’m upset?
Mijal: Okay. Is this another three minute shtick? Just kidding. Just kidding.
Noam: It’s not it’s not wallowing self pity. It’s not wallowing self pity. No, I promise you.
Mijal: We could wallow. We just can’t do it in a way that makes us not be smart and makes us stop fighting.
Noam: I believe that we made, the Jewish people, have made a strategic mistake. And the strategic mistake, with exceptions, is that very often people on the right, certainly in my world amongst my friends, have consistently lamented and said we should fight the antisemitism coming from the left, constantly demonstrating and talking about that we gotta be fighting the extreme left, the Mamdanis, prior to that, AOC, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, like this sort of worldview that’s developing is so problematic and they would say, have to fight that antisemitism.
My friends from the left would constantly say, that antisemitism? This is the language. That antisemitism is not violent. The violent antisemitism is coming from the right. Look at Tree of Life. Look at these different moments. Poway, whatever it is. Like the antisemitism, the problems from the right, we got to fight that from the right. That’s the real antisemitism.
And the strategic mistake there is to think that the right could influence the left and the left could influence the right. The strategic project should have been for the right to be fighting antisemitism from within its ranks, and from the left to be fighting antisemitism from within its ranks. But it’s much more comfortable for people to fight the other political party and to say it’s worse there.
And it might be worse on one side or the other. That’s not my point. I don’t want to get lost on that. The point I want to make is how can you be heard, the way to be heard is by someone you trust and someone that you are in association with. It’s going to be very hard for people on the fringe left to hear anything what a person on the right says and very hard for someone who is on the fringe right to hear what anything from someone from the left says. What’s your reaction to that?
Mijal: No, yeah, I I agree with you 100%. I think things, the sign for me that things have gotten pretty dire is that for the first time in a while, I’m hearing folks on the right and on the left kind of like decry the poison in their own houses. But as you’ve mentioned, it’s at a point where it’s pretty late.
And we haven’t done this for years. So I agree with you. I think that there’s something really important about deciding that certain discourse and antisemitism is unacceptable no matter where it’s coming from.
Yeah. I’ll give you a different reaction now. I’m something that I’m struggling with. So I live in New York and the last maybe three weeks, things have really heated up with the mayor’s election. Part of what’s been happening is there were a significant number of petitions or letters that included rabbis and leaders from across the denominational spectrum. And I would say that the majority of them were kind of like calling the alarm on Mamdani. And then there was a lot of like noise around this letter. So for example, what happens if a prominent rabbi doesn’t sign a letter, you know what I mean? Like then they become the focus of the conversation.
And alongside this, there’s been another conversation of people who basically say, the biggest losers in this are the Jewish community that’s basically tearing each other apart.
Maybe you can help me think about this, I’m really frustrated with the second discourse. I’m frustrated by those who are turning to this moment and basically saying, everybody has good intentions. These are all legitimate points of view to take. And the most important thing is to respect each other and to not let this thing divide us. Do you have a reaction as to either my annoyance or the phenomenon?
Noam: I’m actually more interested in why that bothers you. Why the second discourse bothers you more.
Mijal: I think that part of what we need to do right now in all of these fights that we have ahead of us is we need to have broad tents, but we also need to have certain North stars. And it requires a certain amount of moral clarity and to say certain things shouldn’t be allowed.
Noam: Could you give me an example of what you mean? You might be speaking in metaphors for a reason, but do you, like.
Mijal: Well, in this case, you will have people who say there’s amazing good Jews with legitimate reasons on all sides supporting memdani or opposing him. And we should be focusing mainly on prioritizing Jewish peoplehood and respecting each other as opposed to, know, vilifying each other’s choices.
Now there’s different reasons this annoys me, even though I did say that I would love your help to make sure that I’m thinking about this in a good way, but I’ll just mention two of them. These are voices that didn’t say the same thing for other political choices. This is not the same voices who said, well, if you were pro-Biden or against Biden or pro-Trump against anti-Trump, it’s all legitimate. It’s all good. know, Jewish peoplehood they weren’t saying that in other choices. It’s now that they’re choosing to kind of like, speak up.
And also, I think I am also frustrated because there is this usage of Jewish peoplehood as a way of asking us to kind of like not take on certain fights. And part of me thinks to speak like in a strong personal way–
Noam: Please.
Mijal: I’m not representing anybody else, but I’m like to support the candidacy of somebody who’s dehumanized Israelis and whose coalition involves dehumanizing Israelis is a betrayal of my Jewish peoplehood towards my brothers and sisters in Israel. And there’s like an almost like indifference towards that aspect of things.
So that’s a little bit why, why it’s been, that aspect has been frustrating me a bit.
Noam: Right, and I don’t wanna disagree with that reaction for lots of reasons.
Mijal: You could tell me that I’m off, really.
Noam: No, no, it’s not, I just, the fantasy that we live in to think that we prioritize certain ideals like you use the word moral clarity someone else would say and I don’t want to get into I’m explaining why it’s difficult. This is the way I view it. The term moral clarity is a very tough term when there’s moral clarity about different issues.
So someone would say I have moral clarity about Cuomo’s past. I have moral clarity about the wealth gaps in New York City. I have moral clarity about the inability to afford New York City. And I have moral clarity, let’s say, about the Jewish people should never be maligned and the state of Israel shouldn’t be maligned. What might be the case, and we could change this educationally, one could change this, is that the first three for some are a higher priority and for others it’s a lower priority. And that becomes really tough when you think about the term moral clarity.
And I want to be, I’m interrupting for my sake. I am not saying at all under any circumstances that what he is saying is better for affordability, better for this, better for that. Under no circumstances am I saying that. What I’m saying is that other people would argue that they do have moral clarity. They do.
Mijal: I know, I know, I know, I know.
Noam: Okay.
Mijal: I understand that. I understand and you’re pushing us to recognize how challenging it is. But just from like our conversation that we’re having right now, as Jews who are facing multiple fronts and multiple battles, I think we are going to need to insist on moral clarity. Not the kind.
Noam: In terms of what? Moral clarity of what?
Mijal: I think we’re going to need to insist that even though it’s hard, we can say we have moral clarity on certain values and certain issues. Not in a way that is rigid and narrow and that like makes too much outrage or too many enemies. I also don’t believe in not being strategic. I don’t believe in being a moral purist, but I also don’t believe in basically saying, all opinions are valid. Like I’m like, no.
Noam: Yeah. Exactly. know. So I was on this panel a few months ago and I was asked about the Mamdani question. Like, I don’t even live in New York and I get asked this question all the time. But what I said was, here’s what I’m more interested in. I’m more interested in the fact that, I don’t know if these numbers are perfect, between 30 to 40% of New York’s Jews are voting for Mamdani and a much higher percentage of 18 to 34-year-old New York Jews. So if that is the case, my only point, in reaction to all that as a Jewish educator is I wonder what we are doing to make, on our priority list, the future and the safety of the Jewish people and the Jewish state therefore being primary, in my opinion, to the safety of the future and the prospering of the future of the Jewish people, the State of Israel is center in that.
And the educational problem is that so many young Jewish people seem to not realize that. And I believe that comes from a position of privilege and luxury of having grown up in a certain way, as opposed to having grown up as a Jew in Addis Ababa or in Kiev or in Sydney, I don’t know. Like, it’s just, it’s different. It’s different. And we have to change the Jewish educational experience of young people to make sure that they value the centrality of the Jewish state in their Jewish identity. That’s my reaction to it all.
Mijal: No, but I will say one thing. We don’t know the results. I do say like one of the things that’s been really important to me is that we need to be ready for whatever happens. I’m nervous about people like despairing. I think we can’t allow complacency or despair. I wrote a substack that actually, people… It went pretty far in which I contrasted the experience of Noah an d Abraham in the book of Genesis. And I offered an argument that part of what caused Noah to end up his life after surviving the flood like in, in a state of shame and ignominy is that maybe he was expecting, like a happily ever after, after so much disaster. And maybe he hadn’t had, you know, the muscles built to like continue fighting.
And I contrasted that to the covenant of Abraham. I was reading a book by Jon Levenson that said something I knew, but he said it so sharply. He said, like, when you look at the Genesis portions and when the covenant is created, the covenant is literally framed as a covenant of struggles. Like when God gives a promise to Abraham, it is not like a Disney promise of like, do this and you’ll get the prince or the princess and like everything. It’s like literally, like, go on this journey and your descendants will suffer and you’re coming here and it is like a multi-generational covenant and it is magnificent and transformative and beautiful, but it involves struggle.
And I think that for me, that’s part of what I’m trying to hold on to, not in a way that’s depressing, you know, depressing like, like, but in a way that is sober and says, okay, this is what it means to be a Jew. And we do it while investing in Jewish life and Jewish joy and Jewish laughter and Jewish vibrancy. And we do it in a way that things happen and we get up and we keep building and we keep doing. And that to me, feels like you spoke about education and you gave one vision as to what we need to do in terms of bridging the gaps between different generations and how we think about this moment. And I’m going to add to that educational mission what it means to help us have those tools.
Noam: I love that. I want to double down on that. There’s an idea that Jacob, who’s the grandson of Abraham, pick up on your point, that it says, says, vayeshev yakov, which means that, yakov settled, Jacob settled. And there are commentators that point out that the second he settled, kind of like your point about Noah, the second he settled, well then what happened?
The demise of Joseph, the selling of Joseph. And that is exactly the point that you’re saying, that the story of the Jewish people will always be one of Yisrael, which means, in English means that you’re gonna struggle, you’re gonna have that, it’s gonna be part of their identity. And in Yiddish, we have a phrase that I never say correctly, ober s’iz gut tsu zayn a Yid. Basically, it’s hard to be a Jew, but it’s good to be a Jew.
Mijal: I’ve heard that, but not in the Yiddish version.
Noam: People in organizations always talk about, let’s move from oy to joy. Like, we’re kind of like trying to get rid of the challenges, but we have to reframe them. But I want to say one thing about reframing the challenges. Your substack, which is really awesome, and I check it out every week, and everyone should check it out. In the most recent one, I think from yesterday or two days ago, you spoke about, this is an example of moving from oy to joy of this woman who was on the plane with you, can you tell that story? Because it’s awesome.
Mijal: Yeah, this was like a week and a couple of days ago, I get on this flight on my way to Israel and I see this woman and she’s a stewardess and I’m like, my gosh, I know her and I’m like, and I also like felt like—
Noam: I think by the way, I think we say flight attendant now.
Mijal: Flight attendants. Whoops, sorry. Flight attendant. Sorry. English is third language. I’m going to just say that here.
Noam: Show off.
Mijal: But thank you. Thank you. But I also know I had this moment when I was like, she looks familiar and I really want to hug her. And like, I’m like, this is like weird. It was also like a delayed flight, five hours in JFK, whatever.
Noam: Classic.
Mijal: And then I’m thinking more and I’m like, my gosh, I know what this is. And the year beforehand in March, I had flown to Rome and she had recognized my hostage tag when I came on the flight. And I was expecting some like, I don’t know what I was expecting. And instead she comes over to me, you know, a year ago and she’s like, my gosh, I miss going to Tel Aviv. I used to love goi ng to Israel so much. I am not Jewish, but I’m praying for you. I’m praying with you and with your people. And I remember crying actually. I was in tears when she came over and did that.
And I was taken aback by my own emotional reaction because like I was both moved by her and I was upset by how moved I was by her because it almost like was like a reminder of how much we’ve despaired of this very human compassion, you know? Yeah, and seeing her again, I’m like, my gosh, I’m like, you’re my friend from last year. She remembered me also, which was cute. Or maybe she just pretended to. But yeah, I think what I wrote about, like I’m just very aware as to how much this last two years have hardened us. And I both understand it because it’s a very logical reaction.
Noam: Yep.
Mijal: And I also think that even as we are fighting and facing Jew hatred on the right and the left, I’m always thinking like, what does it mean that for us the covenantal blessing that God gave to Abraham and Sarah was not just, you’re gonna struggle, but it is like, you’re gonna be part of the world and your name will be a blessing. And I think that we can’t lose sight of that, which is really hard.
Noam: It is hard, but I wanna look forward now. I wanna look forward and with looking forward, wanna tell you another short story here. I was in NYU last week and I was in your stomping grounds and I got it when you weren’t there, but I…
Mijal: Yeah, you were in my neighborhood. Yeah, when I wasn’t there. I think you came just because I wasn’t there.
Noam: No, no, but I got to tell you. So I went to speak at NYU. And they, and you were like a major celebrity there. It was really nice. But I think it like, when I looked at that group around me when I was speaking and I gave them a charge of 10 things that I want them to be thinking about and they just huddled around me afterwards talking about like, what can we do differently? How can we express our Jewish identity? How can we express our universal impulses while being strongly Jewish? What does that look like? I’m in, I’m in, I’m in.
And then when I look forward, when I’m looking forward, I see that group of young people who do deeply care, who deeply care about being part of the mission of the Jewish people and the mission of what it means to be a good American citizen as well. And I was really inspired by this group. They’re young. They’re young and hungry.
Mijal: Mostly undergrads.
Noam: Undergrads, yeah. Young and hungry. And they need to be galvanized. Because it’s there. It’s there. We, the Jewish world and the broader world, just needs to do more to provide the framing for it, to guide it more, to cultivate it more. But it is there. That’s what I felt.
Mijal: Yeah, maybe I’ll add something optimistic here. As you know, I’m part of different communities. One of them is the Sephardic Syrian community in Brooklyn. And in the last three months, this community has woken up politically. Like I am in so many chats with so many young people who for the, because of historical reasons weren’t as involved in the civic process. And now there is knowledge, excitement, energy talking about what it means to be an American, what it means to become activated. So I definitely think that I love our people and we definitely have what it takes.
Noam: And I will end with a shout out to someone else who loves you. Her name is Jill Mamie.
Mijal: Hi. Hi, Jill. I love Jill.
Noam: And I wanna give a shout out to her because I learned a new dish. So she made a new dish that I’d never seen. So Syrians have this amazing dish called Lahmajun. so lahmajun I have every single Friday and it’s amazing. Every single Friday. Lahmajun is like this sweet meat on small micro pizzas. They’re almost like, that’s way I would describe it, little circles of dough, of heavenly dough with sweet meat that’s on it.
Mijal: Okay, okay. Yeah. Meat with tamarind sauce.
Noam: Yeah, it’s great. And then I love dipping, I love tahina on it and lemon juice. I love that. Love squeezing lemon and tahini on it. That’s my favorite thing.
Mijal: By the way, if you go to Turkey, you get them very, very large. Right.
Noam: I know, and so they’re different in different places. But what Jill did is she put lahmacun, she put the meat in a rice wrapper. I had never seen it before. And it was amazing. So she served that. So major shout out to Jill.
Mijal: Amazing, never, never, Jill never gave any of that to me. I think, I think we need to fix that.
Noam: Okay, so Jill, we’ll work on that together. Mijal, it is so good to hang out with you. I know we speak about intense topics together, that’s all good, but it really is a joy to be in conversation with you again.
Mijal: It was really good to catch up, Noam. And I am hoping that the weeks ahead bring us good news.
Noam: Amen. And let’s make good news either way.