What Hasan Piker got wrong about Einstein and Zionism

S8
E30
34mins

Hasan Piker weaponized Albert Einstein on Pod Save America to condemn Zionism. But he left out most of the story. Noam addresses Piker’s troubling statements about Einstein by tracing his full relationship with Zionism, exposing how a confident but incomplete portrait collapses under the weight of the full historical record.

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Hey, I’m Noam Weissman and this is Unpacking Israeli History, the podcast that takes a deep dive into some of the most intense, historically fascinating, and often misunderstood events and stories linked to Israeli history. This episode is sponsored by Travis Terry and Cathy and Barbara Malamut. If you want to sponsor an episode of Unpacking Israeli History, or if you just want to say halllo, get at me at noam@unpacked.media.

Before we start, as always, check us out on Instagram, on TikTok, on YouTube, and other fine social media websites on the Internet. Just search Unpacking Israeli History and hit the follow or subscribe button. Okay, yalla, let’s do this.

In case the name Unpacking Israeli History doesn’t give it away, this is a history podcast. This is not a current affairs podcast. I generally don’t like to weigh too much into the politics and culture of the day. I like wrestling with events that happened in the past: after the dust has settled, after the haze has cleared, after we’ve had time — months, years, decades, centuries — to sit down and analyze things deeply. 

I don’t do hot takes. I’m just not a reactive guy.

Sometimes, though, I decide to make an exception. After October 7th. After Charlie Kirk was killed. And after Hasan Piker appeared on Pod Save America and made some what I want to call “troubling” comments about Israel and Einstein and lots of other things, I’ve decided to do so again.

Okay, okay. I know Hasan Piker’s Pod Save America interview was two weeks ago. But in Noam time, that’s two minutes ago. And two weeks later is as hot as my takes get.

But wait, hold up. What exactly am I talking about? Who is Hasan Piker? What is Pod Save America? What exactly did he say?

So. Hasan Piker.

If you don’t know him, I’m jealous. It means you’re not invested in political commentary, which like, good for you. Piker is one of the most-followed political commentators in America. We’re talking millions of people — young people, especially — who consume his content on Twitch, on YouTube, across social media. He is, by any measure, a significant voice in American political culture. And he delivers his views with the kind of confidence that makes a lot of people feel like they’re getting the truth straight up, no chaser.

And listen, I get the appeal. The guy has great hair. I’m aware that for most people, my Jewfro is far less convincing. And those suits! Real professorial chic. Seriously, Hasan, I won’t be taking history lessons from you anytime soon, but I would like to know who your stylist is.

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago, he sat down with Pod Save America, which is one of the most popular podcasts in the world. A liberal lodestar hosted by former Obama staffers that consistently ranks among the top 10 most listened to podcasts in the world.

So this wasn’t some random rant on a livestream at 2:13 in the morning. This was a major platform, a major audience, and a conversation that a lot of people heard as credible, mainstream political commentary.

And for the better part of an hour, Hasan Piker held forth on Israel, Palestine, Zionism, Hamas – you know all the major topics affecting American lives. It was, shall we say, eventful.

Now, before we get into what Hasan actually said, I want to be really clear about what this is and isn’t, and what I’m doing here.

This is not a point-by-point rebuttal of everything Hasan said. I’m not going to go through his comments on Hamas, or his take on the March of Return, or relitigate the Nakba. We’ve addressed all of that in depth on this podcast at various points. I’ll put links to all of them in the show notes, go listen.

Also, this is not an episode about calling Hasan Piker an idiot, or his followers idiots, no. I want to be clear about that. I am not going to sneer at him or dismiss him. That’s not my style, and it’s also, frankly, not very useful. Piker has a gigantic audience. And his audience isn’t going anywhere. And I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt. I’m going to assume most of his listeners are genuinely searching for something — answers, meaning, clarity — in a conflict that feels overwhelming and opaque. I respect that search, so much so, even when I find the answers deeply problematic. So no, I’m not going after Hasan Piker. I know social media loves that fight, that rage bait. Sorry.

What this episode is — is a meta episode. About history. About how history gets used in public discourse. About the difference between engaging with the past seriously and weaponizing it to tell a story you’ve already made up your mind about.

Because Hasan did something in that interview that I found deeply – here’s that word again – troubling. Something that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. And it has nothing to do with his most inflammatory comments. Nothing.

It has to do with Albert Einstein.

“But it was just ethnic cleansing from the start.”

That’s Hasan Piker on Pod Save America giving his take on Israel’s early history.

He goes on to frame the conflict as basically 80 years of apartheid. He says Hamas is quote, “a thousand times better” than Israel and makes Hamas fighters sound less like ideological actors and more like the tragic, inevitable product of dispossession.

And then he brings in Albert Einstein.

“My assessment on Zionism as an ideology is not that different from Albert Einstein’s assessment of Zionism. Because when he saw Deir Yassin and the violence that the early Zionist brigades were engaging in, Haganah, Irgun, Lehi, these militia movements before the IDF existed, before Israel existed. And he was actually asked to be the first president of Israel. He wrote about what Zionism was turning into. And he warned that what he was seeing was exactly what the Nazis were doing. And he warned about it. He said, if we do not have a commitment to binationalism, if we do not have a commitment to the people that are already living there, the atrocities that I’m seeing that, you know, Zionist brigades are engaging in right now, committing right now against the Palestinians is going to turn into exactly what the Nazis have done. And he was right.”

Now I want to stop here, because I think this is important.

On the surface, this sounds authoritative, right? Einstein! Einstein was a genius. A person who embodied intellect and conscience in a single human being. And Piker is saying: I basically agree with Einstein on this.

It’s a powerful rhetorical move. And I want to explain exactly why it’s also, in important ways, either deeply ignorant or deeply misleading — and I’m genuinely not sure which.

But first, let me introduce you to my dear friend Yair Rosenberg. Rosenberg is a staff writer at The Atlantic, and he happened to write his undergraduate thesis on Einstein’s relationship to Judaism and Zionism, poring over the relevant documents in three languages, on two continents. He published a piece recently calling out Piker’s portrayal. And I want to draw heavily on his work here, because he knows this material cold.

Let’s start with what Piker gets partially right. Einstein did have real reservations about aspects of Zionist politics. He was deeply troubled by right-wing Zionist movements, especially the Irgun. He had serious problems with Menachem Begin. In a famous 1948 letter to the New York Times, he signed onto a letter describing Begin’s party in very harsh terms. That’s true. It is. And Einstein, before Israel was established, had advocated for a binational solution — a single shared state for Jews and Arabs. So Piker isn’t inventing Einstein out of whole cloth!

But what he leaves out is the full story.

Let me just walk you through Einstein’s early relationship with Zionism and the Jewish state. 

In 1921, Einstein traveled to America with Chaim Weizmann (the head of the World Zionist Organization) on a fundraising tour. He raised money for the Hebrew University across the United States. Twenty thousand people lined the streets of New York to greet him. In his letters from that trip, he wrote that it was “the first time I saw the Jewish people.” He was bowled over by the pride and unity of American Jewry.

In 1923, he visited Mandatory Palestine and delivered one of the inaugural lectures at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He spoke, a bit clumsily, in heavily German accented Hebrew. He wrote afterwards that his heart was quote, “warmed by the dream and idea of a Jewish state.”

In 1947 — just a year before Israel was founded — he wrote to Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, trying to persuade him to support the Zionist movement. This is what he wrote: “Long before the emergency of Hitler, I made the cause of Zionism mine because through it I saw a means of correcting a flagrant wrong.”

Long before Hitler. Let that sink in.

In 1948, when Israel was declared, Einstein congratulated Chaim Weizmann on becoming the country’s first president. In 1951, he hosted David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister, at his home in Princeton. And in 1952, when Weizmann died, Ben-Gurion offered Einstein the presidency of Israel.

Einstein declined — not because of any political reasons, but because, in his own words, he quote, “lacked both the natural aptitude and the experience to deal properly with people and to exercise official functions.” Which is a polite way of saying: I can explain the cosmos, but I do not want to chair the meeting. He also said explicitly that he was, quote, “deeply moved by the offer from our State of Israel.”

Our State of Israel.

And one final striking detail. At the time of his death in April 1955, Einstein was preparing to deliver a speech marking the seventh anniversary of Israel’s founding. He died before he could give it. His final draft contained these words: “International policies for the Middle East should be dominated by efforts to secure peace for Israel and its neighbors.”

He died preparing to celebrate Israel. That is the full picture.

So what did Hasan Piker actually do?

He took Einstein’s earliest, tentative, pre-statehood position — a preference for a binational solution, and a critique of right-wing Zionist militias — and he presented that as Einstein’s settled, final verdict on the entire Zionist project. Einstein’s binationalism was an opening bid, made before the 1948 war, before Israel came into existence, before the Arab armies invaded. His position, as positions often do when facts on the ground change, updated when reality changed.

Here’s the analogy that came to mind for me.

Imagine your doctor tells you before surgery: look, surgery carries serious risks. We should explore alternatives. We should be cautious. Totally reasonable. Then the doctor sees the scans, sees the progression, sees the emergency, and says: okay, now that I’ve looked at everything, I recommend surgery.

You’re not a fan of going under the knife. So you tell people: “My doctor agrees with me. The doctor said surgery is dangerous.”

Technically true? Sure. But also totally misleading.

The doctor’s earlier caution was the opening assessment, not the final verdict. To cite only the first part and suppress what the doctor actually concluded is a form of deception.

That, to me, is what Hasan did with Einstein.

There’s an old concept in debate called the “frozen man” fallacy. Actually it’s not old at all, I just made it up, but I like it, and I want to make it a thing. But the idea is that you take someone’s position at one moment in time, freeze them there, and use what they said to prove your argument.

Hasan Piker froze Einstein in time. Before the war. Before statehood. Before everything. And presented that frozen version as someone in total agreement with his own position.

Again, Einstein’s Zionism is genuinely complex. Einstein was not an uncritical cheerleader for the Jewish state.

Yair Rosenberg puts it well: 

“Einstein wasn’t an unapologetic Israel-right-or-wrong advocate or an ardent anti-Zionist, but something more subtle — a left-wing supporter of Jewish statehood who believed in Israel’s necessity but also in the fundamental rights of the region’s Palestinian citizens.”

In contemporary terms — and I know our terms are messy and overloaded and everyone hates labels until they need one — but in contemporary terms, that sounds a lot more like a liberal Zionist than an anti-Zionist.

And here’s the irony that I can’t quite get past. Piker has previously, on the record, called liberal Zionists, quote, “liberal Nazis.”

So the guy he’s invoking as his moral authority — the frozen, decontextualized version of Einstein that he needs to make his argument — is in fact exactly the kind of liberal Zionist Piker routinely sneers at.

I don’t know how to feel about that, other than: it illustrates exactly why context matters. 

Why you can’t just freeze-frame a fragment and call it a portrait.

Now, at this point, I think there are two broad possibilities for what’s going on. And I’m genuinely not sure which is true, and I’m not sure Piker himself knows which is true. 

Let’s walk through them.

Possibility one: The Dunning-Kruger Effect.

You might have heard this term. I cite it often. The Dunning-Kruger effect describes a cognitive bias where people with limited knowledge about something overestimate their competence. Basically, people with limited competence in a given area are often over confident. The funny thing about this is that the less you actually know about something, the more confident you tend to feel about it. Our brains can be devious little fellas because we don’t know enough to understand what we don’t know. So we speak with enormous certainty because the gaps are invisible to us.

And maybe that’s what this is.

Hasan Piker is amazingly confident about this subject. He speaks with total fluency. He name-drops Einstein. He cites Deir Yassin – more on that in a moment. He uses phrases like “80 years of apartheid” and “Hamas is a thousand times better than Israel” with complete conviction.

Maybe Piker knows just enough about Einstein to sound compelling to listeners who know even less, but not enough to realize how incomplete and distorted the picture is. That’s possible. 

As Yair Rosenberg puts it:

“Hasan Piker speaks confidently about things that he does not know much about. And this leaves listeners less informed than when they came in.”

So that is the Dunning-Kruger effect in action. 

But there’s clearly another possibility.

That Piker knows more than he’s letting on. That the selective citation of Einstein isn’t ignorance, but a choice, to use a sliver of truth to create a false impression. To invoke the authority of a Jewish icon without acknowledging the parts of that icon’s story that undermine his argument.

In terms of whether Hasan Piker is falling into the Dunning Kruger trap, or using deliberate misdirection, I leave it to you to decide.

If I had to guess, I’d say it’s probably a combination. But let’s be clear. Whether it’s ignorance or manipulation, the effect on the audience is the same. They come away with a distorted picture. And they come away more confident for it. 

Which is a lot worse than just being wrong.

Now, my first instinct was to respond to everything Hasan says in this episode. Every claim, every framing, every sleight of hand. And then I remembered. I have a life, I have a wife, four children, and a limited supply of antacids.

So instead of doing that, let me just say: Einstein is not the point. The move is the point. And it’s a classic move: take a real piece of history, isolate it, flatten it, strip out the surrounding facts, and then present it as if it settles everything.

Hasan Piker is pulling a trick. And the reason it works so darn well is because partial truths are incredibly powerful. Much more powerful than lies. A lie can sound ridiculous. A partial truth sounds reasonable. It sounds sourced. It sounds like the person has done their homework.

And after years of teaching this stuff, I can tell you it’s difficult to combat.

Hasan Piker mentions Deir Yassin. Just name-drops it. As if the mere mention of the name settles something. “Oh yeah, Deir Yassin.”

Now, I want to be really clear here. Deir Yassin happened. It was a tragedy, an atrocity. The year was 1948. The Jewish paramilitary fighters (the Irgun and Lehi, not the Haganah) attacked an Arab village, killing 107 people, including many women and children, and this was about a month or so before the state of Israel was declared, before there was a formal IDF. A dark stain on Israel’s early history. We’ve done a full episode on Deir Yassin on this podcast. Multiple perspectives. Multiple historians. The disputes over what exactly happened. Go listen to that. Again, in the show notes.

But what Hasan doesn’t mention, when he mentions Deir Yassin, is what happened before, or after, four days later.

April 13, 1948. A convoy of doctors, nurses, students, faculty members, and Haganah fighters was making its way to Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus. Palestinian Arab fighters ambushed the convoy, trapped the vehicles, and massacred 78 people. Burned alive. Doctors. Nurses. On their way to a hospital.

So why does this matter? Not as a “whatabout” or to say your atrocity cancels my atrocity. That’s not the point. That is juvenile. The point is this.

History is a sequence. It’s a chain of actions and reactions and fears and choices and misunderstandings and retaliations and contingencies. When you pull one event out of that chain — Deir Yassin — and let it stand alone, as if it happened in a vacuum, as if the surrounding context doesn’t exist, as if there’s no before and no after — you’re not telling the truth. And you’re definitely not teaching history. You’re using your selective framing as prop for your beliefs. As ammunition for your political arguments. As pure propaganda.

And this is the thing that drives me genuinely crazy, because Piker himself criticizes pro-Israel “hasbara,” Israel advocacy, for doing exactly this. For being selective, for being one-sided, for telling a reductive story.

He’s not wrong about that criticism. It’s a real and fair critique of a lot of Israel education. But then he goes and does the exact same thing. Just from the other direction.

That is not history. That is not serving the cause of education or understanding.

On Unpacking Israeli History, we try to do something different. Whether the 6 Day War or Deir Yassin or settlements or peace negotiations, we show the good, the bad, and the ugly. We try — and I won’t claim we always succeed — to hold the full picture.

And the full picture is always more complicated, more morally challenging, and more truthful than any single fragment.

At this point I think it’s important to say: this isn’t only a Hasan Piker problem. I wish it were that simple. Piker is not some lone bad actor. He’s a symptom of something much bigger and, frankly, more disturbing.

There’s a concept in political science called the horseshoe theory. The basic idea is that the far left and the far right end up bending toward each other at the extremes: sharing certain methods, certain impulses, certain tendencies.

Now obviously Hasan Piker and Nick Fuentes are about as far apart ideologically as two people can be. Piker is a democratic socialist. Fuentes is a white nationalist. I am not comparing their politics, I’m not suggesting moral equivalence between their positions, I’m not saying any of that.

But here’s what I am saying. Both speak with enormous confidence, reach massive audiences, and use historical fragments selectively to construct emotionally satisfying narratives for those audiences. Both of them have moved from the fringes of online culture toward the mainstream. Fuentes appeared on Tucker Carlson. Piker appeared on Pod Save America.

And both of them, in very different directions, are shaping how millions of young Americans understand Jewish history and Zionism.

That should concern everyone. Their method — the confident deployment of selective, decontextualized history to massive, young audiences — is precisely the same. Those massive young audiences, those probably well-meaning but highly impressionable people, don’t have the historical literacy to spot what’s been left out. They don’t know what they don’t know.

And that’s what I want to change. Even if our audience is less massive, and our content is less clickable and clippable.

We’re not here to tell people what to think. We’re not interested in replacing one set of talking points with another. We want to build the kind of foundation that makes people resistant to manipulation — from any direction. So that when someone tells them a fragment, they instinctively ask: what’s the rest of the story?

Because if we don’t do that, then all we’re left with is tribal storytelling. Our omissions versus their omissions. Our influencers versus their influencers. Our slogans versus their slogans.

And honestly? The Jewish people are not going to win any of those battles. That is not our comparative advantage.

Our comparative advantage should be seriousness. Depth. Memory. Argument. The willingness to sit with complexity. To embrace the whole story.

Ultimately, the answer to bad history weaponized against Israel is not better propaganda from our side. It’s better history. More difficult, less flattering, more honest history. My colleague and friend, Professor Henry Abramson, is fond of saying, “Anyone teaching the past by skipping over the unpleasant parts isn’t teaching history. They are engaged in propaganda.”

And I want to linger here for a second because this is vital to me.

A lot of people have been trained to hear nuance as weakness. To hear complexity as spin. To hear “it’s complicated” as a dodge.

But complexity is not the enemy of truth. In fact, it’s the closest thing we have to it. Because reality is messy. And the truth about war and history and human beings is never simple.

Like I said, at Unpacking Israeli History, we’re all in on complexity. And of course we’re not automatons floating above the fray. I’m not neutral. I’m a proud, passionate Zionist, a proud, passionate member of the Jewish people. I have skin in this game. I’ve said that a hundred times. But the method matters. Our method is to tell the story as fully and credibly as possible, with different perspectives, with empathy, with context, with room to question and time to reflect.

As I’ve put it before: “objective, with a point of view.”

Which brings me to the reason I really wanted to make this episode.

In some ways, this is a mission statement episode. Because what Hasan Piker demonstrated, however unintentionally, is precisely the problem that Unpacking Israeli History was built to address.

History is not a grab bag of moments you can reach into and pull out whatever confirms your prior conclusion. Real history means context. Asking not just what happened, but when, and why, and what came before, and what came after, and who else was in the room, and what didn’t happen that could have, and how things looked at the time to people who didn’t know how it would end.

It means being willing to sit with the parts that are hard. For me, as a proud Zionist who loves Israel deeply, it means doing full episodes on Deir Yassin. On Kfar Qasim. On Qibya. On Sabra and Shatila. On the internal contradictions and moral failings in Israel’s founding story.

I do not think Israel was born in sin. That is reductive, and just plain wrong. But I do think the full story is the only story worth telling.

There’s a concept in the Mishnah: da mah l’hashiv l’apikoros, know what to respond to the heretic. The great rabbi, the Tiferet Yisrael, has a really piercing reading of this line. He says the Mishnah is not really commanding you to respond at all. It is commanding you to know. Because if the person attacking your story understands it better than you do, then you are already in trouble.

You don’t need to argue. But you do need to know.

And when you do, that makes you Teflon. When someone name-drops Deir Yassin, you can say: yes, and let me tell you the full story. When someone invokes Einstein, you can say: yes, and let me tell you what Einstein actually said.

That’s the goal of this podcast. That’s the goal of this community. To help you know your story.

And yes, I know we are trying to do this in an environment that is almost perfectly designed to resist it.

Hasan Piker’s audience isn’t checking his sources. They’re not going home after that Pod Save America episode to read Yair Rosenberg’s Atlantic piece or dig into Einstein’s actual words or listen to Unpacking Israeli History. They’re absorbing a narrative. And narratives, once absorbed, are genuinely difficult to dislodge.

Jonathan Haidt, who listeners will know I cite probably too often, has the data on this. We are not primarily rational creatures who update our beliefs when presented with better information. We are rationalizing creatures: we find reasons to believe what we already feel. A confident voice, on a platform we trust, telling us a story that fits what we already suspect — that’s hard to undo with a fact-check or a deeper exploration.

So what is the point of doing serious history education, if the algorithm rewards confidence and the audience isn’t going to come find us?

I genuinely wrestle with this. I think about it a lot.

And here’s where I land. Firstly, Asur l’hitvayesh, right? It is forbidden to despair.

And secondly, the goal of this podcast, and of all serious history education, isn’t to win a viral war. I’m not going to out-Piker Piker. I’m not going to make clips that hit 3 billion impressions. That’s not the game I’m playing.

The game I’m playing is a longer, slower game. It’s: can we help people become resistant to the manipulation? Give them enough context and enough intellectual humility that they can hear a confident voice on a big podcast and think: what’s the rest of the story? Can I trust this? What am I not being told?

And I do believe it matters. Because a listener who finishes this episode knows the Einstein story. They know what’s been left out. They can’t un-know it. And the next time they hear Hasan Piker, or anyone else, invoke Einstein, or Deir Yassin purely as a cudgel — they’ll hear it differently.

And that is everything.

That’s the story of Hasan Piker, Einstein, and the problem of viral history, and here are your five fast facts.

One. Hasan Piker invoked Einstein as an anti-Zionist authority. In reality, Einstein supported Zionism for decades — raising funds for Hebrew University, visiting pre-state Palestine, lobbying world leaders, hosting Ben-Gurion. He died preparing a speech to celebrate Israel’s seventh birthday.

Two. Piker cited Einstein’s earliest position — his pre-state preference for a binational solution — as his settled final verdict when it was only an opening bid. Historical figures should not get frozen in time. Their views change when reality changes.

Three. Einstein held complex views on Israel and real criticisms of right-wing Zionism: the Irgun, Begin, Jewish militancy. Real, serious criticisms.

Four. Either Piker didn’t know the full Einstein story, or he did and chose to omit it. Dunning-Kruger, or something more deliberate. Either way, we, the audience, gets a distorted picture.

Five. The answer to bad history isn’t better propaganda. It’s better history — and the willingness to tell the whole story even when it’s hard. That’s what this podcast is for.

Those are your five fast facts, but here’s one enduring lesson as I see it.

Hasan Piker froze Einstein in time to prove his point. And people do this with history all the time.

We freeze the British in the Mandate era and ignore everything that came before and after. We freeze Israel in 1948, and ignore 2,000 years of Jewish exile. We freeze Palestinians in 1967, and ignore the decades of surrounding Arab politics. We freeze their preferred narrative in place and pretend time stopped.

Real history doesn’t let you do that. Real history is uncomfortable with freezing anything. Because real history is always about change, contingency, and the irreducible complexity of human beings responding to impossible circumstances.

Good history resists neatness. Propaganda loves neatness. And maturity is learning to stay with the story even when it gets harder. Even when it stops flattering the people you love. Even when it complicates the simple thing you were so sure of.

That kind of maturity matters. For Jews, especially, it matters. We are a people whose relationship to history is constitutive. We do not just remember the past. We ritualize it. We retell it. We argue over it. We even embody it. We say “we were slaves.” Not “they were.” We were. Memory becomes identity. Story becomes peoplehood.

Which means we should be the last people in the world to treat history like a clip farm. And maybe that is the broader plea I want to make here. 

Learn history seriously.

I want to go back to something I said at the very beginning of this podcast. Not this episode, but this podcast. Back in Season 1. Episode 5. The Deir Yassin episode.

I was a junior at Yeshiva University. History major. Years of Jewish education under my belt. Self-described Zionist. And I was at a Shabbat table at the University of Maryland when someone brought up Deir Yassin and turned to me — the guy who was supposed to know this stuff — and asked what I thought.

And I said, and I am not proud of this: “Um, who is Deir Yassin?”

They said: “I think you mean — what is Deir Yassin.”

I have never forgotten that moment. The heat of it. The specific, particular shame of being caught without your own story.

And here’s what I want to say to you, at the end of this episode. Hasan Piker’s audience didn’t do anything wrong. Most of them aren’t stupid or evil. And the truth is we all have our blind spots; we all have narratives, misguided or not, that we cling desperately to; we’re all susceptible to disinformation especially when it’s delivered by someone with great hair and Japanese tailoring.

Hasan’s audience heard a slick, confident voice on a trusted platform tell them something that sounded researched and authoritative. And they had no way to know what was missing, because they hadn’t been given the story in the first place.

That was me at that Shabbat table. Confident in my identity, ignorant of my own history. The difference between me and Hasan Piker’s audience is that I happened to be embarrassed into learning. Most people aren’t that lucky.

So the enduring lesson isn’t about Hasan Piker. It’s about the Shabbat table or the dorm room or the group chat or the office kitchen or the comment section. I kid – stay away from the comment section. It’s about the moment you get asked — and you find out whether you actually know, or whether you just feel like you know.

That feeling — the heat in the face, the scramble, the sudden awareness of the gap between your conviction and your knowledge — that’s what this podcast is trying to prevent. Not by arming you with talking points. But by making sure that when you’re asked, you actually have something to say. Something real. Something learned. Something true.

You know your story. Or you’re learning it. That’s why you’re here.

Okay. That’s all I’ve got. I’ll see you next episode.

Unpacking Israeli History is a production of Unpacked, an OpenDor Media brand. Follow us wherever you get your podcasts. If this episode hit you in some way, please share it. Send it to someone who watched that Pod Save America episode and has questions. Send it to someone who’s curious about the Einstein story. Send it to someone who thinks they know the history but maybe hasn’t heard the whole thing. And as always, I love hearing from you. So email me at noam@unpacked.media.

This episode was produced by Rivky Stern. Our team for this episode includes Simon Apfel, Rob Pera, and Ari Schlacht. I’m your host, Noam Weissman. Thanks for being here, see you next week.

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