Noam: Hey everyone, welcome to Wondering Jews with Mijal and Noam.
Mijal: I’m Mijal.
Noam: And I am Noam and this podcast is our way of trying to unpack those really big questions being asked by Jewish people, by non-Jewish people about the Jewish story, about the Jewish people, about the Jewish state, about Judaism. often, we absolutely do not have it all figured out, but we try to learn together to wonder together.
Mijal: As we say every week, we really appreciate and enjoy hearing from you. So please send us questions, suggestions, feedbacks, disagreements. Just email us at wonderingjews@unpacked.media.
Noam: Okay, Mijal, we’re going straight to the content today. I’m not gonna even ask you the question that like we’ve been talking about. I’ll give you the deeper question, the tougher question. This Bob Vylan thing. First of all, have you ever heard of Bob Vylan?
Mijal: You mean before this last Saturday night when I opened the news? No, I did not hear of Bob Vylan.
Noam: And maybe I’m being mean right now, but I think very few people have heard of Bob Vylan before this. But tell me a little bit about this Bob Vylan story very quickly, and then I wanna have a real difficult but important conversation with you about it.
Mijal: Yeah, so on June 28th at Glastonbury, I can’t even say that well, at Glastonbury’s West Holt stage, so basically like a huge music festival with about 150,000 people in attendance, a London-based rap-punk duo, Bob Vylan, shifted their set from music to protest, or actually just made their music be part of protest. He led thousands and thousands of festival goers in chants of Free Free Palestine, and then chants of death, death to the IDF. Part of what made this awful beyond, mean, beyond just like the chants is that it was live streamed live on BBC when it aired and filtered for several hours. You know, they could have cut the live feed. didn’t. Only hours later, the broadcaster issued a public apology called the chants utterly unacceptable and acknowledged they should have cut the feed sooner.
Have you watched this, Noam?
Noam: I have not only watched it, Mijal, I have obsessed over it. I have watched video after video on it. I’ve watched pundits respond to it. And I spend too much time, like the rest of the world probably, on TikTok and saw this in so many different forms. my God, yes, I’ve watched it. Yes.
Mijal: Yeah, yeah. Well, it takes a special thick skin to go on TikTok and try to see how.
Noam: Well, I don’t know if it was a thick skin. was more like I had, I had such, and this what I want to talk about with you, had such a visceral reaction to what took place. And then of course the aftermath of it.
The question I want to ask you is, is a question that a lot of people struggle with all the time. It’s something that I get asked about pretty often. And it’s something that a lot of people struggle with. And this is the question. When we love something, we love the art, we love the music, we love the content, but the artist might share messages that we are absolutely at odds with. How do we deal with that? How do we think about that?
Now, I don’t think that Bob or Bobby Vylan’s music is something that Mijal Bitton necessarily loves so much. I could be wrong. I don’t know you that well in this regard. Maybe you love a sort of punk music.
Mijal: I think you’re good, Noam. Keep going.
Noam:, I got it, I’m reading you correctly. Okay, good. But how do we deal with that? How do we contend with that? How do we deal with when we are a big fan of a musician or music and our friends around us are so into it also, we go to their concerts, we go to their shows, we make our schedules, our schedules around, when this human being is producing music, how do we deal with that? How do we contend with that?
Mijal: Noam, are you asking this because you’ve heard from like a bunch of folks who like this particular rapper and who are now all like, what do I do?
Noam: I’m definitely, not, no one, again, no one was like, how do I deal with Bob Vylan? No, no, no. I’m asking more about like, there are other musicians, musicians like Dave Matthews Band, musicians like Goose.
Mijal: Right.
Noam: But how do you deal with those musicians when they say or tweet things out that are problematic that you may not love or that you may strongly disagree with?
So I’ll give you an example. I’ll give you an example before I go to the Bob Vylan thing. There are kind of extreme examples like death to the IDF. And then there are examples of like Dave Matthews band in November of 2023, which is only a month after the 7th of October at a concert in Madison Square Garden. He was standing alone on a stage and he called for a ceasefire in Gaza and opined that it doesn’t make any sense that quote, we send our tax dollars across the world to drop bombs on children, and starve them and deprive them of water and then called to free Palestine.
So yeah, this sort of question when you’re a huge Dave Matthews fan and you have been for decades, you love their music. How do you disentangle the two? Should you disentangle the two?
Mijal: Yeah, I’ll just say Noam, and I’m saying this like, with honesty, it’s almost hard for me to understand the question because I’m not obsessed with any artist. You know what I’m saying? I’m not like I’m not even disagreeing. I’m just saying I have never had a relationship with like an artist or a musician or you know what I mean? An author that was so that felt so intense and intimate that I felt this sort of loyalty towards them.Do you have this by the way with like any artist or any group that like…
Noam: I don’t have it with artists, but I have it with athletes, but not to the same extent. when you go to a music show, you go to a concert, it’s almost like a quasi-religious experience for people. Yeah, it really is. They have their rituals. They know when to sing certain parts of the song.
Mijal: Sports players? Right, sports players, I would think so.
Mijal: It’s a religious experience.
Noam: It’s actually, I find it funny when people say that they don’t understand religion, they don’t connect to religion, but they so deeply connect to these musicians. And I’m like, you’re doing the same thing.
Mijal: Which is fine, like my son is eight and he’s obsessed with Messi, right? So I’m like, that kind of devotion of having Messi posters on your wall from when you were a kid wearing the Messi t-shirt. And I’m almost like imagining the question, like what if, I’m gonna say God forbid here because Messi is an idol in my part of the world. But if Messi were to be, I don’t even care if they don’t support Israel, but it’s virulently anti-Israel or verging on anti-Semitic. So yeah, that would be devastating.
Noam: Okay, so you said that would be devastating. Okay, the next question after it being devastating is what do you do about it? you, park messy aside for a second. Let’s go back to the Bob Vylan thing earlier. Now there’s the extremes, death to the IDF, and then there’s also stand with Palestine, right? Those are the two very different things, very different things. Agreed or no?
Mijal: It’s so interesting to me, not interesting, but I think that having a conversation, how do I relate, how do I feel about an artist who’s saying this, my lizard brain, right, when I think about this episode, just goes into thinking how long will it take for a society that allows 150,000 people to chant this to start taking away civil rights of Jews and lead us to dark places?
Which so, it’s, it’s almost, trying to, I’m struggling to express myself now I’m here, but I’m almost like my emotional reaction puts me in a place that is very different than the question that you’re asking, which doesn’t take away the question, but I’m just naming that. Cause like, when this happens to me, I don’t think, well, if I loved him, would I keep going? I think like, this is threatening everything I care for and it is dangerous. And, and, and, we, and you know, and like, it’s terrifying and we’ve got to fight this with everything we got. So I’m just naming that, just naming that. And I’m not stopping the conversation. I’m just almost naming the gap between my reaction and the question that you’re saying other people have, which is it’s fine, but it’s.Noam: Right, and I want to stay on that. That’s so important because you said 150,000 people. It’s millions of people. was the initial thing was 150,000 people. But in person, but the fact that this is what I was saying about watching it on TikTok is it’s not 150,000 people. And I don’t want to exaggerate, but it’s tens of millions of people.
Mijal: Right in person, yeah.
Noam: And that’s what I want to go into a little bit. It’s not 150,000. And there are, the way I’ve been thinking about this is there’s influence and then there’s control. The State Department made a decision to say, hey, these people, Bob Villan and their friends can’t come to the United States. We revoke their visas. They can’t play anymore. Okay, so there’s control. saying what you did is unacceptable. You can’t come to the United States. Okay. And then there’s influence, which is something else. And these musicians have such influence over people, such influence over people that can’t be stopped to the tunes of tens of millions, really tens of millions.
And I want to go into, you and I are on the exact same page on this, Mijal, except for like how I’m trying to deal with it. I also had a lizard brain reaction. I was just like, I was, you know, I know my brand is Mr. Nuance and on that and great, happy to have that brand. On this, here’s what I started thinking. I started thinking that we’ve become way too smart, way too Talmudic, way too intellectually sophisticated. I felt sick watching this. The fact that if people are chanting death, death to the IDF and it is almost like it was people were mesmerized, death, death to the IDF. And then people just become intellectual about it. And that, you know, I saw an article in the New York Times that said like, doesn’t justify the provocations of Bob Vylan or Kneecap. They meant to offend and they did. Sometimes, however, radicalization is born in the gap between what people feel and what they feel they can say. Like there’s an explanation for it.
And so I felt compelled to give you three reasons why, before we get to the less, to the more complicated topics of things that are more textured, more nuanced and how we deal with it. But death to the IDF, I want to just tell you for those people listening that don’t have clarity on why death to the IDF is problematic, can I give you three reasons why it was like had a visceral reaction to me for me?
Mijal: Yeah, of course.
Noam: Okay, so number one, Number one is when you target the IDF and you say death to the IDF, what that does is for many of us, people like me, people like you, Mijal, the IDF isn’t some abstract military. That’s not what it is. For Jewish people around the world, around the world. It’s our friends, it’s our siblings, it’s our cousins, it could be our children, it could be our students, and wishing death on them isn’t just something that feels personal and violent. It’s not just something that can come across as, it’s not just political. It is something that is personal and that is violent. So people in the world that I feel like gaslit right now, that when they’re saying that the only country you can’t criticize because the State Department took away the rights of Bob Vylan to come to the United States of America, I feel gaslit when they’re saying that Israel is the only country you can’t criticize. No, that’s not what’s taking place. It’s not criticizing Israel. They’re saying death to the IDF. so number one is it blurs totally into targeting Jewish life. It is our family, friends, cousins, and it is the people’s army of Israel, Arabs, Jews, and that’s what it is.
Number two, the second thing that it does for me is it’s calling for the death to the people’s army, which is for Israel, which is the nation state of the Jews. And what that is doing is it’s saying, okay, you and I, Mijal, we could dislike aspects of what the IDF chooses to do throughout its history and in unpacking Israeli history, we go through example after example. We go through Deir Yassin, we go through Qibye, we go through Sabra and Shatila, we go through moments after moments after moments. We do that all the time. But the IDF is the one institution that is there to defend the Jewish people no matter what. And Israeli citizens and civilians, no matter what. That is what they are there to do.
So calling for the death of the very people that are there to defend the Jewish people and only they are the ones that are going to defend them, for me, caused the lizard brain reaction, again. And that’s a huge problem.
And the last thing is, listen, for those people who are unsure about this, and I know there are because you’ve been in touch with me, it creates an unsafe atmosphere for Jews globally. When crowds are chanting slogans celebrating harm to Israeli soldiers, death to Israeli soldiers, it fuels a climate where Jews, especially visibly Jewish people like me, are told when you’re in New York City, take off your yarmulke, a kippah, take it off. It makes me feel unsafe, it makes me feel silenced, it makes me feel vilified, especially outside of Israel. So I just need to say this, that when you’re chanting death to the IDF and you don’t see that as inherently damaging and violent and angry and hateful to me and my people. I have to lay those three things out to make sure that you fully understand.
Mijal: Noam, have you had these conversations with folks?Noam: Well, I haven’t laid it out. I wanted to use this as an opportunity to use this microphone with you and talk it through. The questions often, Noam, like the IDF is a military that does things that maybe I, the person, thinks is heinous. So why can’t I say death to that? That’s not antisemitic, Noam, is that?Like they’re doing things in Gaza that I disagree with. So why is that so problematic for you? Can’t we have viewpoint diversity on that?
Mijal: Right? Wow. I feel like I was just honest. think like part of my, you know, we’re human beings, right? So like part of my, my emotional state would make it hard to have the conversation. You know, part of what it’s so funny, like if I if I had to, as you were speaking, I was thinking, what would I say if I had to speak in front of a hostile audience or a part of audience, let’s say, and explain why this was bad? And I don’t actually know that I would go the direction that you want, not because of this agree, but my brain doesn’t go there in terms of what concerns me. What concerns me is that this rapper, by the way, is like super anti-British, anti-Western. Like he’s not just against Israel and the IDF. He’s very much against what he sees as like a Western imperialist project.It’s like it’s the same moral logic of like Zionists are not welcome here, of by any means necessary, of, you know, of the federal revolution, of all those things. And I think part of what concerns me, part of the reason that like, there is it’s so it’s so funny now. And for me also, like reading about this right after the primary elections in New York City and just thinking nonstop about all this, I am feeling almost more concerned right now for Jews in the diaspora than Jews in Israel. Not that it’s like a contest, but part of what this symbolizes for me is the absolute, there’s like a cancer in Western civilization of movements that are anti-Western, that are violent, and Israel is like the easiest way for them to do this.
Noam: Mm-hmm.
Mijal: So there’s a powerful article, we can put this in the show notes, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali called Glastonberry and the Purge of the Jews in the Free Press. And she breaks this down and she argues that this was part of a coordinated ideological insurgency against the Jewish people. So basically what I was saying, this is not about IDF, it’s about not just the IDF or Israel or Zionism, it’s against the Jewish people, just like the whole conspiracy theory, the whole obsession with it that you have this music festival and that’s what you focus on. And what she really gets to in this piece, which I agree with, is that, I’ll just read towards the end of the article, she says, don’t think it ends with Israel. Israel is just a pretext, the price is broader. The Jewish people have always represented something larger, people that refuse to assimilate to their surrounding society, that carved an identity through ritual, law, memory, and resilience, et cetera.Anyway, she’s basically arguing it’s a threat to the West and to people who want a certain decency and protection of difference.
So having said all this, like Noam, if I was obsessed with an artist, going back to your original question, and I thought they threatened fundamentally my way of life, I don’t think I could ever enjoy listening to them. Now, if they said something that I disagreed with but didn’t like threaten my way of life, that would feel different.Noam: Right. But, Mijal, are you saying, tell me what you think about this. A few years ago, Laura Ingraham had this famous line to LeBron James. She said, shut up and dribble. And meaning her point was, you stay in your lane. You play sports and let the pundits do punditry, let journalists do journalism, let the politicians do politician stuff, political stuff. You stay in your lane.
Are we expecting that from artists, musicians, athletes to just stay in their lane? To me, that feels like an unreasonable expectation. To me, seems like that’s something that’s never been done. And people with platforms have always utilized their platforms. Just look at Muhammad Ali, one of the greatest athletes of all time. Are we saying that people shouldn’t use their platforms for ideas or no?Mijal: Well, I think the question is almost a distraction or like a strawman argument. I think often when it comes to Israel and artists, people bring in other arguments that I’m like, that’s not the point. It’s not about, you know, it’s not about whether artists or athletes should speak up or not. Like, that’s not that’s not the question. The question is whether we want to normalize in society, you know, the kind of rhetoric that is hateful and dangerous against certain people. That’s the question. And if you view things in that way, then, yeah, I don’t know. I’m not even like, then we can have like a very abstract intellectual questions. Can you benefit from people who do this?
Noam: Right. But I don’t think it’s abstract. think it’s very, very tangible, very real, very practical. There are hundreds of millions of people that follow other bands, musicians, basketball players, other, Messi. Like I, a few years ago, I used to wear Kyrie Irving shoes, even though he said things that were antagonistic towards Israel. And like, I’m wondering what I still wear Kyrie’s now. I don’t know.
I struggle with that sort of question. I know that I would not, to help explain it, I would not wear anything that was Kanye-esque because that is, he’s gone, he made, like, he’s gone beyond just disagreement or being frustrated with policies. He’s gone to virulent, hateful, hail Hitler sort of content that makes it impossible for me to, I don’t even listen to his music anymore. Like, that I have stopped.
And we could go example after example. I guess what I’m trying to figure out, you said something before, like, I don’t know if you said this or if it got into my brain. Like you wouldn’t want to, you wouldn’t, it would be, maybe like, it just be hard for you to like enjoy their music, right?
Mijal: Yeah, I’m not even making like an intellectual claim here, but I used to love Jon Stewart. Okay, just like I really, really enjoyed him, like really sharp, like appreciate him and don’t always agree with him, but like enjoyed, like, and I haven’t been able to watch him. I can’t watch him.
I don’t think he’s antisemitic. I’m not saying that. think, but I think he’s part of like a movement that’s like obsessed with Israel in some ways has such different standards of evidence and thinking. And I just, I can’t enjoy it. Like I literally can’t enjoy it. I can’t watch him. I can’t watch John Oliver. can’t, you know, I can’t enjoy it. There’s some actors in SNL that I can’t laugh at anymore. It’s not, it’s not even like, again, it’s not, I’m not making an intellectual claim here, I’m saying I’m in a place where it takes away my ability to enjoy it.
Noam: But you say you’re not making an intellectual claim here, but I think you are actually, with the way I’m hearing you, you’re actually making a really personal and moral claim in many ways. Meaning, you’re not telling other people to feel the way you feel, but what I hear, and it resonates with me, Mijal, is ask yourself this question. If somebody is saying something that is so antagonistic, not to your political worldview, but to your identity, to who you are, to who your people are. How do you enjoy being influenced by their music? Meaning that…
Mijal: Yeah, it’s as if you have an enemy of your family singing something. like, you know what? Like I would, I would, I would take down my son’s Messi posters if Messi one dare. You know what I mean? Like.
Noam: But again, if Messi went there in terms of, and this is the clarification, if Messi went there in terms of disagreeing with Israeli policy, no.
Mijal: No, you know me now. I mean, no, we’re not saying that here. Like, yeah.
Noam: I know, I know, but I’m trying to, but I think for people that want to, like what’s the difference maybe between death, could you help me figure this out? I know it’s not your thing necessarily, but I want you to help me figure this out, because I’m struggling. Is there a difference between death to the IDF and stop Israel from killing babies? Or are they the same thing?
Mijal: Yes, I mourn the fact that we have to ask this. I mourn the fact that we live in a world where we have to make certain distinctions. Yeah, there’s absolutely a difference between hateful chants that demonize and that look at Israel as the main source of evil in the world. And between saying like, you know, like I’ve got plenty of friends in Israel who who want the war to stop in Gaza, who think that what Israel is doing in Gaza is wrong right now. There’s a difference there. And you know what? Let me just name something. think what intellectually interests me about this conversation is that I think it’s a statement about Jewish identity at this moment and the path ahead for us. What I mean to say is like this, for thousands of years, we just lived as minorities in countries where we expected to be despised and where we had no choice but to benefit from societies and voices who did not like the Jews to say the least.
But we lived in those societies and that was the cost of living. So it didn’t mean we’re gonna become best friends, but it meant that if you live in medieval Italy and whatever writers around you are writing whatever in the Renaissance, they’re not, you know, but that’s just the way that it was. And there was something there that you kind of like accepted that is like that society.
The last seventy years or so, the post Holocaust, golden age that we enjoyed in the West, we shifted our mindset and we expected as Jews to feel a certain alignment with our societies. So, Noam, if we are going now to a place where there’s going to be many of us who go back to a place where we enjoy music and artists of people who despise us and what we stand for, that’s the way I see it, it is a return to a certain kind of diasporic history that we are seeing in front of us.
Now, you might say, okay, that’s where we are right now. And for many people, that’s where we’re going. But there’s also resistance to that. I think for me, part of my reaction is resistance to that. I do not want to be in a place where I have to bend the knee and benefit and enjoy something that is so anathema to me.
If we’re going there, again, let me be super dark, I’m not agreeing with myself here. But if you tell me like the world has shifted, soon everything is going to go in that direction. So you want to enjoy music, that’s what you got to do. Okay, that we can have that conversation.
But I think a little bit to me, that’s a little bit to where this is going, to what relationship with the world that we want to have, because there is, and again, we’re not the only people to ever ask this question. Think about, I think about Black Americans who for so long in America, like there’s all of this culture and cultural production and heroes who are hostile to you and your people. And you have to decide what to do. And you develop a double consciousness in which you have one way of looking at the world and then you see yourself through the eye of the world. And like, there’s this constant alienation from the world. So they think that’s at the bottom of the questions that you’re bringing up.
Noam: Yeah, yeah. that reaction definitely resonates with me. I guess where we are landing this plane right now is something that you said, like whether or not you feel like the people in Israel, if you’re Jewish, our family, if you’re Jewish, if you’re really connected, in that sort of way, you have that visceral reaction. I am interested, also, by the way, in how Israelis view these questions. And I don’t know the answer. Would they be offended by people, their cousins, their brothers, their sisters, their friends, their parents, their children, know, listening to this music and going to these shows and going to these concerts? I’m interested to know that, and I don’t have the answer to that.
Mijal: Yeah, but by the way, before we go though, I do want to put you on the spot. No, I want to put you on the spot before we go. Like, Noam, you’re an educator. If friends or students come to you and they tell you, I love, you mentioned Dave Matthews band, you know, they have a big concert coming up, I need help thinking through, you know, should I go, should I not go? What would you tell them? Or what have you told them?
Noam: I mean, anyone that talks to me about this and they expect to get like a direct answer, they know they’re coming to the wrong guy. Cause that’s not me. You know me pretty well, Mijal. Like I’ll never do that. I think what I do is, and you did some of- It’s true, it’s true. It’s true. You’re not going to get a linear direct answer. But here are the reflections that I have on it.
Mijal: This is like a PSA to anybody who wants to go from now on. I’m don’t go to… Sorry.
Noam: Reflection number one is what you said earlier, is like how visceral are you connected to the music and the musician, and how viscerally are you connected to Israel? And that’s a very personal question. It’s not a judgmental question. It comes across as judgmental if you internalize it in a judgmental way. But it’s not. Ask yourself that question. number two is, I don’t want people to think they’re making a moral mistake by going to listen to Dave Matthews band. I don’t think it’s a moral mistake. I do think it’s a moral mistake to do anything with this Bob Vylan guy and anything like that. I don’t. And for a few reasons. One is, I think many musicians, it’s not like they got doctorates in these topics, it’s not like they study the history. They love peace and they see the weak person and they say, The strong person is Israel in this case and the Palestinians are the weak people and they’re pacifists in general. They protested many other things. So I don’t think that it is necessarily from someone like a Dave Matthews band. I don’t think it’s necessarily that they are intentionally being antisemitic in that sort of way. They’re kind of just being consistent with their worldview. And the third thing I will say is like, I think it’s a dangerous game for friends to be judgmental to each other in this regard, because you could play this game nonstop, nonstop with each other and tell, oh, why are you wearing these shoes? Oh, why are you wearing that jacket? Oh, you watch that music. That’s unhealthy. That’s unhealthy. I think the most healthy thing is to ask yourself right now, who do you want to surround yourself with? Who do you want to be influenced by? The politicians in the world are going to control, but it’s the people that you’re surrounding yourself with, the groups that you’re surrounding yourself with, the musicians that you’re surrounding yourself with, it has an influence on you, it has an impact on you. And what I would say to people, again, this is a personal decision, but if you feel that deep familial, that familial connection to Israel, to Israelis, maybe pump the brakes for a year. Maybe pump the brakes and revisit it, and revisit it. Come back to the musicians to the shows later on but you can press pause right now. There’s nothing wrong with it I believe that music is different than sports. This is my take I believe that music is different because with music the medium is the message. It’s soulful That’s why it impact us. That’s why it influences us. A musician is spilling out their soul and their soul is deeply connected to their ideology and what they share with the world.
An athlete is different. An athlete’s soul is not connected to them, with their words when they’re kicking a ball through a goal. They’re different things, they’re separate things. Again, that’s my take. That’s how I distinguish between the two. And if an athlete were to say the heinous things, horrible things, I remember, Mijal, I remember when the New York Knicks in the mid-90s were spewing ideas. I think it was, I could get the names wrong, I apologize, maybe it Charlie Ward, Larry Johnson, a few others were saying ideas from Farrakhan. My father, who was raised a New York Knicks fan, who, huge 70s, 80s. He said in the 90s, I can’t root for them anymore. It wasn’t like you said, it was actually very similar to my dad, Mijal. This is interesting. He didn’t make a decision to stop rooting for the Knicks in the 90s. He just couldn’t. It was just like, he, it wasn’t a decision.Mijal: Yeah, that’s where I am, by the way.
Mijal: But it is also, it is a decision. do think, like what I said earlier was an insight that I only got now with our conversation. I do think there is a question here about alienation and how alienated we want to be from the world. And there’s different forms of alienation. One alienation is to walk away from everything. Another alienation is to sit there and laugh at someone that you think is threatening you. There are very different forms of alienation. And I think it’s like a little bit the options that we have in front of us.
Noam: Yeah, I’ll tell you one more thing. I know. No, I would say one last thing, Mijal, and I feel like I’ve said this on a few other episodes and I know you. I miss Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ leadership now. I just keep on thinking like this happening in the United Kingdom, BBC have like broadcasting this. I feel like they would never I could be wrong. They would never have the chutzpah if Rabbi Jonathan Sacks was there. Like they would. But then.
Mijal: They would have. They would have. I miss him and they would have.
Noam: But then Jonathan Sacks Rabbi Sacks would have something powerful for us to all hold on to So I just miss him. I just miss him
Mijal: Yeah, yeah, I don’t want to share details, but I had to make a decision last week around something that I had to do. And, I kept speaking to his students and being like, what would he say? And it’s hard though, because it’s, there’s new circumstances that weren’t here, that weren’t there, you know, when he was leading and some of it is, yeah, I’m just, I’m just agreeing with, with the fact that I wish he could help us figure out how to… some things now because things are… there’s a lot of very confusing things. Not this to me, this is not confusing by the way, my reaction to this music festival.
Noam: Well, Mijal, I needed this, just to have an authentic, real conversation, with you and getting our reactions because it’s like you said, we both went lizard brain when we saw those.Okay, anyway, thanks for the conversation. Awesome schmoozing as always. Wondering Jews is a production of Unpacked, a brand of OpenDor Media. Today’s episode was hosted by me, Noam Weissman.
Mijal: And by me, Mijal Bitton.
Noam: The team for this episode includes Rob Pera, Rivky Stern, Ari Schlacht, my former student, and Ryan Rabinowitz. We’d really love just to hear what this conversation sparked for you as an authentic conversation. So like, what do you think about all this? Really want to know what you think. So tell us what you think, what you agreed with, what you disagreed with. If you have other insights, let’s like build out this community. Let’s understand this together. Let’s talk it through.
You can find us wherever on social @WonderingJews, email us at WonderingJews@unpacked.media. Thanks so much, Mijal, and see you next week.
Mijal: Thanks.