Noam: Hey everyone, welcome to Wondering Jews with Mijal and Noam.
Mijal: I’m Mijal.
Noam: And I’m Noam and this podcast is our way of trying to figure out the Jewish world. We do not have it all figured out. Sometimes we think we do, but then we’re reminded time and time again that we do not at all. So we try to figure out some big items together.
Mijal: As we always say, we really do love to hear from you, so please email us at wonderingjews@jewishunpacked.com and call us at 833-WON-Jews.
Noam: Today we have the privilege of speaking with my dear friend and a colleague of mine here at Unpacked, Yirmiyahu. And Yirmiyahu, we’re going to do something different. Instead of reading your bio, I want you to tell us about yourself. Who is Yirmiyahu? Who are you?
Yirmiyahu: Well, I would start with what I do on a regular basis and that’s I’m an educator. I’m an educator for OpenDor Media. I’m an educator that’s most associated with two digital platforms right now, the Unpacked YouTube channel and my social media is on Instagram and TikTok at that_semite.
And my, the way that I go about educating is really embracing the complexity of both the stories that undergird our identities and the complexities of our identities themselves. And the way that I go about that is through storytelling, through my personal story, also platforming the stories of other people, particularly minority communities, and then engaging in conversation and dialogue with people and allowing us to kind of wrestle with some of the beautiful comfortable and uncomfortable parts of our collective stories, histories, and experiences. And so that’s basically what I do in terms of like beyond that.
I’m a proud Jew. I’m a proud Israeli. I’m very rooted in the fact that my Jewish story, my Jewish experience, is one which at the same time as it’s a perhaps a unique expression of the incredible diversity of the Jewish diaspora. That’s my Caribbean side, through my mother, I’m also deeply rooted in the story that is the Continuity of the Jewish presence in the land of Israel. My father’s family that hails from the old yishuv, the Jewish community that existed in the land of Israel before modern Zionism and the new yishuv.
So I like to approach Jewish history and Jewish storytelling and Jewish culture and identity in a way which kind of weaves between these two what I think are pillars of Jewish civilization.
Mijal: Yirmiyahu, before we jump in, do you know roughly how many people do you speak to on an annual basis?
Yirmiyahu: if I look at TikTok and Instagram, just as a few examples, I mean, it’s millions. It’s pretty remarkable just how many people were able to touch, able to speak through these platforms. I remember a friend of mine told me when I was just getting started off in the social media space, you get bummed out when you put a video out there and you only see 2,000 views after a couple hours, as opposed to 50,000 or 100,000 or, you know, 500,000. But imagine if you were in front of a crowd of 2,000 people and speaking to them, how excited you would be. And I’m like, yeah, I actually know exactly what that feeling is like speaking to a crowd of, you know, a few thousand people, how exciting it is. And so we lose proportion of how incredible these technologies are for, you know, taking our goals and our passions for education and really exporting it and using it on these platforms.
Mijal: That’s what I wanted to know because I think it’s really exciting that your story is reaching millions of people.
Noam: Yeah, I mean, that_semite has, you, your Instagram has around 70,000 followers and it has no bearing on how many views you get. You have millions of views. And when you host Unpacked videos, you host one a week, you’re over 20 million this year.
Mijal: Amazing. Awesome. we’re definitely going to dive in just into your story and into trying to unpack a little bit, why is it that your story is so compelling and reaching so many? But we always start with listener questions. So we have a question here from a listener named David. And David asks, growing up or today as an adult, did you ever have Christmas envy? So who wants to start?
Noam: Yirmiyahu.
Yirmiyahu: Wow, that’s an interesting question for me. So I grew up mostly in San Diego, California. I spent basically every single winter and summer vacation either in New York City, where a significant portion of my family lives, or in Atlanta, Georgia.
You know, the short answer to the question is yes, absolutely. I don’t think it’s hard to be a Jew that doesn’t celebrate Christmas because there are Jews that celebrate Christmas or have a Christmas tree and not have Christmas envy. But I think my parents did an incredible job of really instilling in us a deep appreciation and passion for Hanukkah as the competitor of Christmas in the American context. So, you know, the Maccabean story and we had a very strong Israeli identity. Like I very much saw myself at really more than anything as an Israeli living in the US. Like I was part of this Israeli diaspora, not just the Jewish diaspora. So the Maccabean component of that story, the part of Hanukkah which speaks to Jewish self-determination and Jewish power, but not in a caricature way, really was inspiring growing up. And so it kind of was like a balancing effect for me and how I looked at Christmas and what we didn’t have as Jews in the US.
Noam: Mijal, what are you growing up in Argentina?
Mijal: Well, my memories are more from Uruguay.
Noam: Uruguay, Uruguay, sorry.
Mijal: Honestly, I don’t remember feeling any Christmas envy. The real memories I have of Christmas as something significant was in high school, because I would have like a really long commute, one hour each way to go to school. And when I would come back, it was absolutely dark outside. And whenever we got to like December, the ride back home was beautiful because there were like all of these Christmas lights and decorations on the way home. So I don’t have Christmas envy, but I do love Christmas lights outside when it’s But I love Hanukkah, yeah, just like you Yirmiyahu.. You know, I’m a Hanukkah person. I just love the lights. They’re beautiful. Just making sure you know that. All good. Yes, yes.
Noam: Is there anything wrong with Christmas envy? We all love Chanukah. We all love Chanukah. Mijal loves Chanukah. Yirmiyahu loves Chanukah. I love Chanukah. We all love Chanukah. Is there anything wrong with having Christmas envy?
Mijal: Well, do you have Christmas envy first, Noam? Don’t deflect the question.
Noam: I always deflect the question. Do I have Christmas envy? No, I don’t even know. I love that on Christmas, there’s always five NBA games on, like the top NBA games, and so that’s awesome. Thanksgiving has been about football. Christmas has been about basketball. That’s how Christmas in the American context has totally changed things. So I don’t, from a religious perspective, I just think from a social American perspective, it’s a day to, you know, it’s a…It’s a day to watch the NBA, but I don’t have any envy. I’ve never had any. It doesn’t resonate with me.
Mijal: Well, no, I wanna add something, Noam, though. I think part of the Hanukkah in America has become so commercialized, and Christmas also, in a way that I think for many Jews in America today, you don’t have the envy because we have kind of the same things. We have the presents, we get to enjoy the lights. There’s the Netflix.
Noam: Our lights are so tiny. Your description of the Christmas lights, like, it really is. It’s like, it’s the whole street. And then the Hanukkah candles, like a cute.
Mijal: No, no, but we get to go outside and enjoy the lights.
No, my point is, Noam, that as a Jew in America, I actually feel totally fine going outside and seeing, how pretty. This is my street. And there’s something very like a similar. It’s interesting because like, Yirmiyahu, you were speaking about the Jewish self-confidence of the Maccabees. And I find it it’s fascinating that Hanukkah in America has become maybe the most assimilated Jewish holiday. So in many ways, we have our own version of. Yeah, what?
Noam: Right, right, right. What do you mean by the most assimilated Jewish holiday?
Mijal: I mean, Hanukkah at its core is a holiday about fighting outside culture and influence. And in America, it has been sanitized and retold in a way that actually aligns really closely with the holiday season based on like a Christian majority. So there’s something right now that is like Hanukkah feels very comfortable in America in a way that I understand why it happened and how it happened. And like I said, I love the lights.
Noam: Yeah.
Mijal: But I think we should be considering what this tells us about ourselves.
Noam: I have a story about this, I think is it’s interesting, maybe it’s, I’m sharing too much, but I’ll share anyway. I had a fight with my girlfriend in college. Okay, so one of the, this fight was about the attending of a Greek party, Greek, you know, fraternity and sorority parties where they had to dress up in togas on Hanukkah. And I’m like, are you kidding me? This is not a way to celebrate Hanukkah to get dressed up in Greek attire and go to a party in Greek life. that to me is, Mijal, you’re on my side on this one, right? Yirmiyahu. You tell me. My side.
Yirmiyahu: Yeah, that’s a no brainer, right? And like to Mijal’s point, if the Greek culture was the dominant culture back then that the Maccabees were resisting, the dominant culture that let’s say Jews need to resist today when it comes to assimilation is like, what, American commercialism, right? Like what is America if not for commercialism? And what has Hanukkah has become for so many American Jews, I couldn’t agree more, is the most commercialized Jewish holiday there is.
Mijal: Well, I do want to note that I don’t know if that was worth a fight with your girlfriend, Noam, even if I would agree with you in principle, but that’s a different conversation.
So Yirmiyahu, so we heard about your work as an educator. Tell us a little bit about like your background. You said you grew up in San Diego, traveled like to New York, Atlanta. How did you end up in Israel? I believe that you’re fluent in Arabic and in Hebrew, which are not especially Arabic, like not easy languages to master if you didn’t grow up with that. I’m saying this as someone who is married to a family of native speaking, native Arabic speakers. So tell us a little bit about your personal story. How did you get to where you are right now?
Noam: Before you do the very serious talk, Mijal, is your husband fluent in Arabic?
Mijal: Sian understands it and can get along. He can get along with a cab driver. That’s like my measure in Arabic. We’ve traveled and he can carry a conversation.
Noam: That’s cool. That’s cool. My 12 year old son who is in a Jewish day school and knows very little Hebrew chose to work on Duolingo. He’s doing Duolingo and guess what? He chose the language of Arabic to work on. That’s what he’s studying. I think Yirmiyahu, I think he gets it from you. He definitely gets it from you. He knows that that’s what you do. So anyway, tell us your story.
Yirmiyahu: I’m excited to hear about his progress. First of all, apropos the cab drivers, one of the things that I look forward to when I travel to the US is getting an Uber because I know that there’s a very high chance that if I order an Uber, I’ll be able to practice my Arabic in the drive. But that was like particularly when I didn’t really have lot of opportunities in the past to practice Arabic, which obviously changed a lot when I made Aliyah 10 years ago.
But going back, a few steps back to where I guess my story begins. So my, as I mentioned before, my father’s family comes from the Old Yishuv. And so I was really raised with the stories of my great-grandfather who was born either fifth or sixth generation in the old city of Jerusalem. And the fact that the most comfortable cultural space for him was an Arab, specifically an Arab-Palestinian, space and it wasn’t really unusual in our family to refer to that side of the family as being Palestinian Jews. It wasn’t seen as something that was unusual or weird or political even like a political statement. It was just a historical fact that there were Palestinian Jews.
My great grandfather spoke Arabic. My grandfather spoke Arabic. Whenever I would come to visit Israel, it was like, I thought it was normal that my grandfather would take us to almost exclusively Arab spaces and Arab restaurants. And I thought, that’s what you do when go to Israel. You go to Israel and you hear a lot of Hebrew in the beginning and then you hear a lot of Arabic, right? That’s part of the experience. I only realized later that that was kind an unusual experience and kind of some rude awakenings.
So in the home, I heard a lot of Hebrew spoken between my father and his parents. I heard some Arabic. The first words in Arabic I learned from my grandfather. Obviously the first words in Hebrew as well. And that, you know, cultural milieu wasn’t seen as something that distanced us in any way from the Israeli identity, quite the opposite. We were very first and foremost Israelis. And so, you know, in the home we would hear like Rami Kleinstien and Zohar Gov at the same time, this very much East and West Israeli vibe, you know, combined in our household, along with…
Noam: Just to explain to people listening, Rami Klinestein is an Israeli singer from Ashkenazi background and Zor Argov is an Israeli singer from North African Middle Eastern descent.
Yirmiyahu: Yemenite. Yeah. Yes.
Noam: Yemenite descent, there you go. Okay, yes, so I got that wrong.
Yirmiyahu: Yes, so, but again, those types of designations that there’s like a clear kind of difference in that style of music and there’s some people that listen to that and other people that don’t listen to that for very certain cultural reasons, that’s only something I really learned later, like significantly later in my life. And at the same time, we also had this very strong Caribbean vibe in the household. We listened to, you know, reggae music almost religiously and all that kind of family infrastructure existed in Israel and existed in New York and my parents for basically the reasons that it was just difficult to not just be, you know, a Jewish couple in New York, because obviously lots of Jewish couples in New York, but to be a mixed race Jewish couple in New York in the early 90s was complicated. And so because my parents, you know, both being Jewish but presenting outwardly as two different races in the 90s in the context of the Crown Heights riots, it made their lives overly complicated. And so they tried to look for greener pastures out West and that’s how they ended up in San Diego.
So, you know, we were, we’re kind of distanced from that Jewish New York experience, from the Israeli experience of New York. But still, we had our identity very strong in the home. And that was really the basis for really shaping my consciousness about everything. How I see identities as being creolized, constantly interacting with each other, diffusing into each other, and borrowing from each other. These are things that were very seamless in the household. And they’re lessons that I took with me as I went on my journey of being a student and becoming an activist over time.
I’ll just give a little example. In previous life, the life that I’m describing in San Diego, I was a football player. And my dream was to get to the NFL somehow, but combining that with academic rigor. And so I got a scholarship and I went to go play college at Willamette University in Oregon. And while I was there, it was important for me that there would be some Jews there. But I realized very quickly when I got there, that there were few Jews, but there were zero Israelis. And I felt very isolated, even from the Jewish community there, that there was just culturally, we were just so different. And so I just did some searching on Google and I found that there was a local Palestinian coffee shop called Al-Aqsa Cafe. And for me, I didn’t think twice about going there. I’m like, those are my people. So I went there as an Israeli looking for community. I walked in, I strolled into Al-Aqsa Cafe.
I don’t remember what word I said, but I said something wrong and they’re like are you Israeli and I’m like yes, and they’re like, okay welcome. And I would be in that cafe sometimes twice a week sitting with them, you know, drinking coffee Telling jokes arguing politics and they would spend a lot of time teaching me Arabic.
And so whatever a few words I knew from my grandfather from there, was just like reading and writing and talking and chatting and joking. That was the basis I had. So, you know, in that period before I decided to make Aliyah, to move to Israel, I kind of had this very strong basis of not just an Israeli identity that’s like rooted in Hebrew language and culture, but also, and this meeting between East and West, but also a deep relationship and feeling of connection and affinity to to Palestinians, to Arabs in general, to Muslims in general, and that really played a strong role in guiding the decisions that I made once I made Aliyah.
Noam: It’s so, okay, mean, amazing. There’s so much to talk about. So…The question I want to get to is something that I’ve found very interesting about your approach in general has been, Mijal and I, I can’t speak for Mijal on this one, but we just learned a term from a previous guest, Yehuda Sarna, called, she definitely knew it, sorry, I didn’t know it, called My Pal Al, Social Contact Theory.
Basically, when you get to know people a little bit differently, you’re able to talk in a much more intimate, real way. You’re able to have a very real conversation with them, and you actually start viewing them radically differently than if you never meet them. I’m interested in the question, I’m interested in the theory of my pal Al and social contact theory, when it’s in the context of you being a soldier, right? What has your experience been like in my pal Al and getting to know people on the other side? And a question that we in the Jewish world like to speak about often. And I want your pointed answers to these questions.
We normally talk about Israel being the most moral army in the world. Is that language we should be using? Should we not be using it? What do you think about this? What’s been your experiences in the world of my Pal-El with Palestinians? And how do you think about the question of Israel the most moral army in the world? And how should we be talking about?
Yirmiyahu: So I’ll start with the last part of the question and I’ll work back. So I think that while the language of Israel being the most moral army in the world can be really reassuring to us, and I think it is important for us to kind of put that as a goal, right? That despite the fact that we’re involved in an incredibly painful and complicated conflict, we should always strive to be moral in making decisions. Often it’s decisions between bad and worse decisions, right? And I think that that really is the reality, is that, you know, when you’re an army engaged in, you know, a hundred years basically, because this is in the start, just the founding of state of Israel, you know, hundred year bloody conflict, a bloody ethnic conflict, morality is a very hard thing to stay true to.
And I think that particularly we look at the context of Israeli military rule in the West Bank, it’s very difficult to look at that situation and be like, okay, this is the most moral it could possibly be. I’m like, okay, yeah, for what? Rule over a foreign civilian population? I mean, I guess, right? But these are not simple situations. It puts people into daily friction and contact that frankly soldiers, particularly combat soldiers, are not supposed to be in, right? This is why we have police and not just the Marines, you know, policing the population.
And yet, this is a situation that in many ways has been thrust upon Israeli society, has been thrust upon young men and women that don’t want to be doing this and are raised most often or often with really good humanistic values, values that love human beings, see them as equal, and then they’re put to the test. And that test is very, very challenging. And I can say that…
Mijal: I share with you your concerns about saying the most moral army in the world because of the reality on the ground. I’m going to add just one more concern. It’s funny, I love being a Jew and the Jewish people and Jewish tradition, but I don’t love… I have very complicated feelings about claiming that we are the most of anything. You know what I mean? I don’t want to hold up just to the most unique standards in the world, even as they have a strong feeling of a covenant with God. So there’s a contradiction there. putting my contradiction aside, what language do you use to describe if you use any other alternative language?
Yirmiyahu: I tend to avoid these types of maxims describing us as the most anything. I think that in many ways we can look at our behavior, whether it’s in this current war or previous wars or the day-to-day reality in East Jerusalem and the West Bank and say, you know what, we’re proud of this. Our young people, our commanders, our decision makers made decisions that other entities, other countries, other people putting that in that position wouldn’t do that. And I think that we can look at that with pride, but to a certain extent, right? Because if at some point you’re holding yourself to an impossible standard, then that’s not healthy for society either.
But yeah, and I think that on a personal level, the fact that I knew Al, that I knew the other side, that I had an intimate understanding of what was going on in their minds and in their homes, that made my job a lot more difficult. I have to say that. I have to be very clear about that.
Noam: What do you mean by more difficult?
Yirmiyahu: So I’ll just say it like this. Combat. The friction that you have between a military and a hostile entity, whether it’s other combatants or the population that is supporting them or that is ruled by them, is a very difficult situation. It’s very hard to measure those types of interactions with the moral yardstick of business as usual. It’s not the same thing as as the NYPD patrolling the streets of Brooklyn.
It’s something different. And in order to do that, particularly young people put in those situations, you have to create a certain type of cognitive dissonance and because you’re doing things that otherwise you wouldn’t do when you’re writing everyday life, right? You don’t just walk down the street and say hey you you look suspicious get up against the wall, right? But when you have when you have a legitimate suspicion that somebody could be coming and have a knife or a bomb or a gun, right, you have to do that in order to tell a grandpa or to tell you know a young man or whoever it is to do that you have to create some type of cognitive dissonance because otherwise it becomes really difficult to do these things.
And so, it’s a lot easier to do that if the enemy so called, or real or imagined is speaking a language that to you sounds like gibberish when you speak that language the murmurings right the those that was otherwise gibberish those sound like like those are real thoughts, those are real emotions you’re hearing, right? That woman walking down the street, know, all of a sudden the things she’s saying, it sounds like it could be your mother or your grandma or your aunt or your sister. It’s a different experience. And that’s the position that Arabic speakers in the army deal with, the Israeli army deal with, the Druze, the Bedouin, the Christians, and myself. And I would speak often to the people in my unit, because my unit was about 40% Arabic speakers, like Arabic native speakers from the home.
You know, like how do we deal with this? And everybody dealt with it in a different way. But that’s like the difficult part of it, the good side of it.
Noam: But but Yirmiyahu, you once told me a really interesting story that I cannot get out of my head. There was a lack of understanding of language that there was a Palestinian woman who, something happened to her car and she was being arrested by Israeli soldiers. Do you remember what I’m talking about?
Yirmiyahu: Yes, of course. So this was after October 7th. This was while I was on reserve duty. And we were stationed in a place that I won’t get into too much detail. And all of a sudden a car slammed very close to us and hit another car. And it seemed, in that split second, it looked like it was an attempted terrorist attack. It looked like a ramming attack. And the guys around me, and I was not the senior officer in the situation, so I was not supposed to be the person in control.
And so what happened was immediately, immediately, everybody sprang into action and there was very quickly a lot of intense violence to get the people out of the car and to fight, right? And I understood immediately that it’s not just screaming and yelling going on. I hear people speaking Arabic and I understand what’s going on and I hear that there are people in the car that are just as alarmed as the soldiers are and that’s not what you would expect to hear if it’s a terrorist attack.
And I quickly assessed the situation. I understood that we’re talking about a car accident, right? And in that car accident, there are not just adult men sitting in the front seat. There’s also women and children in the back that are freaked out. And the men in the front are also freaked out. And so before it escalated and got to a dangerous place, when I saw that the commanding officer wasn’t acting, wasn’t able to assess the situation properly. I basically told everybody, I screamed everybody to a halt. I started speaking directly to the Palestinians in the car in Arabic to understand what was going on. And then we kind of did, I gave the soldiers the job they needed to do, close the perimeter. We spoke to the people, I made sure that they understood that there was a misunderstanding and that this is a really intense time right now and there’s lots of terrorist attacks in these areas. And we avoided some…which could have ended terribly. And unfortunately, if you don’t have those tools, you don’t have the ability to do that, it could have ended in a completely different way, and that’s tragic.
Noam: Fascinating.
Mijal: know, Yirmiyahu, what you’re sharing, I mean, it’s unusual and it’s difficult from two perspectives. I’ll say, first of all, I think most from like a US perspective, most pro-Israel and Zionist Jews, we have very little to no access to Palestinians. And I mean, here like real Palestinians on the ground, not, you know, like not the people who end up representing them, you know what I mean, on social media or the like.
And it’s also just, just name it, it’s really hard. I’ve been having conversations with a different friend of mine about the human capacity for empathy. Like how, whether like from a completely human perspective, we can have empathy for everybody or whether, you know, or whether at some point it’s like, can’t, I cannot see everything everywhere and feel everything for everybody and, stand up for my people. So I’m just reflecting on that.
I know it’s a tangent from what Noam asked you, but just for our listeners, could you share like one or two things that you think would be good for American Jews to know about the Palestinian experience right now? I know that’s like a very big loaded question, you know, and that you’re also not Palestinian, but from where you’re sitting.
Yirmiyahu: I would emphasize again, I know you just said it, that I’m not Palestinian, so it’s very difficult for me to speak.
Mijal: Yeah. Yeah. And we hope to get guests who are, we’re, you we’re working on that, but I think it’s good just to get your perspective, what you’ve learned.
Yirmiyahu: Yeah, I would say a few things.
Noam: Yirmiyahu, before you answer that, one funny thing about that, when I show people your videos, they always ask me which, they don’t know you, they’re like, which one is Yirmiyahu? Is he the Palestinian? Is he an Israeli? They have no idea. And it’s very interesting to see their reaction. They have no idea what’s going on.
Yirmiyahu: I think you’ll get a kick out of the fact that that’s one of the number one direct messages I get both on TikTok and Instagram from Palestinians and Jews. Israelis asking me, are you Arab? And then Palestinians asking me, are you actually Jewish? There’s an assumption for many Palestinians that watch my videos and the majority of my following on TikTok is Palestinian. The assumption is that for many of them is that, this is just like, a Palestinian that either converted to Judaism or, you know, somehow like grew up in a mixed family, like he has one parent that’s Palestinian, one that’s Jewish, right? I get a lot of mixed responses and assumptions about my identity.
It’s so, I’ve been in situations where I’ve been in a Palestinian village and I have my kippah on and then they’re still asking me, are you Jewish? After talking for like 20, 30 minutes, because there’s an assumption and it’s based in reality that if somebody is speaking our dialect of Arabic like this and understands us in the way that he’s communicating, like, you know, the mannerisms and like the things that I choose to emphasize, you know, there’s an assumption that an Israeli Jew cannot be that, right? There’s something else going on there. And it really is, it’s a testimony to the fact that there has been this, you know, kind of self-segregation before even walls were erected and checkpoints that has really made us so that we live in two completely different realities in this tiny little sliver of land.
Mijal: By the way, tangent—
Noam: I tangented your tangent, Mijal. Now you’re going to tangent my tangent.
Mijal: I, yeah, I, okay, I’ll say this quickly. Sorry, my children are growing up learning Hebrew in a school that emphasizes old Syrian pronunciation. So when they speak Hebrew, I have a lot of ambivalent feelings about it because they speak in a way that I’m like, I want them to one day want to move to Israel. And I’m like, I don’t know if you will, if you don’t feel comfortable talking to all of your friends there. I know, but they say the head, you know, the eyeing like it’s all very like it like when my husband and I when we’re in Israel, like people people get confused by him because like he’s we were at like the Israel Museum a couple of years ago looking for an exhibit on Aleppo. And my husband’s like.
And people are just like looking at him, where’s Aleppo, like in this very Arabic accent. And I’m just like laughing. But Yirmiyahu, going back to my question about what are one or two things that you’ve learned from your interactions with Palestinians that is important for American Jews to hear right now, especially with all of this scarcity of empathy that is alive in the air?
Yirmiyahu: So a couple quick things. First I would say that, and I would start with Arab citizens of Israel, that kind of exist on the spectrum between identifying fully as Israeli and identifying fully as Palestinian. And one of the surveys that really stood out to me was that in the immediate aftermath of October 7th, Arab citizens of Israel on the one hand felt unprecedentedly connected to Israeli society and even committed to the stated goals of the war. Partially because they also suffered on October 7, just like their Jewish-Israeli counterparts.
At the same time, there were super high levels of fear as to what their Jewish neighbors might do to them in the future because of this feeling that they’re kind of this fifth column. And I think that speaks a lot to this lack of security that many Palestinians feel. This idea of helplessness, of an ongoing nightmare of dispossession that Palestinians have been experiencing. that’s not to speak to who’s responsible because you have to put aside for a second the political argument about this, the political side of this Palestinian experience because these are people, are human beings, have communities and they have villages and have cities and they have schools and they have aspirations and some of those aspirations are political and some of them are just like, hey, we want the same types of protections and securities that anybody deserves to have and that doesn’t, that’s not to say that everybody is inherently, this is again, this is, when I say that, some people would be like, no, but there are important differences, cultural differences, yes, are important, cultural differences, need to be acknowledged, they need to be understood. But at the same time, you can’t detach the Palestinian experience from the insecurity and the lack of, and really the homelessness that has defined the Palestinian experience for the last, I would say more than 70 years, the last 100 years.
Mijal: Now, how does that affect you said that like I didn’t realize your biggest audience on TikTok were Palestinians.
Yirmiyahu: So first I think it’s important to mention that I really it was an accident that I got into this space at all. For so long I was like social media like such a waste of time like, you know. What is it other than just, you know, the the endless pursuit of views and likes? And and this is kind of empty field, in terms of, empty of content and value.
But I realized that the work that I was already doing so when I got out of the military my mandatory service I almost immediately got in, I almost immediately got involved in grassroots, you know, conversation circles between Israelis and Palestinians, particularly those who live in the West Bank and in Jerusalem. And originally my job in these meetings was just to translate, like literally, Arabic to Hebrew, Hebrew to Arabic, and then very quickly I realized that I was engaging in lot more than that, that I was really translating narratives. So, you know, it’s one thing to translate a word literally, but if you don’t even understand what that word means and like the cultural resonance of that word, then you don’t really understand what the person is saying. I realized that I had to make my myself into almost a bridge between these different narratives in order for people to actually, you know, solve basic things like, you how do we figure out like these land disputes between who can graze where and who can build where to the larger issues of like, what does it mean for a Jewish state to exist or a Palestinian state to exist, you know, alongside a Jewish state or not, right?
And so in May, 2021, like towards the end of that war, a lot of my friends were really pushing me to like make some videos. And I started very slowly. I made one video and I put it on TikTok. And the reason why I said, okay, this is something to pay attention to is because I realized how viral it went in Palestinian spaces. And I saw immediately that there was this thirst on the Palestinian street to really engage with an authentic expression of Jewish identity and aspiration in this land. Because to the extent that they had any interactions with Israeli Jews, it was the Israeli Jews that are constantly apologizing, if I’m going to be frank, for their identity, for their existence in this land. Or it was just super, super extremist Jews that they would see fighting them on some hilltop next to Bethlehem or a soldier. And that’s not a real conversation.
And so what I presented to them was an opportunity to really engage with the Israeli identity and narrative. And that’s what I’m still doing. And it’s an interesting process. It’s constantly challenging, because I’m consistently putting myself in a position to, to wrestle with these very painful and complicated ideas of Jewish return to a land that had people living in it, of a Jewish state and Jewish sovereignty in a region that is surrounded by only Arab and Islamic sovereignty, and wrestling with the very real questions about human rights and the national aspirations of Palestinians in a land that I see as sacred, right?
And so it’s not just challenging for the people that I’m in discussion with, that I’m speaking to. It’s also challenging for me and I think that that’s important, right? Because this, you know, if the essence of Israel is to wrestle with the good, with God, with truth, then that’s something we need to be engaged in because, you know, I have a firm belief that as much as I’m rooted and, you know, grounded in my identity and what I see to be true, I also completely embrace the fact that there are things that I don’t know right now that I will discover to be true in the future and I think it will be a product. of this type of pursuit of education through dialogue.
Noam: How do you change people’s minds, Yirmiyahu?
Yirmiyahu: you have to speak to their soul, right? And that sounds kind of like esoteric, but I think it’s like a practical skill that you develop. You gotta understand who people are, right? What makes them tick? What speaks to them? What kind of music speaks to them, right? What kind of poetry, know, literal and figurative, right? Like causes them to get emotional with you. And when you know that, when you understand that, you can actually speak to them in an effective way.
Not argue with them, not debate them, but really speak to them. And again, it’s not always going to be the person, this is kind of the strength of social media by the way, it’s not always gonna be the person in front of you that’s able to hear what you’re saying and reconsider at the very least their own held assumptions. It’s the thousands or millions of people that may see that after. So there’s been, I’ve had a video that, you know, that have gone viral where the person who’s speaking to me is like not budging at all. At least not in the way that they’re presenting themselves, right? It could be there’s something going on behind the scenes, you know, in their mind and in their heart that I’m not seeing. But for each one of those types of videos, I get thousands of direct messages from people that are like, you know what? You changed something. You know, or at least you’ve caused me to reconsider. Or maybe now I have some questions for Jews that I didn’t have before. And I think that’s enough.
Noam: Yeah, I think it’s interesting. I think it’s really interesting because one of the things I like to say is while those, there are many people out there who argue that facts don’t care about your feelings, there’s an equally true reality that feelings don’t care about your facts. And that’s a really fascinating thing to figure out. And what you’re talking about is you’re doing soul talk with people. It’s hearing from them, talking to them and being culturally attuned to them and whomever the them is. It could be Israelis, could be Jews, could be Palestinians, could be whomever. But it’s actually speaking to them, not speaking from the here are the facts, here’s the logic and somehow you’re gonna change your mind based on that. That’s what it sounds like. And you recently just, I saw on one of your videos, you actually, on the video, the person, I didn’t see it coming. They’re like, I changed my mind, something you had just said to them. You went heart to heart, you went soul to soul with them.
Yirmiyahu: Look, a lot of it is telling the narrative, the Israeli narrative, the Jewish narrative, the Zionist narrative, in a way that doesn’t present it as inherently at the expense of the Palestinian narrative. And I think that that’s far too often what we’re used to hearing, right?
And that’s true, like the inverse is also true. We as Israelis are only often, only familiar with a Palestinian narrative that exists at the expense of our own right and so when I like almost like assuring and I think that’s what you saw in that video I’m like, I’m like wait wait hold up listen to what I’m saying What I’m explaining what I’m saying is that this fact about Jewish existence in the land doesn’t come at the expense of your understanding of Palestinian Arab existence in land and the second that’s able to resonate then it could have the it have the desired effect of actually, you know, shifting someone a little bit.
It’s the importance of understanding the culture of the other when you’re coming into conversation with them isn’t just relevant to Palestinians, right? So somebody could listen to this and they could maybe get maybe they misconstrue it into some type of orientalist argument that’s like you can’t communicate with the the other unless you understand the culture that right It’s not that at all, right? I had a video that that also went viral completely different conversation with a Haredi woman an ultra-orthodox Jewish woman. We were talking about Whether or not Haredi Jews should be drafted, Haredi men should be drafted into the military. And in that conversation with her, it’s very clear that I’m speaking to her in her language, right? Because otherwise there’s no point of having a conversation because we’re now just speaking past each other. We were speaking the language of Torah. And in order for me to even have any type of ability to have an influence on her or people that think like her, I need to speak the language of Haredi Jews. Otherwise, we’re not going to be able to understand each other. We’re definitely not going be able to convince each other of anything.
Mijal: And I’ll just add, you need to understand your own language and culture as well. Like I find this, there’s a lot of scholarship that talks about how, as a quick example, most scholarship on psychology is produced by research done on young American college students. And then we assume that the findings are universal, but they actually reflect a very, very like specific culture. I guess I’m saying like even in let’s say like, liberal America, we forget that we have our own culture that needs to be understood in terms of our own assumptions and language and how it defines us.
Yirmiyahu: Absolutely.
Noam: What do people get wrong about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?
Yirmiyahu: I think it’s that we try to force the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into the very familiar and now dominant narrative of settler and native, right, as colonizer and colonized. And that’s certainly true in the ways that Israel and Zionism and Israeli Jews are demonized by the anti-Israel crowd. And I think that in certain ways it’s been internalized and it’s been flipped in a way. And now Palestinians, Arabs in the land are being described by some people in our community as being foreign invaders and we Jews are the only indigenous people. And the reality is far more complex. Israeli Jewish and Palestinian Arab identity are in so many ways connected to each other in ways that make many of us uncomfortable but really fascinate me and I think should fascinate everybody because—
Noam: Like what?
Yirmiyahu: Like for example, the fact that the olive harvest that just is finished in this land, right? Our ancestors were engaged in that olive harvest, right? These are things that are discussed in detail in our texts. Like why are we making reference to things that being a k’zait, right? It’s like, why is that the measurement? Like an olive, it’s because the olive is such a central or was for our ancestors when they were living in this land as an organic part of this land, a central motif.
Noam: Like an olive in English.
Yirmiyahu: And if you spend two minutes in any Palestinian home, you realize how dominant the olive and olive oil is in there. Rhat’s just like perhaps, maybe that’s a superficial example, but there are so many. Like our cultures are saturated with these kind of cross pollinations and, you know, even something more modern, like our Israeli Hebrew is inflected with not just Arabic of the languages that Jews spoke, you know, in North Africa and throughout the Middle East, but also specifically Palestinian Arabic.
And the same thing can be said about Palestinian Arabic today and the ways that Hebrew has kind of came in there and had an influence and an impact. And so it just speaks to the fact that we really are peoples of the land. Whether we like it or not, whether it was Providence or just an accident of history, we are peoples of the land. And the geography of this place, the topography of this place, forces us to be in contact with each other whether we like it or not. So we might as well figure out a way to like it.
Mijal: Beautiful. Thank you so much, Yirmiyahu. I’ve been taking notes on this side of new concepts and new ideas that I’m taking with me. I’m thinking a lot about what it means to speak to the soul. So thank you so much. Really appreciate it.
Yirmiyahu: Thank you. This was wonderful.
Noam: I have no idea if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be solved, but I deeply believe that if it will be solved, it will be with people like you. So thanks for joining us.
Yirmiyahu: Amen. Thank you so much.