True Jew

The Blueprint

Episode three starts with a story. Julia’s first day working at a company with Palestinian colleagues. Being pulled aside and told not to mention that she was Jewish. Because of what “Jewish” has come to mean in a world where identity, state power, and violence have been fused together. From there, we zoom out. This episode is about origins. Zionism. The founding of Israel. The role of the United States. And the uncomfortable reality that what many of us were taught as a purely Jewish story is also deeply tied to Christian theology, British imperial strategy, and Cold War politics. We talk about Theodor Herzl and the early vision of a Jewish state, not just as refuge, but as a project shaped through the logic of empire. We look at how that vision collided with people already living there, and how displacement was not an accident. It was part of the design. We also turn inward. What does it mean to grow up Jewish, steeped in stories of survival, persecution, and near-erasure? What does that do to how we understand safety and threat? What does it make harder to see? The moral core of Judaism calls for care, dignity, and responsibility for others. And yet the systems built in its name are often rooted in control, hierarchy, and exclusion. Then there is the U.S. We look more closely at the relationship between the United States and Israel as one of strategy, military power, and global control. And we name that real critiques of Israel and U.S. policy are getting tangled up with antisemitic conspiracy thinking. So what are we left with? A recognition that Jewish safety cannot exist on its own, or at the expense of someone else. And a question that sits underneath all of it. If the history and the “how” of this whole thing is a blueprint, what do we do now? Sourced Audio Clips: Joe Biden, https://www.c-span.org/clip/senate-highlight/user-clip-joe-biden-were-there-not-an-israel-the-usa-would-have-to-invent-an-israel-to-protect-her-interest-in-the-region/4962369 [https://www.c-span.org/clip/senate-highlight/user-clip-joe-biden-were-there-not-an-israel-the-usa-would-have-to-invent-an-israel-to-protect-her-interest-in-the-region/4962369] President Richard Nixon, https://www.youtube.com/shorts/GUm74GXbN28 [https://www.youtube.com/shorts/GUm74GXbN28] Fannie Lou Hamer, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsxK0ODR6bU [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsxK0ODR6bU] All other audio is original.

We are taught that we are always unsafe.

Episode two of True Jew asks a question that feels simple: What does Jewish safety actually mean? We talk about fear. The kind that lives in our bodies. The kind that gets fed to us daily. The kind that gets weaponized. We’re joined by Nina Mehta, community educator and co-director of PARCEO [https://parceo.org/](alongside the wonderful Donna Nevel), and Nora Lester Murad, writer, organizer, force behind Drop the ADL from Schools [https://www.droptheadlfromschools.org/], and someone who spent more than a decade raising her children in the West Bank under occupation. Together, we examine how Jewish history has been narrated to us, often as an endless chain of persecution, and what that does to our sense of self, and our sense of threat. If we are taught that we are always unsafe, what happens next? We dig into the role of institutions like the ADL and the IHRA definition of antisemitism, and how Jewish fear is being conflated with unconditional support for Israel. We ask hard questions about white nationalism, Christian Zionism, U.S. foreign policy, surveillance, and who actually benefits when Jewish identity gets fused to state power. We also sit with something uncomfortable: the difference between being challenged and being endangered. Between discomfort and danger. Between feeling scared and being under existential threat. Because if our safety is built on someone else’s dispossession, that’s not safety. And if we’re going to talk about fear, we have to be brave enough to talk about who is actually living without shelter, without food, without freedom.

So… What is this?

Hey, I’m Julia. My brother Samuel and I made a podcast together. It’s something for us, for our family and friends, and hopefully for you, too. This is True Jew. The name is a bit of a joke. There is no one way to be Jewish, and everyone is welcome at the table. If this trailer does its job, you won’t just know what we’re doing. You’ll get a vibe for why we are doing it.

I don’t want to be on your podcast.

“I Don’t Want to Be on Your Podcast” is an invitation into the world of True Jew. The tone. The questions. The friction. The love. It is a sampler of what this whole shebang is about. We talk about identity. We gather around a big family dinner table and let the microphones roll. You will hear from our parents and from family friends, in moments that are tender, awkward, funny, and raw. We listen to the son of Holocaust survivors wrestle out loud with the wildness and the pain of seeing survivors of genocide perpetuate genocide. We name the systems and the powers that be, the tiny fraction of people who shape our world while claiming to speak for the rest of us, and we call them what they are, moral monsters. This episode does not offer clean answers. It sets the stakes. It shows you how we talk, what we care about, and why this podcast exists at all.