transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] 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. Thank you so much for sponsoring. So incredible. Thank you, thank you, thank you. If you want to sponsor an episode of Unpacking Israeli History, or if you just want to say, alo, get at me, at noam.unpacked.media. Before we start, as always, check us out on Instagram, on TikTok, on YouTube, all those 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. We are home. In case the name Unpacking Israeli History doesn't give it away, this is a history podcast. It's not a current affairs podcast. I generally don't like to wait too much into the politics and the 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 Albert 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 are talking millions of people, young people especially, who consume his content on Twitch, on YouTube, across social media. He is, by any measure, by any measure, a significant voice in American political culture. And in pop culture, frankly. 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 gray hair. Really good hair. I'm aware that for most people, my Jufro is far less convincing. This thing. And those suits? Real professorial chic. Seriously, Hasan, I don't think I'll be taking history lessons from you anytime soon, but I would love to know who your stylist is. Like, I'm into it fully. It's awesome. Anyway, a couple weeks ago, he sat down with Pod Save America, which is one of the most popular podcasts in the world. A liberal load star hosted by former president Barack Obama staffers that consistently ranks among the top 10 most listened to podcasts in the world. And I am a listener of that podcast. So this wasn't some random rant on a live stream 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 what this isn't, what I'm doing here. This is not a point by point rebuttal of everything Hasan Piker said. I'm not going to go through his comments on Hamas or his take on the March of Return or relitigate the 1948 war or 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. Does anyone go to the show notes? I have no idea. But go to the show notes. It's there. Listen. It's important. Listen to the whole story there. 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'm 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. 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, and conflict that feels overwhelming and opaque. I respect that search so much though, even when I find the answer is deeply problematic. So I'm not going after Hasan Piker. I know social media loves that. I know social media loves that fight like that rage bait. We're not doing that here. 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 Piker 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.

Speaker 2:
[05:53] But it was just ethnic cleansing from the start.

Speaker 1:
[05:57] 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.

Speaker 2:
[06:19] 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.

Speaker 1:
[07:17] 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, and Einstein, that person who's a moral figure, who embodies intellect and conscience in one single human being, agrees with me. It's a powerful rhetorical move. And I want to explain exactly why it's also, in critical ways, either deeply ignorant or deeply misleading, and I'm genuinely not sure which. So hear me out. 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, pouring 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. That's the compelling part, right? Einstein did have real reservations about aspects of Zionist politics. That's facts. He was deeply troubled. Einstein 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 on to 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 bi-national 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 Weitzman, the head of the World Zionist Organization, on a fundraising tour. He raised money for the Hebrew University across the United States. 20,000 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, Einstein visited mandatory Palestine and delivered one of the inaugural lectures at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He spoke a bit clumsily and heavily German accented Hebrew. He wrote afterwards that his heart was 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 Javar Halal 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 Weissman on becoming the country's first president. In 1951, he hosted David Ben-Gurion, Israel's founding prime minister at his home in Princeton. In 1952, when Weissman 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 could explain the cosmos, but I do not want to chair the meeting or, I don't know, talk to people like that. That's not my thing. He also said explicitly that he was, quote, deeply moved by the offer from our state of Israel. And one final striking detail. At the time of his death in April of 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 of 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 earlier tentative, priest statehood position, a preference for 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 my mind for this. Hear me out. 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 Piker did with Albert 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 into a thing. But the idea is that you take someone's position at one point in time, one moment, you freeze them there, you use what they said to prove your argument. 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. By the way, my Zionism is complex. Einstein was not an uncritical cheerleader of the Jewish state. By the way, I'm not an uncritical cheerleader of the Jewish state. Yair Rosenberg puts it well. Einstein wasn't an unapologetic Israel writer, 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 anything that sounds like 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. What is actually going on here? Now, at this point, I think there are two broad possibilities for what's going on. And like I said earlier, I'm genuinely not sure which is true, and I'm not sure Piker himself knows which is true. But let's walk through them together. Possibility number one, the Dunning-Kruger effect. You might have heard this term I cited 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 overconfident. The funny thing about this is that the less you actually know about something, often the more confident you tend to feel about it. Our brains can be these 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 the subject, right? He overindexes on confidence. 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 is 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 story that undermine his argument. In terms of whether Hasan Piker is falling into the Hasan and 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 Piker 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 Hagana, attacked in our village, killing 107 people, including many women and children. And this is around 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 four days later, April 13th, 1948. A convoy of doctors, nurses, students, faculty members, and Haganah fighters were 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 what about, or to say your atrocity cancels my atrocity and vice versa. 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 a prop for your beliefs, and as ammunition for your political arguments, as pure propaganda. This is the thing that drives me genuinely crazy. Because Piker himself criticizes pro-Israel, quote, Hasbara. You know that term, Israel advocacy, basically PR for Israel, for doing exactly this, for being selective, for being one-sided, for telling a reductive story. Listen, you know me, I have criticism about that stuff also. So, sure, be critical about a one-sided approach, a reductive story. I get it. It's a real and fair critique of a lot of the way people learn about Israel. Sure. But then he goes and does the exact same thing, the exact same thing, but from the other direction. That is not history. That is not serving the cause of education or understanding. Unpacking Israeli History, sorry to speak meta, but I want to speak to you as my audience, as my community. We try to do something different, whether the six-day war or Deir Yassin or settlements or peace negotiations. I try, we try to show the good, the bad, and the ugly. We try and I won't claim we're always succeeded to hold the full picture. And the full picture is always more complicated, less viral, 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 towards 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'm not comparing their politics. I'm not suggesting moral equivalents between their positions. I'm not saying any of that. But here's what I'm saying. Both speak with enormous confidence, reach massive audiences, and use historical fragments selectively to construct emotionally satisfying narratives for those audiences. That's their goal. They want to get their audiences going. Both of them have moved from the fringes of online culture toward the mainstream. Fuentes appeared on Taco Carl's Den. Piker appeared on Pod Save America. And both of them, in very different directions, are shaping how millions of young Americans, millions, millions, understand Jewish history and Zionism, and the broader story of the Jewish story. 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 it's not just young people, it's all of us. All of us. And that's what I want to change. Even if our audience is less massive and our content is less clickable and clipable, 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, whatever the hour is. 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 the game. I've said that a hundred times, but the method matters. Our method is to tell the story as fully, credibly and completely 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 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 Kibyeh, on Sabra and Shatila, on the internal contradictions and the 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 is a concept in the Jewish tradition in the Mishnah, Daam al-Hashiv le-Apikar, Noah to respond to the quote unquote heretic. The great rabbi known as 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's commanding you to know. Because if the person attacking your story understands it better than you do, then you're 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 us explore our stories, to know our stories. And yes, I know that 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 Peace or to dig into Einstein's actual words or maybe even to 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 this a lot, a lot, a lot. And here's where I land. First, in Hebrew, Hasur Lehit Yaesh, right? It's forbidden to despair. That's an idea from the great Hasidic leader, Rabbi Nachman. Rabbi Nachman of Breslov. You can't, you can't give up. We don't, I don't give up. We don't give up in life. And secondly, the goal of this podcast that involves serious history, education isn't to win a viral war. I'm not going to outpiker 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? I do believe it matters because the listener who finishes this episode knows the Einstein story now. They know what's been left out. They can't unknow it. They can't unring the bell. The next time they hear Hasan Piker or anyone else invoke Einstein or Deir Yassin purely as a cudgel, they'll hear it differently. That is everything. That's the story of Hasan Piker, Einstein, The Problem of Viral History. Here are your five fast facts. Number 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. Number two, Piker cited Einstein's earlier position, his pre-state preference for a bi-national solution, as his settled final verdict when it was only an opening bid. Historical figures should not get frozen in time. Their views changed when reality changes. Number three, Einstein held complex views on Israel and real criticisms of right-wing Zionism. The Irgun, Menachem Begin, Jewish militancy, real serious criticisms. Four, either Piker didn't know the full Einstein story or he did and he chose to omit it. Dunning-Kruger or something more deliberate. Either way, we, the audience, gets a distorted picture. And number 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 best 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, right? 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 our 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 are so sure of. That kind of maturity matters. For Jewish people 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 form. And maybe that is the broader plea I want to make here. Learn history seriously. Go out and learn. Tse u'lamad. I want to go back to something I said at the very beginning of this podcast. Not this episode, but this podcast. Back when we had seasons, back when it wasn't every single week, back in season one, episode five, the Deir Yassin episode. I was a junior at Yeshiva University, history major, years of Jewish education under my belt, self-described Zionist. 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. I said, I'm not proud of this, 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. 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. 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 their 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. Kids, stay away from the comment section, seriously. 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 help 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 is curious about Einstein's story. Send it to someone who thinks they know the history but maybe hasn't heard the whole thing. As always, I love hearing from you, so email me at noam at unpacked.media. This episode was produced by Rifki Stern. Our team for this episode includes Simon Apfel, Rob Pera, and Ari Schloch. I'm your host, Noam Weissman. Thanks for being here. See you next week.