Listening to Marc Maron's podcast and pondering why (some) American Jews, who for the most part have lived in relative safety, are so obsessed with personal safety.

Also the fascination with fascism and the fear of it seem at odds with the relative apathy to political activism.

Meanwhile he gives up on his father for watching OAN; my dad showed me the Plandemic video before it trended and I shut it down.

You can engage or retreat but both choices have consequences.

It's almost as bad as hearing him complain about capitalism then transitioning to *sponsored* content.

How do people listen to podcasts. Seriously.

Ok, if you do choose to listen to this, it is truly divine that around the 18-minute mark they begin to fetishize Israelis.

If they called any other people "leathery" and "tough" and "veiny" and portray them all as brutish ruffians. people would be up in arms.

Seth Rogen: "I haven't gotten along with an Israeli in a long time."
Marc Maron: "I don't think I ever got along with an Israeli."

And to think people keep blaming Israelis for why there's such a gap between the two largest Jewish communities in the world.

Seth goes on to explain it by way of the "psychotic" fresh-out-of-the-army counselors at his Jewish sleepaway camp.

I can't imagine harboring such resentment for a people based on such a limited sample size.

After discussing their resentment of the Jewish institutions that helped their development, Maron asks Rogen if his wife is Jewish. She is.

"I don't care that she's Jewish. I'd have been totally happy marrying a non-Jewish person, it's totally coincidental."

Maron responds with his experience having been married to both.

"I used to do a joke about it. The only problem with marrying a Jew is that means everything you hated about going home is now in your house."

Maron: "Could you imagine living in Israel? Would you ever live in Israel?"
Rogen: NO!
*laughing*
Maron: "I'm the same way and we're gonna piss off a lot of Jews."

Rogen can't imagine living in Israel: "At best you're convincing yourself that you are far enough away from a major conflict without having to worry about it."

Rogen lives in a multimillion-dollar mansion miles away from Latinx and Black communities being ravaged by COVID.

When people are shocked that Hollywood actors come off as detached from reality, this is why.

Rogen truly thinks Israel is in a major conflict even though more people are killed from gun violence EVERY YEAR in America than in decades of the Israeli-Arab conflict.

Rogen: "If it's for religious reasons, I don't agree with it because I think religion is silly."

Thanks, bud, love to know that you have no problem milking the culture for your own benefit with no regard or respect for the people still practicing the religion it comes from.

Rogen: "If it's for the preservation of the Jewish people, it makes no sense. Because, again, you don't keep something you're trying to preserve all in one place, especially when that place has proven to be volatile."

How do you even argue with this logic?

Rogen: "As a Jewish person, I was fed a huge amount of lies about Israel my entire life."

Whose fault is that? I was also fed those lies when I was younger. I was IN the Israeli education system. But I sought out other sources.

I moved to America in sixth grade. The American history I was taught was also patriotically whitewashed. But, again, no one stopped me from reading Zinn.

No one *owes* you a deprogramming. It's on you.

Do these people not understand the concept of agency?

Maron: "I get frightened to talk about it. We're afraid of Jews."
*laughing*
Rogen: "I'm afraid of Jews. I'm a hundred percent afraid of Jews."

Is this a joke? You're talking about it, with no fear of repercussions, on one of the most popular podcasts in America.

This is painful.

They keep equating being Jewish with being old and it is exhausting. There are young Jews redefining what it means to be Jewish but you'd never know it from listening to these two "famous Jews" complaining.

Rogen is now claiming DNA tests can tell if people are Jewish.

Rogen: "Being Jewish is inextractable from us. It is literally our DNA, our DNA comes back Jewish."

Rogen: "But being Jewish is not exclusive to... you don't have to believe in Judaism to be Jewish. Let's round down and say I believe zero of Judaism. I'm still Jewish. I can't help it, if my DNA comes back Jewish."

They're now talking about how wonderful the Jewish rites around death are and my poor, poor brain.

They just want to be able to pick and choose their Jewish traditions and, if they bothered to talk to anyone, they'd realize that's one of the best things about Judaism.

Rogen: "Israel is the thing that I was, that I look back on, and look at as maybe one of the things I was most misinformed about."

The refusal to take responsibility is exhausting. At some point, you become your own person and have the freedom to seek out dissenting views.

Rogen: "My parents actually always did instill, I remember my dad, I was very young, my dad very frankly telling me: people hate Jews. Be aware of that."

Moses help me.

Maron: "It's funny though, I can get mildly antisemitic with guys that are too Jewy. There are some people where I'm like you can turn it down a little bit. You're white. You're the reason."
Rogen: *laughing*

Aaron help me.

Their erasure of the trials and tribulations of FSU Jews, Mizrahi Jews, Ethiopian Jews, is also exhausting.

R: "I have friends from summer camp... and none of us are religious or do anything Jewish."
M: "But you have an understanding."
R: "But also not that long ago there was like 30 Jews on earth. If you go back like a disturbingly few generations we're all related to one another."

If you go back three generations, there were as many Jews alive as there are today. Rogen would know that if he picked up ANY book on Jewish history or demographics or even just stopped to think about the Shoah for more than a second.

R: "It's why we get sick, it's why we're riddled with disease."
M: "It seems like the Orthodox are a little tight. Their gene pool is so tight, they're actually producing Jews that don't even look like Jews. If they didn't have the get-up you wouldn't know they were Jewish."

Rogen: "They've mutated beyond Jew."
*laughing*
Rogen: "A whole new Jew."
Maron: "How do you feel about the Chasidim? What is your first reaction when you see them?"
Rogen: "Again, not doing us any favors."

Maron: "They *are* wizards. They're the only ones that understand certain things. You've got to be deemed worthy to understand it, but you also have to be stupid in every other way."

Maron: "They're ultimately a community in direct reaction to the Holocaust, and the only reason they're living the life they're living and reproducing as much as they are is specifically to make sure that the world is populated with very Jewish people."
Rogen: "To what end?"

This is incredibly insulting to Haredim and, yet again, entirely ahistorical.

Well, that was demoralizing.