Sneak Peek: Jon Polin answers questions from young Jewish adults

**Dan Senor** (0:00)
Over the past couple of years, Call Me Back has grown into something much bigger than we ever expected. A place for clarity, context and honest conversations, at a time when those things can seem hard to find. That's what Ark Media is all about, building a truly independent voice, which means no one shaping what we say or how we say it.
To help support our rapidly expanding operations, we created Inside Call Me Back, our members only feed. If Call Me Back has been meaningful to you, and you want to be part of what we're building, I hope you'll join us. You can subscribe at arkmedia.org or through the link in the show notes. And to our insiders, thank you.

**Jon Polin** (0:46)
You are listening to an Ark Media podcast.

**Dan Senor** (0:58)
Welcome to Inside Call Me Back, our members-only edition where we open the door and let you shape the conversation. Today we have a special episode. Over the past few months, we have gotten some very personal and moving questions, most of them coming from our younger listeners. It wasn't clear which one of us should take them on, but then I remembered an event I was at with Jon Polin at the Heschel School in New York, and he just clicked with them with a lot of these teenagers, these young Jews in the diaspora. So I thought, why not have Jon come on Inside Call Me Back to answer questions coming from young adults and teenagers. So with that, Jon, welcome to Inside Call Me Back.

**Jon Polin** (1:38)
Thank you, Dan and to the whole Call Me Back community. I say this at the risk of offending perhaps some of your listener-based, but you mentioned at the Heschel event in New York, and I do always say, Rachel and I do a lot of speaking in Israel in the diaspora to all kinds of audiences. It's all supportive and we appreciate it, but we particularly get energized when we talk to young people. So that conversation in Heschel was one of numerous high school conversations we've had and we love it. We love talking to the younger people. Yeah.

**Dan Senor** (2:08)
And the energy between you and them, like just watching all these students engage with you guys was very moving. Very inspiring and is especially nice, as you know, which I didn't fully appreciate at the time was you and Rachel insisting that not only the questions, obviously the questions were going to come from the students and the audience, but that the people moderating the conversations with you at these high school events should not be teachers or faculty or staff, it should be students.

**Jon Polin** (2:34)
I think there's been talk over the last couple of years about the younger people and condescending way of the TikTok generation and short attention span and gross generalizations. Maybe some of it's true, but I got to tell you, in our meetings with thousands at this point of young people, high school kids, I have been nothing but impressed by their ability to carry a conversation, to sit and moderate with people, Rachel and me, who are tough. We are sensitive and we bring out sensitivity in people, and I've seen young people carry it with tremendous maturity, so we look forward to doing more of that.

**Dan Senor** (3:12)
We get questions a lot from young people, so we figured given how much you connected with them, this would be the perfect conversation to put a bunch of those questions forward to you. So we're gonna get right into them, and they're from all over the place. So the first question, Jon, is from Ben from Chicago, who writes, hi, Call Me Back team, I'm new to the podcast, so sorry if you've already talked about this before. I'm 17 years old, I'm a Zionist, and I'm really proud of being Jewish, but there's something I've been struggling with.
There are settlers, meaning in Israel, who commit really extreme violence against innocent Palestinians, sometimes even murder. They see themselves and are often seen by others as among the most committed Zionists in Israel. And at this point, it happens often enough that I have a hard time believing it's just a few crazy people or quote unquote bad apples. So I guess my question is this, how is their Zionism different from mine, meaning from Ben's? I believe in Israel and in the Jewish people living in a country, but I feel embarrassed and honestly kind of ashamed when people do these things and call it Zionism too. How am I supposed to understand the difference between their Zionism and mine?

**Jon Polin** (4:19)