By
Oliver Holmes
29 Jul 2020
Seth Rogen made the comments when talking on Marc Maron’s podcast to
promote his new film, An American Pickle. Photograph: Hopper Stone/AP
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Seth Rogen
has said he was “fed a huge amount of lies about Israel” as a young Jewish
person, stoking controversy around the country’s sometimes fraught relationship
with many North American Jews.
The
Canadian-US actor, who attended Jewish camp and whose parents met on a kibbutz
in Israel, said the fact that the Jewish state was created on land where
Palestinians were living had always been omitted.
“[As] a
Jewish person I was fed a huge amount of lies about Israel my entire life,”
Rogen told the comedian and actor Marc Maron in an episode of Maron’s WTF
podcast.
“They never
tell you that, ‘Oh, by the way, there were people there’. They make it seem
like it was just like sitting there, like the fucking door’s open.”
More than
700,000 Palestinians were driven out of their homes or fled fighting in the
1948 war that led to Israel’s creation. Today, those families and their
descendants make up around 5.6 million refugees.
Rogen and
Maron, who is also Jewish, were speaking to promote Rogen’s new comedy, An
American Pickle, which tells the story of a Jewish immigrant from the 1920s who
falls into a vat of brine and wakes up in modern-day Brooklyn.
The pair
talked and joked at length about Israel and also spoke about antisemitism,
which Rogen said remains pervasive and prevalent.
“I remember
my dad frankly telling me, ‘People hate Jews. Just be aware of that. They just
do.’ And it’s honestly something that I am so glad was instilled in me from a
young age. Because if it wasn’t, I would constantly be shocked at how much
motherfuckers hate Jews.”
Zionists
have pointed to the Holocaust and centuries of bloody antisemitism as evidence
that Jews will never be safe without a state. Rogen, however, argued, “you
don’t keep something you’re trying to preserve all in one place”.
Asked if he
would ever go to live in Israel, Rogen said no. Maron replied: “I’m the same
way, and we’re gonna piss off a bunch of Jews.”
Lahav
Harkov, a senior contributing editor to the Jerusalem Post newspaper,
criticised Rogen’s comments on Twitter, saying they were “made from a position
of really, really great privilege – and ignorance - if he can’t understand why
Israel makes sense to millions of Jews around the world”.
Among
Zionists, there is anxiety that North American Jews, who could possibly outnumber
Israeli Jews, are becoming less supportive of the Jewish state, even as surveys
often show the opposite.
The debate
has frequently reignited after high-profile figures, often Jewish, express
views that are highly critical of Israel.
Most
recently, Peter Beinart, a prominent Jewish American political commentator, was
both derided and lauded for commentaries in which he questioned whether he
could remain both a liberal and also support the Jewish state while millions of
Palestinians continued to be denied basic rights.
Original
Headline: Seth Rogen: 'I was fed a huge amount of lies about Israel'
Source: The Guardian, UK
URl: https://newageislam.com/islam-west/canadian-actor-seth-rogen-i/d/122499