Gen Zionist Taking the Fight for Israel to Harvard | Z3 Conference Bonus Episode
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If you don't know who you are, you're never going to be able to stand up for yourself. If you don't know who your people are, you'll never be able to stand up for your people. Understanding where you come from is the baseline toolkit, but it's a very strong and effective toolkit for teaching other people who you are. We cannot allow ourselves to be defined by our adversaries. On college campuses around the world, the bullies feel that this is their moment to assert their presence in the yard.

The threats, the violence, the intimidation, none of these are new. But in the moment after 10/7, they feel energized and emboldened to push Jewish students around. And a new generation of Jewish students are rising up to tell them that you can pick on the Jews, but the Jews are no longer easy pickings. The guests on stage today are some of those Jewish students and leaders of the Jewish tomorrow.

They understand that they are not just Gen Z, they are Gen Zionists. And that being a Zionist means standing up to the bullies. You don't let them push you around. You don't let them call you names. You don't let them make you be ashamed of who you are. You stand up for yourself. You stand up for each other. And you stand up for your Jewish brothers and sisters in need, wherever they may be. Breaking

Alissa, Charlie, Maya and Avi are four of the eight contributors who are here at the conference today of Young Zionist Voices.

I was too old to write a contribution at the grand old age of 33. So David, very kindly let me write the forward. And today we're going to have a conversation. We're going to catch up and take stock on what has happened over the last year and specifically what lessons we have learned about how to fight back, about how to fight back.

about how to stand up to the bullies and take control and take responsibility because, as we'll discuss, one of the most inspiring things that has happened since 10/7 has been the way that the Jewish community, and especially the young generation, have taken responsibility and not waited for other people to seize the gauntlet. They've seized it themselves and they are determined to drive a new agenda to take responsibility for our future.

So I'll let you each say in a word, introduce yourselves, and then let's get cracking with an interesting conversation. Alyssa. Hello, everybody. Alyssa Bernstein. I'm the Assistant Director of American Jewish Committee here in Los Angeles, Bay Area native. My bat mitzvah party was here, and I'm so excited for being here with all of you and thank all of you for being here today. Thank you.

Hi everyone, my name is Charlie Kovett. I'm a sophomore at Harvard and I'm here because I started my college experience in a pretty bizarre time, as you all know. I ended up writing in the Wall Street Journal, being on CNN and Fox, really just sort of a mini, very small scale version of what Elon was doing. And I'm excited to be with you all today.

Hi everyone, I'm Maya Platek. I'm a senior at Columbia University where I am the student body president of my undergraduate college. I am Israeli but I was born and raised in Japan and I've been doing my part in advocating for Israelis and Jewish students on campus.

Hi everyone, I'm Avi Gamolka. I live in Jerusalem. I grew up in Jerusalem. I'm a student, a second year student at Hebrew University and I do some work with the World Zionist Organization getting ready for the World Zionist Congress in 2025.

Thank you, everyone. Avi, my first question is for you. We're going to talk a lot today about the American Jewish community's relationship with Israel and Zionism. But you are there on the ground in Israel at a time when your connection to Zionism is not about pushing away hostile debates on campus. It is literally about how we sustain and build a country that is under attack on seven fronts.

Because the Iranian regime now is pursuing a strategy of trying to make life in Israel intolerable, impossible. I don't know how people raise children there when every day there are rocket attacks from four or five different directions. And it means that for the young generation of Israelis, those who have the chance to take that relocation and move abroad, they need to connect to a real sense of meaning and purpose about why they want to live in this country and what they are fighting for.

So since 10-7, what changes do you see within Israel about how the young generation are connecting to that Zionist mission and understanding why they have to stay and fight and not take the easy option of taking that relocation in Silicon Valley? Well, the first step to solving any problem is defining the problem itself. And we have to recognize that in some ways,

They've already succeeded, the Iranians. Life in Israel is unbearable. And you have to know that. And we have to recognize that. And we have to look it in the eyes and not stray away and not gloss over the fact that life in Israel is quite unbearable. And it leads to a national feeling and a sense of despair. And that is by far the most common emotion

in my generation, young people, and not limited to, on the streets of Israel. So we have to recognize that this extreme lack of hope, this despair is real, it's palpable, it exists, it's out there. And without recognizing that, it'll be very hard to move forward. Part of that, let me take a step back.

and acknowledge that that is not entirely true demographically, right? So the Israeli public is more divided than one can even imagine. And I think you can imagine pretty well. It doesn't take too much. And there are many people for whom that experience is not true. That is not their lived experience, right?

And part of the issue in solving this problem is that people are living very different realities within the small, tiny little borders of our country and having very different, you know, vastly different experiences of their reality, whether it's, you know, Arab Israelis who, you know,

I won't speak to their lived experience, but clearly have a different relationship with hope and despair when it comes to the Israeli public, whether it's ultra-Orthodox Haredi Jews who are a growing share of society, whether it's the Israeli versions of QAnon who live in their own warped experience,

And so when I say that that is the common feeling of despair and lack of hope and a real issue that we need to tackle, it's not entirely true. But it is true for most of us, you know, common sense young folk. And

I would say that the first step, the second step, so the first step is defining the problem. The second step would be returning to big ideas. We are in an era where young people have no, certainly in Israel, have no more patience for any platitudes and metaphors and cliches and great oratory explorations. They're people of action.

They're people who have discovered within themselves that when called upon, they do spring into action no matter what, whenever they're called on, wherever they're called on. And so the second step is a return to big, grand ideas of whether it is Zionism or liberalism or the Jewish core values of hope that can reinvigorate people's experience of liberalism.

In other words, you're saying that in order to reinvigorate Zionism for the young generation, a generation that in your contribution in the book, if you haven't heard about the book yet, you speak about us being Israel's greatest generation, no less than Dor Tashach, the 1948 generation. So it's not enough for Israel to simply become

an American-style country where everything happens in Hebrew, but to reconnect to big ideas about a sense of specifically Jewish collective purpose. Very much so. There is an experience of living in Israel that is

that is essentially and at its core different than living in a place where your raison d'etre, your reason for waking up in the morning, the reason for existence is quality of life and it is a return to a reason to wake up in the morning that is larger than oneself. Alisa, I think there's a similar question, analogous question confronting young American Jews because the

hate movement around campuses and increasingly encroaching on other public spaces is trying to make Jewish life impossible for Jews. It is saying at most you can have conditional acceptance as Jews and do your challah and do your havdalah and kiddush if you separate yourselves from Israel. If you tell your cousins in Israel and tell Avi, burn. We will throw you under a bus. And some people are taking that opt-out.

Some people are taking that opt-out, whether it's going all out for the pro-Hamas movement, whether it's shamefully calling on the Biden administration to suspend arms sales as young Israelis are dying fighting on seven fronts. But there is a movement that says, we're going to make it impossible for you to live proud Jewish lives because if Israel, God forbid, people accuse it of genocide, there is the threat that every young Jew is seen as being guilty by association unless they disavow Israel.

So I wonder what you have seen over the last year about how young Jews are reconnecting to a sense of meaning and community and rediscovering what it is that they are fighting for and waking up for every day as Jews when there is so much pressure on them to keep their heads down, to fade into the wallpaper, and even worse, to defect to the dark side. Thank you for that question.

I think one of the biggest things that I have to say for young Jews, but for all, is that the pressure to succumb to being the kind of appealing Jew that our anti-Zionist, anti-Israel colleagues, peers, hopefully not friends, but the people around us want us to be, is to say, this isn't the truth. You may think that Jews or Zionists,

are one way that we believe in supporting genocide, that we believe in settler colonialism, apartheid. And it can feel scary to confront these things when people around you who you trust and admire and respect believe these things to be true. But it's important to start by saying, "That isn't true. That's like someone trying to tell me my hair is blue. It's not. I know it's not blue. So why would I succumb to you trying to convince me otherwise?"

I think being an effective advocate, being a proud Jew starts with understanding where you come from. What is Judaism? Where do we come from? What does it mean for me to be a Jew? What was my Jewish experience and upbringing? How do I connect to this community, this practice? If you don't know who you are, you're never going to be able to stand up for yourself. If you don't know who your people are, you'll never be able to stand up for your people. Understanding where you come from is important.

the baseline toolkit, but it's a very strong and effective toolkit for teaching other people who you are. We cannot allow ourselves to be defined by our adversaries.

We have seen decades where that was the case, where we felt, you know, I don't want to put a target on my back. I don't want to experience prejudice. We just got to this country from either, you know, Europe or the Middle East and North Africa. I just escaped genocide. I don't want to cause any trouble. And for years, this assimilation and this being kind of a more appetizing Jew protected us.

But we now live in a world where Jews have a lot of strength, a lot of power. We do not have to be vulnerable or subject ourselves or hide ourselves from hate. We have relationships with people in power who can help protect us. We know who we are.

And the people who are most important, who are in power, they know who we are too. We've made that known. I think where we have failed and where we need to improve is sharing with our peers around us on a grassroots level, telling them what Judaism means to us. What was Shabbat dinner like at your home growing up? What was Hebrew school like? Sure, maybe you didn't want to go to school again at 6 p.m. after hours of school. But when I was...

14 years old, I remember my gym teacher saying, you don't have to run the mile today. Walk with me. I want to ask you some questions. I'm married to a Jewish man. I'm not Jewish. We want to raise our son Jewish. I don't know if we should send him to Hebrew school. What do you think?

I said, well, I just had my bat mitzvah, so I've done the whole shebang. I've been studying. Lord knows it's a lot of homework outside of my regular school and homework. But I said, my best friends are from Hebrew school. My very best friend of 15 years, she's somewhere in here today, who also works in the Jewish world, I met in Hebrew school. We went to summer camp together. We worked at summer camp together at Camp Ramon, Northern California. Round of applause. Thank you.

love my remonics um but being able to talk to people because i had that that upbringing i was able to say he might not love going to more school at 6 p.m but he will thank you for it in 10 years because he will understand who he is and where he comes from and he will be able to tell his friends who he is and where he comes from and what the jewish community is like and

There's a quote from Abraham Lincoln that says, and my brother used this as his senior quote in high school, and mine was really dumb, so I a little bit regret not choosing something smarter, but it says, I do not like that man. I must get to know him better. This is the reality. If people do not like you, it is because they do not know you. So if they do not know you,

and you do not know yourself, that's where we fail. So get to know your community. Go back to shul, you know? Send your kids to Hebrew school. Send them to Jewish summer camp. Exactly. Bring them to the JCC.

And then they can be the next generation of fighters and leaders and advocates. That's such an important point that precisely when there is so much pressure on young Jews to back off, now is the time to lean in and to engage in more Jewish activities and specifically in Jewish activities that are increasingly Israelized.

Because Jewish culture is now increasingly Israeli culture. We see it in the cuisine, the food that we've had here, the music, what counts as Jewish music now. And that will create the real strong cultural connections. Maya, you go to one of the most hostile campuses against Israel, Columbia. You've had a few problems there, a tentifada problem. And I want to ask you, what do we do about the Jewish anti-Zionists?

I interviewed your colleague, Professor Shida Vidae, on my podcast, State of a Nation. I asked him this question. He said, "I have no problem with them because I know for every one Jewish anti-Zionist student, I get 20 emails from their family saying, 'Please do something. They're a Shonda.'" So I know for every one anti-Israel Jewish student, he has 20 Zionist family members.

But these are people who have fully defected to the dark side. And I feel that the debate isn't even, they don't think that the Jewish people have a right to their own country. They don't think we're one people anymore. They look at their brothers and sisters in Israel and say, we're just not the same tribe. We're not the same people. We're not the same collective.

And that means the problem is much, much deeper than misperceptions about this military action, policy in Gaza. What do we do about them? So you're very, very right in the sense that I would say that the Jewish movement has become more and more Israeli, especially on our campus. I would say that the world is completely different between before October 7th and after October 7th, especially within Jewish communities.

I would say that a lot of Jews that identify as Zionist are much more willing to acknowledge their Israeli identity, their relationship to Israel nowadays than they were ever before. You see there's

I honestly never really had conversations about me being Israeli, about our Israeli identity as Jews until after October 7th in these spaces. But at the same time, there's always been an anti-Israel sentiment issue at Columbia and I would say a lot of other institutions. And it's very, very easy to be pressured into trying to disconnect yourself from that sort of environment.

And unfortunately, when you have faculty members that are continually legitimizing the end of the existence of Israel, that are continually villainizing our existence.

and are trying to make it so that Jews don't necessarily feel comfortable in acknowledging their Israeli identity, you come across this problem where you see this divided people amongst Jewish communities, especially amongst younger Jewish communities who no longer identify as much with Israel. But at the same time, I do want to say... But it's not just not identifying with Israel. It's not identifying with the sense of a global Jewish tribe. Yes.

So I would want to say quickly that firstly, many of these Jews are a really drastic minority. They're probably one in ten. I'll bite that. It is an issue. It is a complete issue. That doesn't sound like a drastic minority. That's quite a significant minority. Yeah.

And ultimately, I think that going forward, the only way forward is to make sure that we are proud in our Jewish identity, that we reiterate the fact that we are part of one tribe. I would say that it's been an effort for the last few decades. This didn't just start now. This has been an effort to continually misinform people, to continually divide people across the diaspora.

and breaking up Jewish identity away from Israel, away from one tribe. And we have an obligation to make sure that when looking forward, we're educating future Jews, like future Jewish leaders, future Jewish students, that they feel entirely connected to their roots. They feel entirely connected to their people. And ultimately, the reality is it failed with a lot of these students and

I'm not sure what we can do beyond having difficult conversations with them. Some of them are too far gone, but it's not too late to change course. I think that going forward, we have to prioritize

younger generations and building this narrative that we are a part of one tribe to rebuild our connection to these people. Honestly, a lot of people have redefined themselves within this one tribe identity after October 7th. I think a lot of people actually lost their way and came back to it after October 7th, which means that it's not too late. There are a lot of people that are still willing to change their minds. Charlie,

Hopefully some of these people will be willing to change their minds, but it's not easy in a context, and you go to Harvard, so I use the word context, in which we have a whole ideological superstructure that is telling a hostile story about us that divides the world into oppressors, oppressed victims, victimizers, and places the Jews, not just Israel, Jews,

on the side of the oppressor and of the victimizers. That is a story, a way of thinking that they have fallen into. And it's a threat that we have to be open and acknowledge this. And Zach spoke about the need in Israel for a commission of inquiry, and there needs to be soul searching in the diaspora about what went wrong. We missed it.

The diaspora did not take this threat seriously and was therefore shocked when October 7th happened and there was an outpouring of support for Hamas. They didn't understand where it was coming from because they hadn't been following the intellectual undercurrents. I wonder why you think that the Jewish establishment in the diaspora missed those intellectual undercurrents such that they were shocked when what happened happened on campuses after October 7th.

Well, look, I think that there's a couple different problems embedded there. The first is that, you know, it's really interesting to look at the events calendars of all of the different centers at Harvard. If you go to the Center for Middle Eastern Studies or even centers that you wouldn't think have anything to do with Israel, like there's a health and human rights center.

There's a center for equal justice in America, something like that. And if you just look at the events that they're having, almost every single one is about lack of abortion rights in Gaza in the context of the last year because of the war. Or there was just an event on femicide, on scholasticide. They've come up with all these different forms of side that they can use in relation to Gaza. It's not just a genocide, in case you weren't aware.

And so we're facing really this battle from many of the most powerful professors right at Harvard to really convince Harvard and all these other schools, Columbia, too, obviously, to really show kids that Israel is really the embodiment of evil in the world. So that's the first thing. Right. It's this very powerful current.

And there really is not anyone fighting back against it other than, you know, maybe Hillel and Chabad having the occasional, you know, Israeli government official come speak that, you know, maybe 20 kids will show up to.

But the other thing is that we talk a lot about, you know, these, quote unquote, as a Jew Jews, right? The Jews who are, you know, supporting Hamas and, you know, or have this sort of fantasy idea that Israel could just be a binational state, you know, from the river to the sea. Because if you look at the rest of the Middle East, right, one majority Muslim state has really worked out for the Jews, right, whenever we've tried that so far. So that's another great idea. You're a student of history? Yeah.

So, you know, we're fighting back against that. But the overwhelming majority of Jews at Harvard and I think on most of these campuses really just don't care. You know, they hear people screaming intifada and they hear us saying, no, this is anti-Semitism. And they're thinking, you know, I want nothing to do with this. You know, I want to go and get drunk and get a job at McKinsey or maybe come to Silicon Valley if they're a little bit more creative.

That's what their focus is. In that order, get drunk and then a job at McDonald's. Right. Or maybe both at the same time. It depends. On the context. Right.

And, you know, Hillel and Chabad and the existing Jewish organizations, as great as they are, they're not appealing to those Jewish students that probably, you know, if anything, think that these, you know, the tentafada kids are pretty annoying, but really want nothing to do. You know, don't want to deal with the politics, don't want to deal with the stress and the stigma.

And there is real social stigma of being associated with Israel. You know, I think that these, you know, the Israeli kids at Harvard are some of, you know, the coolest kids. There's none of them in the sort of, you know, elite at Harvard instead of final instead of fraternities. There's these things called final clubs. You know, there's not a single Israeli in a final club and there's really only a handful of, you know, observant Jews. So there's a stigma. And I think a lot of students think, why deal?

So what we've been trying to do at Harvard is we're thinking now, you know, and this is really student led, how can we give kids an incentive to care about Israel and the Jewish people? So one thing that we've been trying out in the last year is we've been bringing in, you

who have a connection to Israel, whether they served in the army or they started their career in Tel Aviv and bringing them to speak on campus. And in the last few months, we've had 400 kids, half of them not Jewish, come to these events with entrepreneurs from both Harvard and MIT, the two best schools in the country. Thank you.

I'm sorry if that offends the Stanford people in the room. But, you know, to come in here, you know, because at the end of the day, you know, you have to give kids what does the other side have to offer, right? They have, you know, Keffiyeh Thursday, right? There's not even free lunch. Is that a real thing? That is a real thing. Can you explain for the uninitiated among us what Keffiyeh Thursday is? Keffiyeh Thursday is a longstanding tradition at Harvard. It's pretty obvious. Everyone wears a keffiyeh. And it really has become, you know, you see a lot of, you know, the good-looking kids on campus are wearing their keffiyehs.

You know, I was talking about it with some of my Israeli friends over the summer, and we said, it's not even like they give free baklava. You know, like, literally all that they're offering is a kathiyah that you have to pay for. And by the way, they're all made in China. Yeah.

And some of them may be Indonesia, in fairness, but they're definitely not from anywhere in the Middle East. And we thought, you know, there's so much that the Jewish world has to offer, right? So much amazing talent and opportunity, right, and fun. And so what we really need to think about going forward, and this is... What's the response to Kefir Thursday, Talis Tuesdays? Right, so I mean...

Our response has been, we've actually called it Entrepreneurship Wednesday, you know, because there's so much, such an entrepreneurial spirit, you know, both here in the Valley and Israel, right? Obviously the highest, you know, startup per capita rate in the world. You know, when all that they have to offer is kefiyas and we have so, so much more as a people, as Jews and as Israelis, you know, there's no reason that we shouldn't be winning this battle. And that's...

And that's a critical point. I think showing your peers that the bullies and the nutters have gone too far and that they want to tear things down while you want to build and that Jewish students are the ones who want to help everyone else prosper and grow and not tear down the institutions that have built this country. Alyssa, following on from that, I wonder how you see advocacy as having changed.

over the last year. Not specifically the overall message, but the tactics. A lot of people are looking at the pro-Palestinian movement and saying,

Wow, they really know what they're doing. They're so on brand. They're so on message. They're so organized. Maybe we need to do more like them. And then other voices that will come and say, no, we shouldn't try to emulate them. But there are new patterns of community organizing, of speaking out, of new organizations and clubs. What are you noticing? How are Jewish students mobilizing now in a different way to speak up?

I will start with big picture and then I'll go to specific tactics because I think the former leads into the latter. As I mentioned before, primarily what we need to be focusing on is ensuring that our kids, our rising generation of leaders, love being Jewish. I was raised in a home where we had Shabbat every week. I maybe didn't always love that I couldn't hang out with my friends on Friday, but my parents said, "Oh, you can bring them to Shabbos. They can come here."

And Friday night became the warmest, most amazing Jewish experience. I went to summer camp. My best friends are from summer camp and from Hebrew school. All of my closest friends are Jewish, not because I want to only sequester myself to Jewish communities. It just so happens that they tend to be my favorite people.

And with that baseline, when I got to college, I went to Occidental College and I witnessed anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. I already had a fire inside me that inspired me to speak out, that inspired me to email the administration and say, you're not protecting us and you're not supporting us and we need help.

You know, when you're serving latkes and bacon as the Jewish option on Hanukkah, that's a problem. When you're serving bagels on... That was a real thing. That was a real thing. They served bagels as the Jewish cultural option on Pesach. I mean, it was pretty unbelievable. So I had an understanding of where I came from, which allowed me to speak out. That baseline is super important.

Everything else, in my opinion, are kind of complimentary, but I need to really press that the most important thing is raising our kids to really love being Jewish because they'll want to stand up for themselves more in terms of tactical response. I know I'll get there. Yeah.

We have started to do a better job of our grassroots organizing. Historically, we have done an exceptional job at our top-down approach, meeting with members of our government, with CEOs of tech companies and other leaders in the private sector. Top-down approach, great. We do a really good job of the closed doors, kind of quiet advocacy approach.

But a lot of people don't know what's being said behind those closed doors. And there are a lot of people who don't have access to those meetings, who don't have relationships with these elected officials or CEOs that want to do something and they don't know what to do or how to channel their energy. We have started to do a much better job at saying, here's what's happening at your local city council. This is a ceasefire resolution that's coming up that's riddled with misinformation. This is what time they're meeting. This is the location. Here is a template.

testimony that you can give, go forth and raise hell. And we started to do that more, which is great. We've also started to do a better job on social media, but we need to do even better. That's one of the things I think that we can learn from our adversaries. By no means should we fall into the trap of spreading misinformation

because it's frankly a lot sexier and easier to spread. We're great at nuance, but people are really bored by nuance. We should not fall into that trap, but we need to do a better job at making advocacy appealing, fun, and energizing. It is very easy to rally behind hate, but also you lose a lot of energy doing that. We have our entire advocacy movement centered on love.

Which can be a bit of a slower process, but I think it's something that energizes us and allows our advocacy to be much more fruitful long term. We have to take it day by day, but we have to do a better job at getting people excited. And I think on social media, that's one of the things that we really need to learn from our adversaries.

Thank you. Speaking about getting people excited, I want to end on a message of hope, but I don't want to end with the cliche of asking what makes you hopeful, because as Rabbi Amitai Freeman taught us, hope is optimism plus a plan. So I want you all on one leg. You don't have to stand. You can do it sitting down. It's a metaphor. To explain to the people in the audience today what they can do to empower other young Zionist voices like you and to create more. I'll start with one of my own.

There are some astonishing Gen-Zionist heroes who since October 7th have done incredible things, often paying the ultimate price on October 7th. I want to see every Jewish school in the world naming a room in honor of a Gen-Zionist hero. I think that Anna Shapiro...

who tried to save his friends by throwing seven grenades out of a rocket shelter until the eighth took his life and probably Hirsch Goldberg-Polin's arm as well, deserves a room named after him in every school. I was in Vancouver just now. One of their alumni, Ben Mizrachi, was killed at the Nova Festival using his experience as a combat medic to try to save lives. I think every Jewish school needs to have a Ben Mizrachi room as well.

Give young Jews a way to honor the heroes and the role models their age. So standing on one leg, in one sentence, how can the audience today empower more young Gen Zionist voices like you?

Thank you, Alyssa. Charlie.

You know, my parents are super secular and they always say that the reason they sent us, me and my siblings, to Jewish school is because the Jews are the best club in the world and they wanted us to get to be part of that club.

So what I would say is that make sure that you're welcoming people into that club. When you're interviewing someone for a job or you're recommending someone for a position at a university or as a student who's applying to college, really reinforce for them that they're part of this club and that that's why you're helping them out. That's what we're trying to do at Harvard, and that's what I think we have to be doing at campuses around the country.

showing kids that they are part of really the best family in the world. As Groucho Marx said, I wouldn't want to be a member of any club that will have me. Maya.

empower people to be able to tell the truth. Unfortunately, the reality is a lot of students and a lot of younger generation members are nervous about speaking out about the reality. So despite that discomfort kind of along the lines of what you were saying, we need to encourage people and incentivize them to be strong enough to tell the truth, even if it is

is at the cost of the social cost. We have to make sure that these students and those people that are standing up to what hatred and to standing up to what's incorrect, albeit the consequences that they may face, that they have a reason to continue standing up because as more people stand up, more people will follow along. Thank you, Maya. Avi, give us a plan from the Holy Land. I want to echo what Alana said at the end of her remarks and say, speak truth to power. Um,

There we've had a moment of clarity on the forces of good and evil, of right and wrong over the past year. We know now with perspective on where everybody stands on those issues and we need to speak truth to power.

My unpopular opinion is that politics are something to be leaned into and not shied away from. For the TV show nerds out there, I like to say politics are one part the West Wing, one part House of Cards, and one part Veep.

And they create a vacuum together that is both inspiring and dark and sometimes downright clownish. And if you leave that vacuum to other people, it'll just be filled with frustration and darkness. And it is our job to roll up our sleeves, get off the fence, as Zach mentioned earlier, and dirty our hands and get involved. Thank you, Avi. Please give a round of applause to our GenZionist panelists.