"I like films that are surprising…I like to delight the audience by surprising them.”
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"How do we move people to a different place? It’s not that they don't think the occuparion is immoral—they do think the occupation is immoral. They just think the alternative is national suicide."
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"Imagine you’re a Palestinian committed to peace, and your Israeli partner says, 'I think we have to hit Gaza, we have to hit Hamas, I don’t see another way out.' The cost of that, whet it means on the Palestinian civilian life is tremendous and how can you possibly say that. But I think that most Israelis have come to that feeling.
"On the Israeli side, people were triggered by Palestinians saying, I don’t think any children were killed, Hamas only attacks military targets, your media is lying to you. And you have someone in our WhatsApp group who just buried her niece."
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"They *needed* the money lenders…it’s just a whole system of commerce they doesn’t work without money lenders…it’s like, Jesus went and threw all the clerks out of city hall. 'Well that’s great Jesus, but how am I going to pay my taxes!'"
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"I reacted very personally to people I knew personally from the left-journalism milieu, reacting excitedly, triumphantly -- or just justifying the Hamas attacks…I was surprised by the controversy of the humane left piece, and even more surprised and kind of appalled by the published response to it. These were things that I thought were basically uncontroversial ideas….”
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“We are all characters in our stories, and we have to look internally, and hopefully at the end of 90 minutes we’ll become a better person. But sometimes the characters don’t change, and you’re just like, ‘Oh, you were offered the opportunity to grow and learn from your experiences, and instead you’re still being the same turd you started out as.’ ”
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“That's what it's supposed to do: the ritual itself is transcendent, and pulls you out of your everyday. And that is what we're trying to create: it's really an experience of awe.”
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"There are 100 senators, a total of 535 federal legislators--and not one of them has called for an investigation of Jeffrey Epstein. It's a bipartisan thing: the Epstein cover-up has gone ghrough Bush 2, Obama, Trump, and now Biden...both sides of the aisle are guilty."
“It's really up to us to clean this up now...I believe something can be done, and I belive this is the time. Every American knows there’s something seriously wrong with Epstein. And our government and media are depending on us to be apathetic."
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"The path I'm learning is to be aware of the reactivity and slow it down, but not by denying the realness of how I'm experiencing it...by being able to hold myself and soothe myself enough that I don't have to be reacitve to it."
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“I wish that wearing this kippah around didn’t mean I was right wing on Israel. I wish that wearing this kippah around signaled that I was someone who would be someone who would be showing up at a Black Lives Matter rally. Or someone cares about making sure that we have a higher minimum wage.”
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“Creativity is finding the thing inside you that you didn’t know was inside. To find that thing that’s higher and beyond what I can actually do, and yet something that comes through anyway. And it’s a surprise. Those are gifts. Those are such gifts. Then those gifts become your friends.”
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“I want to know if there is any meaningful use for religion? In the way that rock and roll is of use. In the way that love is of use. In the way that feeding people is of use.”
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On navigating anxiety as a musician:
"That voice attacks what means the most to you: the overactive critical voice that does not stop telling you you did everything wrong. This barrage of self-criticism and self-doubt, just a million times a minute. The Buddhists call it monkey mind. I could very easily have an anxiety attack just listening to music. I was judging myself against who I was listening to. And I thought somehow that I should be able to analyze this piece of music and know exactly what is going on. And if I can’t I’m just a failure!"
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“I want to highlight the role of noncomformity in framing the sacred, and how artists have played a central role in being able to articulate the things that you aren’t able to say in public…”
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"Family lore conveniently forgets that Zeide the antiques dealer was actually Zeide the beggar; or that Bubbe the saintly seamstress was also Bubbe the hooker, who turned tricks during the slack season to make ends meet. These elisions are the lies we tell ourselves to elevate our pedigree and to make ourselves look palatable in the mirror of history. But along the way if we decide to ignore the sometimes ugly realities of our past, we lose some of the pieces of the story that make us human, and we do a disservice to the historical record…”
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“They weren’t like other people really. I wasn’t like other people really. We were these suburban imposters.”
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