Uncomfortable Conversations With A Jew

When a friend you love is hurting—and another friend is angry at you for standing with them—how do you stay human, honest, and whole? In Uncomfortable Conversations With a Jew, Emmanuel Acho (a Black Christian TV host) and Noa Tishby (an Israeli Jewish advocate) argue that the way out of our most explosive cultural fights is through: through rigorous curiosity, through plain language about antisemitism and Israel, through stories, and through a willingness to hold tension without dehumanizing each other. They contend that ignorance, lazy labels, and meme-level slogans have outpaced history—and that you can relearn how to see people before positions and complexity before clicks.

The book is a seat-at-the-table conversation that keeps boomeranging to one core claim: antisemitism is a shape-shifting conspiracy mindset that survives by changing costumes—religious, racial, political—and today much of it wears the wardrobe of anti-Zionism. Yet, they insist, you can critique Israeli policies (as Noa herself often does) and even oppose specific wars without veering into anti-Jewish hatred. The line, they show, is bright when you learn how to find it—and porous when you don’t.

What You'll Learn (And Why It Matters)

You’ll first discover what "being a Jew" actually means—and why the word Jew isn’t a slur to reclaim or a synonym for a religion. Judaism, they explain, is an ethno-religion and a peoplehood: a portable civilization that includes belief, story, land, culture, and law. That matters because many of the fiercest modern claims (e.g., “Jews are white colonizers”) short-circuit once you really grasp Jewish diversity, origins, and belonging. You’ll also see why Noa lights Shabbat candles as a secular Jew and why Emmanuel asks, without flinching, “Is it fair to say Jews are white?”

Next, you’ll walk through stereotypes—money, media, power—and learn how a medieval workaround about moneylending plus Shakespeare’s Shylock became today’s “globalist octopus” memes. You’ll look at Hollywood’s real backstory (Jews built studios after other doors were closed to them) and sit inside Emmanuel’s lived tension: every major gatekeeper in his career has been Jewish, which made him feel both protected and pressured when he wanted to interview a Palestinian advocate. Noa’s answer reframes “power” vs “positions of power,” and the two of them model what it looks like to talk through a moment that almost blew up their book (spoiler: it did, briefly).

A Layer Cake: Antisemitism Then and Now

You’ll also trace what they call the antisemitism layer cake—from “Christ-killers,” to “plague poisoners,” to “race polluters,” to “Zionists are racists.” The ingredients don’t change much, just the icing. That’s why October 7—and more revealingly, October 8—becomes a hinge in the book. On October 7, Hamas massacred more Jews in a single day than at any time since the Holocaust. On October 8, before Israel had responded, celebratory marches and campus mobs mocked hostages and papered over rape and murder as “resistance.” To Noa, that instant justification was the mask slipping. To Emmanuel, it was the moment he realized how little shared context most people had—and how quickly they reached for slogans.

From there, you’ll study Zionism without slogans: simply, the Jewish right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland (Zion is an ancient name for Jerusalem). You’ll race through two millennia of exiles and returns, Ottoman and British maps, the UN Partition plan, the wars of 1948, 1967, and 1973, and the paired refugee catastrophes—Palestinians who fled or were expelled in 1948 and ~850,000 Jews expelled from Arab lands after. You’ll also examine BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions), its progressive packaging, and its leaders’ stated goal of ending Israel, not reforming it (compare to Natan Sharansky’s “3D test” for antisemitism: Demonization, Double standards, Delegitimization).

Why This Conversation Is Different

Two things make the book feel different. First, the authors don’t hide their missteps. Emmanuel shares the exact moment his choice to host a Palestinian guest wounded Noa just days after October 7; Noa admits her own anger and why she briefly walked away. Second, the book is crowded with “how to” tools, not just “what to think” claims: how to spot myths that begin with a truth-kernel; how to separate policy critique from people erasure; how to check on your Jewish friends when the news breaks; how to use Shabbat dinners, not social posts, to grow empathy; and how to be a Mensch (Acho’s favorite definition of allyship is simple: find a need and fill it).

Ultimately, this book argues you don’t have to choose between compassion for Palestinians and compassion for Jews; between justice and truth; between your values and your friends. But you do have to learn some history, reject seductive simplifications, and ask better questions—out loud, with someone you might lose. If you crave a playbook for that, this is it.

Acho starts where most social-media fights never do: definitions. Noa Tishby insists you can’t navigate modern debates (from whiteness to Zionism) until you grasp that Judaism is not just a religion; it’s a peoplehood—an ethno-religion with a shared story, law, land, and culture. That’s why you’ll meet Jews who are devout, secular, left, right; Ethiopian, Moroccan, Iraqi, Russian, and American; with every skin tone and set of rituals. You don’t try to “convert” people to a nation; Judaism historically discourages conversion because the covenant is heavy and, frankly, makes you a target.

Peoplehood, Not Just Belief

Noa’s secular father was “very much a Jew” even as an atheist. That paradox makes sense when you see the two covenants Rabbi Jeremy Borovitz highlights: the genealogical covenant of Abraham and Sarah (“we are a people”) and the Sinai covenant (“we practice a law”). The Torah (written) and Talmud (oral) guide Halacha (Jewish law), but the culture is bigger than belief. Hence, you can be “culturally Jewish” and never step inside a synagogue—yet feel instantly at home at a Shabbat table in Melbourne because the vibe, cadence, humor, and challah track.

Four Pillars Of Jewish Identity

Policy thinker Gidi Grinstein’s framing helps you locate yourself: (1) Religion (faith and practice), (2) Peoplehood (shared story and family), (3) Tikkun Olam (the mandate to repair the world), and (4) Nationhood (self-determination in an ancestral land). You might favor one pillar more than another. Noa leans deeply into peoplehood, culture, and nationhood; an Orthodox rabbi might weight the religious pillar. You don’t need a perfect mix to be “in the tent.”

Flexigidity: A Living Tradition

Judaism evolves via what Grinstein calls “flexigidity”—rigid in core commitments, flexible in application. That’s how Conservative authorities permitted driving to synagogue on Shabbat in the 1950s; it’s how you now meet female rabbis—and how a minyan (a prayer quorum of 10) still insists grief needs community. The ethos is hands-on: Jews are “this-life focused” (Rabbi Jonathan Sacks) and measure devotion in actions—blessings over bread, gratitude after using the bathroom, a calendar tuned to the moon and agricultural seasons (Sukkot huts; Tu Bishvat trees).

Storytelling, Education, And Questioning

Culturally, three traits surface again and again: (1) Storytelling—you rehearse liberation at the Passover Seder with the punchline, “They tried to kill us. We won. Let’s eat.” (Comedian Alan King). (2) Education—mass literacy is centuries old; honey was spread on letters so children tasted learning as sweet. (3) Questioning—argue, doubt, challenge. Hillel’s one-foot Torah rule (“That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow”) turns ethical complexity into street-usable wisdom (compare to Jesus’s Great Commandments in the New Testament—another echo Acho notices).

For everyday life, remember this test: the more you can place religion, peoplehood, culture, and nationhood on the table at once, the less likely you’ll be to generalize about “the Jews.” And if you’re invited to Shabbat? Go. A loaf of challah will teach you more about Jewish continuity than a thousand tweets.

Are Jews white? In America, the honest answer is: it depends—and “conditional whiteness” creates a double bind that fuels confusion and resentment. Acho presses the question with the precision of someone who knows Blackness gets painted with one brush, too. Noa’s response—“yes and not at all”—is the thread the book keeps pulling.

Not A Race, But Often Treated As One

Historically, calling Jews a race was the gateway to dehumanization. Nazis did it to justify extermination. Modern science treats race as a social construct, not a biological essence. You’ll find shared ancestry among segments of world Jewry and specific disease clusters, but no single “Jewish gene.” That’s why you can meet Ethiopian, Indian Cochin, Iraqi, and Polish Jews who share covenant, not phenotype.

How Jews Became “White”—And When They Didn’t

Most American Jews are Ashkenazi (Central/Eastern European) and can be white-passing. But 19th–20th century Europe frequently classified them as swarthy or Black-adjacent (look up John Beddoe’s “index of nigrescence”). In the US, millions arrived amid eugenics and nativism, faced quotas and “No Jews Allowed” signs, and got a conditional path into whiteness—if they assimilated their names, accents, and dress. White nationalists to this day tell them, “You’re not white; you’re Jewish.” Progressive critics often tell them the opposite: “You’re white and therefore oppressors.” Both deny Jewish specificity.

Not White Enough, Too White

Two chapters—“You’re Not White Enough” and “You’re Too White”—trace the paradox. On one side, a long record of exclusion, culminating in the Holocaust, and postwar suspicion during McCarthyism (remember the Rosenbergs and blacklists). On the other, contemporary privilege when white-passing Jews don’t face color-based policing or medical bias—and non-Ashkenazi Jews bristle at being labeled “white” at all (Noa’s Moroccan friend: “I have one eyebrow—screw you, I’m not white!”). Noa adds the painful present-tense: Jews are 2% of Americans but roughly 63% of religion-based hate-crime targets, a reality that spikes after October 7.

Acho’s Helpful Distinction

Acho offers a clean frame you can use: white-passing Jews can sometimes exit the cycle of skin-color oppression, but not the cycle of antisemitic oppression. That distinction holds two truths at once. It honors Black pain under color-coded systems and Jewish vulnerability under conspiracy-coded systems. Hold both or you will erase one community to center another.

(Context: Similar “conditional belonging” dynamics appear in discussions of light-skinned Black Americans and colorism; see Ibram X. Kendi on color hierarchies. The book’s contribution is to place Jewish experience inside and outside American Black/white binaries at once.)

Why do “Jews + money/power” tropes stick, even with people who don’t think of themselves as antisemitic? Acho and Tishby go to origins—and to awkward personal examples—to help you pull these myths out by the root. The skill you’ll learn is spotting “truth kernels” that evolve into slanders.

From Moneylending To Shylock

In medieval Christendom, Church rules restricted interest-charging among Christians. Some rulers funneled lending to Jews—who were also barred from land ownership and many guilds—creating a middleman role with guaranteed blame. Enter the stereotype of the rapacious lender. Shakespeare’s Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, beloved in Nazi Germany’s theaters, branded the image. Language absorbed it (“to Jew down” as a synonym for haggling).

Hollywood, Law, And Finance—Explained

Jews built major studios (MGM, Warner Brothers, Paramount) because prestigious fields excluded them and vaudeville didn’t. They founded law firms because white-shoe firms wouldn’t hire them. Hospitals like Mount Sinai exist because others wouldn’t credential Jewish doctors. That’s overrepresentation born of exclusion, not evidence of a cabal. Over decades, the “kernel” of success was baked into the “cake” of conspiracy.

Emmanuel’s Lived Tension

Acho bravely narrates that nearly every key decision-maker in his career—from NFL owners and GMs to talent agents—has been Jewish. After October 7 he wanted to interview a Palestinian advocate; Jewish gatekeepers warned him off. He experienced it as real power that could jeopardize his livelihood. Noa answers with painful history: talk of “Jews running Hollywood” has preceded pogroms; Jews are in positions of power, not running cabals; and post–October 7, many drew a boundary after years of playing Clark Kent about Jewish concerns. The two don’t fully agree—and that honest dissonance is the point.

The Octopus Myth

Antisemitic cartoons often depict a Jewish octopus strangling the globe or the White House, updated now as “globalists.” ADL data shows many Americans endorse some version of “Jews have too much power” or “use shady practices.” Tishby counters with scale: Jews are ~0.2% of the world and control ~1.1% of wealth (Christians ~55%). Conspiracists fixate not on numbers but on narrative: Jews as puppet masters. It’s the 1903 Protocols of the Elders of Zion in digital form.

(Context: See Deborah Lipstadt on contemporary conspiracies; compare to Cass Sunstein’s work on rumor cascades. The book’s contribution is to stitch macro-history to micro-feelings—because conspiracies thrive in the gap.)

Tishby’s most memorable metaphor is a cake you can’t stop tasting: antisemitism as a layer cake, each era smearing on a new layer while the sponge stays the same. If you learn to identify flavors, you’ll spot yesterday’s libels inside today’s hashtags.

Religious, Racial, Political Layers

Start with the early “God-killer” charge and Saint Jerome’s mistranslation that birthed horned Jews; move to blood libels (Jews steal Christian children’s blood for Passover); then the Inquisition; then the “wandering Jew” and plague poisoner myths; then 19th–20th century race science that made conversion irrelevant—you can’t convert your blood; then Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda that equated “Zionism” with racism and imperialism (UN Resolution 3379 echoed this before being revoked). Each layer recodes Jews as whatever a society most fears.

October 8 As X-Ray

October 7 was atrocity. October 8 was diagnosis. Before Israel struck back, paragliders were glorified on social accounts, hostage posters torn down, and “From the river to the sea” was chanted by people who often didn’t know the phrase’s origins. To Noa, that cheer proved how easily the anti-Jewish layers slip under a humanitarian mask. To Emmanuel, it revealed a yawning history gap that made many mistake ancient libels for righteous solidarity.

Internalized Antisemitism

Like internalized racism or misogyny, internalized antisemitism is real. After millennia of “there’s something wrong with you,” some Jews grow quiet, complicit, or even hostile to their own. Tishby cites comedian Hannah Gadsby’s “I was already homophobic by the time I knew I was gay” as a parallel: when a system teaches you to despise yourself, you may seek acceptance by echoing its contempt. That’s a trap because it cedes the terms of belonging to people who will never truly include you.

The Holocaust’s Through‑Line

The Holocaust wasn’t a bolt from the blue; it was the capstone of those layers. Germany legalized exclusion (Nuremberg Laws), normalized looting (“Aryanization”), escalated violence (Kristallnacht), and industrialized murder. Postwar amnesia, curriculum gaps, and denialism now recycle the pattern. When school boards avoid teaching genocide because it could cause “distress,” they invite a future where distress arrives in person.

(Context: Dara Horn’s People Love Dead Jews explores how societies prefer Jews as metaphors, not neighbors. Tishby’s cake gives you a diagnostic you can carry into any room.)

Strip away the noise and Zionism means this: the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland. “Zion” is a biblical name for Jerusalem. That’s it. Everything else you’ve heard—colonizer, apartheid, racist ideology—are judgments layered on the core claim. Acho asks the hard questions; Tishby answers with timelines, not tropes.

Ancestry And Maps

Jews originate in ancient Israel (think David, Solomon, First and Second Temples). After Roman conquests, the area’s administrative name was changed to “Palaestina” to sever Jews from Judea. Across centuries—Byzantine, Islamic Caliphate, Crusaders, Mamluks, Ottomans—Jews maintained a presence and a prayer: “Next year in Jerusalem.” In the late 19th century, after Europe’s emancipation curdled into pogroms and Dreyfus’s humiliation, Theodor Herzl reimagined the longing as a modern movement. His utopian vision included minority rights, separation of religion and state, and social welfare (well before Haight-Ashbury).

Partition And Parallel Disasters

In 1947, the UN proposed partition into Jewish and Arab states. Jews said yes; multiple Arab states said no and invaded. Israel survived and expanded beyond the proposed borders; Jordan and Egypt occupied the West Bank and Gaza. Around 700,000–750,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled; roughly 850,000 Jews were expelled or fled from Arab countries. Two peoples, two traumas. If your story includes one and erases the other, you are not reading history; you’re reading a team pamphlet.

Critique vs. Erasure

You can critique settlements, wars, or leaders (Noa herself publicly opposed Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul and lost her envoy role). What crosses into antisemitism is delegitimizing the Jewish right to any state at all or applying double standards other countries never face (Sharansky’s 3Ds again). “People are not always their government” cuts both ways: Palestinians aren’t reducible to Hamas; Israelis aren’t reducible to whichever coalition is in power.

BDS And The Fine Print

BDS markets itself as a civil-rights campaign; its leaders say openly they oppose a Jewish state “in any part of Palestine.” Its umbrella has included groups the US designates as terrorist organizations. If your stated endgame is Israel’s end, you’re not pressuring policy; you’re pressuring existence. That’s not a “boycott like South Africa” (South Africa had a one-state system denying citizenship by race); it’s a call to erase the world’s only Jewish refuge.

(Context: For an empathetic Israeli read addressed to Palestinians, see Yossi Klein Halevi’s Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor. Tishby’s focus is the scaffolding: you can’t argue policy on a foundation that denies a people’s right to be.)

Some books age with events; this one collides with them. The authors recount the Hamas massacre (Noa livestreaming through the night; hostage posters later ripped down in Western cities) and then dwell on the day after. That day became a Rorschach test: did you see barbarism that required moral clarity, or “context” that excused euphemism?

The Human Texture

You meet survivors like Noam Ben-David, shot in the hip and forced to lie under her friends’ bodies in a trash container at the Nova music festival as terrorists sprayed bullets; you hear echoes of Noa’s great-aunt Gita, who survived beneath corpses in Poland. You sit with Tova Friedman’s request to Emmanuel—“Promise me you’ll tell my story”—and with epigenetic research on trauma passing to children. These aren’t abstractions; they are names, scars, and shaking hands.

The Ideology Gap

Acho quotes Sam Harris to draw a bright line: Islamist doctrines of jihad and martyrdom—not Israeli policy—animate groups like Hamas. If you imagine everyone everywhere “wants the same things,” you will misread a movement that calls for eradication. None of that absolves Israel from moral and strategic scrutiny in war; it does prevent you from laundering genocidal intent as “resistance.”

Speech, Humor, And Trauma

Who gets to joke? Jews have reclaimed pain through Mel Brooks and Sarah Silverman, but that does not license outsiders to replay slurs. Acho offers a parallel: a white friend innocently calling a Black girl “a little monkey” because she was climbing. Intent didn’t nullify harm. Ditto Jamie Foxx’s “they killed this dude named Jesus”—a phrase many Black Americans understood as a Judas allusion but felt like an antisemitic stab to many Jews. The fix isn’t rage; it’s context and conversation.

The Disinformation Tide

If your education about the Holocaust and Zionism happened via TikTok, you’re standing in a river of Soviet-era memes, modern campus activism, and algorithmic outrage. The authors argue that universities and DEI spaces often exclude Jews as “not a minority,” which leaves them vulnerable to old stereotypes dressed as new morality. When the UN needs eight weeks to condemn sexual violence used as a weapon of war on October 7 victims, it trains the world to doubt Jewish pain.

(Context: Compare this approach to Jonathan Haidt’s work on viewpoint diversity or John Powell’s bridging research. The authors’ distinctive risk is making the conflict personal in public, which lets you practice alongside them.)

If you only absorb headlines, you might think Black and Jewish communities are locked in permanent stalemate. This book offers a longer, truer timeline and a practical way back. The through-line: proximity breeds care; distance breeds fear.

Shared Marches, Divergent Wounds

Jews helped found the NAACP; Rabbi Heschel marched with Dr. King; Bayard Rustin built Black support for Israel. Yet James Baldwin was right: America was the house of bondage for Black people and a house of refuge for many Jews. That creates a visceral difference in how each community relates to the flag, police, and the idea of belonging. Noa names recent hurts (Kanye, Kyrie, some BLM chapters celebrating paragliders). Emmanuel names Jewish silence that landed as complicity, and acknowledges envy at perceived Jewish access: “We’re kids sent back in from recess while you keep playing.”

The Opponent Is Outside The Huddle

Acho’s football parable is sticky: Longhorns tackling each other while the Sooners score. When minorities punch sideways, the real opponent (extremism, fascism, institutional exclusion) wins. The move is to lock arms—not on everything, but on enough.

How To Be A Mensch (Ally)

Acho defines allyship as “find a need and fill it.” That can be as simple as checking on a friend, lending your production skills (his friend Nick provided free music that became the Emmy-winning series’ theme), or showing up at a Shabbat you don’t fully understand. Tishby adds two simple tools: adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism where you live/work, and use Sharansky’s 3Ds to keep your critique clean. Then go analog: host dinners, trade stories, and get specific. Algorithms make us abstract; tables make us neighbors.

Break The Huddle

The conclusion casts readers as a team: “Blessed are the peacemakers,” Acho quotes—not the peacekeepers. Peacemakers move toward the conflict with intact compassion. The play-calls differ by role, but the objective is the same: refuse dehumanization, reject “team pamphlets,” and replace slogans with story and study. In this telling, Soul Food Shabbat isn’t a cute event; it’s strategy.

(Context: See John A. Powell’s idea of “bridging” across difference; this chapter is the field manual version.)