Being Jewish with Sascha Penn

And I couldn't think of a better person, better, a better whiter or more Jewish person than his actual best friend from college. When you guys met. I will say though, by the end of this I feel like Ben needs to decide who his best friend is. I mean I feel like we need we need to see it really because listen, I listen to every single fucking one of

these men, I'm going through a really painful divorce. Every single one you gotta say I love you to each other, you know, painful that's from me, how much that's hurt. I love you, I love you. And I'm just sitting there listening to it as I take like was fucking walked through New York City, looking at everyone who's happened with me, and I gotta listen to that shit. I think there was room. There is enough love in the world to share you. We love you too, all right, Okay,

all right, we'll see, we'll see how this goes. I'm Khalil Gibron Muhammad and I'm Ben Austin. We're two best friends, one black, one white. I'm a historian and I'm a journalist. And this is some of my best friends are yep, some of my best friends are in this show. We wrestle with the challenges and the absurdities of a deeply divided and unequal country. And this episode we are marking the end of Hanakah, ha ha, Hanakah, done, done and gone. Yeah.

So we're gonna look at judaism and white ness. We're gonna understand race and racism through some of the deepest histories and some of the most important questions in this episode. And we have a special guest to help us do that. How hey, can we can we ask? Can we ask Sasha to introduce himself? Yeah? Sure, I am Sasha Pin. I am a very old friend of Ben Austin. We met in college University of Rochester. I'm a writer. I

write movies and television shows. I am currently actually on set on the show PowerBook three, Raising Canaan, which I created and I run. It's a spinoff of Power, which was a series on the Stars Network. And this is the sort of the third iteration of that. Yeah, Sasha, you're actually on location right now in a trailer somewhere in Queens filming the second season of Raising Canaan. Can you say something about what's going on with the show

in the second season? I mean, yes, season two, what we start to see is like some real distance between Rock and Canaan, like that that that relationship starts to really evolve all in interesting ways. And so you know, that relationship between Canaan and his mother becomes increasingly complicated. And I will say that the season does end because we're getting close to shooting the end in spectacular fashion. You will you love it, You will be stund missed,

love it. We are. We are really grateful for you to take it. Sometimes, man, I'm so happy to be here. So let's let's get let's get into this. So I think it's really important first to just establish just tell tell us how you and Ben met. We met through my roommate at University of Rochester one night in our dorm and yeah, man, the rest is history there it is, you know, Okay, But I want to know that first moment when you meet this guy because I send him

away to college. You know, I've known him from fourteen to eighteen. He's my best friend. You know, he doesn't wear Judaism on his sleeve. What was your first impression of Ben when he showed up at Rochester. Well, I'll say like, I would never have known it a million years. Ben was Jewish like that, that's you. I'll say that right off the back. And I think I probably made judgments about him based on the fact that he played

on the tennis team. Because tennis, as you guys discussed in a prior episode, A fantastic episode, a great episode, absolutely is a somewhat rarefied sport in terms of what your backgrounds, right, because Jews weren't admitted to country clubs either tennis club I get it. I get it. I was like, Oh, he's he's a guy whos probably pretty wealthy, plays tennis. I mean I like Ben, obviously, I mean we we we became uh you know, best friends or

I was like his second best friend. Apparently I didn't know that at the time that I was going to be the second best friend. And I will say, like, interesting enough, Ben was a more observant Jew than me, so Ben would go to services. I never did, um, but I think that might have been the way I found out that Ben was even Jewish. Like he said, oh, I'm going to Hillel or whatever the hell it was, and I was, and I was like, really, okay, all right, cool.

That kind of surprises me. I mean because the Jewishness of Ben that I knew with Shabat dinner on Fridays, which usually went from dinner to poker khalil is like I went to Shabbat dinner at your house every Friday, and I didn't. I'm not saying that, and you're Jewish saying that that was the extent of it. I mean, like, and so I don't. I didn't really even understand what all of that meant, saying like, obviously, everyone experiences their

own Jewishness or whatever their culture identity differently. My parents were both immigrants, you know, but I did not come from a family that really did those kinds of traditions. We would go for the high holidays for sure, which is like you had a bart I did. I went to Jewish day school like Ben early on, and I remember like every Friday, the kids at school would have like Shabat dinner, and I remember saying to my parents

like this is my parents were still together. I was pretty young, and I was like, you know, we should do Shabbat dinner. And I think like we did it like two weeks and then they were both like nah, man, fuck this were And I remember feeling really like some how I was I was failing as because everyone I knew was doing it right and I wasn't. And I just felt like, wow, we're just we're not good at that, We're not good at being Jews. So it was it was.

It was I had an uneasy relationship I think with my Jewishness as a monster Sasha, I get it, man, I mean that discomfort. If I'm honest, I probably felt that way as a as a young kid in the Nation of Islam mosques Like I mean, I went a few times, and you know, my parents divorcement was pretty young, and so the whole thing was a little weird. When I was a kid, you know, but this does have

me thinking about ben right, and I'm wondering. So at best, I'd know you got a lot of you know, your Jewish identity, at least from going to a Jewish day school. So what was that experience? Like, yeah, yeah, I went to that Jewish day school until fifth grade and when I transferred to public school, and I wasn't a good student at all. I actually failed dobvning, which is prayer, and my mom was like, am only God can fail

fail a kid in prayer? You know? I think, you know, I was definitely trying to figure stuff out though about about the larger community. So like I lived in a black, largely black community, and within it this Jewish community, and like moving through space trying to even sort of look to the Jewish part to understand the larger part, you know, so like trying to understand like what it meant to be part of a community. We had this teacher who

was teaching like an essex class, mister Levy. He was the principal of the school, and he asked us one day, you know, what should you do if you find five dollars outside of a synagogue and you know, we're like huh, I don't know, Like we're start to talk about it, invested and invest it And so he finally gets around to it and that gives the answer and he says, you know, you take it inside and give it to the front office. You give it to the synagogue. And

I was like this motherfucker. I was like ah, And I raised my hand and I said, mister Levy, what if you find it outside a church? And thank you? Thank you? And you know, like in south Shore where I lived, it was it was all synagogues because the neighborhood had been Jewish about about fifteen years before my family arrived there, and now all those synagogues were churches. And mister Levy like he's this egg shaped man. He looks at me with his slid eyes and he said

keep it. I was like, ah, all right, So like I didn't. I wasn't. I wasn't finding lessons in you know, a Sasha was saying like sort of the formal religious teachings of the school that helped me understand my world. And I will say that like where I did find it was more in like the cultural Judaism, you know, like if it wasn't in religion, like being a cultural Jew.

I was like, oh, I can understand stuff. You know that there were other Jews making jokes, that there were other Jews like telling stories, that there were other Jews who were who were making sense of a lot of these issues and for me specifically like about race and like you know, figuring out their place in the world. Yeah, you know, look, obviously, Jews, like black Floks, are not monolithic.

You know, it's you know, you have you have Reformed Jews, you have conservative Jews, you have Orthodox Jews, then you have the specific Jews, then you have you know, you have Jews of college. Yeah, exactly. It does speak to like the complexities of Judaism. Yeah, there's the there's this sort of religious aspect aspect to it, and then there's also a cultural aspect to it. And also there's a very big difference between sort of European Jews, which is

what my parents were, you know, having fled the Holocaust. Uh, we're not even fled living the Holocaust, versus you know, American Jews who've been who'd already been here for a number of generations, Like I'm the first generation of my family would be born here in the United States. Yeah, Sash, I guess uh. I don't think about it a lot. But I'm on my father's side. I'm first generation too. My dad is born in Nazi Germany in nineteen thirty seven,

and he leaves when he's very young. He leaves in nineteen thirty nine, you know, and his father is arrested. You know, he manages to get free, So you know there was there was real, real, real risk. M Yeah. Well, I mean listening to both you and Sashatel tell these stories about being you know, the first in your family be born, you know, in the United States, I am curious how did you both learn about the Holocaust? And

you know what kind of affected did that have? That experience of learning about it, of learning about what happened to your relatives have on you as a young person, Like, like, did it become a defining thing and your understanding of being Jewish? I think I think from I mean it, did it became the defining aspect of my Jewishness to a certain son, Like my last name is Penn. Of course that's not really my last name. The last name

was Penkinski. But when when my family got here, it was like, nah, man, we need to change our name so they can't track us down. I mean, my father's my father's a Holocaust survivor. My mother fled Vichy, France, you know, before things got super duper crazy. But my dad's was a Holocaust survivor, and so he didn't talk about it at all. Really Like one of the things

about my dad, which of course I didn't realize. I didn't learn this until much later, is he lived in this house at one point where you had to walk up these stairs to get to the main floor, and there it was like a really noisy hallway. And I would come in and I would open this door and I walk up the stairs, and he would always every time hello, he panted, who is it? Who is it? And I was like, damn, man, it's me, you know, relax, shit.

And come to find out that when he was a kid, he was hidden in basements all the time while people walked overhead, and he would hear the footsteps, and so when he would hear these footsteps come, it would create this incredibly visceral reaction for him. Had a very similar reaction when it came to the police, anyone in a uniform. My dad would shit himself. I mean, I remember him getting pulled over for speeding, and he was like he was basically face down on the pavement before they even

got to the car, you know what I mean. He was like, you know, yeah, I give it, I give it. And so yeah, I think my my Jewishness obviously is inextricably linked to this trauma. But what's interesting is when I've had kids, it has felt more important to me that they identify as Jewish um, which I didn't. I didn't necessarily expect. So so Ben, for you, I mean, obviously the same question applies. Yeah, I mean, so m my my father's parents still had German accents, you know,

my whole life, they never lost their accents. And so, you know, we we understood this history. We didn't sort of like unpack it as a family, you know, at all, Like we didn't talk about it in in great length. You know, I went to Jewish day school and the stuff about the Holocaust was just part of the conversation in a way. It's interesting, I mean, that sense of being tied to trauma as part of your identity. I probably feel differently than Sasha. I mean, I feel very

much like it's part of my history. As as a Jew, but I'm not, but maybe less part of my personal you know, like I didn't experience it personally. I mean, you know, the Holocaust was experienced very differently by different Jews around the world at the time, and so what I was, for example, my grandmother was really wary of quote unquote American Jews because you know, my family was being slaughtered in Europe and the Jews in the United

States weren't doing shit about it. And so you know, ultimately, my father, my grandmother, the way they got to this country is a Jewish family sponsored them and paid for them to come over here. That's how they got here. But my grandmother, you know, she sort of felt like the the Holocaust had been co opted by people who really didn't do enough at the time to really help

those who were actually victimized by the Holocausts. That's fascinating, I think, you know, the interesting conversation to have his jewishness and whiteness and and and what is that and how what is what is the what is that relationship? And how does that work? And all that kind of stuff, because you know, as I was raised, I was certainly not raised to believe that we were quote unquote white. You know what I mean. I was raised to believe

we were Jewish, which was not white. Yeah. And do you think do you think and the difference is that white people the other people think of us as lesser. I mean my father actually said it to me straight up. He said white people tried to kill me. Yeah. Yeah, So you know, for him, it was it was very very clear that no, no, no, that's not who the fuck we are. Those people want us dead. And David Lee Roth and his memoir, you know, the lead singer

Van Halen Uh. He says that he gives a speech at like his nieces bad Mitzvah, and he says, remember, you're not white. Nobody thinks you're white, You're Jewish. And then he does and then he does this split and jumps off and you know, and then he pops the balloon and then he jumps up and pops with it. Yeah. Can I just tell you, guys, I'm sitting here on Zoom looking at you both. I'm in between you both, which is just the miracle of faith that I used

to happen to be. And I feel like, for the first time in my life, I've arrived at the moment when I wanted to be a fly on the wall when white people and Jewish people talked about each other. You are and here we have it. It's like Jews and black people on the screen fighting racism together through comedy. All right, man, I am enjoying this. I got Ben in the hot seat, I got Sasha dropping bombs everywhere. Bring it. I'm learning so much about like about heritage,

about immigration, about personal choice. It's awesome. And so the thing that I'm really curious about now is listen, both of you are writers. Both of you have have committed your professional lives to making and to creating knowledge. Ben, you as a journalist, so much of your work has been really about race and racism. And Sasha, I mean, You've got this incredible career of these amazing stories, and

many of them are about black people. So I'm trying to figure out, like, Okay, help me understand how did this happen? Sasha? You first, look, I've thought a lot about this. I have to say, I think about it all the time because you know, the the show that I created, the show that I run is very much you know for a black show. You know it is,

that's that's what it is and as it it. I always gravitated towards like books by Richard Wright, and I remember, you know, reading Manshaw on The Promised Lamb, the Claude Brown Book, and I've talked about it and those books. Yeah,

it really resonated with me. And I think part of what resonated with me was, you know, I always felt a little bit like as a kid, especially because I was I was the son of immigrants, and I didn't know any other kids whose parents were immigrants, and you know, I always felt like I was somewhat looking in from the outside. And I feel like in some of those books and some of those experiences, you know, there were

themes and ideas that really resonated with me. Right But I think more than anything, I just I mean, my family, my family existed in this cauldron of injustice, right um. And I think that very much informed my worldview and the things that were important to me and the issues that were important to me, and this, frankly, the stories that were important to me. You know. Yeah, when I think of my own identity, I think I think of

my entity that I'm Jewish, that I'm white. I'm also a Southsider, like I'm from the South Side of Chicago, and you know, as a writer and a journalist, I wanted to solve in some way for injustice, you know, I wanted to sort of, you know, investigate inequalities and try to make them right. And being on from the South side of Chicago and looking at the injustices around here, most of them happen to black people, not all of them,

most of them. And so there are other Jews from my community who are also deeply involved in that, you know, involved in civil rights back in the day, and also like at my synagogue now, who were engaged in these issues and these questions. Because that's that those are the surrounding communities. That's that's the world we're trying to make sense of. I remember this so well, and because it's

always stayed with me. I think you were on Tavis Smiley at one point when Tavis Smiley was still somewhere you could still be on. But I remember you said the two defining moments of my life so far, we're Rodney King and O. J. Simpson. And I remember you

said that. I'm like, yeah, those are the two defining moments of my life too, you know, like that's The thing that's kind of amazing about this, which is like, if you're our age and you grew up at that time, like, how can how can those two things not be I don't give a fuck. If you're white right black, how can those two things not be the defining moments of your life? I mean, it speaks to the American experience and and and the truth is we're not talking about

being black or jew Wish or anything. We're talking about just being a good human being and that if you see something wrong, you wanna, you want to you want to do something about it. I mean, you set up an awesome segue to come come back to Sasha. So so with the most recent um sequel, The Power Book three, Raising Canaan, which just finished its first season, which was incredible.

Thank you, Stephanie and I were there for the premiere this past summer, and you took the stage to really introduce the vision for this new Power series and you told a story. You told a story about your father's immigrant experience in the United States as inspiration for this

black family story that you were about to premiere. What you said is that the struggle of this family is a universal story of a lot of immigrant experiences, right, and the quest for power, for dignity, for visibility is something that you felt from your father's experience, and it helped you. It helped you to see in these characters something that that you thought the audience would really admire and appreciate. Yeah, my father when he came to this country.

And keep in mind, my father had died about a month and a half before the premiere, so you know, it was very, very fresh from me. He was on your mind a lot. Yeah, yeah, he was, he was, and he had died sort of suddenly. So but when he came to this country, you know, he um the way he learned about America was through popular culture, is through movies, through TV. You know, that's how he assimilated. Skip Gates wrote something in The New York Times a few weeks ago about you know, who gets to tell

what stories? And what he ends up is like anyone can tell anyone's stories, and he says it's important that that happens. I agree, and yet at the same time, I'm very sensitive, especially given what I do and the stories that we tell on this show of who I am and how these stories, how these stories are told, and listen there may be a lot of people who are like, nah, fuck that, and that is certainly their

right to say that. But I think that if we get to a place where like I can only tell what you are a story, you can only tell an Asian,

what does that say about us as a society? Like, I'm not willing to take it that far down the continuum, right because I don't want my kids to grow up in that world, you know, And I do think that again, it goes back to I guess the speech I gave, but the premiere the stories about ourselves are the way that we share our experiences with other people, and they share their experiences with us, and we try to understand them.

I mean, that's the human the human experience, like you know, in your in our brain, it's like we turn everything into a story. Yeah, I agree with you about about you know, the need to tell stories that whatever, however we define our limited identity. I mean, like one of the things we're talking about is that identity is really

mixed up. Yeah, Like it's it's you know, there's a sort of hybrid sense about who we are, and so you're finding universalities and connections and the dangers happen when we sort of see otherness and think of it as something you know, very foreign and exotic and fixed, and there is there isn't either the work to understand how people are different or or to sort of see the connect plainer than that, right, Like, but I mean because the truth is like, oh, they're the overriding tradition is

is not the moment when people authentically reach for the experiences of others and try to understand them on their own terms. The experience in this country has mostly been to caricature blackness, right Like American popular culture came into being caricaturing black life. It was, It was the essence of American culture in the nineteenth century, from the vaudeville

stage to minstrual cy to the blackface traditions. Every seminal moment in American popular culture was defined by some moment of taking the raw material black life, not out of ignorance and distance, but out of familiarity and proximity, by actually being close to black people and turning them into monsters or children or piccaninnies or sambos or fill in

the blank. And I'm not saying those things are one and the same or you're describing about what happens today, but that is the weight of history, that is the longer story. And of course, I mean, what is so wonderful about this conversation is that both of you and Body the counter push against that and for reasons that I think have a lot to do with your own

personal personal journeys. Right then, I mean, and this, and I know this is a lot of history in this moment, but but this is exactly my point about what you do. I mean, I remember you telling me the story about someone coming up to you when you were doing a book talk about your book about you know, very poor black people living in Cabrini Green and all the amazing things that they did, you know, to make fuller lives

for themselves. And I think you told me something to the fact someone was like, well, why you Ben Austin, did you choose to write this book? Yeah? Yeah, I get asked all the time, you know, what made you want to do this? And like I'm I'm writing across racial lines and class lines and often gender lines, and I guess religion lines too, right since we're having this talk about judaism. Um. Yeah, but there's there's something about telling that story, which felt like such an important story

to tell. It is the story of Chicago, it is the story of the nation, It's the story of cities. I could find that connection in there. Sasha was saying, like the importance of practicing empathy, which is so much of writing, of doing the work to to to feel, to put yourself in other people's shoes, to learn about their stories and to try to tell them the best

way possible. You know, It's like I'm listening to this whole conversation, which of course has gone way past any conversation about Judaism, right, but because of our history, because of the stuff we've experienced, Like and I'll speak for my own family, you know, my father, my intensely interested in politics and intensely interested in current events. Why because you know that, by the way, that was like the most jewishit I've ever done in my life. Why why

now you has why I better make it? But yeah, because that shit has a material impact on our lives. We've seen it happen before, which is that if you take your eye off the fucking ball, guess what they show up at your door. They take you, They throw you in a fucking train and they take your house. So you know, it's like, you know, this is the stuff that I grew up as a jew being like really interested in, because this was the stuff that my family talked about, because we felt like it was important.

Because again, it had a material impact on us. And part of the experience of being a child of a survivor, frankly, is feeling like at any time shit could go really bad at any time. There's not a uniquely Jewish experience.

I should say that, it's not at all, you know, right, I gotta say, like, I mean, listening to what you just shared, Sasha, I mean thinking about how I was socialized, you know, both to like celebrate the freedoms that came with the successes of the civil rights movement, only to kind of stumble into and aware, you know, by virtue of Rodney King and the stuff that started to just seep into my consciousness. You know. It feels actually a lot more like Ben's story in terms of like this

upbringing that wasn't conscious like yours. But the irony is that the three of us end up in the same place. I mean, obviously I'm living this black experience, but by dint of some you know, really diverse path that the three of us journeyed. We all end up in this space where our understanding of the potential for harm to other people animates the work we do. Absolutely, And you know, I'm really grateful for being on this journey with both of you. Brother, Thank you for saying that. Man Sasha

was so great to have you on the show. It really means a lot that you're participating in this with us. And you know, the first question that Khalil asked you was how did you meet me? And what was your first impression? And I want to ask you about your first impression when you met Khalil, because when we were in our early twenties, like like just out of college, you came to Chicago one winter and it was the

first time that you met him. Well, it's funny because when I met Khalil, he was on this track to be like an accountant or something. You were on. You were working at PwC Delight, Delight and Too and too so okay. So I remember meeting him and being like because because of course Ben and I were like we had no hope of a career whatsoever, Like it was like the best. We were both like we're gonna be

like writers, which of course is ridiculous. And so I remember meeting you and being like, wow, man, Khalil really has it together. But here's what I really remember, and this is the only thing that matters. I remember we went out to dinner. Khalil opened his car door and he reached down and he all of a sudden, he brought back forty dollars, and I was like, what the fuck, because I was like, I just found it, and we're like, get the funk out of here. And then he reached

out again and he pulled out another forty dollars. Remember this, Kalue, you found all this money on the street and then you took us all out to pizza. It was like negative it was like negative twenty. It was negative twenty, and we went to we went to Girodano's, and that money covered all the paces. This brings us all the way back full circle to Ben b mister Levy. If you ask Khalil, I take everybody out to pizza. That's right, I take the Jews out. I take the Jews out

for pizza. It's not yet. If you find twenty dollars, I take them to pizza. That's what I do, mister leaving. Oh my god, Now that's hilarious. That is hilarious. All right, Well you know what I think. I think. I think it's fair to say Ben that I love Sasha too. Is that all right? Is right? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, of course I'm not gonna lie. I love you, guys, love you, Love you, Sasha. Some of My Best Friends Are is

a production of Pushkin Industries. The show is written and hosted by me Khalildbron Mohammed and my best friend Ben Austin, produced by Sheriff Vincent and edited by Karen Shakerji. Our engineer is Martin Gonzalez. Our associate editor is Keishell Williams. Our associate producer is Lucy Sullivan, and our showrunner is Sasha Matthias. Our executive producers are Leeta Molad and Mia la Belle. And special thanks, of course to Sasha Penn not just one of my best friends, one of my

two best friends at Pushkin. Thanks to Heather Faine, Harley Nigliori, John Schnars, and Jacob Weisberg. Our theme song, Little Lily, is by fellow chicagoan AVERYR. Young from his Amazing album Tubman. You will definitely want to check out more of his music at his website averyryng dot com. You can find Pushkin on all social platforms at Pushkin pods, and you can sign up for our newsletter at pushkin dot fm. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. If you love Some of My Best Friends Are and any of the other shows from Pushkin Industries, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and uninterrupted listening for four dollars and ninety nine cents a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple podcast subscriptions.

If you like this show, please give it a five star review, and please tell some of your best friends about it, like a lot of your best friends, all of your best friends, all of your best friends. Now, hey you guys, it's Hanukkah time, and I learned how to say Happy holidays. Shock sameya? Right? Oh man? Did I get that right? Did I get that? Yes? You kill shot? All right? Do you want to correct mersh you designegg sa