Tablet’s Alana Newhouse on Reimagining Jewish Media—The Z3 Podcast
In this episode of the Z3 Podcast, host Rabbi Amitai Fraiman is joined in conversation with Alana Newhouse and Ani Wilcenski from Tablet Magazine for a candid, cross-generational conversation on the role of Jewish journalism post-Oct. 7. Together they explore how independent Jewish media can reclaim agency in an age of disinformation, rising antisemitism, and eroding trust in legacy news. At a time when the Jewish world faces new external threats and internal divisions, this conversation asks: Who gets to tell the Jewish story and how can that story sustain us?
Listen now to this compelling discussion on reclaiming the Jewish narrative.
About Our Guests
Alana Newhouse is the editor-in-chief of Tablet, which she founded in 2009.
Ani Wilcenski is the deputy editor at Tablet Magazine.
Video Transcript
Z3 Project (00:07)
Hi and welcome to the Z3 podcast. I'm Amitai Fraiman, the founding director of the Z3 project and this is our podcast. So today we're trying something a little bit new. We've invited two voices from the same newsroom, Ani Wilcenski Tablet's deputy editor and Alana Newhouse Tablet's editor-in-chief, to give us an inside look at how one organization balances in its internal culture with serving a diverse Jewish audience. And in a way, this conversation is a continuation of one that we've had a couple episodes ago in which we spoke with Rebecca and Shanie, two contributing authors to our Young Zionist Voices book where we began
unpacking some of the questions around the generational divide when it comes to Zionism, the relationship with Israel and Jewish peoplehood. And in this episode, what we've done is we've dived within to one organization because we have Alana and Ani who represent different generations and had this conversation between the two of them how they see the reality different, how they complement each other, how do they supplement each other and you know, it just gives a different angle to a similar conversation. And in this episode, we talk about what is Jewish journalism, why it's important, the role that it serves, how it complements it.
general or legacy media, a little bit of what is legacy media, what's new media, and how that fits in this whole puzzle. We talked about how October 7th has shifted their work and the perception of our community. We talked about other generational questions in terms of engagement platform-wise and topic-wise. Anyway, it's a great episode. Whether or not you're a devoted reader of Jewish news or simply an interested person in our story, this conversation I think will give us a little bit more of a fresh insight of how we tell our story as a community and what to look out to, what to
attention
to and it really was an enlightening conversation so I hope you enjoy it. Before we dive in I just want to remind you all and to follow us across our channels, our various social media channels, LinkedIn and Twitter, X, TikTok and YouTube. We have a newsletter of course, all the links to that will be in the description of this episode. And one last thing before we continue is that the nominations are open for the Z3 2025 Bridge Builder Award. It's a $10,000 prize, yes, $10,000 prize for the winner.
And so if you know someone who is building bridges or you yourself are doing this important work building bridges within our community and between communities Please head to our website and nominate yourself or nominate that person. And you know, this is a limited period for this ⁓ Part of the award so do so soon again. Thank you for listening I'm Amitai Fraiman the founding director of the Z3 project and today we are exploring how Jewish journalism shapes who we see ⁓ How we see ourselves and how others see us and how we tell our story. So enjoy this episode
Let's dive in.
Amitai Fraiman (02:46)
Hi, welcome Alana and Ani. It's so great to have you on the Z3 podcast today. This is a special episode, I think. It's the first time we have two people from the same organization, though it doesn't seem like something that we're gonna stop doing, because there's always interesting ideas that come from within organizations, even if it's not ⁓ from outside. So thank you very much for joining us. I'm very, very, very much looking forward to this conversation.
and it's really a pleasure to have you on our podcast.
Alana Newhouse (03:17)
Thanks for having us.
Amitai Fraiman (03:18)
Absolutely. so we're to jump right into it. know, we have, you the two of you, you know, you work, you Tablet, right? Like that's the the outlet that we're going om. Alana, you you founded it and Ani, you're now, you know, you have a role there. And I think the conversation is going to go along the lines of generally speaking, journalism in this moment, Jewish journalism post October 7
Ani Wilcenski (03:18)
Great to be here.
Amitai Fraiman (03:39)
and some generational differences within, you know, we had a conversation in our last episode with folks from our book, which is called Young Zionist Voices, those 31 essays written by people younger than 30. And we talked a lot about the differences, the generational difference, or least the perceived one when it comes to Zionism, Israel, and Jewish peoplehood. And I imagine some of that will come up here as well, one way or the other. So yeah, with that, we'll jump right into it. If you want to give us an overview from your perspective, what do you...
What do you think role of Jewish journalism is and how it shapes how we understand ourselves in relation to the world?
Alana Newhouse (04:17)
⁓ So I can start us off. I think that the role of Jewish journalism has actually changed a lot. I think that in a previous media landscape where many of us relied on legacy outlets for basic news, Jewish journalism had the opportunity to be an additional source of the ways of looking at the world. ⁓ And it enhanced
other sources of news and analysis. I think that what's changed recently is that for many of us, those legacy publications have stopped being places that are as trustworthy as they once were, which actually ⁓ makes the role of Jewish journalism, I think, more expansive, and it makes our responsibility and our mandate bigger.
⁓ Because now for many of our readers, not only are we providing a perspective on the news, but we're sometimes providing the news itself. I don't know if Ani sees it as different.
Ani Wilcenski (05:28)
Yeah, absolutely. I think
And Tablet is a really good example of this, but there's other Jewish journalistic outlets that are the same. We are covering stories that people are sometimes not going to get anywhere else because they go overlooked or unreported by these big legacy places. Or we're covering things that there's a very defined point of view that somewhere like the New York Times and the BBC and all of these places, they have a party line. And we're showing the side that if you are on Twitter and you're parsing through the news and you have some common sense about the whole thing, you can probably tell that there's another
side to the story, but a lot of these places are not willing to report it. So our job is kind of to make sure that that perspective is coming to light for people who often are very, very grateful to have an outlet that is covering these things honestly.
Amitai Fraiman (06:13)
So that's interesting. I just want to, ⁓ before we follow that thread fully, I think it's worth kind of explaining because in my mind, I mean, as we were describing it, it was very clear to me what you meant. And also I think that there's some people that might want a little clarification. So when you say legacy news outlets or media, right? In my mind, typically what I guess was assuming that's like the traditional way we do news. There's a newspaper, there's kind of this main place where we come in.
And that's the main channel. There's other channels that kind of support that main. I mean, they've been around for a very long time, obviously, as part of that definition, as opposed to kind of like the new media, which would be the social media kind of outlet. And what it sounds like you're saying is there's might be a little bit more of nuance in there that's worth kind of understanding.
Alana Newhouse (06:58)
Yeah, what I would say is that I think that actually the distinction is ⁓ not between social media and traditional journalistic outlets, but actually between what we refer to as legacy media and then what we refer to as independent media. Those two feel like very different ecosystems. ⁓ Legacy media is ⁓ made up of the
names of outlets and people who were once made up mainstream news. ⁓ So those are major metro daily newspapers in the US, ⁓ television channels, big magazines from big magazine companies. ⁓ The independent space right now is made up of ⁓ many different and sometimes individual outlets, like people's sub stacks.
⁓ some of which have more or less reporting and research behind them, ⁓ but also places like the free press ⁓ and very large steps at substacks that do investigative reporting like for example, Matt Taibbi's. ⁓ There's also places like Pirate Wires These are places that that exist on all sides of the political spectrum, ⁓ but they are outside of that traditional ecosystem.
in a funny way, Tablet, which started 16 years ago, was we, I think it's fair to say that we were a niche outlet in the mainstream ecosystem.
Amitai Fraiman (08:32)
That was my next question. was going to be, yeah, go ahead, sorry.
Alana Newhouse (08:35)
Right, and
now we are, and I think that we had a choice, I don't think we were very conscious of it, but we definitely had a choice of whether or not we wanted to stay a niche outlet in that legacy space, or whether we kind of wanted to be the granddaddy of the independent space, and in many ways, Tablet became the ladder. And so we exist in that second space.
Amitai Fraiman (09:01)
Yeah, because I was going to say from my perspective as a fairly not a very sophisticated user in my perception was like, okay, there's like big world legacy stuff. mean, we generally speak right to Jews like there's Ted and then there's like the Jewish Ted talks, right? And so it felt like sometimes unfairly, know, Jewish media was like, okay, there's like big world legacy. And then there's like in the Jewish world, there's like there'll be the channels that would be considered like the legacy news outlets. And in my mind, that's where, you know,
know, the main ones would live, I guess. But that's an interesting distinction. You're saying, well, yes. And even within that niche, there's a way to kind of carve out to be more like independent. And that, guess, has to do with tone and topic and perspective more so than kind of the place that kind of lives in people's imagination. In other words, it's much more about the subject matter. That's okay. that thank you. First of thank you for that. I think will help us kind of frame the rest of this conversation.
and because we might be scratching their heads around that. So that's good we got that out of the way. So you didn't mention a shift ⁓ of sorts, Alana, said it further recently. ⁓ Where would you pinpoint that? What would cause that shift in ⁓ your estimation?
Alana Newhouse (10:17)
⁓ so the shift at Tablet begins actually fairly early on, although we didn't know what we were undergoing while we were undergoing it. I think that the shift for us began with the.
what was then called the Iran deal or JCPOA in the US, ⁓ where we were looking, our reporters and analysts were looking at something that didn't make a lot of sense to us. And we started reporting it and we noticed a really vast difference between the way we were reporting it and the way that these legacy outlets were reporting it.
And in some cases, we noticed that there were wildly different assumptions, but also we noticed that the way that they were using sources, particularly simply just taking the story that was being given by establishment powers and regurgitating it, which was never the role of journalism. The role of journalism was to analyze and say, and ask if they were telling the truth.
and ask if what they were saying made any sense. So in the beginning for us, it was just this one weird story that we were covering very differently than everyone else. But then all of a sudden, there were more and more of those. Another example for a Tablet was Russiagate, ⁓ which we were quite skeptical of and did not see as having nearly the...
evidence that it would need in order to be convincing as a case. ⁓ But the real moment I think of where all of this blooms is during COVID in 2020, where we just were astonished at the level of ⁓ reflexive repetition of what people in power said.
without any real interrogation of what it meant. the idea, for example, of school closures. School closures made no sense ⁓ from the very beginning. And seeing these outlets that we had all come to trust and really rely on simply
report out stories as though that made sense without asking any question about it felt very troubling to us. ⁓ But then I think, of course, this really hits a different plateau around right after October 7th and in the reporting around October 7th, which seemed, it seemed just wildly divergent from what we had come to rely on and trust.
So that's the broad trajectory. And I think that, you know, in the last five years, the suspicions that we had about legacy media started to be contagious. And many other people began questioning what they were reading.
Amitai Fraiman (13:26)
Got it. And you, you, you referred to this as kind of someone has common sense and know where to look. And I'm curious from your perspective, ⁓ you know, because I certainly what Alana is saying about the, you know, the suspicion of legacy media certainly tracks and something that I on a personal level also ⁓ experienced here and in Israel. But I think that to me that ties into other other elements. And I'm curious for you, Ani, how do you how do you experience this this ⁓ distrust and
what you're seeing.
Ani Wilcenski (13:57)
Yeah, think well, to piggyback a little to both answer your question and piggyback a little bit off what Alana was saying, I think it's important to note that Tablet was very, very early on a lot of these things at a time when a lot of people were not taking them seriously. And in many ways, a lot of what Tablet was saying was dismissed as kind of like fringe or whatever. And people didn't really listen. There's a really good example about this, where in 2014, I believe Tablet published an article pointing out that Hamas was maintaining a bunker underneath the hospital.
in Gaza, very famously, which of course, 10 years later became extremely prescient and relevant. And we're whipping that out of the archives to point to this as the New York Times was just slowly kind of coming to grips with the fact that this existed. So Tablet was very much ahead of the curve for a while. I think, however, Americans and more specifically now a big chunk of our readers who came to Tablet over the last five years, was 2020 was the watershed year where people really started seeing
that there was a massive dissonance between what these big places were saying and the things that they could see with their own eyes that were happening. There was COVID, there's also a really famous instance with CNN covering the protests that happened in the aftermath of George Floyd. There was a very famous chyron that said, the protests were fiery, but mostly peaceful. And the footage on the screen is literally like massive riots. And people were looking at this and they're saying the media is reporting things that are different from what we are actually observing in the world around us.
And then obviously in 2021 with the Hamas little flare up with Gaza and then much more powerfully in 2023 with October 7th, I Jewish audiences were really experiencing this, noticing this massive gulf between people's lived experiences, what they knew to be true, their knowledge of Israel, their knowledge of the Middle East and what was being reported and seen.
⁓ And so I think that there was kind of this dual trajectory that Alana is talking about here, which is the way that Tablet has evolved in terms of like being ahead of things and also the way that a big portion of our readership in a more mainstream way has kind of come to grips with the same terms because we haven't always been on the same timeline, even though we're very much aligned now.
Amitai Fraiman (16:03)
So there must be a moment where you kind of perceive that ⁓ legacy. And it's one thing to say, OK, we recognized and we pivoted away from the way things were done in order to kind of do our job basically as journalists, as Alana would say, right, ask the questions, not take everything for granted. When in your estimation did that kind of line or when did the legacy media start breaking in that way? Or was it always broken, we just didn't notice it?
Alana Newhouse (16:30)
I don't know. ⁓ I think it was, it wasn't always broken. ⁓ And it did break. I just think it was very gradual. And, you know, Ani brought up 2014, which is actually a pretty banner year, ⁓ because we, there is a Gaza war in 2014. ⁓ And that is also the year that Tablet published Maddie Friedman's piece on how news outlets cover
the Israel-Palestine conflict. And that piece was a pretty surgical approach to explaining to readers why this story was getting miscovered. What I would say is that in the wake of that piece,
I looked at Maddie's analysis and everything he saw happening around the story that related to the Middle East was also happening everywhere else. And I started seeing the problems with how news gathering was being done even domestically in domestic stories. And
So I do think that it was a virus and it took over slowly, ⁓ but eventually took over in such a way that it created ⁓ this impression that Ani described, I think quite perfectly, of people now actually in their own neighborhoods experiencing things that did not match the stories that they were reading about them.
Amitai Fraiman (18:19)
So, how do so what is, know, so in light of that, I mean, one way to go with this is to, you know, I'm curious to hear like, OK, so if we with the mistrust of the centralized legacy establishment, mean, that's I think what I was what I was saying earlier, I think it permeates. It's not just in media, it's in the central banking system we're seeing with the rise of cryptocurrency and all that stuff is, think, a reflection of people's distrust of of that and then of government and forms of government and people being critical different ways, you know, like, you know, like the old school.
⁓ order is no longer relevant. So think generally we're seeing like a breakdown of, a churn in how we experience the world. And I think it cuts across a variety of different industries. But with that, there's also a danger. ⁓ Not loss of control in the sense of being able to dictate how people think, but a loss of quality control maybe is a better way to think about it. And how do we think about parsing out? Because there's also a whole lot of...
you know, this, we'll call it investigative or quasi, I'll put it more in the, I'm not equating the two. This is in the quasi-investigated rubric and podcasters who are out there spewing, spreading a lot of half truths or incomplete pictures. How do we kind of, you know, how do we navigate that dance?
Alana Newhouse (19:41)
think my argument is that you have to lean in to that space and try to compete and compete for smart listeners and readers. Because ⁓ imagining that we are all going to go back into the box of being legacy media readers,
feels just incredibly unlikely at this point. And I do want to say, I think that you're right, that when institutions break down, what you lose is the stability that they offered. And that's why we try our best to preserve institutions and to criticize them in healthy ways so that they don't break down.
What I think we had certainly in the States is we had a set of institutions that made themselves deaf to criticism and couldn't hear it for decades. And as a result became kind of wild with their own power, assumed that they were the only game in town. And this, you can talk about banks, you can talk about the universities, you can talk about legacy media and...
What we're seeing on the other side is that they weren't eternally powerful. And those, now are going to be, they're going to have competition. And some of that competition is going to make everyone dumber. It's just the case. But when I look at it, I'm like, well, great, everyone's dumb. People who read the New York Times are dumb and people who listen to Theo Vaughn are dumb. it's just lots of people.
making themselves really stupid. ⁓ But then the question is, what do you do in that space? And the answer is you lean in and you publish more stuff that is smart, that does have reporting underneath it, that does have smart analysis. And you start to learn.
smart readers eventually, the market will eventually move in a direction where smart readers will gravitate toward the voices and the outlets that get proven right and prescient. The question is how long that takes and how much damage gets done by people not having good information between now and then. And I think that's just what we're, that's what, that's the moment we're living in.
Amitai Fraiman (22:11)
So we're in that messiness of now we have to untangle and find and seek out kind of that. So that to me kind of, you know, that speaks to the responsibility that journalists and outlets have. And in particular, do think that the Jewish, you know, the Jewish journalists or journalism have a specific responsibility towards the community in this moment? You know, using the big picture of the breakdown and also obviously the moment, it's already two years, but this moment we are in ⁓ now.
Ani Wilcenski (22:39)
Well, I would like to bring up something that Alana very humbly didn't, which is a recent piece that she wrote for Tablet, which was entitled You Are Not the Media and it accompanied the launch of our print magazine. And basically the argument that she was making, she's referencing the what is now famous on at X formerly Twitter of Elon Musk telling everyone after he bought the platform, like you are the media now, right? Like you don't need to read these places because as we've already discussed, they're
full of lot of lies and inaccuracies or whatever. So you can just go on social media and you can get all your facts and your information. And what Alana was arguing is actually like, that's also bad for you, right? Like just because these big gatekeepers have sort of fallen apart and there is diminished trust does not mean there's not also a need for the media. And obviously within the Jewish world, there's a need for Jewish journalists. And more broadly within the regular world too, there's still a need for Jewish journalists who are applying our values to covering general news.
But I think the point is that the media still matters, right? Like the media is there as Alana wrote to mediate American public opinion. We're there to help people make sense of the world. And now because of social media and this glut of information that people are being fed, the media is actually more important than ever because as you were talking about earlier, there is a ton of disinformation out there. And also there's just a lot where it's hard to dig through.
the absolute barrage of stories that you get to figure out what's important, what's not, what matters, is this a small narrative, is this something that actually matters? So the media does, I would say, continue to have this outsize importance, Jewish and otherwise. And just because legacy media isn't trustworthy and just because it is more democratic, which is really good, it doesn't mean that there isn't a need for a certain type of gatekeeper, even if the role of that gatekeeper and what that gatekeeper looks like has changed.
Amitai Fraiman (24:28)
And the two of you, you think this is like a generational shift? In other words, do you see this distinction that we're within your readership and broadly speaking, is this like, is there like an age factor that plays into this thing or not so much?
Ani Wilcenski (24:44)
Well, I will start to speak for my cohort. I'm in Gen Z, and then I'd be very curious to hear what Alana has to say. I am shocked by how many people my age that I know, including people that went to my school, which was Columbia, don't read. People get their news from the internet, basically, like TikTok and Twitter and things like that. That is where people go. And so it does pose a challenge that we have had to take on at Tablet, which is like,
Amitai Fraiman (24:45)
First.
Yeah, okay. Yeah,
Ani Wilcenski (25:14)
We need to put our stories on these platforms because unfortunately this is where people are sourcing their news. So we have to go and be the media and be the gatekeepers, put these stories, all of these places on these platforms because there is a massive part of America right now that is just like logging on the internet to make sense of the world around them, which has a lot of potential possibility in a certain way, but at the same time, obviously it's very dangerous.
Alana Newhouse (25:42)
Yeah, I would obviously agree. ⁓ What I would say though is that a couple things. One,
The legacy media diet when there was one was never that you got your news from one outlet. There was always, it was a pyramid and you got very local news from local outlets. You got ⁓ your village news or your local small city news. Then you got your, you had a major ⁓ newspaper from your nearest city. ⁓
Then you had national newspapers like the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, which many people around the country received. And then you had magazines. had Newsweek, Time, know, news magazines. And then on top, at the very, very tippy top of the pyramid were thought leader magazines. And those thought leader magazines were always for elite audiences. And so they were always read by a small number of people.
And but they were small numbers of people who were important in various industries. And I don't think it's bad for there to be thought leader outlets now that are not read by millions of people. What's bad is that we're empowering people who don't.
actually know anything. And again, this is not about your perspective or what you read at the top of that thought leader pyramid, right? This is more about the fact of reading at all, or of being informed at all. Whether what you do with that information and with what you how you educate yourself can be wildly divergent as it used to be, right? We had thought leader magazines that in this country that were very right wing and thought leader magazines that were very left wing.
So it's not really about everybody ⁓ sort of collecting in one opinion, but it is about people having demands of themselves at different levels of power and influence.
So when you, when you look at it that way, I think that you, for a magazine like Tablet, which is meant to be a thought leader magazine, we at once need to be on those platforms because the thought leader, there are, there are thought leaders in Gen Z and we want to reach them. But you also don't need to create or to, uh, to edit your content.
to for the lowest common denominator. We don't need to have 30 million readers of Tablet. So the first thing is sort of a practical ⁓ answer that relates to how big an audience a place like Tablet is gonna have naturally. But then when you kind of break down by generation, I have this theory that ⁓
Ani has heard me talk about a lot, but ⁓ my theory is that basically Gen Z, particularly younger Gen Z, ⁓ is mirroring Gen X, whereas millennials are mirroring the boomers, both in how they read, in their politics, ⁓ in their assumptions, and in where they are emotionally. And it makes a lot of sense when you look at it generationally.
But to me, tabless readership now has a lot of younger Gen Z and Gen X. That's kind of, those are our two biggest cohorts. And millennials, millennials and boomers drop out for us a little bit. Boomers are bigger than, our boomer cohort is bigger than our millennial cohort.
but those are still the smaller ones. ⁓ And so then you start to ask yourself why? What happened with these two generations? What did Gen X experience and Gen Z experience that made them similar to each other? And I think that that brings up really interesting questions about technology and about the economy and about ⁓ American history. But for me,
It feels really interesting because I feel like we are writing for two groups of people who are both incredibly anti-authoritarian and very skeptical. And that's my natural reader anyway. So I like it.
Amitai Fraiman (30:34)
Yeah. But also is there just a simple fact of like who's important to you at a certain age related to your age? In other words, like when millennials were forming their opinions, who are the important people? Right. And for Gen Z, you know, like, I don't know who's for Gen X, who is important for Gen X? You know what mean? If it really is that kind of like, and if it, but that, I mean, it's interesting. I'm like, as you're saying, like it makes, it makes a lot of sense, but you know, I'm curious, Ani, from your perspective, how does that, how does that play?
⁓
Ani Wilcenski (31:04)
Yeah, I was gonna say, you know, it's interesting. Gen Z, I think one of the other reasons that Gen Z is drawn to Tablet, and it also relates to our new print magazine. I think Tablet for because Gen Z ⁓ grew up on the internet, like I really don't know a time where I wasn't plugged into the internet. I've been on Twitter since I was like 13 years old, right? So we've just been
hit with a fire hose of information basically our entire lives. So the function of somewhere like Tablet in particular where it like winnows things down for you, I think is something that is very, very appealing to Gen Z where we just have a glut of content. And speaking about the print magazine in particular, what I have heard from people, and this is something that I very much feel, is that we see so many things on the internet every day, but the smallest, smallest proportion of them are memorable.
Right, I see so much stuff every day on my phone and I probably remember 1 % of it, even less. And so something like a print magazine where everything is consolidated into one space and it's not just doing like the act of thought filtering or anything like that, but you have this package, which is like, this is what matters. These are things that I can remember. These are things that I can hold in the palm of my hand. I think that's also something where there's a lot of appeal in that for Gen Z.
which is a generation where we have like so much at our fingertips, but at the same time, little of that is stuff that matters.
think she's paid, I believe, on them.
Amitai Fraiman (32:28)
Wait, Alana, you're...
Yeah.
Alana Newhouse (32:32)
I just want to echo something that Ani was saying because ⁓ it was a real reason, it was a real impetus behind the print magazine, which was Gen Z. There was one person who wrote into me who's probably now 25. ⁓ And he said, look, I grew up, he basically said what Ani just said. I grew up that internet was the wallpaper in my life. I didn't grow up not knowing the internet.
But what that also means is it's not magic to me. I don't think that just because I saw something on the internet that I believe it, which I do think ⁓ was a problem for some people who as adults or ⁓ as older adolescents, teenagers, first came to the internet. ⁓
Amitai Fraiman (33:15)
Mm.
Alana Newhouse (33:22)
And he was like, so to me, I know that I could start a website in my basement and call it the Delhi Chronicle if I can get the URL and I could put up a bunch of garbage on there. I don't believe anything I read on the internet. I take it all in, but what I choose to believe or not doesn't come from that. The platform doesn't get, doesn't build in any trust. Whereas.
If somebody took the time to print something, to pay for paper and ink and a design, I at least feel like they believe it. And then as a result, it's worth me reading. I may not agree. I may not think they're right, but there's ⁓ a level of investment on their part that automatically builds in some trust.
I was so moved by this argument. I thought it was exactly right. It's also how I think, because what he was basically saying is in a broader way is he was saying, the reason why I don't trust any of these outlets is because I don't know what their investment is. I don't know what they're actually, what did they get out of me believing what they say? I don't know is the answer. Whereas if you move into, for us,
a printed product that comes to your house once a month, you feel human engagement in that. That was not produced by AI. It's not produced by some kid in his basement. You can feel professionals making it. And whether you like it or not, or you agree with it or not, you feel somebody, some human with some gifts made you something. And I think that that
Amitai Fraiman (35:06)
Yeah.
Alana Newhouse (35:18)
creates a completely different attachment and connection.
Amitai Fraiman (35:21)
Yeah,
I mean that makes sense in a way because you know, and if it's too, if something's too accessible and the motivation, mean, general, speaking, right, we know that part of the promise of social media was a greater trust and connectivity between people when in fact, know that actually very much worked in the other direction. ⁓ Generally speaking, a of distrust, the incentives of shocking your audiences, siloing them off and you know, how to generate revenue.
Alana Newhouse (35:27)
Mm-hmm.
Amitai Fraiman (35:50)
It's something people can already understand that they're being targeted in a way. And so you really can't trust a lot of what you're seeing online. So that makes sense how you have to have this kind of real world connection. mean, that's part of the work that we do at Z3 is exactly that, right? This argument that everything online, everything in the national level, everything is very, very high stakes and very impersonal. But if you can get together in the same room with people from your community and have an educational experience where you can disagree constructively.
then you're building, you're getting, you're gonna be better informed and build better relationships with people because that interaction that, you know, immediate kind of human connection is something that is so valuable in building that trust and that connection. So that's kind of like, that ties in, right? This like real world. So it's just, you know, zooming out. It's interesting to see this, cause I didn't grow up ⁓ as Ani with, you know, for me it was a revolution, this whole thing with the phone and the internets and all that stuff. ⁓
But certainly it feels like there's like kind of like, okay, everything was out there and now we're kind of coming down to realizing the negative impacts of it. And then how do we adjust? Because it's here to stay, but we have to kind of find our way back into building that trust. And it sounds like this magazine ⁓ that you guys started recently is a great way to build that trust with your readership. And so, mean, I think that that's kind of like, that speaks to also how we, each generation in our community grew up.
Right? What were the, what are the, what are the events that informed them? And, you know, how do they, how do they see the world? And, you know, I'm just curious from your perspective, like Ani, you know, what was like the Jewish events or like, you're, you know, as you're coming up in this world, like, what are the things that you would say this is, you know, something that really influenced me because you mentioned you went to school in Columbia, not very known for its, uh, uh, favored view of our, of our people. Yeah. Um, and so, yeah, and I'm curious. And then, you know, and lot of for you, you know, what was your.
Ani Wilcenski (37:32)
the most phylo-semitic institution.
Amitai Fraiman (37:39)
I grew up in Israel, so I'm always curious to hear from an American perspective, because it's very, very, very different. But Ani... Okay, there you go. So Ani, let's start with Ani. Yeah.
Alana Newhouse (37:44)
I also went to Columbia.
Ani Wilcenski (37:48)
Yeah, a bunch of traumatized Columbia alumni.
I would say, I mean, I think that probably most people my age, Jews, would have a similar answer. Number one, obviously, was the election of Trump. I think you have a pretty standard, I think, profile of like the sort of person that might read Tablet or especially come to Tablet over the last five years. And just speaking for myself, I was a freshman at Columbia.
When Trump was elected, I had worked for the Clinton campaign. was appalled. I was horrified, et cetera, et cetera. Obviously, that's a very big, politically formative watershed moment for a lot of people. However, I was at Columbia watching the way that people reacted to the election of Trump. And I was like, man, these people are just going to, like, they're going to piss people off so much because they are taking this horribly, essentially. And as you may have seen, Columbia wasn't exactly trending in a positive direction.
So by the time I graduated Columbia, which happened to be in 2020, the second big watershed moment for me was COVID and watching the George Floyd situation and that crazy year where everyone that I had gone to school with, who I basically already thought was kind of nuts, went absolutely insane. And that was the moment where I would say that my trust in the media really began to crater my opinions on my peers, which had already been sort of like, I don't know about their politics. They're really were radically shattered.
⁓ but I definitely, the last one, obviously it was October 7th, which was the moment where I had kind of like these fragile truces with people where I knew that we kind of disagreed on these matters of politics. And I knew that like, we probably didn't agree about Israel, but we were running in the same circles, et cetera, et cetera. And then October 7th just broke all of that wide open. And then it was just very clear that the things that I thought were like maybe political disagreements that we could just have and be respectful about were actually these vast moral differences in every single way that we saw the world.
And I think that it just had this absolute ripple effect on pretty much every politically engaged Jew that's sane from my generation. And it really, you just look at this timeline of events, and I'm pretty sure that 85 % of Tablet Gen Z readers would be able to pinpoint one, two, three, because it was an emotional arc that a lot of us had.
Alana Newhouse (40:01)
And I have to say something. mean, it's going to embarrass her, but to me, one of the testaments of Tablet and of our ability to ⁓ tell the truth in ways that were both accessible and also helpful was having someone like Ani actually be a reader and then want to work there. ⁓ And at this point,
Ani has magnetized a whole cohort around her of people and they are the smartest people that we have in our space right now. ⁓ And it is, to me, that feels like the most exciting part of the moment that we're in now is when I hear people in the Jewish community talk about...
that we're losing all these kids and they're all brainwashed and they're all every, it's so despairing and it's such a terrible moment. It's not that I, I'm not trying to be a Pollyanna, but I really think they're missing something, which is they're missing the other trend that's happening, which is a trend of people who may never have actually had any attachment to Israel or any real one or any real interest in Judaism or Jewish.
identity, who all of a sudden came online in the last two years. And even if they're a smaller group of people than the masses who are being brainwashed, I'd much prefer to be with that small minority anyway. And the Jewish story is a story of being small and mighty. So for me,
This feels like a time of incredible, both deepening and growth of Jewish identity in the States and also Jewish engagement.
Amitai Fraiman (41:57)
So, I mean, because everything, what you're both saying is very compelling, ⁓ you know, but I, as someone who works within the Jewish, in the Jewish nonprofit side of the Jewish communal element, there is a certain degree of frantic or angst around, you know, the growing numbers of disengagement, you know, and surveys are pointing to high numbers of people who are moving away from.
Israel and the connection. And so, I mean, how do we, how do we, the way Ani is describing is like, yeah, like, obviously everybody's moving this way, but, and yet at least some numbers, I don't believe all numbers, of course, right? Everybody has a, what is it? 80 % of statistics are invented on the spot, including this one. You know, it's, but, but, but to, to the extent that there is some truth of saying like the younger generations are more, typically more progressive. ⁓
Alana Newhouse (42:54)
⁓ I think it's a lot. think these things are broad strokes that actually don't show a real story. ⁓ And I think that Jewish communal life has always been driven by fire alarm politics. And this moment is not any different. Again, I'm not trying to ⁓ argue that everything is fabulous and we are in this amazing moment where there is no bad news. ⁓ But.
I absolutely think that our obsession with numbers and our obsession with actually legacy spaces is preventing us from seeing this other trend that I think is going to end up being more important than that. Right. So we care about all the kids who are sharing statistics on X that come from some NGO that is basically
anti-Israel. And we're like, look at how many of them there, there, what's implied by that is that you, is that there's something about those legacy spaces that you still think is where you want to build your future. Whereas I look at that and I'm like, I don't know if people want to believe that stuff, they're going to lead a parallel life. And ⁓
I feel bad for them and I feel that it is the Jewish community's responsibility to try to save them from that future.
not at the expense of not paying attention to the enormous, even if it's a minority, it's an enormous minority of people who just raised their hand and said, I want in. And instead we're obsessing over all the people who are like, well, I don't know if I want in or I definitely don't want in and you people smell. And it's like, okay, fine.
You can have those people and they can be a problem, but you also have to be dealing with all the people who all of a sudden want to be invested. And I feel we're overlooking them. And by overlooking them, we're missing an enormous opportunity.
Amitai Fraiman (45:15)
Yeah, think, I don't disagree, by the way. I think there's a huge neurosis around this. think that we've done ourselves a huge disservice in trying to, I mean, it's a bigger problem that affects a lot of public policy and the incentives model just create a race to the bottom. And so instead of incentivizing good behavior, you're incentivizing bad behavior, right? So a classic example would be birthright. I mean, they've moved away from this, but it's like, we're only going to take those who are the least affiliated, right? So instead of rewarding those who are invested in it,
You're just saying that we're gonna incentivize you to disengage because ultimately you'll get a ⁓ free trip. So, for instance, okay, I'll save all this money, but that will be the silver bullet that will solve things, right? So, over time, inadvertently, mean, this was no intention, right? But two things happened. One is that they ran out of kids who never been and wanted to go. And so, they had to start moving in toward, right? Actually, if you have been or...
And the same thing is kind of happening, I think, in other spaces where it's like, well, if you're in a Jewish day school, then you can't go in this, you know what mean? Like, there's this kind of parsing out of, and we're incentivizing, instead of, you know, bad behavior, instead of celebrating good behavior and saying, you know, if you're invested, if you spend a lot of your resources to maintain a Jewish identity, we're gonna help you. Not, you know, yes, for a capture audience because you want to be. And then, you you build a much stronger core that, you know, that ripple effect. This is not like an original idea. I think this has been a neurosis of ours since for, you know,
Simon Rawidowicz, you know, and his ever dying people that essay, that famous essay that I speak about like every other episode here, you know, it's like since Abraham, you know, he's saying I'm gonna be the last Jew, right? And so I think that that dynamic has kind of perpetuated itself. But what's interesting is that even on the, know, because we interface with a very, very broad set of individuals, a of people say, you know, lot of the legacy spaces actually are pushing out the more progressive voices that are holding onto the more traditional conservative ones in a way. And yeah.
Alana Newhouse (47:04)
You know,
just as an example of that dynamic, I wrote a piece ⁓ last year about this trend of people who are coming online.
and very invested in their Jewish identity. And in it, I analyzed that my feeling was that the Jewish community was being split into two. And there was what I suspected, a majority of people who were moving away from Zionism and moving away from a connection to Israel.
and what I called a large majority of them who were moving closer to it. And the piece went on with some reporting to actually talk about that second group and who they are and what their psychology is and what they're invested in.
I can't tell you the number of anxious Jewish communal employees who wrote to me and said, why do you think it's a minority? Does it have to be a minority? And I was just like, you just missed the entire point. It doesn't matter if it's 45 % or 55%. Like why do you, you must win. You must get, it must be the majority. And I was like, who cares? If you have, I don't know what the number is because we're not going to know for at least 10 years.
Right. But the point is, if I told you, you have a group of people who wants in focus on them, no matter how many of them there are. If there are three of them, focus on them. To me, it feels emotionally and psychologically obvious. And it would be great if there could be a reorientation where people would just leaned into the confidence.
⁓ of understanding that we have an enormously gift, we have an enormously gift-filled tradition and people are attracted to it.
Amitai Fraiman (49:08)
Johnny, what do you think?
Ani Wilcenski (49:10)
Absolutely. And I would just like to add, know, speaking specifically about the youth, like, obviously, there is lot of hand wringing about these, like, Jews for Hamas, the Gen Z, JVP, whatever types, but I will tell you speaking anecdotally, but as someone who's really been immersed in this community now and has met like Gen Z Jews at the highest levels of people working and supporting Israel and everything like that, the people that have, as Alana said, answered this call, the people my age are phenomenal.
They're exactly who these Jewish organizations should want. And there's a lot of them and they're not just people working in it. They're just regular people who woke up and they went to schools that became, not even became antisemitic. They went to Columbia. They went to University of Florida. They worked in marketing. They worked in PR. They're just normal people who have suddenly become incredibly aligned and they care and they're passionate and they are, they value their identity. And there's more than you would think. And they're doing more than I think people even realize that they are.
And they've also found incredible, I think, reserves of courage. And they look at their friends and they look at their social worlds and they see it with a lot of clarity. And it may not be, as Alana said, a perfect majority, but there's more than I think the statistics say for sure. And it should be something that gives a lot of people hope. It certainly gives me hope, especially as someone that went to one of these schools and basically had to remake my entire social world. It was something that was tremendously fulfilling to me to be able to.
rebuild an entire new world of people my age who were Jewish and convicted and amazing and had similar views and just I keep meeting them. It's something that's really heartening. And I think we all really feel like we've found each other and are so grateful for each other. And we feel like we have better friends than we ever had before and they're aligned and it just keeps happening. ⁓ So I definitely take a more positive look on the future because of that.
Amitai Fraiman (51:01)
What do think it will take, in other words, you know, because I'm, as you're speaking and thinking about, what's a, what will be considered a thick or layered Jewish identity that would, that would stick and sustain itself over time, right? Because I don't know if it's, part of, part of it, of course, will have to do with traditions and literacy around some of the core things, but doesn't necessarily have to be that. And I'm curious from your perspective, how do we, how do you continue and develop that, that rich fabric of who we are and not just pigeonhole it to, know.
the two things that maybe, two ingredients, know, like Israel and like traditional or traditions from a Jewish perspective.
Ani Wilcenski (51:43)
Well, something I would say, or go ahead, Alana. Something I would say, just worth noting, and it's happening across Gen Z, but it's definitely within Jews too. I think we're becoming more religious, right? Like in terms of people are starting to keep Shabbat, people are starting to keep kosher. There's more of an emphasis, like people are looking for modest fashion and stuff like that. Obviously you mentioned Israel and religion and this is within that bucket, but I think in terms of the sense of...
people who may not have been traditionally affiliated are picking and choosing from different parts of the tradition and not in a superficial way either. They're really looking to meaningfully engage in different customs and bring them into their life in what seems to be a pretty lasting way. ⁓ I would say that that's also another part of it is there's people who are really turning to different parts of Judaism on a deeper level and it has nothing to do with Israel and politics. They're really trying to like make it part of their lives.
Alana Newhouse (52:35)
And I think that ⁓ the broader menu of possibility for your Jewish identity includes lots of things that I would say actually the Jewish community ⁓ has done well. I think about ⁓ the whole space of Jewish food, which is an incredibly rich space that has lot of, ⁓ so much excitement and so much
⁓ So many projects being done and thought about and iterated and ⁓ there's so many different people who are very drawn to that space. But then there's also Jewish theater, ⁓ Jewish film, and I think that's a whole area of excitement, the arts in general. ⁓ And then there's the space of ⁓ Jewish communal life and how we live.
So there's now a new community, I think it's called Shefa, I'm not sure, where ⁓ there's a community of Jews who live in a rural area together. They're living in the mountain top somewhere and they have kosher food and mikvah and they can have their, but they all can have a, they can live a rural life that's also Jewish. And
That feels super exciting. That's an expression of a way of living Jewishly that is very different and very new. And what I see when I see something like that is I see people who are bringing their Jewishness and using it as an inspiration for lots of different expression. And I think we just need to expose it and make people aware of it. That's what makes our job fun.
Amitai Fraiman (54:26)
Yeah, the role of Jewish journalism in that sense is to curate and also ⁓ share and expose people to these different kind of modes of Jewish life. I want to talk about one aspect that didn't really come up ⁓ so much ⁓ and make more of a statement with less of a question just to get your reactions to it. I I think that part of what we're experiencing as a Jewish community, generally speaking in this moment, is the...
Alana Newhouse (54:38)
Yes.
Amitai Fraiman (54:55)
this isn't new, but it feels even more so in this moment, is the use of antisemitism from a political perspective, from outsiders, I'll say, not from our own community, and also internally, for sure. And there's a relationship between those two. And I'm just curious, from a journalistic perspective, how do you figure the role is in terms of helping people understand what is and how to...
react to antisemitism.
Alana Newhouse (55:27)
Tell me what you mean. Give me a little bit more.
Amitai Fraiman (55:29)
So I think that people are going to be a little bit more charitable with antisemites or antisemitism if it fits a grander narrative for theirs. And I think it's true on both sides of the political aisle. And what I find frustrating from an internal perspective, right, like this is something that comes up, I'll give you an example from my work, right? People would say, you gotta include X, Y, and Z, right? And they're not necessarily from the Jewish community. And while I...
value very much the perspective and allyship and partnership with people from outside our community when it comes to determining the future of the Jewish people. think Zionism and our whole story of agencies that we could do it for ourselves in our own terms. Right. So I think that's so when people are kind of OK with external views of antisemitism, as long as it fits into a grander narrative of how they experience life, people will make find, you know, after all kinds of gymnastics and.
mental pretzels to kind of fit that into different things. And so I'm curious from like a, you when you talk about journalism and journalistic values and kind of figuring, you know, what your audience is and how you reach them, how do you think about telling the story of antisemitism from your perspective?
Alana Newhouse (56:46)
Any women take this one?
Ani Wilcenski (56:49)
Well, I think with antisemitism, the way that Tablet kind of can cover it is, it's like the Supreme Court case, like, you know a way to see it, right? And so what that means is that there are a lot of places and a lot of people.
who basically will try and use logic that only applies to Jews, which is like, "we get to tell you what's antisemitic, but you actually don't get to speak". But then if it applies to another racial group or ethnic group or whatever, they're the ones that get to determine it. And so I think Tablet has done a good job of sort of reclaiming, not even reclaiming, I think, because we never ceded that authority. Tablet has claimed the fact that we have the authority to speak and we don't need to outsource that authority to other places to tell us what actually is antisemitism or
that antisemitism can only be called out if it's lumped in with these other buckets that I believe you were sort of referencing of like, we must also reference Islamophobia and all of those other things. I don't think that we feel the need to justify that. And we don't think that one must necessarily bring up a call out of the other in order for it to be valid. And I do think that's something that the community has more widely adopted is a bit more of like a self-sufficient kind of form of this, where it's like there are a lot of politicians and there are organizations still
that are behind on this because they'll call out antisemitic acts and they'll feel the need to call out every single other injustice that has also happened to every other group. But I do think there is a little bit of a grassroots shift towards being able to see it and recognize it and speak just from the authority of ourselves and not feel any doubt towards it.
Amitai Fraiman (58:21)
Right. that's certainly yes, that's one side of the coin. But the other side of the coin is to say, well, these people kind of like us most of the time. And so we're kind of OK with them being mildly antisemitic.
Alana Newhouse (58:31)
Here's what I would say. ⁓ I think that there's a difference between ⁓ anti-Jewish prejudice and antisemitism. Anti-Jewish prejudice, which is I don't want to associate with you, I don't want you in my country club, ⁓ I don't care about. I don't care, I don't care if people don't like me. It doesn't matter to me. In fact, prejudice is a natural human emotion.
⁓ and it comes from tribalism, which is itself also totally natural. Antisemitism is a conspiracy theory where you believe that the Jews control the banks and the media and also probably the US government. My issue with Americans becoming antisemitic is that it's a brain disease that rots them from the inside and they are my fellow citizens and I do not want them to fall prey to a disease.
So me calling out antisemitism, which is a very specific way of understanding the role that Jews have in society, is quite different than me tolerating somebody who doesn't like Jews. I don't care about the latter. I do care about the former.
Amitai Fraiman (59:46)
Yeah,
I hear you. think that maybe, I I understand the distinction helps. just don't know there's like how much, useful is the distinction between prejudice and antisemitism in that sense? Because if there was a group that we would say that they can't be in our country club, we would say that's full on racism. ⁓
Alana Newhouse (1:00:03)
Totally.
by the way, and again, you can say, I don't like you for having those prejudices, but am I losing sleep over it? I'm not. I'm not losing sleep over Jews not being allowed into country clubs, if that happens again.
Amitai Fraiman (1:00:11)
Well, right, that's okay.
Ani Wilcenski (1:00:15)
But I think more
broadly also to answer your question, you were talking about like, oh, this person might not like Jews, but we're going to tolerate them. I think that that's something that was at its peak in 2020 and 2021 where all these Jewish organizations were basically partnering with a bunch of other organizations that didn't seem to like Jews very much, or had espoused kind of antisemitic statements in the past, or had affiliates or people that were coming out and speaking on behalf of them that were super antisemitic. And I think that's something that people...
were holding their noses on and have since paid the price for.
Amitai Fraiman (1:00:48)
Yeah, mean, look, that's that goes into an older Jewish tactic, right? Like we, you we partnered with, you know, now resurfacing in a negative light, right? Like, why, why isn't there prayer in public schools? Because Jews partnered with Catholics to kind of get rid of it. OK, we didn't get along with Catholics. And but we, you know, they were necessary ⁓ allies in a moment where we felt like our rights were being infringed upon. I that's fine. That's a that's a that's a pragmatic approach to life. I'm OK with that. What I'm saying is, or I'm trying to understand is like there are
You know, it's yes, I don't like when all the types of racism are lumped in when you're talking about a specific case of, you know, antisemitism, right? Generally speaking, yes, it's good to make statements against all types of hate and racism. When something happens, you should be talking about the victims in the story and not trying to make a blanket statement. But on the other side, there are those who we might say that we have this political expediency to tolerate them beyond just they don't like us right now. They don't want me in their country, but like peddling actual antisemitic tropes and, you know, directly indirectly were like
Yeah, but you know.
Alana Newhouse (1:01:50)
I mean, but here's the thing. I think that the operative word in your sentence there is political, right? I think that you're right. We should never ally with people who we believe are antisemites. We shouldn't. On the other hand, from an American perspective right now, I don't encounter that.
necessarily on a daily basis. I don't encounter people who want to ally with me who I believe are anti-semites. So it's not a problem that I'm encountering. If I were to encounter it, I think we should solve it the way that you're saying, which is we should have a red line and not partner with people who we know to be anti-semites. I just don't, I feel like the problem now is that...
there are huge people on both sides who used to be allies who don't know whether or not they can ally with us anymore. I think the problem is that we don't have enough people who want to ally with us politically. So again, maybe it's just my particular view. I think in an abstract example, obviously you're right. We should never partner with an antisemite in part because it empowers them over the long term. ⁓
But my question is, who are we actually talking about here?
Amitai Fraiman (1:03:14)
And I think that will come down to people's personal kind of observations of what they, you their own kind of barometer and tolerance.
Alana Newhouse (1:03:21)
Absolutely, because if you talk,
you know, Ani was talking about certain ⁓ institutions and places on the left, but if you speak to some of those people, particularly who work in racial justice spheres, they will say to you, I know this person. He's not an antisemite. I've known this person for 25 years. So I look at that interlocutor and I say, okay.
Like you should partner with somebody if you do not believe that that person's an antisemite, go ahead and create that relationship. We might see otherwise and that's part of why we watch these stories. But I think that you're right to say that it's a personal and an individual judgment call that should be rooted in our own personal experience.
Amitai Fraiman (1:04:10)
Yeah, I mean, that's really makes sense. mean, the point wasn't to identify a person or a personality. think that the clear, the gray is where it becomes more complicated and interesting, unfortunately, because yeah.
Alana Newhouse (1:04:21)
And
here's, let's be honest about the landscape we live in in America right now. Antisemites on both sides of the political aisle, right now, the most prominent antisemites on both sides of the political aisle are anti-Israel.
So we have an easy test.
Are you deeply anti-Israel? And if that person is not deeply anti-Israel, sure, they could still be an antisemite. It's just right now in 2025 in America, it's less likely because the space for antisemitism, the expression for antisemitism, particularly on social media, takes its best form as anti-Israelism.
Amitai Fraiman (1:05:06)
Yeah, no, I hear that. mean, that's a whole other issue of how we were collapsing our own identity and how we kind of, instead of trying to dictate our own, we're trying to fall into the other people's box. So look, I mean, we did all right. We kind of touched on hope a little bit. went, this was a little bit more negative. So I do want to end on something a little more hopeful. you gave us a good statement on what gives you hope. Alana, you also echoed part of it. But if there are anything else that you want to kind of share.
hope and maybe advice even for readers out there who wants to kind of understand the landscape.
Alana Newhouse (1:05:40)
I'm gonna go first in part because I really want Ani to get the last word here. ⁓ Because what is incredibly helpful to me is the trend that I see on the part of younger Jews and Americans toward
a deepening investment in the future and a real understanding that skepticism is their friend and that tradition is their friend, history is their friend, facts are their friends. And for me, building into that space right now, I'm not sure I've been as hopeful as I am right now in 10 years. And a lot of it is driven by them.
Amitai Fraiman (1:06:33)
Ani.
Ani Wilcenski (1:06:34)
Yeah, I'd echo that. think that there's a lot of people and we meet more of them every day with Tablet who are really clear-eyed and who, whether it was in 2016, whether it was in 2020, whether it was 2023, whether it was three weeks ago, who have sort of woken up and opened their eyes in really interesting ways and are paying attention. They care about honesty. They care about truth. They care about Judaism. They care about tradition. And as I said, there's more than you think. And I think that it's something that continues to be really, really exciting. And there are also people who are
invested in building something for the future. There are so many people that I meet, particularly young people, who are action oriented. They're not just kind of passively sitting back and like reading and consuming. These are people that have actually felt like there's sort of a mandate to make the things that they're seeing and the problems that they're observing in America to solve those problems and make things better. And the fact that there's action behind these feelings is also really exciting and it's something that I definitely should make.
things should make people feel really optimistic.
Amitai Fraiman (1:07:35)
Right. That's great. Good. So on that, on that more positive and uplifting message ⁓ that will conclude today's episode. Thank you, ⁓ Alana and Ani for joining us. And it was a great pleasure to get insight a little bit from, you know, people who shape the news for many of us ⁓ who are, you know, following, ⁓ you know, the leading voices, I guess, in telling and sharing and sharing our story externally and also helping us craft it internally and how we think about it. So thank you again for your time.
for your insights and for joining us today.
Ani Wilcenski (1:08:08)
Thank you for having us.
