Shalom. Hello, what is up?

This is Courtney Hazelit, and you're listening to How to Be a Jew, joining me, as always, producer, Josh Cross.

Hey!

And Rabbi Diana Fursko.

Shalom.

Diana, welcome to the show.

So happy to be with my two fearless co-hosts, as usual.

Today, I'm thinking a lot about something that would always

happen to me in my childhood, which was this. People would say, hey, where are you from? And all my

classmates would answer. Most of them would say, I'm Italian, because most of them were. But I

never knew how to answer that question. What am I supposed to say? I'm Lithuanian. I'm Latvian. I'm Russian. Like, I seriously doubt my grandparents, my great-grandparents, who fled from those countries, identified with that culture. No, I was a Jew. So I think that this book that we're exploring sort of gets at that question

of like, where are we from? And why don't we maybe feel fully comfortable embracing it?

And the book Diana is talking about is book by author Ben Freeman. This one is called The Jews in Indigenous People. Ben, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled. And it's a very important conversation right now.

It's an important conversation, one that will be very pleasant to listen to because of your Scottish accent.

So I want to start right there. If you are new to some listeners, tell us about being a

Scottish Jew. Tell us what got you to this point of writing this new book of yours.

You know, so growing up in Glasgow, Scotland, which is the biggest city in Scotland, and it is

where most of the Jews live, growing up in Glasgow was really a privilege as a Jew. And it sounds

probably kind of strange to maybe

some of our maybe North American or Israeli listeners because we were such a minority but it meant

that we understood that we had to work to be Jewish. You know, I remember when the kosher butcher

...