This interview is part of Moment’s Jewish Political Voices Project. To learn more about the project, click here. To see our other participants, click here. To see all posts from Deborah, click here.
Age: 58
Occupation: Vice President of Swell
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Party Registration: Democratic
Jewish Denomination: Unaffiliated
2020 Vote: Joe Biden
Current 2024 Vote: Joe Biden
Family: Single
News Sources:
Do you feel like young people are getting a skewed perspective from their news sources?
I mean, we all are. We can wax poetic about how the young people are just so inundated with news that comes through their social feeds. News is being very dramatically and cleverly delivered with horrible agendas behind the news, sensationalized, lacking context, lacking historical information, sort of creating an us vs. them. Like “we have to stop the old people from being cruel and violent and oppressing the minorities.” And they don’t have any right to destroy our future. And they’re just angry. And they’re angry because they’re receiving news at a rate that’s so fast, and they don’t have time to connect sources. So all they do is bat away or consume, depending on how much they’re able to do with information coming at them. So young people are getting news in a very Pop Tart kind of way. There’s no real fiber there.
What do you make of how Israel has been covered in the news?
The Israeli position is complex, and there’s multiple truths, right? People don’t look at any complexities around distribution of water, and food. And they don’t look at anything to do with the neighboring Arab countries that won’t receive Palestinians. They don’t look at any of the history of how we’ve given the Gazans so much infrastructure to work with. And they spent all that money, the billions of dollars to build tunnels and not to build schools and hospitals. No one will tell the story, probably we are living in a time when we won’t get our story told, because there’s too many machines that will never get the word out about even October 7 at this point. So I think we’re living in a time when because now it’s parallel to deep fake work where all the generated videos and generated audio is coming out. They’re gonna say everything’s fake. And that’s happening left and right.
What do you think of the media coverage of Biden?
We have this clarity that Trump will be the GOP nominee. And we have this clarity that if Biden doesn’t switch out for a younger person, we’re probably going to have a pretty bad experience. And I feel like this has to do with your media conversation, actually, because Biden is especially in the first half of this presidency, he’s done some amazing things for our country. You know, we have 150,000 students that are about to not have to pay back their debt. And he had, you know, a little bit of movement with gun control. He made some progress with the violence against women act. Our unemployment is down to like 3%. Again, we have a total we’re doing well as an economy and a lot of ways and infrastructure bills have been passed along the way and things are feeling like we’re actually doing pretty well as a country in a bizarre way. And I just feel like people are dismissing him because of his age. The media is taking up all the gaffes that he’s had because of his age, and they’re not focusing on telling his story because it’s not sexy.