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Actor Seth Rogen: ‘I don’t understand Israel at all’

“As a Jewish person, I was fed a huge amount of lies about Israel my entire life,” said Seth Rogen.

By Josh Plank, World Israel News

Actor Seth Rogen shared his views about Israel in an interview on comedian Marc Maron’s “WTF” podcast on July 27.

Rogen said that he didn’t understand Jews immigrating to Israel after the Holocaust. “You don’t keep all your Jews in one basket. I don’t understand why they did that. It makes no sense whatever,” he said.

When Maron asked Rogen if he would ever live in Israel, Rogen said, “No.”

Rogen conceded that there are nice parts in Israel, but said, “At best, you are convincing yourself that you are far enough away from a major conflict to not worry about it, which is like a terrible thing to convince yourself of.”

He said, “I don’t understand. To me it just seems very, like an antiquated thought process. Like, if it is for religious reasons, I don’t agree with it because I think religion is silly.”

“If it is truly for the preservation of Jewish people, it makes no sense, because again, you don’t keep something you’re trying to preserve all in one place especially when that place has proven to be pretty volatile,” he said.

Rogen said, “As a Jewish person, I was fed a huge amount of lies about Israel my entire life, you know? They never tell you that oh, by the way, there were people there. They make it seem like it was just like sitting there. It was like the f–king door’s open.”

He said, “I don’t understand it at all. And I think like for Jewish people especially who view themselves as progressive and who view themselves as analytical and who view themselves as people who ask a lot of questions and really challenge the status quo, like what are we doing?”

Rogen said that in Jewish school and synagogue, he was “brainwashed and kind of just taught a lot of things that I don’t believe.”

He said, “Honestly, Israel is the thing that I look back on and look at as like maybe that was the thing I was like most misinformed about.”

Rogen said that there are “soft Jews” and “sinewy Jews” and that he would put Israelis in the “tough category.”

Maron said, “Israelis aren’t going to put up with our f–king middle-class Jew bullshit.”

Apparently in reference to Palestinian Arabs, Maron said that all Israelis want to know is “Do you think they deserve a country, or can we kill them?”

“Exactly,” Rogen replied, adding “I haven’t gotten along with an Israeli in a long time.”

He said, “At my Jewish summer camp, there were Israeli counselors who were fresh out of the army, and they were psychotic and they would torture us.”

Rogen was on the podcast promoting his new movie, “An American Pickle.”

The movie is about a Jewish immigrant to America in 1920 who fell into a vat of pickles and was brined for 100 years. He wakes up in present-day Brooklyn to find that his only surviving relative is a great-grandson that he can’t even begin to understand.

“If my grandparents were to see how I live, they’d probably be very proud of some of the superficial things. But the fact that I’m not religious, I don’t speak Yiddish, these kinds of things would be appalling to them,” Rogen said.