Noa Tishby
Sapir Journal, Spring 2025
Feeling like an outsider is nothing new to me. Things seem peachy now, but as a child I was not what you would call a popular kid. I had a buzz cut and looked like a boy, with teeth almost the size of my face. The buzz cut was due to the fact that I was far more popular with the head lice that frequently took up residence in my hair than I was with my peers. Being an only child of divorced parents, which was fairly uncommon in 1980s Israel, didn’t help. I developed a tolerance for the discomfort that came with feeling uncool, on the outside of the in-crowd.
Arriving in Hollywood as a young adult and trying to make it in the entertainment industry while constantly yapping on about Israel felt the same way — what I had to say would, many times, put me on the outside. I know for some this might feel like a new phenomenon; however, I can tell you that Israel was never a popular cause in polite circles, at least not since 1967 (before I was born). Moving in these performative circles, I heard statements about Israel that I knew to be flat-out wrong. Conditioned by my uncool childhood, I was more comfortable speaking up and challenging my peers than I was performing and playing along for acceptance. I was happy to be unpopular rather than keep quiet and pretty, which is how Hollywood prefers its young girls.
I have lost many friends because of this over the years. A few years ago, one friend insisted that anti-Zionism was not the same as antisemitism, and that if I carried on publicly stating that they were the same, we could no longer be friends. That was the last I heard from him. Wielding friendship and social acceptance as a threat has little power over someone who learned early in life not to mistake other people’s views of oneself for truth. Truth does not depend on what other people think. If stating it has cost me friendships and work, neither was ever worthwhile. ….SOURCE