Digital Social Hour
Surviving a Car Bomb at Age 7: My Childhood in Jerusalem - Barak Swarttz | DSH #1610
11 Nov 2025
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I feel safer in Israel than I do in the United States of America. Wow.
Chapter 2: How does growing up in Jerusalem during the Intifada shape one's perspective?
And I'm white Caucasian saying that.
If you're in a good neighborhood, you feel pretty safe just walking out and about.
It's crazy that like even you asked me that, but I think a lot of people share that same sentiment. When I would go back to Israel, there would be people who would hit me up on Facebook or Instagram and be like, you good? Now I live there in a very complicated place. But when I step outside of Tel Aviv, my house, people have this idea that like I'm ducking from like bullets.
Okay, guys, we got a guest. He's been traveling a lot lately.
Chapter 3: What experiences led Barak to develop a love for basketball?
So thank you for making the time to make it to Vegas, Barack. Good to see you, man. I saw you on social media and I thought you had a really important message to share. So thanks for hopping on.
Thank you for having me, man. This is the tail end of my trip, but we're going to grind through this one.
Yeah, you've been all over. Is that for basketball or business or what are you traveling so much for?
I was on Roseanne Barr's podcast in Texas. I was in LA to see a few friends, some work stuff, and then my family's in Boston.
Chapter 4: How does Barak compare safety in Israel to the United States?
Nice. So I've been Boston, Texas, New York, you. Wow. Head back to Israel on Sunday. Let's go. You grew up in Boston, right?
born in boston yeah suburbs in newton um i both of my parents come from the rabbinical background so when i was six years old we went to israel i was in jerusalem for 2001 2002 2003. it was during the um the second intifada so it was just like a really difficult time in terms of tension within the middle east so i got exposed to a very different reality at like six seven eight years old wow
And car bomb went off on my street when I was walking to school with my brother. Holy crap. You get introduced to what sirens are and you just, you get thrown into the ocean. And it's like very different from Newton, Massachusetts, where like jaywalking might be one of the worst things. So I, part of my childhood is very much woven into, and those really early childhood experiences are to Israel.
Um, and I started playing basketball there when I was a kid, just picked up a basketball, fell in love with the game. We came back to the States after my dad's program. After two years, my dream was to be an NBA basketball player. And I think I learned really on that as a white Ashkenazi Jew from Boston, I was not going to the league.
And so like I accepted that pretty early, but I, I really, my, my aspirations were just to be a hooper and my environment, my life was always different.
basketball we talked a little bit offline about this like my environment my friends my routine i would even neglect sometimes homework or dinner just just to shoot so um i played at two high schools and two colleges in the states um i studied marketing and never really found my my my path my passion through the corporate world in america i had a bunch of a bunch of experiences with
internships and I worked for corporate companies, startups, all this stuff. But my mind and my passion were always really connected to my Judaism, Israel, somehow actually after being in a war and basketball.
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Chapter 5: What unique cultural insights does Barak share about being an Ashkenazi Jew in Israel?
And now I live there full-time. My parents and my family are still in the States. But I've been sort of kind of like going back and forth my whole life since, for me, home is quite multidimensional. Wow. Given the fact that my family's in the States, I'm very close with them, and I'm kind of solo dolo on the other side of the ocean. Yeah. In the most controversial place on earth right now.
Yeah, especially these days, right? Especially these days. What a journey. You think seeing that stuff at that young age would turn you away from living there, right? You want to know what's interesting.
How spiritual are you? I'd say very spiritual. Very spiritual? Are you into like astrology? Yeah.
Numerology, astrology.
Amazing. So in early childhood development, the ages of like six, seven, and eight, six to nine are some of the most important years of all of our lives. Mine, yours, hers. We have experiences that our subconscious is still beginning to retain information. And these experiences, just that six, seven, and eight, we're kids.
We don't understand the imprints that they're going to have on who we are later in life. I was in Israel during six, seven, eight. That's when I was thrown into the Middle East. And it's really interesting looking at how a seven-year-old kid who didn't speak Hebrew, who was in this place called Israel. I knew nothing about Israel.
I didn't want to go to some really like foreign country across the ocean. I wanted to continue to play baseball with my brother in the street and just hang out with my friends.
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Chapter 6: How did Barak's childhood experiences influence his personal growth?
And I saw some really like, I was in a war. And you would think, just like you said, you would think that those experiences would create dissonance between that kid later in life from wanting to bind himself closer to the same place he has trauma from. And I've experienced the complete opposite. I live there now. And so I, lately, I've also really begun working with an incredible woman who
is not only an astrologist, she's a Reiki master, she studied Kabbalah and converted to Judaism, and she has allowed me to understand more about going through our past experiences in life, the things that we go through. And it actually weaves beautifully into a lot of the stuff that I do today in terms of...
Talking about the Middle East, trying to share a different perspective on the Middle East as this basketball player, which I think is a really interesting angle to humanize things and have difficult conversations.
Very, very interesting angle because a lot of athletes, not just basketball, are a little scared to speak out on this topic, right? You see that a lot. They don't want to jeopardize their sponsors or whatever. It makes sense from a business point of view.
It makes sense from a business point of view. And I'll tell you, Sean, like in the beginning, when after October 7th and the I word, I call it Israel, became like the headlines in the world. It was easy when I look back at how I was acting in the beginning of like,
anger, fear, you know, having this like revenge attitude and frequency in my life and how that's evolved almost two years now into this epidemic. But I used to not have like empathy as to why people weren't saying anything, right? Because to me in the beginning was so quote unquote obvious, which is an unfair thing to do because people have way more baggage than what you see
at face value on social media that might be keeping them tied down from speaking up on something that they actually don't have the right access to the information for. So like, I don't really necessarily go into that blaming situation anymore. Just because somebody hasn't said anything doesn't mean that they don't care, right?
Because there's so many other things happening across the world that maybe I haven't posted yet about on my social media. I just don't know enough about it. So it doesn't feel right for me. So that could be them about Israel-Palestine.
You know what I mean? No, it makes sense. There's a lot of stuff going on throughout the world. Too much. Yeah. This war, though, is definitely getting the main focus, I feel like, in America, at least. Right? I can't stroll on Twitter without seeing something. Without seeing it. Like, every, like, tweet is about it.
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Chapter 7: What role does travel play in shaping Barak's worldview?
Yeah. The echo chambers people live in. I... I think the reason I love hoops and basketball is because when I look at those four lines that I've been in my whole life, the court for me is really a sanctuary. So my three closest friends, one's family's from Nigeria, one is from Haiti, and one is from Jamaica. My closest friends are not Jewish. None of them are Jewish.
When I moved to Israel in 2001, I told you that my parents come from a rabbinical background. So we have this concept in Judaism called tikkun olam. Tikkun means to repair and olam means the world. So it's this concept of how do we repair the world in the ways that we can given who we are as people.
Charity, volunteer, making the world a better place is really an integral part of the Jewish tradition and also me. I, by default, when I came out of the womb, got it because both of my parents are rabbis, actually. My mom's a Reform rabbi and my dad's a Reconstructionist rabbi. And the reason this has been an incredibly... big gift in my life.
And again, I'm gonna go back to those two years I was in Israel. In the most fundamental years of growing up as a child, I got not just Israel, my parents took my brother and I down to the Negev, which is the desert in Southern Israel. And we went down there because there are many Bedouin communities down there.
Arab Bedouins who don't necessarily have, they're nomadic groups of people that travel a lot. They pick up their bags, they travel, they put them down and they move because they're kind of on the go. They don't necessarily have the same access to resources as other people do. And they actually, there was a village that had dirty drinking water in Southern Israel. And my family at six years old,
They say, we're going to go down there. We're going to live in a tent for two weeks and we're going to help build them a medical facility out of haystacks and clay so that they can have clean drinking water. These are Arab children speaking Arabic. I don't speak Hebrew. They don't speak English. I'm communicating with Arab kids at six years old and I don't see ethnicity. I don't see religion.
I don't see language. I don't see these barriers. I see them as a kid. I'm a six-year-old too and they're six years old and we're playing soccer and I'm making like sounds just playing with them because we didn't even speak the same language.
that six-year-old Barack got exposed to the concept of bridging communities, being around other people who don't necessarily share the same belief in God or whatever it is tradition.
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Chapter 8: How does Barak view the impact of social media on public perception of Israel?
There's so many international talent in there.
Right? Yeah. And that's how they connect. They connect on food. They connect on music. They connect on either language. They connect on traveling. I'm lucky that the earliest time I ever left the United States was in first grade. And the more you travel, the more you are acculturated with other people. Agreed. And I'll tell you one thing. I mean, you live in the States here.
born American, proud American always will be. I love so much about me being an American. I really do. I do think that there's a sheltered life within certain societies inside of the United States.
And I'm saying that as somebody, not from like a judgment perspective, I'm saying that from collecting data, like every state I go to, if I'm speaking to the person at the hotel, the Uber driver, my friends from college or high school, I know friends from high school that haven't left Massachusetts and they're 30. Wow. And that, you know, I think that's crazy. And I think it's not good.
I think it's not good. I also think it's, It's not going to help, like you said, a lot of the people here on this side of the world at least get a little bit more of an understanding of what other parts of the world are and how they work. For example, the Middle East or for example, the East, just the code of conduct and Western values compared to what's going on in that part of the world.
It's just when you travel, you then begin to meet people and understand a little bit more. So I'm, I would say, just like you said, like basketball, it could be any professional sport. It could be football. It could be soccer. Like that's how these guys connect.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you've got an impressive resume when it comes to basketball. You've trained over 20 NBA and WNBA players now.
Yeah.
That's unreal, right?
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