A Jewish comedian confronted Rep. Ritchie Torres over his staunch support for Israel in a tense and emotionally charged interview published on Thursday.
“Do you feel in your heart that what you’re saying is right?” Adam Friedland asked Torres after the New York Democratic congressman rejected the idea that Israel is intentionally killing civilians in Gaza.
Friedland, 38, first rose to prominence as a co-host on the “Cum Town” podcast, a cult-favorite known for its subversive comedy. In 2022, he launched the “The Adam Friedland Show,” which has drawn both criticism and praise for its incendiary interviews with a range of guests including streamer Hasan Piker, California Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna and Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy.
Friedland often confronts his guests with an offbeat, at times disorienting interview style that has become a hallmark of the show, which models itself as a deconstructed, ironic version of traditional late-night talk shows. His show has over 300,000 subscribers on Youtube and is increasingly a de rigueur stop for personalities seeking exposure to a left-wing “manosphere” audience.
The New Yorker recently profiled Friedland, and GQ magazine recently said he “could be the millennial Jon Stewart.” Like Stewart, who recently discussed Israel and Gaza on air with the left-wing Jewish writer Peter Beinart, Friedland was openly emotional during his conversation with Torres.
“The fact that I still f—king care about being Jewish is embarrassing,” he said at one point. “I should just be, like, a guy. This feels like a stain on our history, and it feels like it’s changed what being Jewish is.”
In the interview, Friedland often interrupted the lawmaker as the pair sparred over Torres’ staunch support for Israel amid rampant antisemitism in the United States. He also expressed deep pain over his own feelings about Israel, which he said were alienating him from Judaism.
“Me saying this to you right now will hurt people in my own family, OK?” Friedland told Torres as he lamented Israel’s actions in Gaza; questioned the seriousness of alleged antisemitism on college campuses; and said he believed that Israel was fueling an explosion of antisemitism in the United States.
“I think hatred of Jewish people has exploded in this country. And … I think it’s because of our support of what looks to be an absolute brutality,” said Friedland, 38, who grew up in Southern California and spent a year living in Israel after high school and has openly criticized Israel in recent years.
“You think Israeli government policies are justification for antisemitism?” Torres asked. “My view is that there is no justification for antisemitism.”
Accusing Torres of “deflecting again,” Friedland dug in.
“I’m telling you as a Jew right now that we are receiving a lot more hate because of what the people with the flag that has a Jewish star on are doing to other people right now,” he said. “I’m telling you as a Jewish person how painful it is for us to say — and it hurts my stomach to say this, and you’re going to say, I disagree, I disagree — that this is a genocide.”
Friedland noted several times that he has rarely had the opportunity to interview members of Congress as he hosted Torres for a conversation that began with Torres’ personal trajectory from public housing in the Bronx to Congress but soon centered squarely on the war in Gaza.
In June, Friedland hosted Khanna, who has spearheaded an effort in the House to urge the Trump administration to recognize Palestinian statehood and pushed to block U.S. involvement in the Israel-Iran conflict. In that interview, Friedland did not question Khanna on his opinions on Israel.
Torres’ interview began and ended with the duo noting that Torres had been uncertain about whether it was a good idea to come on the show.
Torres declined to comment on the experience. A source close to him said that conversations ahead of the appearance included discussion that the conversation would not focus on Israel.
Friedland did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But even as he initiated the Israel portion of the conversation and extended at several points, he signaled during his conversation with Torres that he had not planned to dwell on Israel, saying at one point, “I don’t want to be disrespectful like this.”
Torres has the endorsement of the AIPAC pro-Israel lobby and is cherished by many Jews in his district for his defense of Israel at a time when many Democrats are increasingly critical of Israel and its war in Gaza. He did not yield much to Friedland’s pressing, though he did tell Friedland he had made a “fair point” when he asked why Netanyahu had supported Hamas in the past.
“It seems to me the United States and Israel could have shut off the spigot and did not do so,” Torres said. “I don’t know why, but, but that was a failure. There’s no question.”
The conversation also gave air to Friedland’s ideas for addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. After Torres asked him for his own solution, Friedland — whose parents are from South Africa — rattled off a vision immediately.
“I’m proposing a democracy,” he said. “I’m proposing an extensive demographic study of what was taken and what was lost, extensive reparations for what that was taken, and a truth and reconciliation process where we could end this s–t.”
Both men appeared frustrated at times, with Friedland telling Torres at one point to “shut up.” And each man appeared at least once not to know what the other was talking about — Friedland when Torres mentioned “the Gaza envelope,” a term for the region of Israel attacked by Hamas that Friedland said he had never heard, and Torres when Friedland shared that the Proud Boys, a white supremacist group, had entered campus fights on the side of Israel.
At the end of the conversation, the pair stood and began to move off camera before sparring a little longer. The last thing that can be heard on the YouTube reporting: Torres telling Friedland, “I just don’t think you know what you’re talking about.”
Reception to the interview was mixed on social media, with many praising Friedland for openly challenging Torres on his support for Israel while others criticized him for appearing to side at times with Hamas.
“Adam wants @RitchieTorres to be ‘human’ where human means shutting off critical thinking and accepting the propaganda of a terrorist group as fact,” wrote Rabbi Samuel Stern, the Reform rabbi of Temple Beth Sholom in Topeka, Kansas, in a post on X.
Friedland suggested that the immediate reaction was mostly positive. On X, he wrote, “Thanks for the nice feedback from everyone except for my dad.”
As with Stewart, Friedland drew praise from other liberal Jews who said he had given voice to their wrenching angst over Israel.
“Watching the clips of this, and getting a little teary-eyed too. Leaving aside Torres’ robotic responses, Friedland’s publicly working through emotions a lot of us have felt,” tweeted the journalist Jordan Weissmann.
Aaron Rugenberg, a former member of the Rhode Island House of Representatives, wrote that Friedland’s comments “really hit me hard.”
He tweeted, “Adam Friedland honestly and directly sharing the anguish of seeing atrocities being done under a Star of David in his name straight to Ritchie Torres is honestly the best embodiment of what Judaism should and can mean.”
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