Screams Before Silence - with Sheryl Sandberg
Sheryl Sandberg is one of the most accomplished executives in the tech industry. After attending Harvard University for undergrad and for an MBA, Sheryl’s early career included stints at the World Bank and the U.S. Treasury Department in the Clinton Administration, where she served with then-Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. She then joined Google as VP of online sales and operations in 2001, before joining META as COO, where she worked from 2008 to 2022.
Today both companies are among the top 10 market cap companies.
Sheryl is also an accomplished author: she co-authored "Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead (2013)"; and "Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy" (with Adam Grant, 2017).
But since 10/07, Sheryl has been focused on one cause – Israel and the Jewish people. Sheryl has been confronting: Rape Denialism. She has done this primarily through a documentary film she created called "Screams Before Silence", which you can watch on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAr9oGSXgak&t=1456s
You can also learn more about the film here: https://www.screamsbeforesilence.com
Sheryl has also raised awareness about this issue all over the world, from the UN to capitals throughout Europe.
In this conversation, Sheryl and I discuss how Judaism and Israel had shaped or fit into her life before 10/07, how 10/07 changed her, and how she came to create this film and commit to this cause.
Transcript
DISCLAIMER: THIS TRANSCRIPT HAS BEEN CREATED USING AI TECHNOLOGY AND MAY NOT REFLECT 100% ACCURACY.
SS: I took these witnesses to France, and there was a lunch, Maurice Levy generously hosted for us. And this woman stood up and she said, just her words, “I'm not Jewish. I run a non profit in France that works on sexual violence and conflict. I've done this for three decades.” And then she started listing the countries she's worked in Bosnia, you know, et cetera, et cetera. She said, “no one's ever asked me if it's true. They've only asked me how they can stop it. All of a sudden, all anyone wants to know is, is it true? Not how they can stop it.” And she said, “I think it's anti Semitism, because I can't understand what else could be going on here.”
DS: It's 10:00 PM on Thursday, May 9th, here in New York City. It's 5:00 AM on Friday, May 10th, in Israel, as Israelis get ready to start their day. Before we get into today's episode, one housekeeping note. Over the past 24 hours or so, I've received a lot of questions from many of you about the crisis, the escalating crisis, in the U.S. Israel relationship. I have a lot of thoughts on this crisis and where it's going, and we'll be recording a deep dive on it for our next episode release, so be on the lookout for that. Now, on to today's episode. Sheryl Sandberg is one of the most accomplished executives in the tech industry. After attending Harvard University for her undergraduate studies and for her MBA, Sheryl's early career included stints at the World Bank and at the US Treasury Department in the Clinton administration where she served with then Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. She then joined Google as Vice President of Online Sales and Operations in 2001, before joining Meta, or was then Facebook, as COO, where she worked from 2008 to 2022. Just a couple of data points here: When Sheryl joined Google in 2001, the then private company had 20 million in revenues. And when she left in 2008, the company, by that time it was public, had 22 billion dollars in revenues. When she joined Facebook in 2008, the company had 270 million dollars in revenues, and when she left revenues were at 117 billion dollars in revenues. Sheryl is credited as being one of the key and instrumental figures in the growth and success of both companies. Today, both of those companies are among the top 10 market cap companies. Sheryl is also an accomplished author. She co-authored Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, which served as the basis for an organization she founded. And then also later on, Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy, which she co-authored with Adam Grant. But Sheryl's business accomplishments, her time in government, her books, are not what I wanted to talk to her about. You see, Sheryl could be spending her time on any number of projects or causes these days. But since October 7th, she's been focused on one very important cause. Israel and the Jewish people. Sheryl has unleashed her voice, her energies, her leadership, her convening power, her resources, and her network on confronting something, a term, I guess, I could never have imagined existed before October 7th: rape denialism. Sheryl has orchestrated a campaign to confront rape denialism as she's learned more and more about what happened in Israel on October 7th through a documentary film she has created, called “Screams Before Silence”, which you can watch on YouTube today. We'll post the link on the show notes. She's also raised awareness about this issue all over the world at the UN, and in capitals throughout Europe. Sheryl and I sat down in this conversation to talk about how Israel and Judaism fit into her life prior to October 7th, how she was raised, and then how October 7th changed her, and how she came to create this film and commit to this cause. Sheryl Sandberg on Screams Before Silence. This is Call Me Back.
And I'm pleased to welcome to this podcast, for the first time, my longtime friend, Sheryl Sandberg, who joins us having just released on YouTube, this extraordinarily intense film, which we are going to talk about. We're going to talk about a bunch of things related to the film and related to Israel. Sheryl, thanks for being here.
SS: Thank you for having me, Dan. I'm really grateful to be here with you.
DS: Sheryl, we're going to cover a whole range of topics around, as I said, around the film, and around Israel. But before we do, can you tell us where you were on October 7th? How you learned about October 7th, what your immediate reaction was to October 7th? I just want to sort of be able to place you in the moment as we were all reacting to this nightmare.
SS: It felt to me like 9/11. That was at 6:30 in the morning, my time, my friend Lee Sachs called me from the East Coast, woke me up on the phone, you know, the real phone, and said, turn on your TV, and I watched the second tower get hit. You just can't believe it. You're like, you go to sleep and the world is normal and you wake up and -
DS: Right.
SS: Yes, and I gotta say, the only thing more surprising than October 7th was what happened afterwards.
DS: Yeah, and I think for those of us in the diaspora, more unnerving, actually, because Israelis feel that way, that watching what's happened here post October 7th is, they're going through a trauma, they're feeling shattered, but they're watching what's going on here, and they find watching what we're going through unnerving. We'll get to that. But before October 7th, what was your relationship with Israel? How, you know, what was your involvement? How would you, you know, kind of place yourself in the diaspora world that is attuned to Israel?
SS: I was raised a Reformed Jew with parents who were very active in the Soviet Jewry movement. I was raised with the stories of the Holocaust. I know why Israel exists. Israel exists because Jews needed a homeland after half of us were killed. I was raised to believe that Jews have to have a homeland because one day they're going to come and try to kill us again, which I, I know sounds crazy to my non Jewish friends. It really does. And I actually had never really had these conversations with my non Jewish friends before October 7th, but I have since. And when I looked at them and I did this and said, “are you going to hide me?” They were like, “what are you talking about?” And I explained, during the Holocaust, there were people who hid people who made it. They're supposed to be Israel. I'm supposed to be able to go to Israel. There's a country that will take me. My husband's great grandparents were on the St. Louis, and that St. Louis is that boat. They got all the way from Europe. They looked at the Statue of Liberty and they were sent back. And his ancestors were the ones who were the lucky third that got off in London and made it. But the other two thirds died in the concentration camps. And so, I was raised to believe that Israel is that place that would save me when the world, when the world would turn against us. You know, I'd been a few times. I lived there as a baby. My parents lived there for a year. And I've been there, I think, two or three other times in my life. Did a high school program there. But what I never questioned, was that Israel had the full support as the only democracy in the Middle East - the place where there are rights for people who are gay or LGBTQ, the place that there are no honor killings of women, the place that is a democracy, tightly, tightly in alliance with the United States and other democracies around the world. And a democracy that's very important to a troubled region that I think you understand so much more deeply than I do.
DS: That question's an interesting one, that you said to your friends after October 7th. “Would you hide me?” I think a lot of people feel that way, and felt that way. You start looking around at everyone, and you become very attuned to the people who reach out. People who aren't Jewish who reach out, to see how you're doing, or just to kind of express the shared horrific reaction to what's happening, and then those who don't. I found this. Why aren't they reaching out? Is it indifference? Is it actual skepticism of Israel, and therefore think that this whole issue is more nuanced than we were immediately thinking after October 7th? And I know you and I spoke around that time, and you've been involved with a number of organizations that don't, your philanthropy and other activism that is not in the Jewish world. And let's just say, the uneven reactions you are getting from people in your universe. Can you talk about that?
SS: Yeah. I mean, I would say October 7th really changed me. I am a different person with a different perspective on the world. And I looked at my son, who's proudly worn a Jewish star around his neck. He was going off to a gap year. He was traveling internationally. And I looked at him and said, “I can't believe I'm saying this, but do you mind taking that off?” I just… didn't want violence, and that was before there actually was violence! Now there is, and then a few months later, my daughter actually asked me for a Jewish star, and she's been wearing it and I've been wearing it since, on a lot of the days… But I think about it. I think about it very, very, very differently. My Jewish friends, I mean you and I are friends. We were in touch before October 7th, but I would say you and I have had more contact since October 7th than in, how long have we known each other, two decades?
DS: Yeah.
SS: Three? Two and a half decades.
DS: Two and a half. Yeah.
SS: And we've always been friendly. I've always been grateful to call you a friend. I think it's fair to say that you and I have had more communication since October 7th than the 25 years before that. Is that fair?
DS: Right. Yeah.
SS: Right? I find that with a lot of my Jewish friends. With my friends who weren't Jewish, kind of a month in, I called them and said, “Hey, you need to understand this.” And two of one, they said, “we didn't understand it.” They all believe, my friends, believe in Israel, democracy. What it stands for, that we all need peace in the Middle East, all the things I believe.
DS: Okay, so, now I want to transition to the film. How did you get involved with this project? Like, why this, and how?
SS: Well, I didn't mean to. I mean, what happened is, October 7th happened, all the stories of death and destruction and terrorism happened. And then, pretty soon after, reports started coming out that were about sexual violence and conflict. Bodies discovered that were naked, genital mutilation, claims of rape. And what I saw was people ignoring it, or starting to, even worse, deny it. So around, I think the week of Thanksgiving, I wrote an op ed, and then I did a video, and my op ed and video said one thing. It said, “no matter what you think should happen in the Middle East, no matter what flags you're flying,” and I very carefully in that video had half Israeli flags and half Palestinian flags, I said, “no matter what you believe, we all stand united against sexual violence because rape is never resistance.” And that video went viral. And I got a lot of support for that, but I got a lot of hate for that too. Then I helped organize an event at the UN to give people a chance to bear witness. I brought those same witnesses to parliaments in Europe. We went to France, we went to Germany. We went to London. And then still, people were denying or ignoring, not everyone, but many more people than should. And that's why I went to Israel. This amazing philanthropist, Joey Low, financed this. Tom Nides called me and said, “there's this production company. They have the financing. They want to make a documentary on sexual violence and they'd like you to be the interviewer.” And I said yes in minutes.
DS: So, this is something that I think is very important. I have two reactions from early days after October 7th. One was, I remember Bret Stephens, who I know just wrote a column about “Screams Before Silence”. He came over to our apartment on October 8th. So he and I were recording a podcast on Sunday, October 8th. So he came over late in the day, like late afternoon, early evening. And he had just come from a rally in Times Square, that was an anti Israel rally, on October 8th, that was blaming Israel for October 7th, basically. And, he came to the apartment, says, “you know, I just came for this really weird rally. I was gonna write something about it. But the whole thing seemed so freakshow-ish and so inconsequential and so fringe that I don't actually think this is going anywhere and I'm not gonna write about it.” And I agreed with him. I believed in those early days that the outrage of the world was going to be directed at those who massacre Jews, and not at Jews for objecting to being massacred. But here we are, we fast forward, seven months later, and I hate to say this, but I'm sort of, I'm a little numb to what I'm describing right now, that is like, the sexual violence denialism, the blaming Jews, blaming Israel, it becomes normalized. So I'm trying to, like, go back to that period immediately after October 7th, when it sort of hit you, and maybe it was around Thanksgiving, where you were just like, wait a minute. It is clearly obvious that sexual violence was used as a weapon in this war and everyone's sort of pretending that it didn't happen. Like what were you, like, this is not normal. Like, when you was like sort of, start to scream from the hilltops, like what, I’m just trying to get a sense for, you know, when you were, like, thinking, “Oh my gosh, this is unacceptable.”
SS: I think in kind of the weeks leading up to that op ed, because, the fog of war, October 7th happens. Then it was in the weeks after that. And I really want to give like kudos to Jake Tapper who got on CNN and said, “sexual violence happened.” And I was actually already writing my op ed, but he went out there first.
DS: I remember that.
SS: And he was brave. No journalists were covering this. And let's take a minute on that. Why wasn't that getting covered? Right? It's just so interesting to watch the reaction. So you look at The New York Times piece, which is such an important piece, 150 interviews for that. Jeff Gettleman, one of the authors, is very well respected. He's covered sexual violence for decades. He won a Pulitzer for his coverage of Somalia, and his sexual violence coverage of Somalia was a big part of that Pulitzer. And I looked, I actually did a search, thinking, well maybe they always claim it's not true when Jeff Gettleman covers sexual violence - and I can't find anything else. I was in France when I took these witnesses to France and there was a lunch Maurice Levy generously hosted for us. And, this woman stood up and she said, just her words, “I'm not Jewish, I run a non profit in France that works on sexual violence and conflict, I've done this for three decades”, and then she started listing the countries she's worked in, Bosnia, you know, et cetera, et cetera. She said, “no one's ever asked me if it's true. They've only asked me how they can stop it. All of a sudden, all anyone wants to know is, is it true, not how they can stop it.” And she said, “I think it's anti Semitism. Because I can't understand what else could be going on here.” And I find that scary, scary, because if you look at the history of war, women's bodies, through the ages, right? Biblical times on, you got the war, you got the village, you got the gold, you got the women. I mean, it's horrible. And it really was only 30 years ago. Bosnia, The DRC, former Yugoslavia, where people said no, and it was progressive groups, human rights groups said, “we are not going to let women's bodies be used as a tool of war.” And it's only been enforced for 30 years. It's only been prosecuted for 30 years. So if in this moment, we let that slip - right now, right now, hostages are in Gaza being sexually assaulted right now. Women are being sexually assaulted as part of war in Ukraine, Sudan, Ethiopia. I could go on and on. If we let the politics walk us backward, think about what's at stake. And that's why I did this. And because of the denialism, I went to Israel and said yes to this film. This documentary is up on YouTube. It's free. Anyone can watch it. If you're over 18, anyone can watch it. And you can see with your own eyes. These are the people telling their stories. And I'm hoping that people can just watch with an open mind. This is 57 minutes. And just listen. And see if you can come to grips with the facts here, which, by the way, you can believe that this happened, that sexual violence is not acceptable, that rape is never a resistance, and you can believe anything else you want to believe about Gaza at the same time. One does not negate the other. You can believe, I believe, that Gaza is a tragedy, and still believe that sexual violence happened. You can believe, I believe, that there should be two states, and still believe that sexual violence happened.
DS: So you arrive in Israel in January, I actually think we overlapped, we were there at the same time. You were with your parents, so this is when you first started to really dig into this project, I think. Maybe that's even when you had commenced filming some of the interviews. Why did you go with your parents?
SS: In all this work, I am proudly Adele and Joel Sandberg's daughter. They raised me to fight. My mom is very, very proud. Her synagogue was an early synagogue. When she was very young, she marched for civil rights with her synagogue. They raised me to fight injustice and they raised me to be a proud Jew. And those two things really come together. They've worked on issues over the years, for Jews, for political prisoners from the then Soviet Union. They raised me to speak out. And so my parents were with me in Europe. They went to all the parliaments with me and then they went with me to film and we sat in a big warehouse. If you've seen anyone watch the documentary, you can see that big open empty -
DS: Yeah. It's like the set for the main interviews.
SS: Freezing space. And then we went, we went down South, we went to one of the kibbutz, we went to the Nova festival, we went into the forest and saw with our own eyes with people who were there.
DS: For anyone that's ever worked on any kind of production, I can't think of many other examples where you're dealing with people and content that is so raw and you're dealing with such trauma, and it's ongoing trauma. I interviewed Rachel Goldberg, who's the mother, you know her too, the mother of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, and she just was describing this trauma that she's in, it's not like there's a trauma, then it ends, and then you're kind of reacting to the trauma - it's just it's this trauma that's living with you all the time. Now that's particularly cute because her son is in a dungeon in Gaza right now, I suspect it's similar in terms of the people you were dealing with, and I just was struck by that, and what you know, watching the film, these are people who are still processing this trauma. It's not in the rearview mirror for them. What are the do's and don'ts for doing what you did? Which is traveling with them as you did to the sites where some of these things happen, and sitting down in interviews with them - this is extremely complicated, you know, how did you approach that?
SS: My friend, Davis Guggenheim, who's a great filmmaker and a great documentary filmmaker advised me. He said, “when you make a documentary film on any topic, particularly on a hard one, just don't talk. Let them speak.” And that's what I tried to do, but there were, you know, moment after moment, I think there's one and it made it into the final cut where someone started crying and I went to hug him and I said, “is this okay?” And he looked at me and said, “yes.” And gave me a hug. I mean. I don't think it's possible to describe the trauma of the people who are in this film, and many more people who weren't, who experienced this. But they're telling their story because they know the world doesn't believe it. I mean, Amit Soussana, she is a released hostage. She sat in that chair and she told her story. Her story. She was held for all those months. She was chained to a bed. And they, her captor, forced her, forced her in his, in her words, “to commit a sexual act.” On her. And she said she never wanted to talk about it. She doesn't want to live with that, but she knows there are hostages still there. And you know, people are asking, “why aren't there more people coming out?” Because they're dead, they're dead. Most of the victims were killed. I walked into the forest. It's in the film with this guy, Rami, and he's ginormous, right? You remember him from the field. He towers above me. This guy is a hero. He's a private citizen. The alarms go off on October 7th. He gets into his car, with his gun, and goes where the terrorists are, interacts with them, rescues hundreds of people. But where I walked with him, we walk into a forest where there are trees and what he says, tears pouring down his face is, “in this forest, there were women tied to all these trees, naked, bleeding, bleeding from their genitals. Legs spread. I walked into this forest and I covered them,” and he was crying and I asked him, you know, and he said, “I'm crying because I didn't save them. I didn't get here soon enough to save them.” But if we can't agree that sexual violence is not resistance, if we can't agree that this is not okay - there's going to be more of this in the next conflict. I mean, and look, what scares me… I mean, Hamas, they're not subtle. They don't say, “Oh, we're done.” They say, “we're coming back.” October 7th will happen over and over again. And then, you see on Columbia's campus, New York City, someone's screaming at a Jewish kid. “October 7th will happen to you over and over again.” And I think everyone needs to take a deep breath, and look at what October 7th was. Really? You want that to happen to any human being on the world over and over again? I think people need to open their eyes and we can see it more clearly. Get to the facts here.
DS: So you started mentioning some of the people you interviewed. I want to talk to you about, is it Naama Shachar, who's the daughter of Dr. Ayelet Levy Shachar?
SS: Yeah. I interviewed Ayelet and her daughter is Naama.
DS: One thing as a parent that just got me, was, when she starts talking about when the video of Naama being taken away, and she sees her hair, and she just remembers, she heard, the image went to her as a parent, stroking her daughter's hair as a little girl, and then she sees her daughter's hair in that Hamas video. Did anyone you interviewed talk about, why all the video evidence? The Nazis slaughtered Jews in a very systematic way, but also was very systematic about hiding evidence of the slaughtering of Jews. Hamas, it was like the opposite. They not only engaged in this unbelievable, grotesque, ghoulish, unfathomable attacks on everyone, but especially as you documented the women, and then they insisted on documenting it, and broadcasting it, telegraphing it. It's extraordinary that there's all this video footage that's theirs. You know, it's a lot of the footage is theirs. I know you'd show a lot of footage that was footage of these women at like, the Nova festival and hiding and all that, but there's also footage that Hamas was broadcasting. It just, it's, it's a form of like psychological torture to the Israeli public. That's just a whole other level.
SS: That's right. And I think it is traumatizing for the Israeli public that people are denying the violence and denying the sexual violence. Because sexual violence is traumatizing. There's a reason rape is used as a tool of war. There's a reason sexual violence is used as a tool of war, because it is sadly very effective. It traumatizes a country. That's what happened in the DRC. That's what happened in Bosnia. That's what happened in the former Yugoslavia. And that's what's happening in places today. And that's why the denial of this, I think, is so scary.
DS: Another character you interview who I adore is this guy Simcha, from Zaka, who is the one who has this video footage on his phone that he doesn't want to show you, but you insist on seeing it. So I guess, two questions. One, can you explain Zaka's role in all of this? Cause I think they're an extraordinary, very special organization, the role they play. So can you talk a little bit about Zaka and then specifically Simcha?
SS: So Zaka is a non profit, they are Israeli, and they go to sites of disasters or crime, and they prepare bodies for burial. And they actually don't just do Israel, they do it all over the world, and they're very specially trained to do this. I met Simcha at the UN. He was one of the people that spoke. He couldn't speak. He said he was there to tell the story of, sorry, women who aren't there to tell their own stories, and then he went with me in Europe. So I've had the chance to travel with him, and get to know him - and what he said is, they're trained not to take pictures of bodies. That is a rule. You do not take pictures of a dead body. And I think in a normal situation, that's a pretty good rule. If someone in my family were murdered or - I would not want a picture taken of them and posted. I would not want the world to remember them that way. But he said 24 hours into this, as he was seeing naked body, naked body, all of these horrible genital mutilation. He's like, “someone's not going to believe this happened because I can't believe this is happening.” And so he took photos and he showed me those photos. And those photos are the worst things I've ever seen in my life. You know, people have asked why we don't show them in the film. Two reasons. One, we don't have permission from the families and we're not going to get it so we can't. And the second is that we put the film up on YouTube so anyone could see it for free, and that would violate the standards. You can't have that kind of graphic, violent imagery, and then no one could see it, but I saw it. And I will never forget. I mean, and it's okay to describe because I think people need to believe and understand what happened. These photos are not subtle, you know, there's a naked woman with nails, like nails, physical objects in her part, you know, private parts. And you just can't believe anyone would do this. Simcha told me about, there were, what their job is, is to get the dead bodies ready for burial. That means you have to identify them. He said there was body after body where you couldn't even tell if it was a man or a woman, because they had been genitally mutilated. I said to him in the film, and we put it in the film, “in your experience, you've processed dead bodies all over the world. How often are they naked?” Do you know what his answer was? “Never.” And if the world is not seeing what we are up against, let's, let's talk about Hamas. This is a terrorist, misogynistic, anti LGBT group that does honor killings, honor killings, which means you kill women, for example, who have been raped. Because it protects the honor of your family, because your sentence is diminished. Huge percentage, like I think it's about 30 percent of girls in Gaza, are married under the age of 18. That is not okay, that is slavery for these girls. They're married off as a child, and they are right now, they're holding not just Israelis hostage, they're holding Americans hostage. We have to stand against this, and we can do that while we also believe in two states, in peace. We have to stand against this violence. And I hope anyone who's skeptical, 57 minutes on YouTube, please just watch with an open mind.
DS: It's not just people who are skeptical. I think there are a lot of supporters of Israel, many of whom will be listening to this conversation, who will say, “I get it, I can't watch it.” And I will tell you, just yesterday, in talking with a woman who works with me, who is a supporter of Israel, not Jewish, but she said, “I started to watch it. I will finish watching it, but I couldn't watch it in one sitting. It was hard.” And so she said, “I started watching it. I paused it,” and she goes, “I'm going to return to it.” And I said to her, “promise me you will return to it.” So, you can understand that reaction. So what do you tell people who are, again, I'm not, obviously we hope the skeptics will watch it, but even supporters of Israel, why it's important, it's not okay to say, “I get it. October 7th was horrendous. I stand with Israel, but I don't need to watch this.” So how do you react to that?
SS: Look, it was hard. This is not an easy film to watch. Someone told me that he had watched the 47 minute footage that Israel released of Hamas. I never watched that because I was just too afraid and I didn't want the trauma. And I thought exactly that. I said, “I believe, why would I watch this?” But he found this harder. And what I would say to that is that is because sexual violence hits us in a different way. It hits men. It hits women. I have done interviews on this film with men who are not criers, like people I know well, I've never seen cry, who will cry about this. And that's because everyone has a mother and we know what sexual violence does, but that is why this is so important. So important because we have to understand what we're up against. And this is not just a threat to Israel and Jews. It starts there. This is a threat to democracy. This is a threat to women. This is a threat to our way of life. And it is a deep threat. I feel like, as a country, we're forgetting that 9/11 was not that long ago. And again, they're not subtle. They say, “death to Israel, death to America. We're coming. The little Satan, the big Satan.” These groups are not subtle, and we have to stand against this and protect our way of life.
DS: Campbell and I were in Israel last week with our kids over Pesach, and we took our children to the Nova Music site. We didn't take them to Kfar Azza, we took them to Kibbutz Nir Oz, and 16 year old, 15 year old, our two boys, and they're exposed to a lot of the October 7th story, because they're at a Jewish day school. So they knew a lot, but obviously they hadn't seen it the way they saw it. We had this amazing, stoic, impressive, brave guy named Nir Metzger give us a tour of Kibbutz Nir Oz, whose, both his parents were taken hostage. One of whom, his mother, was released in the deal in November. His father is still in Gaza and, that night, and last summer, we took the kids and my cousins, my sisters and nephews and nieces with my mother, who's a survivor of the Holocaust. We went to Eastern Europe with the whole family last summer, so pre October 7th, and we were, among other places, at Auschwitz, where my mother's father was killed. And our 16 year old said to me, “Going down to Southern Israel today,” he said last week, you know, he was like kind of, uneasy with how this would come out, come across. He says, “going to southern Israel and visiting the places we visited was harder for me than going to Auschwitz the way we did last summer.” And I asked him why, and he said, “because I tend to think of what happened at Auschwitz as another, somehow,” I mean these weren't his words, but he, what he was basically saying is he thinks that humanity must be in a different place than it was 80, 90 years ago. There's - we've modernized, we've reformed, we've, whatever we have, we're more enlightened, we're more compassionate, like you tend to think that that thing that happened, The Shoah, as awful as it was, it was another time, another world. And what he saw, in terms of the remnants and the story of October 7th, was something that happened in his lifetime. I think that what is so unnerving, and so jostling, and so unbelievably upsetting, is that these things can happen now. And that is also why I think seeing the film is important for people, even if they're supporters of Israel, just to know what humanity, unhinged and fueled by unbelievable hate, can do even in this, you know in these modern times we live in
SS: I can't believe some of the things I hear and see now, and I can't believe how many times I say, “I can't believe.” I just, I just can't believe it. I thought, if you had asked me about anti Semitism on October 6th, I would have said, “yeah, it exists in some places. I've never felt it.” And I feel like it was there all along. I think other people, I think you are among them, saw it much more clearly than I did. I think as Jews, we have and continue to stand against hate of all forms, but our generation did not know it would be directed at us. Ten years ago, ten years ago, I had a conversation with a woman, Jewish woman who worked for Meta. She worked on my team in Europe, and she's observant, she's Orthodox. And, uh, there was a swastika painted on the door of like, her community or her, I forget exactly what, but like, it wasn't the synagogue, it was like a Jewish center or a house right next to her. And I said to her, “don't you worry. If anything happens in Europe, I will get you and your whole family out.” Like, “I'm here, I live in the United States, I've got you.” And then I went home and I said to, then Dave, my husband, and my parents, “I can't believe I had this conversation. Wow, it seems pretty bad in Europe. I'm so glad I live in the United States.” And then October 7th happened, and as I said, I looked at my closest friend who wasn't Jewish, the woman I think would hide me, and I don't really think I'm going to need to be hidden, but I'm scared. And I have not been scared before.
DS: So let's talk about that. You and I are both especially rattled, and it's hard to say, use the word ‘rattled’ because everything is rattling, is what's happening on college campuses. You are the product of elite U.S. educational institutions, the beneficiary of them. So are many of the people you work with and know. You're watching what's happening now on these campuses. What's your reaction?
SS: It's horrible. And it's counterproductive. I mean, look, our country was founded on the ability to talk openly, free expression, free speech, communication, protests, proud protests. College, college is that place where you're supposed to have dialogue, and sit in the dining hall or even at a peaceful protest and say, “I believe this, you believe, I believe X, you believe Y.” And then the next point should be, “why do you believe that? Let me listen to you calmly.” Listen. That's the kind of conversation and dialogue that's going to get us to a peace solution. We're certainly not going to get it by screaming at each other, or worse, pushing each other. And we're definitely not going to get it by screaming at Jewish students, “shame, shame, shame,” or pushing Jewish kids or saying, “October 7th is happening for you,” or “go back to Poland.” That's just anti Semitism. And so it scares me, not just for the kids in college, and I have college age kids. It scares me for our society that these are the people who are supposed to be able to sit down, and talk. And the fact that college campuses, by allowing the protests to get where they have gotten, they are not just not doing their job to keep our students safe and our Jewish students safe, and all students safe, they're stifling any conversation that could actually get us to any form of a solution. Because that is not happening when people are pushing each other. And also these universities have rules. They have rules. There are universities where, all of them, as far as I know, have a rule that you can't protest in the president's office. And a lot of people like to do sit-ins in the president's office. And there are schools which handle that by professors sending the protesters food in the president's office. So they don't have to leave to get their own food. And there are schools that handle that by saying, “get out of the president's office.” You want to protest? There's the law and do it peacefully. And if you just adhere, they don't, none of these schools, as I understand it, need a new rule. They just have to enforce the rules they had.
DS: Right.
SS: And the fact that they're not doing it is completely counterproductive.
DS: I'm totally with you. I will just flag for our listeners, I read, in the last hour before we sat down, I just happened, people had sent to me the statement by the president of Dartmouth and the statement by the president of Washington University in St. Louis, both of which were phenomenal statements that basically said a version of what you just said, which is, “we have rules, you can peacefully protest, but you can't engage in vandalism and destruction, and you can't disrupt other students learning environments. And these are the rules. And if you comply with the rules, protest your heart out. But if you don't comply with these rules, we will remove you from the learning environment, from the campus and suspend you if need be.” It's very matter of fact. And Ben Sasse, who's the president of University of Florida, also put out a fantastic statement. He said, “university is not daycare. It's not childcare.” That's what he said. He said, “we are adults. We have rules. Rules, breaking rules have consequences.” It's just very, the lesson we are teaching these young people who have, are wreaking havoc at these places, it's so destructive far beyond what it means for the future of the Jewish world. To your point, it has huge implications for America.
SS: Can I add to your list?
DS: Yeah, please.
SS: Chancellor Daniel Diermeier of Vanderbilt.
DS: I'm a huge fan.
SS: His op ed in The Wall Street Journal was fantastic.
DS: You sent it around to one of, to one of our chat groups. I know.
SS: He said, “free speech is alive and well. We have rules, we enforce them, and therefore we have real dialogue.” That's what everyone has to understand. This is not real dialogue.
DS: Yeah, I think he's great. Look, we spent a lot of time lamenting the schools that have been, uh, disappointments. There are some, like you said, Daniel at Vanderbilt, and I was, spoke recently at Duke University, had a great experience. 400 kids showed up to hear me speak. Frank Bruni interviewed me. He asked me some tough questions about Israel. It was all about Israel, but everyone was respectful. It was, there were no protests. No one tried to shut it down. It was like - but again, the administration is very clear about rules. Alright, Sheryl, last question before we wrap. So it's easy, obviously, to get, and I, this has been my experience since October 7th. It is very easy to get downward spirals of despair. I also have been inspired by a lot of people, by my most recent book, The Genius of Israel, is all about Israeli resilience. It's all about the people who make this country, who make Israel tick and keep it moving, even when it is dealing with challenges and adversaries that one could not, you know, could not even imagine. And so I tend to be pretty optimistic and upbeat, even when dealing with shattered people in a shattered situation. I found some of the people in your film inspiring, even in the midst of despair. I know one of the people you've spent a lot of time with, Shari Mendes, my sister's friends with her. They, they're friends in Jerusalem. I had her on my podcast a while ago. She's an architect by day. She's in this reserve unit that is responsible for preparing female soldiers for burial after they die. It's actually not been that busy a unit since it was created, because not many females were being killed in battle. And then October 7th happens and she gets called up a reserve. She's an architect by day. And she starts, as you know, as you, you know, she starts to see a pattern and she's looking at these bodies. And yet when I spent time with Shari Mendes, it's like I'm inspired by her. Like, where did these people come from? She's both so modest and she's a superhero. So, maybe in wrapping, just, anybody that you can just put a spotlight on. I know there's a lot of them that you've been inspired by that should give us hope. Cause I don't want to end this conversation in tears.
SS: When I was in Israel, a friend of mine who lives there said to me that, “as a people”, we were talking about Israelis, she said “we are as broken as a people could be, and as resilient as a people could be.” I have met more people through this that inspire me. You mentioned Shari Mendes, Simcha, Amit, Ayelet, all of them. Mirit, she's in the film as well. She's a police chief. I've traveled with her in Europe too. She is bold and brave and strong. Kochav, who is leading the effort, the privately funded effort, to document these - I mean, person after person after person. The people who made this film, who brought me onto the project, Meny Arivam, he runs a company called Kastina Communications. I knew of him because they made Fowda, the first season, and I was obsessed with Fowda. And then, Anat Stalinsky, who's the director of this film, you know, there's a moment in the film where one of our witnesses gets scared. And that woman runs into Anat's arms because that's who Anat is. I also, and I'm again, an optimist, and I'm looking for the silver lining. Anti Semitism is the oldest problem in the world. It is hatred, pure, simple, as other forms of hatred are, and it is unacceptable. And maybe it's been around, and we didn't know, and our generation was asleep, but now we are not. And maybe this brings it all to the surface so that we can handle it and eradicate it as we have to eradicate all hate. And maybe, just maybe, we are gonna get to peace. We have to, there's no other choice.
DS: Well, I'm - on that front, you're more hopeful than I am, but, along the way, I think we have a lot of educating to do, and I think this film, “Screams Before Silence”, is just an extremely central part of the education process. So I will tell you as a Jew, as an American, as someone who lives in the Western civilized world, someone with a wife and a mother and sisters and nieces. Sister and nieces, by the way, who live in Israel. I truly am grateful for you taking this on. You have a lot of things you can do with your time and energy and creativity. And this is a project that found its moment. And anyways, I just want to thank you.
SS: Well, I want to thank you because you have been loud. Your book on Israel came at the right moment. Israel's a special place. Not a perfect place. Not every government that runs Israel is perfect. But -
DS: It's messy.
SS: Israel, yes, all democracies are. There's a lot that needs to change there. But Israel's a special place filled with a lot of things we value. Gay rights, women's rights, democracy, and your voice on that technology, the contributions Israel has made. Um, but you've also been loud and proud since October 7th, and that has given me part of my, you know, fortitude to go through and be, and try to be loud and proud as well. I am a friend and a fan. Thank you for having me, Dan. I appreciate it.
DS: Right back at you. Thank you, Sheryl. And we will post to the show notes, uh, link to the film. And, like I said, start the film and watch the whole thing. That is my advice to our listeners. Sheryl, talk soon.
SS: Thank you.
DS: That's our show for today. To keep up with Sheryl Sandberg, you can find her on Instagram, @ Sheryl Sandberg. And we'll post the link to her film, “Screams Before Silence”, which you can find on YouTube, and which I highly recommend. Call Me Back is produced and edited by Ilan Benatar. Our media manager is Rebecca Strom. Additional editing by Martin Huergo. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.