Hello everyone and welcome back to People Jew One and O podcast.

I'm throwing in a solo episode today to talk about my trip to Scotland and Ireland which was genuinely a trip from hell.

It's no secret that the UK and Ireland are very anti Israel places, so when I posted about my trip on Instagram a lot of people asked me to share about my experience there as a Jew right now.

At first I didn't think there would be much to share because I went went to Scotland for work, but as the trip went on and on I had been gone for about two weeks, things progressively got Wilder and Wilder.

So now I have a whole episodes worth to tell you about.

I have to start by saying that logistically speaking the whole trip was a disaster.

The anti-Semitism and anti Israel stuff aside, I was just having one travel nightmare after the other which I will elaborate on shortly.

As it happened, I ended up traveling within the nine days.

But please make no mistake, all of the travel disasters happened even before the nine days stardom.

For those who are not familiar, the nine days are a period of intensified mourning in Judaism leading up to Tashabaab.

Tashabaab is considered the saddest day in the Jewish calendar and it commemorates the destruction of the 1st and 2nd Temples in Jerusalem, and it's a fasting day.

The nine days preceded and are a time to remember the destruction of the temples as well as any other tragedies in Jewish history.

This year the 9 days began on July 25th and Tashaba of fell on August 3rd.

My trip was July 11th to August 1st.

During the 9 days, observant Jews are not supposed to eat meat, drink wine, they don't launder clothing or swim in a pool, remodel homes, plant trees, buy, sew or knit clothing, or cut nails.

During the actual week of Tashaba of I'm not an observant Jew and I didn't know about any of these rules and I can assure you I definitely ate meat.

I definitely swam in a pool and definitely cut my nails.

So with that said, I can't read into the timing and circumstances too much, but it's just an interesting coincidence I wanted to share.

I'll add that the nine days are generally understood to be a very unlucky time for Jews, and that part I can confirm.

I was very, very unlucky on my trip to Scotland and Ireland.

So buckle up.

Let's begin with how the trip started out.

I got to the airport and when 8:00 PM rolled around, we were not boarding.

About 30 minutes late into boarding, we were informed that our plane had a mechanical issue and that we would be moved to another gate and receive another plane.

About an hour later from when we were supposed to take off, we were at the other gate ready to board onto our next plane.

People began entering the plane, and it was discovered once people had boarded that this plane also had mechanical issues.

And so everyone was deplaned.

At this point, people were kind of confused, like, will the issue get fixed?

Should we get rebooked?

And now it's maybe 11:00 PM.

We are issued a $15 vouchers for food as we wait outside.

But at this point, almost everything at the gates was

closed because it was 11:00 PM.

And let's talk about briefly what the vibe of the passengers is as all of this is unfolding.

People are crying, like sobbing crying tears.

People are meant to be at funerals that they will now miss.

People have connections that they will now miss.

People spent money on tickets to things and admissions that they now won't make because of this delay.

And the others are just sitting waiting, annoyed.

I will be honest, I'm usually someone that gets really butt hurt about this kind of stuff, but seeing people who have such important life events that they're missing gave me perspective.

So I was completely keeping it together.

As we were waiting to figure out what was going on.

I even ended up befriending a Jewish family.

We were sitting at the bar hanging out trying to pass the time and as midnight rolls around we are unfortunately informed that our flight is canceled and this means that we're getting rebooked on other flights.

Now the complication is that there aren't that many direct flights going out from Newark to Edinburgh every day.

I think there's like 2 flights a day, one being at 8:00 PM and

1:00 at 11:00 PM.

So the second they made that cancellation announcement, I immediately called United to get myself rebooked ASAP because I knew that we'd all be fighting for seats on the same two flights the next day, and those flights are probably already mostly full.

I did get myself rebooked to the 11:00 PM flight the next day, and from my perspective, I basically lost a day of my trip.

But as an avid traveler, I never really booked things or buy tickets for things on the day that I'm supposed to land because I know that cancellations can happen.

So I didn't really lose very much if I came a day day later.

I lost like one night's worth of a hotel and my company was paying for that anyway.

That second day of my trip, however, was packed.

I had like 3 tours booked starting from early in the morning and now because my

flight is at 11:45 PM the next day, I would effectively land in the morning of the day of all of my tours.

So mentally, I'm preparing myself to take an owl and just power through this day.

Because our flight was canceled everyone started walking out of the airport and or baggage claim because we were told to get our bags.

People were then told to work with the United counter buy the baggage claim to get vouchers for a hotel overnight.

But since I live in the area I was planning to get my bag and just go home.

As I'm waiting at the belt the bags start coming out.

After maybe 5 bags come out, the belt stops and suddenly people start talking to each other and someone comes up to me and says, hey, did you see that?

Our flight's back on?

And I'm just like, what?

And they're like, yeah, they put the flight back on.

It's not cancelled.

So United uncancelled our flight.

And it's like maybe 1:00 AM at this point.

But because I already got rebooked to the next day's flight, I'm thinking to myself, like, shit, I want to see if I can get myself back on to the original flight so that I can fly sooner.

I end up finding someone from United who's very nice and he rebooks me to the original flight and all of us are now stampeding back through TSA with all of our stuff.

TSA does not operate at 1:00 AM because there are technically no flights going out that late out of Newark, so there does not need to be TSA.

They end up making some exception for us and they like turn TSA back on just to let us through.

We all run back to the gate.

The crew boards us.

Everyone is overjoyed.

The door of the plane closes, everybody is on, we applaud, and off we go to pull to take off.

At this point, I actually can't believe what's happening.

I've been there from like 6:30 PM and although it's been difficult travel experience, I'm just happy that we get to fly after all.

I put on my sleeping mask, I take melatonin, I'm out and an hour later I wake up and I can tell that the plane has not taken off, that it's sitting still.

Suddenly the lights turn on the plane.

The pilot makes an announcement.

Hey everyone, I hate to do this but we will not be flying out tonight.

The Department of Transportation turned us away because it is against the law to depart planes out so late into the night.

We thought they can make an exception for us but they couldn't.

We're turning around and we will be re booking you guys on the soonest lights out.

People were so frustrated like nobody could believe what was happening.

I think the most frustrating part is this could have been predicted.

Like they did not need to uncancel our flight considering this result was imminent.

And as we're sitting on the plane I once again immediately call United because I don't want to fight people for a seat on the next day flight.

So I get rebooked once more to the same 11:45.

To summarize, we had a cancelled, uncanceled and then

re canceled flight and at 2:30 AM we are getting off the plane and the flight attendants inform us that we will not be getting our bags back and they will be on the plane for our next flight or waiting for us at our destination.

I don't really care because I'm rebooked to the next flight that's happening 24 hours from now.

So I head out and I order my Uber.

In the Uber, I realize that there is a fatal flaw to my plan to go back home.

My house keys to get into my apartment are in my checked bag.

I know that's a rookie mistake.

My thinking was that even if my flight didn't go out, they'd give me my bag bag so I could get my keys.

That was the wrong assumption.

So at 3:00 AM emergency maintenance had to come to my apartment to let me in but they couldn't leave me with the key so I was effectively stuck in my apartment the next day.

Even though my flight was not till the evening, I did find a way to get a spare key and leave my apartment the next day and I went into the city.

When I got into the city, I got off at the World Trade Center stop and there was a fire alarm, which never happens at World Trade Center, and a massive Stampede and panic of people trying to exit.

And then when I was heading home to go to the airport, as the train departed for my stop and the doors closed, the driver made an announcement that the train would be skipping my stop and going to the next stop, which was 10 minutes away by train and a 15 minute car.

Right away it was skipping my stop because of a medical emergency so I had to Uber home from this next stop and lost close to an hour in my commute time and almost missed my rebooked flight because of it.

I don't know.

I don't know why all of this happened and all of this was out of my control.

It's not my fault that the flights were canceled.

It's not my fault that the train had a medical emergency.

I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

So that is the preamble with which I departed for Scotland for a week long work off site.

I ended up having the one Sunday there before the off site to see the entire city in one day.

I went on my 3 tours, saw all the landmarks.

It was really intense but I did it.

Compared to Ireland, Scotland wasn't really that bad.

On the Jewish front, I saw a couple of Palestinian flags here and there, and there was also a Palestinian goods store that I saw that sold different Palestinian souvenirs and even sweatshirts that had a map of Israel, and inside the map was a design of a kafia pattern.

Also, I noticed that in Edinburgh there were a ton of Arab people, whether it was tourists or locals.

One in five women on the street were wearing burkas.

It was really noticeable because I was there for work.

I don't have much to report on other than this.

I think things got a lot more interesting in Ireland because I had more time to see the country.

But rest assured that I did not make it to Ireland so easily because my flight from Scotland to Ireland, a one hour long flight, was canceled 10 hours before it was supposed to depart.

I once again lost another full day of my trip because I had to go the next day.

Regarding anti-Semitism and pro Palestinian sentiment.

Ireland is a whole different ball game.

There were Palestinian flags and stickers all over Dublin, people in Kafias signs that said death to America and and the genocide all over town.

The energy felt really off it felt so political.

I personally think it's taken to an extreme in Ireland, like when you go to the National Library of Ireland, which is meant to be a National Library, the nation being Ireland.

The main exhibition in the library is about Islam.

It really felt like Ireland was just consumed by Islam, and specifically it really seems like Ireland took the Palestinian 'cause as their own and it's probably because of their own history.

For those who are not familiar next to Ireland, there's something called Northern Ireland.

For many years Ireland was not independent from the United Kingdom.

Only in 1919 did Ireland gain its independence and become its own country, but in Northern Ireland however, there was a majority of the population that wanted to remain part of the United Kingdom.

So after Ireland's independence, Northern Ireland continued to be part of the United Kingdom and this instigated conflict and violence.

In the 1960's the conflict between Northern Ireland and Ireland really came to a boil and lasted for 30 years, which is known as the Troubles.

Effectively, what had happened was that Northern Ireland had a majority Protestant population that wanted to be part of the United Kingdom and a minority Catholic population that wanted to be part of Ireland.

The rest of Ireland, however, was majority Catholic and wanted independence and not to be part of the UK.

The Protestants in Northern Ireland oppressed the Catholic minority there.

The Catholics were ghettoized away from Protestant society, they had their own schools, they could only work certain jobs, etcetera.

So these minority Catholics in Northern Ireland created paramilitary groups and attempted to resist the UK and Protestant majority and make Northern Ireland part of the larger Ireland or independent Ireland.

They wanted to resist the discrimination they experienced and they took a very violent form of resistance where they would stage bombings, kidnapping, shootings.

People would disappear.

Sometimes these bombings and shootings would happen in their very own neighborhoods.

They bombed themselves.

This form of violent existence is the playbook that has inspired a lot of Palestinian violence towards Israelis, and I think the Irish mistakenly think that what happened in Northern Ireland is what's happening to Palestinians today.

But make no mistake, it's not the same.

For one, Northern Ireland was not offered a state of their own five times, which they declined every single time.

But you know what?

I'll spare you all the reasons why Northern Ireland is not the same as the situation in Palestine, but the resistance approach is definitely similar there.

The Troubles lasted until the 1990s, when finally a peace deal was struck.

President Bill Clinton was instrumental in brokering that deal.

And America as a whole was really invested because there's a large Irish American contingent that really cared about this conflict.

The result of the peace deal in the 1990s was that Northern Ireland would remain part of the UK.

So the resistance was not successful.

Today, Northern Ireland and Ireland, they don't have any border you can drive right through.

But everything in Northern Ireland is done in pounds, whereas in Ireland it's done in Euros.

Ireland is part of the EU and Northern Ireland is part of the UK.

I did end up visiting Northern Ireland on a bus tour.

As part of the tour, you get to see Belfast, which was the hub for the paramilitary groups and the resistance and conflict.

The tour is led by former members of the Northern Irish paramilitary group, which is called the IRA, and they recall how they grew up and tell us about their history.

I mean, it's really legit.

Some of these guys were shot by the Protestants, some were acquainted with top leaders of the IRAI came to the tour really prepared because I just finished reading Say Nothing by Patrick Rad and Keith.

That's a book that recounts the conflict.

I highly recommend it.

And it's also been made into a show on HBO, I believe.

So I got to ask a lot of questions about the conflict and really get into the weeds with the guides.

Aside from the interesting Irish history, what was fascinating about Belfast is that the whole city today has been converted to essentially a shrine to Palestine.

The entire town is covered in murals about Palestine, flags everywhere.

For the murals that were not about Palestine, the guide told us to take photos because they're repainting all of them the following week to be about Palestine.

It's like an obsession.

It's genuinely bizarre.

I did poke the bear a little by asking some of the tour participants what they thought of the tour.

1 of the couples I spoke to said they were interested to see the comparison between the colonization of Northern Ireland to Palestine, to which I responded well Northern Ireland wasn't colonized and neither was Palestine.

But I understand what you mean and smiled.

It just really goes to show how uneducated people are and they use this vocabulary Willy nilly.

I also spoke to someone at a bar about it, but I think I ran into the Irish equivalent of a republican because he had this whole conspiracy theory that the resistance groups of Northern Ireland were funded by the UK to destabilize them and destroy or sabotage them from within.

His point was that these groups were really well funded for about 30 years.

Like a lot of equipment, guns, bombs, and the question is where would they have gotten this money?

I don't think it's necessarily far fetched as a theory because it's well known that there were a lot of spies on either side of this.

His point was that the people at the top of this IRA were definitely in on it, but the soldiers or militants executing the day-to-day were probably not and thought they were fighting for just cause.

And actually, if you listen to the interviews or read about what these Catholic militants or resistance fighters said towards the end of the conflict, they felt really defeated.

When the peace deal was struck and the concessions to stay in the UK were made, these resistance fighters felt as if all of their effort and terrorism, lest I find a better word, was all for nothing.

And this is always so perplexing to me because nothing was ever guaranteed to anybody.

Like you should have thought about that when you bombed innocent people in your own neighborhoods.

I think the similarity I see between these resistance fighters and what we see with Hamas is they employ violence and then they're outraged that their violence is met with consequences.

And you'll hear a lot of anti Zionists say, for example, like, well, nonviolent resistance hasn't worked so that's why they're moving to violent resistance.

And even if that's true, things still have consequences.

If you're going to use violent resistance, be prepared for the consequences, and also be prepared that it might all be for nothing because you're not guaranteed to to win.

No one ever promised Northern Ireland they'd win or get their way.

That's not how conflict ends.

And I'll mention on a side tangent that the same guy from the bar tried to draw the comparison between Northern Ireland and Ukraine and imply that Ukraine does not need to be independent from Russia.

That was crazy.

Anyway, I want to move on to talk about my bus mate on my tour to Belfast.

My bus mate was another young woman from London who was very nice.

her and I both did the tour of Belfast but we got split up into different subgroups of the tour so we didn't have the same guides for that part of it.

When we got back on the bus I was telling her how I feel like Irish people are so gung ho about Palestine because to them it's like a way to support someone in achieving what they themselves were not able to achieve.

The Irish are so invested in this cause because they didn't get their desired outcome so maybe the Palestinians will.

She had said something also about being interested in the comparison, but it was a rather diplomatic comment.

Then it was time for lunch.

We decided to eat together at a cafe and share our meal.

As we're sitting there talking, she asked me what I do for work and I tell her I work for a tech company and host a popular Jewish podcast called People Jew On and Up.

I don't mention that my company is Israeli like I usually would because I can sense that's not going to go over well.

I then say to her that that that's actually why I'm on this tour, because I'm so close to the conflict I wanted.

To see what Belfast was like and look at their support of Palestinian rights.

I explained to her that my podcast is very diverse.

I have people on that don't support Israel and do.

My goal is to show the different points of view, not to prescribe a specific point of view to the listener.

She goes on to tell me about what she does for work, the project she's working on for her PhD Turns out she's in a medicine adjacent field.

As we're about to wrap up the meal, I take the last bite of my steak sandwich.

It's a big piece of steak that's kind of chewable and I chew, I chew, I chew, and as I chew through it, at some point I just kind of mentally give up and I'm like, OK, let me just swallow it and be done with it.

As I swallow it, I instantly feel and block my air pipe.

I know what's happening.

I know exactly what's happening.

I need the Heimlich immediately because I cannot breathe.

What I'll say is kudos to me because I was really calm.

I was a competitive swimmer for most of my life, so I have really good breath control and I'm comfortable with not breathing for a little.

But at that time I could tell like I need the Heimlich.

And then as I'm thinking like OK, it's really happening, you need to ask for the Heimlich.

My other thought was if something happens to me, my parents are going to kill me.

My actual gut instinct response was my parents are going to be so mad that my idiot ass died from eating a steak sandwich.

Anyway, the whole thing was not very dramatic.

It lasted maybe 15 seconds.

I signaled to her that I need the Heimlich.

She didn't get it at first but then caught on and I literally got up.

I walked over to her and she did it.

She only pushed on my ribs once and the steak literally landed back in my mouth and I gently spit it out.

It wasn't some big debacle with the steak flying across the restaurant and everybody gasping, but yeah, she saved my life.

Afterwards we laughed about it because who does that?

Like, how does that happen?

It felt like it was out of a cartoon or something.

We then leave the restaurant to go walk around Giant's Causeway and my bus mate and now savior starts asking me about Israel.

She tells me she's seen the movie No Other Land.

I explained to her that I haven't seen it because it hasn't come out and streaming but I really wanted to watch it and that I heard that while it was well done and it depicted the realities of the West Bank, I also heard that I had some big accusations and inaccuracies in it as well.

This is where she got visibly frustrated.

I don't remember the exact play by play of the conversation from here on out, but I do remember telling her that I had lived in the West Bank and did not support how the settlers act and the settlements generally because they're not in the best interest of Israel.

I also explained to her how my family and up in the West Bank in the 1st place, I think there's this misconception that everyone who lives in the West Bank is this violent settler who wants to destroy Palestinians and they've made it their lives mission.

This isn't true.

In the case of my family, who had come in the Second Aliyah.

They ended up in the West Bank because the housing was affordable.

The Israeli government wanted to incentivize people to move into the West Bank by creating more affordable housing there.

I think this was the wrong play by Israel, but it's not like my family is there to prove a point.

They're there because that's where they could afford a nicer home.

This is where my bus mate interjected and said well settlers aside, I think it's absolutely disgusting and inhumane what Israel is doing.

Israel shouldn't exist.

I told her that it is really horrible what is happening as part of the war, but that Israel is the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people so it will exist.

She goes well Israel was created after the Holocaust.

I don't understand why couldn't they just have given them a state in Germany after the war?

They should have never done this in Palestine.

This is where I'm like holy fuck.

After having a near death experience I have to say listening to this I was cool as a cucumber.

I very calmly was like well there are many reasons why Germany didn't become the homeland of the Jewish people.

I basically started by saying that you can't make a state and a place that just gassed you by the millions and that this is traumatic and wrong.

But apart from that, a state wasn't made in Germany or anywhere else but Israel, because the Jews are not indigenous to anywhere else but Israel.

And this is where she said, well, this is what I don't get.

How many generations removed can you say that someone is indigenous?

And I explained to her that even apart from that, we had an uninterrupted presence in the land, even if many Jews lived elsewhere.

There was always a Jewish population living in modern day Israel, even when it was Palestine.

And she goes, yeah, and they lived in peace there.

And I said wrong.

That is a common misconception about Jews residing in what was called Palestine at the time.

They did not live in peace.

She got very frustrated and switched the subject.

But thank God we had this conversation after the Heimlich and not before.

Imagine getting your life saved by an anti Israel person.

Like what a precious irony.

I think about that video that was shared maybe a year ago of the doctors in Australia who said they wouldn't save Zionist patients.

And it made me wonder like if she knew what I felt would she have saved me?

And to be honest with you I think she would have.

Even though her views hurt my feelings, I think they come from a genuinely misguided place.

The rest of the tour was absolutely fine.

We talked about other things.

I did tell our tour guide about the Heimlich incident and he kept making fun of me for the rest of the tour.

He said like OK Margarita, today is the first day of your new life.

I did buy my bus mate ice cream as a small token of gratitude for saving my life.

The whole trip, I mean the whole thing, like nothing was normal.

Nothing was normal about it.

The next day I went to Cliffs of Moore.

I had 0 visibility, no cliffs, just sheets of rain.

We saw absolutely nothing.

We slept there for five hours to see these Cliffs of Moore.

Nothing was steam.

But that's a tangent.

Anyway, after the Belfast tour, apart from thinking about like Oh my God I almost died how crazy I was also thinking about how I probably didn't give the strongest arguments possible for why a Jewish state couldn't have been in Germany.

Like I think broad strokes what I said was correct but I didn't deliver my case in the strongest way.

So as I was in the hotel I decided to see what ChatGPT would have said to the question.

ChatGPT gave the following reasons for why Israel was made in Palestine and not somewhere else in the following order.

First, historical and religious connection to the land.

Second, modern Zionist movement influenced it to be Israel and not something else.

Third, British support from Balfour declaration.

4th, existing Jewish presence in Palestine.

5th, aftermath of the Holocaust requiring a safe haven for Jews.

And finally, other proposals for places like Uganda, Argentina and US were rejected.

But that's not all folks.

I recently got access to something really special called Beacon AI.

For now this is an invite only chat bot slash ChatGPT equivalent, but with a pro Israel slash western values lens.

You can't just use it on the Internet publicly.

Their whole value prop is that chat bots are strongly influenced by the volume of information.

So because there are like 30 anti Israel Al Jazeera articles for everyone, pro Israel article, a ChatGPT will inherently be biased against Israel because it's trained on a disproportionate amount of information against Israel.

This beacon AI is meant for pro Israel contingent to get accurate and strong information about the conflict and Jewish people.

So I pose the same exact question to Beacon AI and here's what I got in the order.

Number one, historic and religious connections.

Jews have an unbroken religious and historical bond to the Land of Israel 2 International legal recognition, 3 moral imperative after the Holocaust, and four Zionist movements.

Focus.

What's interesting is they're a little bit in a different order, but they're also framed and communicated differently, even if some of the reasons are the same.

It's not the aftermath of the Holocaust, but the moral imperative after the Holocaust.

It's not that the Zionist movement influenced the state to be Israel, but that the Zionist movements focus or agenda was always for it to be Israel.

These are small differences in how we convey information, but these small differences.

I'm really excited to keep testing out this beacon AI thing and seeing how it frames answers for other questions I have.

Anyway, back to my trip.

After the Heimlich incident and the Belfast tour, I basically was mentally done with my trip.

I had had enough and thankfully I only had one day left.

A small anecdote about my return flight.

At this point, after two cancelled flights, I was making a joke of whether I was going to be a three for three on the cancellations.

My flight was not cancelled, but it was an hour delayed with no explanation.

And as I walked through security, a child in front of me projectile vomited all over the floor.

Like bad.

At this point this was unsurprising and unremarkable to me.

But here's the deal with my flight.

I have a friend, Ari, who is United's number one customer.

He has like the highest status of all statuses and after he had heard about my flight disasters, he did the sweetest thing and he called his special high status people hotline at United and they put me on the upgrade list.

I was the first in line for the upgrade and there were two open seats in first class.

So I had it in the bag and I thought to myself, wow, thank you Ari, what good fortune, how lucky am I?

What a crazy turn around for the trip.

At the end when I got to the kiosk to check my bag, they confirmed my seat, but they told me that the seat number would be assigned at the gate.

When I got to the gate, there were no open seats of first class.

The gate attendant said that someone had bought them and OK, like that's disappointing, but it's not the end of the world.

I still had a great seat on the plane in row 8, which is right at the front.

As I'm in line to board the plane, the gate agent goes, wait, come over here, let me move you to row 12.

It's going to be fully open, so you'll have the entire rotor yourself.

And I was like, wow, how nice of United to do that for me.

Guys.

I get on the plane, row 12 is the row in front of the exit row so it has no recline.

The row is not empty, it has passengers in it.

So now I'm on the plane and I asked the flight attendant about moving me back to my original seat 8F and they tell me they can't because they've given my seat away already and actually they don't even oversee the seats, that's the gate attendants.

The flight attendants just service the flight and this really isn't their problem.

So I just got fucked for no reason on a 7 hour flight.

I don't know why I never asked to be moved.

I had a great seat.

I was perfectly happy to continue to sit there.

There was 0 accountability taken from United.

Literally.

When we landed, I was like Oh my God, what has been happening to me in the last two weeks?

I want to go home.

My Orthodox friend who had told me about the nine days was begging me like please, when you get home from your trip, do not leave the house until Tisha Ba'av is over.

I did not listen to her.

I left the house and on to Shabba'av.

The PATH train, which is what I take every day to get into the city, literally exploded in flames.

I was not on it, thank God, but there were passengers who were really hurt as a result of this explosion of the train.

I think there was something wrong with the track and it lit on fire and then it caused the whole train car to light on fire as well.

I don't know what's going on with the universe right now and with me.

If someone knows how to de evil eye please hit me up.

However, thank God I'm in one piece and fine given everything that could have been.

One thing that I'm wrestling with since getting back is, for lack of a better phrase, the dichotomy of it all.

Like the girl that saved my life also so hates Israel.

I had a horrible trip in Scotland and Ireland and at the same time I saw some of the best nature I've ever seen in my life and caught up with my friend from high school who lives in Dublin and who made my time.

They're incredible.

How do you have such high highs and such low lows at the same time?

What I do know for certain is the UK and Ireland are not places where Jews are welcome.

The UK has a sizable Jewish population of anywhere from 200 to 300 K depending on how you count.

But that population is dwindling as Jews are immigrating out of the UK due to anti-Semitism.

Ireland has only 2000 Jews.

2000 that's it.

The population of Ireland as a whole is 5 million.

Ireland had more Jews in the 1940s and 1950s.

That's during the times of the Holocaust, folks, than it does today.

At the height of the Holocaust, Ireland had 5500 Jews.

Today it has 2000.

Why do you think that is?

And what's interesting is you can always feel when a place is hostile to Jews.

For example, Almadi, Kazakhstan, with only 1000 Jews there, doesn't feel hostile to Jews.

Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan on the other hand, with like 200 or 500 Jews does same thing here.

Ireland feels hostile and it's really a bummer.

So if you're thinking about going to Scotland and Ireland right now, I tell you to think again.

There are much better places that welcome us Jews.

For example, I'm always amazed by South Korea.

South Korea has a strong pro Israel movement and almost no Jewish population in this country.

OK, I don't even know how to close out this episode.

I don't have some ceremonious closure.

When I think about my trip, I'm still Let me know what you think of this travel debacle.

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