The Chavis Chronicles

>> Gabriel Groisman, one of our nation's leading entrepreneurs, next on "The Chavis Chronicles."

Major funding for "The Chavis Chronicles" is provided by the following... At Wells Fargo, we continue to look for ways to empower our customers.

We seek broad impact in our communities, and we're proud of the role we play for our customers and the US economy.

As a company, we are focused on supporting our customers and communities through housing access, small business growth, financial health, and other community needs.

Together, we want to make a tangible difference in people's lives.

Wells Fargo, the bank of doing.

American Petroleum Institute.

Our members are committed to accelerating safety, environmental, and sustainability progress throughout the natural-gas and oil industry around the world.

Learn more at api.org/apienergyexcellence.

Reynolds American, dedicated to building a better tomorrow for our employees and communities.

Reynolds stands against discrimination in all forms and is committed to building a more diverse and inclusive workplace.

At AARP, we are committed to ensuring your money, health, and happiness live as long as you do.

>> Gabriel Groisman, welcome to "The Chavis Chronicles."

>> Thanks so much for having me.

It's an honor to be here with you.

>> First thing I want to go over is your upbringing.

Where are you originally from?

And tell me how your family upbringing contributes to what you do today.

>> I was born actually here in our nation's capital in Washington, D.C., but my family's story is not a straight line, like, actually, many Jewish Americans.

My family actually comes, on my father's side, from Argentina and my mother's side.

We were there for... >> Argentina?

>> ...since the late 1800s, yeah, on my... >> Hablas espaol?

>> Of course.

Mi primer idioma -- my first language.

That's what we spoke at home.

We didn't speak English at home.

My parents had just moved from Argentina in the late '70s.

And, like most homes in South Florida and Miami, we spoke Spanish.

That's what we spoke.

And that's what I speak at home with my kids today still.

But we were only in Argentina for a little under 100 years, my family from my father's side.

>> Hundred years is a long time.

>> Yeah, it's a long time for some.

We were driven out of Russia during the pogroms of 1892.

Family got on a ship, made their way to Argentina, the first ship of Jews that ever landed in Argentina.

On my mother's side, they came over from -- when they left Russia in 1892, went to Poland, couldn't make a living there, and were able to get on a ship also to Argentina in 1905.

So, my family was there from about then till the late '70s.

And during the military period there, where there was a military coup for 13 years, it was tough for everybody.

It was particularly tough for Jews.

A lot of anti-Semitism during that period in Argentina.

Drove my parents separately, by the way, to South Florida.

And that's where I was born, a first-generation American.

>> Interesting legacy.

I'm glad you shared that, because a lot of times when we interview people, it comes across as being dislocated from a family setting or dislocated from a social crucible.

So, thank you for sharing that.

>> I can tell you, for me, nothing is disassociated from a social crucible, as you put it, as sort of from my family nucleus.

I'm a father of five girls.

I've been married for over 20 years.

My family is the most important thing to me beyond -- way beyond anything else that we can discuss.

>> You mentioned the anti-Semitism in Argentina, but, you know, here in the United States, the FBI, the Justice Department, the ADL also reporting a tremendous increase in anti-Semitism in America.

What do you think is the root?

Why, of all of what we've accomplished in America, why haven't we been able, as a nation, to stamp out anti-Semitism?

>> It's a tough question, but it's an important one.

I mean, first, to be clear, the levels of anti-Semitism in this country have been increasing almost twofold every single year for the last ten years.

And, really, it's an amorphous concept, anti-Semitism.

It's coming from all these different places.

Anti-Semitism, first, I like to say, is different than all other forms of hatred in that anti-Semitism is when a given society ascribes its most loathsome quality to the Jews.

So, for the communists, they are the capitalists.

For the capitalists, they're the socialists.

If you apply that to the rubric that people look at the world today, if the enemy is the white person, then the most white person is the Jew.

If the enemy is people that are not white, it's the race polluters, which is the term that the Nazis used against Jews, right?

So, you just keep ascribing that.

Your question about America, and how come we haven't been able to stamp it in America?

Look, America, we're not very different than every other society in this world that's always been.

If you think about societies of generations past or even today, we like to think we are.

And America is an incredible nation.

They've welcomed my family, my parents, when they came here.

I'm living, thank God, a great life, working very hard, spent many years in school.

And it's still a nation full of promise for many.

It's not perfect, but it's a nation of promise for many.

But it's not perfect.

It's an imperfect union.

And we still are looking for scapegoats.

And every time that there is economic unrest and political unrest in history, the first scapegoat that societies turn to typically are the Jews.

And we're not different from that.

And that's what we've seen over the last ten years.

And it's now really past the tipping point.

And we're not immune to it.

>> I worked with Dr. King when I was a teenager.

Back in the 1960s, it was just such a close affinity, a close solidarity between blacks and Jews.

I remember Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and others who really stood with Dr. King all the way.

What can we do today to also help improve relations between blacks and Jews in America?

And then blacks and Jews in America together can work on also some of these larger problems.

>> Yeah, it's a great question.

I think about it a lot.

First of all, a lot's happened since the '60s, but in the '60s during the Civil Rights Movement, like you noted, the Jewish community stood side by side with the black community and worked not just in word but in deed, in every way, from legal cases to founding, establishing the NAACP.

>> And sharing blood.

A lot of Jews were killed.

>> Yes, absolutely.

And now we're at a point still where people like you and I look at this and say, "Wait.

There should be an allyship between the black-American community and the Jewish-American community, first of all, because of the historical relationship between the different groups.

Second, because there's actually a lot of parallels between the experience.

Of course, they're not the same, but there's a lot of parallels within the experience.

We're both people who have been enslaved.

We're both people who came to this country.

We are first -- we're mostly put together because neither of us were allowed.

The city where I was mayor -- I was the mayor of Bal Harbour in South Florida, a small community.

Every deed on the homes in Bal Harbour, which is in South Florida, says in it that "this home should not be sold or transferred or leased to anyone at least one-quarter Jewish..." >> It's written in the deeds?

>> "...or black."

It's written in the deed.

And it was enforced until 1982, when a man named Skolnik -- >> This is in the United States of America?

>> The United States of America in South Florida until 1982.

They tied it into the deed and, also, it said the same restrictions to enter into the club, which doesn't exist anymore.

And that's how they were able to continue to enforce it until the first person, named Phil Skolnik, challenged it in a court.

The second he challenged it, they dropped the restrictions.

But it's in the actual deeds.

>> You obviously are leading the Jewish community, and you became mayor.

During your term as mayor, how were you able to bring these diverse communities together?

>> So, Bal Harbour is not the most racially diverse city.

It's a small city.

So, Miami-Dade County is made up of 34 small municipalities, 3 million people divided by 34.

And we're a small one.

But having the title "mayor" and being able to sit in that chair gives you a lot of opportunities.

So, for example, I worked with the mayor of Miami Gardens, which is a largely African-American city.

The mayor there was a friend of mine.

He's now on the county commission.

We did a roundtable of mayors, for example, with no media around.

We said, "We're not going to have media.

We're going to discuss racism and anti-Semitism, not just for the sake of discussing it" -- that's why we didn't want media there -- but we want to discuss what we can do as mayors, as community leaders, because when you have a title as an elected official, you really get to sit in the shoes as a community leader if you choose to.

So, how can we use these positions we're in to try to make things better for our communities, bring our communities together and those kind of initiatives.

We also did many initiatives as our city.

It's an affluent city.

So, we did initiatives with our police chief, who's actually African-American, a close friend of mine, Chief Flowers, and we did every single year, went out to communities of need, communities of color on the more west-side cities of South Florida, of Miami-Dade County, helping kids in schools during Thanksgiving, but also trying to help build relationships.

It's a never-ending project.

There's no answer you could say, "I did this, and I ended it."

The question is, what's your intent?

And if that becomes part of your being a part of the mission that you have, and that's what we tried to do.

>> I spent some time recently in Broward County.

As you know, there's a large Jewish community in Fort Lauderdale in Broward County.

There's also a large African-American community, and there's a large Haitian community.

They're a part of the African-American community.

But these two communities were not really communicating.

Each community was solely in its own silo.

And we brought some of the Jewish leaders to the African-American Museum in Fort Lauderdale.

Then we took some of the African-American leaders to the Holocaust Museum in Fort Lauderdale.

They had never been.

They live in the community, but they had never been across, not just across the aisle, but across the ethnic divide.

What do you recommend can be done, Gabe, from your experience so that people just don't wait till a crisis happens?

Then everybody kind of huddles.

And then after the crisis wears off, they go back to being separate and apart.

>> So, I'll tell you that within the Jewish community, we have the exact same problem.

So, you understand how deep-rooted the problem is that you're identifying.

Within the Jewish community, we have Orthodox Jews, Reform Jews, Conservative Jews, different levels of observance.

They're not different churches, per se, like you have in Christianity, but the different levels of observance who really operate in separate silos, usually, and don't mix.

Then there's a big incident of anti-Semitism, and everybody joins, and there's thousands of people together, and we have all these events and roundtables and discussions and plans, and then things cool down, and everybody goes back to their corner.

The same thing happens with other communities.

So, since October 7th, I've worked with mayors all over the country.

You want to zoom in to Broward County, where you were.

We had a meeting with, I think we were 15 mayors of all races and ethnicities through all of Broward County to discuss these issues, how to deal with this, how to navigate all the issues that have come since October 7th in our communities.

And I asked the same question, and the answer is very simple.

The answer is if we want to continue, for our communities to continue to engage, we have to continue to engage.

It's that easy.

We just have to do it.

No one's going to do it for us.

We have to understand that we can't wait for a crisis to unify, even within the Jewish community and also with other communities, like our neighboring communities in South Florida and all over the country.

>> When I visited Israel, I got a sense of -- there's a great book called the "Start-Up Nation."

>> Love it.

>> There's so many young people that go into business very successfully.

We need examples of people not only achieving success and excellence, but doing it in a way that unifies its people, rather than doing in a way that causes people to revert back to some of the worst times in human history.

>> Yeah.

So, first of all, entrepreneurship in general is the great equalizer, right?

You can come up with an idea that's a good idea.

You put the right team together, and you go out into the marketplace, and the market will decide whether you're a success or you're not a success, right?

And that's the great equalizer.

That's, for me, what the American Dream is about.

Now, I work with a lot of American companies but also with some Israeli companies.

So, I'm involved with the tech ecosystem there, which is something that's spectacular.

They have more companies listed on the Nasdaq, Israeli companies listed on the Nasdaq, than any other country in the world, outside the United States, of course.

And we're talking about a population of 10 million people.

So, it's a small country with a very strong tech ecosystem.

That book talks about it.

The "Start-Up Nation" book talks about how trying to understand why so much entrepreneurship comes from Israel.

Some people say it's for having a Jewish mother, who's very encouraging and pushes you out the door and values education.

There's something to that.

Also, it's a military culture, where there's a military conscription, where you have to serve in the military.

And the biggest unit in the Israeli military is intelligence.

It's the 8200 Unit.

And coming out of that 8200 Unit, which this book "Start-Up Nation" speaks about so much, that's where the biggest entrepreneurs come from, because they're forced to innovate for military purposes, and now they have to go out, and they want to take chances.

They want to create their own companies.

And the military structure in Israel is actually different than the American military, in that it encourages you to challenge your superior.

If you don't agree with an order, you can challenge it.

Here in the United States military, as far as I know, you can't do that, right?

You just got to take the order and go.

It's a different society there.

So, it speaks about that.

But you ask about how that can help lead a society.

And, really, what it does is if you can let everybody feel that they have a chance to succeed, that if they can put their mind to it, or they can come up with an idea, they have the ability and the tools themselves that they're available for everybody, of all races and religions, etcetera.

The tools are available for everybody, and if you can come up with the right business and move forward, and then you can succeed and then go out and hire other people to give them jobs and support their families and encourage them to leave your company and go out and start their own company, which is a phenomenon you only see in start-up ecosystems, like in San Francisco or in Israel, where people's number two will leave, and the number one will invest with the number two in their new company, because it's all about creating a start-up ecosystem, which creates a powerful society full of independent people who are CEOs themselves.

>> As a father, what would you recommend to all fathers and all mothers, all parents, to make sure that their children know the truth but also rise above any appetite to revert back to anti-Semitism and racism?

>> Be with your kids.

That's the answer.

You have to have dinners with your families.

You have to be around.

You know what's better than quality time with your kids?

It's quantity time with your kids.

Be around.

Be with them.

Speak about everything.

So, in the generations past, you wouldn't speak about politics in your family dinner table, and you wouldn't talk about money, right?

Those are the things you couldn't talk about at the dinner table, at least the way I grew up.

These days, it's the opposite.

We have to talk about politics.

We have to talk about the difficult issues.

Look, I'm politically conservative.

My daughters, who are in high school, my older daughters, so are they.

They'll come out and they'll say something that I may agree with, but I know it's just a tag line.

So, I'll challenge them, and I'll say, "Tell me three reasons why you believe that."

And they get upset at me.

Like, "What do you mean?

You don't agree with what I said?"

I go, "I do, but why do you believe that?"

Right?

Challenge them, teaching your kids how to think and pushing back because kids are going to say dumb ideas.

They're going to say things that may sound racist.

They may say things that may sound ignorant because they're learning, but if they have a parent there who can teach them and can guide them, that's the answer.

And the answer really needs to be in the home.

If you give me a second, though, I'd like to challenge the premise of your question just a little bit.

>> Sure.

>> Harvard Harris came out with a poll just a couple months ago about American sentiment towards the war in Israel.

And in the Jewish community, people were parading it around like it was a wonderful poll, because the conclusion, the top line, was four out of five Americans support Israel over Hamas, right?

Hamas, a genocidal terror organization, in their charter says their only reason for existing is to kill all Jews in the world.

Four out of five -- but if you actually just peel the onion back just a little bit, you see that it's divided up into different age categories.

And I may get the numbers slightly off, but they're close.

65 and up, people 65 and up, supported Israel at a rate of 94% over Hamas.

And if you just go down to the youngest age group, which is 18 to 25, it's down to 52%, okay?

About half.

You lose about half.

But what's interesting is -- and that, if we think about, we spoke about it earlier, about the way that generation was raised of how they should look at things, sure.

They look at Israel as the "white," the oppressor, and the Palestinians as the oppressed or the victims.

Even if that's not the case, it doesn't matter.

That's how they were taught.

That's what they're fed on TikTok, and there's no one teaching them anything different.

But I do agree with you that the generation under that, which is the high school generation today, is pushing back against the older generation, which we always see in society, right?

They're seeing this, and they're seeing all these different issues in society where they're like, "This doesn't seem right."

If I sit with my daughter's high school friends, okay, they come over the house, and they want to talk about everything, because I work in politics.

I work in government.

They're pushing back on everything.

Everything you're seeing in college campuses today, all the divisiveness, they're pushing back on it.

Now they're deciding which colleges to go to now based on that.

And it's not just Jewish kids.

It's also non-Jewish kids that don't want to be part of that craziness, right?

So, I do think we have hope.

First of all, we have to always have hope, because if not, what else do we have?

We have to have hope.

But we also have to have a mission because it's not going to happen by itself.

>> Well, you know, one of the things I wanted to ask you is that we live in a social-media age.

From your vantage point, how should we use social media to combat some of these problems?

>> The only way to combat bad ideas is with good ideas.

That's why I started a podcast this year.

I didn't like the conversations that I was seeing.

>> What's the name of the podcast?

>> It's called "Standpoint with Gabe Groisman."

It's on all platforms, but the idea was to have like we're having here, long-form discussions, mostly with elected officials on politics and government, on anti-Semitism and Israel.

Basically, whatever's important, that I find is important to me, or big news stories of the day that I think people are misunderstanding and actually getting into it.

Sure, I have my opinion, my standpoint, which is a viewpoint based on where you're coming from.

Everybody can have one.

So, it's good to disagree.

It's okay to disagree, but we have to have these discussions.

Now, what makes it maddening, though, is that social media is two things.

One, social media is algorithm-based, right?

And there's a lot more bad guys than good guys out there in the social-media landscape.

So, the bad ideas really get pushed to the forefront.

And then another thing that was looked at as a conspiracy theory and now, again, it's objective fact, is that we have foreign governments that are involved in what our kids are seeing in social media, like TikTok, where the Chinese government is pushing things that they don't push their own population.

But imagine that divisiveness that that's causing in our society.

That's a real problem.

We can either throw our hands up in the air and say, you know, "We're not going to be able to win this war," the war of information, of misinformation, or we can get engaged.

And, again, you get to see a theme that I have in my life, and my life is we have no options.

We can't sit on our hands.

We have to get involved.

>> I agree with you that bad ideas have to be countered with good ideas.

And I would also say that it has to be countered consistently.

Again, not just when there's a crisis.

We need to have much more proactive.

When you work in the Congress of the United States, how important is bipartisanship to you?

>> What's important to me is getting things done.

And when you need bipartisanship, you need it.

What I don't like is when people say there's two stories, and the truth is somewhere in the middle.

I don't think we need to water things down.

I think we need to stand on principles.

When you're talking about governance, you shouldn't govern on ideology.

Ideology can drive you.

You have to govern on practicality, right?

And then you politick to try to move the electorate to where you want it to go.

But you have to continue to govern.

If you look at the beautiful image behind you -- right?

-- in that building in Congress, we've seen just a total standstill because the parties don't talk in mostly all occasions.

I mean, if they're talking on something, it's a really special day because usually they're not, right?

They're each running to their own corners.

And that's not good for the American people, right?

So, for me, on a personal level, I think it's very important to have not just bipartisanship but diversity of thought.

I want to sit with people who I disagree with.

I want them to hear my ideas.

I want to hear their ideas.

I want to learn from that.

I want to hone my own arguments by understanding what people that I disagree with say.

But I also want to be open to understanding perspectives that I don't understand.

I think that's what makes us better people, better business leaders.

It makes our government function better.

And that's something we need more in our society.

>> You know, I'm smiling.

You say you're a social conservative, but you sound like a moderate.

>> Well, we haven't gotten into any issues yet, but yeah, I'm pretty -- listen.

You're going to like this, so no pun intended.

But I'm not really into labels.

I think labels are actually very dangerous in our country.

So, if you take, like, the most divisive issue in our society today, whether it's, let's say, abortion, and you say you're pro-life or you're pro-choice, about 82% to 84% of Americans actually land in the same place.

It's just a different starting point, a different label that they put on.

So, I'm not really a fan of that.

I'm a religious person.

I pray to God every day.

I, you know, live a religiously observant life to the best of my abilities.

I'm not perfect, but I try.

I don't try to be perfect, but I try to do the best I can.

So, those are things that are important to me, and I won't yield on those things.

But I'm open to other people living in our society that have different views as long as they're not imposed on me.

>> So, Gabriel, I always ask this question before we end.

From your vantage point, what gives you the greatest hope for the future?

>> The greatest hope for the future is I see that there are leaders out there.

There are people out there that are fighting the good fight.

It reminds me, right as you ask the question, of 9/11.

And on 9/11, everybody said, "How do we look at these images?"

And I don't know who to attribute this to, but it was said at the time, "Look for the heroes," right?

Look for the firefighters that are running into the burning building to save these people, right?

Don't just look at the atrocity of the day.

And if we look at that today -- right?

-- if we look at society today, it's like the buildings are falling just like 9/11, right?

Everything seems to be falling.

All our institutions are falling.

They're crumbling.

Our judiciary is crumbling.

Our government seems like it's crumbling.

Our universities are crumbling.

There's all these terrible issues, right?

Wars are breaking out all over the world.

Racism is up.

Anti-Semitism is up at levels that we haven't seen since the Holocaust.

But there are so many people doing good things.

We're having this conversation, right?

How important is that?

There's television cameras here.

People are going to see this conversation.

How important is that?

We have leaders in cities.

We're talking about black/Jewish relations.

We have leaders in cities, like Mayor Adams in New York or Mayor Bibb in Cleveland or Mayor Stoney in Richmond, who are out there really fighting the good fight when it comes to black/Jewish relations and fighting against anti-Semitism, right?

There are leaders out there.

We have people, even members of Congress -- right?

-- if we're talking again about black/Jewish relations.

Hakeem Jeffries on one side, Byron Donalds on the other, Tim Scott.

There's people that are out there that are from the black community who are doing the right thing and from the Jewish community, as well.

And we have to lean into that because, like I said earlier, I can't look at the world as a glass half empty.

I have to look at it half full, and I look at my kids and the vigor that they have.

When I was a teenager, all I wanted to do was play music and play basketball.

That's it.

My kids want to get involved in politics.

They want to get involved in volunteering.

They want to get involved in communities.

They want to do things.

And it's not just them, right?

It's their generation.

And that's what brings me hope.

>> Gabriel Groisman, thank you so much for joining "The Chavis Chronicles."

>> Thank you so much.

>> For more information about "The Chavis Chronicles" and our guests, please visit our website at TheChavisChronicles.com.

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Major funding for "The Chavis Chronicles" is provided by the following... At Wells Fargo, we continue to look for ways to empower our customers.

We seek broad impact in our communities, and we're proud of the role we play for our customers and the US economy.

As a company, we are focused on supporting our customers and communities through housing access, small business growth, financial health, and other community needs.

Together, we want to make a tangible difference in people's lives.

Wells Fargo, the bank of doing.

American Petroleum Institute.

Our members are committed to accelerating safety, environmental, and sustainability progress throughout the natural-gas and oil industry around the world.

Learn more at api.org/apienergyexcellence.

Reynolds American, dedicated to building a better tomorrow for our employees and communities.

Reynolds stands against discrimination in all forms and is committed to building a more diverse and inclusive workplace.

At AARP, we are committed to ensuring your money, health, and happiness live as long as you do.