Scrubs star Zach Braff is hanging out in Tel Aviv these days, and in an interview with Haaretz it sure sounds like he wants to stay for a while:
“As an American Jew it’s an amazing feeling to come to a place where you feel you belong. You know we’re such a minority in the U.S. Even though I grew up in New Jersey, which was very Jewish, and then I went to school in Chicago, which was Jewish, and then I moved to New York, which is very Jewish, and then I went to Hollywood, which is very Jewish. But they say we’re only 2 percent of the population and shrinking because of intermarriage.”
Braff says that when you come here, “you just feel this amazing sense of community. We hear so much about Israel and politics with the Palestinians and you feel so separate from it. So I really wanted to see for myself.” He says he was “lucky” to be able to come and see things firsthand and to talk to Israelis. “As a Jew I think it’s really important to come to this place. There is such a tremendous sense of community, tremendous bond for obvious reasons. I don’t know if Israelis have a sense of it because they live here, but I love it.”
The Israeli experience made such an impression on him, he says, he is thinking of his next film touching on a story about an American Jew who visits Israel. Braff, who wrote and directed the successful “Garden State,” which also starred Natalie Portman, says a story like what he has in mind is something he’s never seen in a movie and thinks it will be really interesting.
Full story
Not to sound too snippy here, but I bet I’d like Tel Aviv a lot, too, if I could just hang out all day in nice apartments and on the beach, doing nothing and enjoying being rich. Still, I bet Zach Braff quotes will be all over Israeli tourism ads in no time.
