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Zoe Manor was born in Jerusalem and grew up in Denver. Her mother is an American who made aliyah from Long Island, while her father comes from a large Moroccan family in Israel. Hebrew was her first language, but she left at four and built her life in Colorado, trained as a fine artist, studied political communication in Washington, and worked in news production in Los Angeles.
For years she carried a quiet frustration about all of it, a sense that she was supposed to be living some other life somewhere else. In this interview she puts that feeling into words anyone raised between cultures will recognize: she doesn't quite read as a tourist, and she doesn't quite read as a native Israeli, and for a long time she wasn't sure where that left her.
Then October 7 happened while she was in LA, and the ground shifted under her. She describes it as her body being in one place while her heart and mind were somewhere else entirely. The creative community she'd built her identity alongside suddenly treated her Israeli and Jewish background as a problem, and she's candid about what it felt like to screen herself before walking into any room.
A two-week volunteer trip that December, where in her own words she was "down to pick avocados," turned into something much bigger: a Masa Israel teaching fellowship, a move back for good, and almost by accident, a podcast. She'd volunteered to edit some audio for the program and ended up co-creating Talking Unfiltered, building its entire brand from scratch. That side project eventually led to her current role as brand and content marketing manager at Masa.
Wrestling between two worlds
What makes the conversation worth watching is how honest she is about the parts that don't resolve neatly. She still wrestles with the accent, the categories, the feeling of never fitting cleanly into one group, and she's genuinely funny about the online hate, which she's learned to treat as free engagement rather than a wound.
There's a moving turn when a single podcast teaser reunites her mother with a college roommate the family had lost touch with for decades.
Underneath everything is one idea she keeps circling back to: everyone who built this country arrived from somewhere else, everyone had an accent once, and there's room here for people who don't fit the mold. If you've ever felt like you belong to two places and fully to neither, her story is worth hearing in full. Watch the complete interview above.