Getting to know physician and Hollywood radio-TV personality Dr. Drew Pinsky

He was warm and accessible in our hour-long conversation.

“I’m what people call Jew-'ish,’” he told me. “My grandmother Fanny was from Belarus, and my grandfather David was from Ukraine. They were part of the Diaspora that anticipated the Holodomor, a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine in the early 1930s.” That period resulted in the deaths of millions of Ukrainians and pushed many Jewish families to seek refuge in North America.

The family fled starvation, violence, and political upheaval, but life in America came with its own loss. “They had a child who died,” Drew related. “I think it was a botched appendectomy.”

Drew’s grandfather went into the grocery business to make ends meet. “That’s how they kept their heads above water,” he explained. “I remember seeing a photo of him sitting in his grocery store with a long white apron, looking like a butcher, surrounded by food.”

The Jews who went to the US tended to describe themselves as “from Russia.” However, they were often from countries like Ukraine and Belarus that were part of the Russian Empire, where they were second-class citizens and frequently subject to violence.

Drew never met his grandfather David, but he remembered his grandmother’s stories about the “old country” and “the bandits,” a vague term that sketched the violence and chaos the Jews endured. “She didn’t know whether it was the Bolsheviks, the Mensheviks, the Czarists, or just some old-fashioned pogrom,” he said. “They’d just come through and destroy everything.”

The Pinsky family story sounds like my own family’s: pogroms, long trips on ships to uncertain futures, fending off poverty. My grandparents fled Lithuania, Poland, and Russia. My grandmother whispered stories about pogroms, and my mother used the term “peasants” to describe my Eastern European/Russian ancestry.

I learned that Drew attended Hebrew school from first through third grade in the same temple my husband and I joined many years later – with the same rabbi. How’s that for classic -Jewish geography (that fun game Jews play when they meet each other for the first time and try to identify people they know in common)?

After Drew’s grandmother passed away, “the whole thing [religious studies] just stopped.” His parents no longer belonged to a temple, but Judaism remained a presence at family gatherings, holidays, and Passover Seders. He fondly remembers Uncle Abe and Aunt Leah and their delicious hamentashen.

Then the tone in the letters shifted. “They started getting more honest,” he said. That contradiction, the performative optimism masking desperation, was a code or signal that life was terrible there.

We shared stories about the discrimination our families faced in America. “The country club down the road would not have my parents,” he told me.

“The hospital where I eventually worked for 30 years would not have my father. He had to open a new hospital with a group of guys and gals. I was loosely aware there was something weird going on, but it was the tail end of some real serious stuff,” he said.

“You know, it’s funny. ‘Not welcome’ was the euphemism I heard, too,” Drew observed. “It wasn’t ‘We’re being ostracized’ or ‘We’re being discriminated against.’ It was just that you were not welcome there. So interesting,” he mused.

I wondered aloud about the Jewish experience of "intergenerational trauma." The first time I heard the term was in 2020 when Black Americans spoke about the impact of slavery and the Jim Crow laws. As a Jew, I instantly understood what they meant. I have this feeling in my bones as if I’m carrying all our history inside of me, and I have an antenna tuned to possible danger.

“However, memory, passed from person to person, generation to generation, is an extremely inaccurate and inefficient way to transmit information. It tends to come in emotional buckets. That’s the intergenerational trauma,” he explained.

But I’m not so sure that’s a bad thing. The memory of previous traumas sensitizes us to the mood in the community around us. Time and again, we become desensitized to the signals of growing Jew-hatred. We think, somehow – like in the time of Moses – that it will “pass over” us.

“Oh, a hundred percent. People need it,” he said. “Whatever it is, whatever their concept is,” he continued, “having something bigger than yourself – something like faith – is important. And if you can be in line with God’s will, if that’s your perception, it’s extremely beneficial for humans.”

He has seen it time and again, especially in his work with patients facing life’s most challenging moments. “If people have some sense of purpose built on that, and even an afterlife – God, I wish – those people face death and dying much better than those of us who don’t.”

And what about the good doctor himself? “I definitely believe in God. Definitely a higher power, even if it’s just ‘faith in the laws of physics.’ Whatever it is, something way bigger than me is going on. I like to be in line with the will of whatever purpose is out there,” he declared.

That feeling that we’re all part of something larger isn’t at odds with science, despite what some might assume. Drew recalled a time, maybe 10 or 15 years ago, when he studied the relationship between science and faith more intentionally.

“I remember exactly what it said because I thought it was so beautiful,” recounted. “It said: ‘Faith and science are the two wings upon which humans ascend to the contemplation of truth.’” He paused. “Boy, is that pretty!”

Science and faith are ways of stretching beyond our limits to grasp something larger than ourselves. “The brain is a limited instrument,” he explained, “so faith, intuition – these things are powerful. And that’s one of the ways we reach for truth.”

What troubles him now is a cultural shift toward false certainty. “There’s this weird thing going on where people believe they can know the truth,” he said. “And that’s counter to science. Science has always been asymptotic [getting closer and closer to something without reaching it].

"We can’t fully know the truth. It’s too big, too much for our brain,” he said. That struck me because God is often described the same way: infinite, unknowable, everything and nothing at once.

And yet, for Drew, meaning doesn’t come from abstract definitions. It comes through connection – service, compassion, and being truly present with others. “When I’m deep in with people, it feels very spiritual,” he said. “It feels like there’s something else created.”

As our conversation moved to different topics, he readily admitted when he has conflicting opinions. He believes in nationalism: “I want cultures and countries to figure out who they are and be that, without being undone by outside forces.” On the other hand, he hates the prejudice, violence, and even war that sometimes come when cultures collide. He thinks we should celebrate ethnic and cultural identities but doesn’t like “clubs.”

He admires and models the ethics of Jewish families.

“There is a clear understanding that the family is the fundamental social unit and determines the child’s sociocultural, emotional, and cognitive development,” he observed. “There’s always an emphasis on higher education and scholarly pursuits. And there’s the appreciation for building financial security for our family, children, and the community.”

However, he feels uncomfortable referring to himself as “a proud Jew.” First, because it feels like a "club." “I don’t like belonging to something others don’t get to belong to.” And secondly, because “my mom wasn’t Jewish, so I’m technically not.”

And there’s the other question: “Why the Jews?”

“I’m constantly trying to get my head around it, but I can’t explain it,” he said. "The fact that antisemitism exists “and that it’s tolerated is an absolute mystery to me.” He tossed around various psychological constructs to explain it – traumatic reenactments, projective identification, contagion, response to chaos, hysteria – before discarding them as insufficient.”

"I like David Mamet’s take on the subject, which is to reject the discussion altogether; Mamet says, 'To ask the question is to suggest there is an answer worthy of consideration,' which there is not. Exactly."

That doesn’t preclude me from worrying about the antisemitic disinformation that is being fed to and coming out of the mouths of millennials and Generation X. I fear that the damage to their thinking may not be reversible.

“My hope,” he said, “is that this generation – one that was led away from reality, panicked by a virus, and shut out from their schools – will open their eyes and start thinking autonomously as adults. They’ve been spoon-fed ideas instead of being given data to draw their own conclusions. That kind of manipulation is infantilizing. It denies them their intellect and agency. And when they wake up to that, I hope they’re livid – because they should be.

“Just remember,” he added, “whatever’s cool today becomes uncool tomorrow. I know how adolescents and young adults work. They often gravitate toward the opposite of whatever the prevailing adult views are.”

How do we deal with people entrenched in disinformation in the meantime? “Never confront. Never be aggressive. It’s always about asking questions.” The key, he said, is curiosity.

“Approach them with genuine wonder – ask, ‘I wonder how you came to that point of view?’ or ‘Have you ever thought about this?’” This technique, called therapeutic wonderment, is something he draws from his clinical practice. “Even when people know you’re using it, it works.”

Perhaps most importantly, he emphasized the power of human connection: “One thing we’ve known since 1950s social psychology research is that the best way to reduce racism and similar issues is through one word: contact. So, be a human with another human. Make contact and see what happens.”