You’re not bringing up hard times for me. You’re bringing up hard times for our country. My grandfather did an adaptation of a book by John Steinbeck called East of Eden, and in that book, there is a discussion of a Hebrew word in translation in the Cain and Abel story and that word—and I’m going to butcher it, ’cause I’m not Jewish, which is a whole other question if you want to talk about that—is timshel. Steinbeck translates it as thou mayest, and the question at hand is that God says to Cain, in some translations, you can triumph over sin, and some translations he says, you will triumph over sin. And this character in the book does a kind of deep dive into the actual word in Hebrew and comes up with this thou mayest. Thou mayest triumph over sin. But it’s in the hands of the next generation.

I have not wanted to weigh in on my family’s political history, partially because of the other people it involved in my family who have prized their privacy over a public life, so I’m not going to go into it, but I will say that I thought a lot about how the history of our country affected my family’s history, what it meant for my grandfather as an immigrant to this country to have his American-ness tested, and the choice that he made from that. And I thought a lot about my own choices that I’ve made—the way that I choose to live my life.

I think thou mayest choose a different life. And I think that the reason that Steinbeck put that in his book about the foundation of the West in this country is that it’s also about America choosing to recognize who they have been—Cain did kill his brother—but also to recognize that they may choose a different future for themselves. I think it’s meaningful in the book that it comes out of the mouth of an immigrant. So those were the things that were on my mind as I worked on this. It was a profound experience for me working on this—personally, politically, artistically. And I think that’s all I have to say about that. Thank you.