Jonah Platt refuses to be quiet

Jewish News UK – Every Friday evening, Jonah Platt gathers his family around the Shabbat table and places his hands on his children’s heads to say the blessing. The kids find it slightly annoying. He does it anyway – and has, without exception, since the day they were born.

“Since I was a little kid, I always said: ‘When I have kids, I’m blessing them every Shabbat,’” he said, laughing.

Growing up, the actor and singer would watch his second cousins receive the blessing and quietly take note – a thing he wanted, a thing he would do. They will understand when they’re older.

That is Jonah Platt: a man who pays attention, takes notes and shows up – especially when no one is making him.

Jonah is the second of five Platt children. Growing up in Los Angeles, he was the first in his family to be born there; his parents, aunts, uncles and cousins were scattered across American cities from Baltimore to Houston and Kansas to New York. The family came together for holidays, for summer camp and for Shabbat whenever geography allowed. What held it all together was less about ideology than habit that became identity.

“It was never talked about in a didactic way,” he explained. “We celebrated every holiday, kept kosher and were connected to family – it was just intrinsic to who we are.”

Jonah grew up in a Conservative Jewish household with American-born grandparents. His great-grandparents made the crossing around the turn of the 20th century, so there is no family mythology of the old country because there was no one left alive to tell it.

“It was never a case of them telling us this is important to do,” he said. “They just did it, and then we saw that it was important. It was never ‘talk about it’. It was always ‘be about it’.”

Ask Jonah about October 7 and he resists the word “shift”. Nothing about who he is changed – just how he spends his time.

“The big shift was more on how I budget my energy and time and focus,” he said. “I went from being somebody who was spending all their day doing auditions and trying to be an actor to being a Jewish advocate.”

He had been doing some Jewish advocacy on social media since 2021, and a 2023 trip to Israel with the Tel Aviv Institute deepened that commitment. After October 7, there was no more part-time. He launched Being Jewish with Jonah Platt – a show built on deep, curious conversations with Jews of every background about identity, faith and what it means to live Jewishly today.

He enrolled in a masters program in antisemitism studies at Gratz College, becoming part of what he describes as the first cohort of its kind. He started a Jewish travel programme, came on board as editor-at-large of Ora magazine, and is developing a Jewish apparel brand. He now tries not to use his phone on Shabbat, reads the weekly parsha, and hosts Shabbat lunches on Saturday afternoons as a New Year’s resolution for 2026.

“If you had told me before October 7 that my life would look like this – that I’d be spending all day, every day, thinking about, communicating with, innovating on behalf of and educating Jews – that’s not what my life looked like at all.” He paused. “But now that I’m here, it actually makes complete sense. It feels like I’m doing exactly what I’m supposed to be doing, and that everything was leading to this.”

Ask Jonah Platt what sits at the top of his identity and he doesn’t hesitate. Being a dad. His wife Courtney converted a decade ago; theirs is a fully Jewish home, and he is deliberate about every corner of it. There is Hebrew art on the living room wall and books about the parsha by Jonathan Sacks on the bedside table.

He approaches Jewish parenting with almost evangelical intentionality – reading, learning and planning before his first child was born. Day school was a given. Shabbat, non-negotiable. Limiting screens, hosting lunches, making it feel “different from the rest of the week” – habits that evolved gradually and still are. His youngest daughter was born on Shavuot last year, a holiday he had only recently begun to observe. “Instead of staying up all night studying, I’m staying up all night seeing her be born, which was even better.”

Crisscrossing the country as a speaker and emcee at Jewish events has made him newly aware of how unusual his upbringing was – not in its intensity, but in its ease. Many Jewish parents, he’s found, don’t actively think about it. “It’s very unnatural to me,” he said, not judgmentally, but with something close to bewilderment.

“A lot of parents sort of think, ‘Well, if I just live my life in a way that’s important to me, my kids will get it.’ But basically what happens is they go, ‘It’s not that important.’ My parents never showed it was that important.”

Judaism, he believes, has to be something you are, not just something you do. “It has to be a practice, or you’re out of practice.” The same logic, it turns out, applies to friendship – and October 7 tested both. “Judaism has to be something you are, not just something you do.”

Jonah has thought carefully about how to respond when a non-Jewish friend posts something troubling – or says nothing at all. His approach is to lead not with argument, but with the friendship itself.

“It can’t be, ‘Your ideas are wrong and I’m going to change your mind,’” he explained. “It has to be, ‘You’re my friend and when you say or do this, I feel abandoned. Consider me as a friend before you post something. This is my life.’”

The goal isn’t to win, but to preserve the relationship and, where possible, be understood. In his experience, it works – not to shift beliefs, but to maintain connection. “It hasn’t changed anything materially in terms of their beliefs, but it has allowed us to maintain a relationship.”

Then there are the cases where that approach never gets the chance to work. Jonah had a friend – Palestinian-American, someone he considered broadly like-minded – who began posting support for Hamas in the days after October 7. He reached out.

“I get where your allegiance lies, and I don’t fault you for that,” he told her. “But they raped people, murdered babies, burned people alive. It’s kind of crazy that you would stand with this.” She never responded. That was the end of it. “She just hates Israel with every fibre of her being.”

He knows others have lost far more – friends of 30 or 40 years, something he finds hard to fathom. “It makes me question the foundation of the relationship to begin with.”

For him, it comes back to ideological capture. “You have to have been captured in your mind,” he said of those who have embraced antisemitic or anti-Zionist ideology. “They just cease to be an individual in your mind. They become part of this group that you’ve been told is bad, and you just embrace that prejudice, and it supersedes…” He stops short.

Still, he is not without optimism.

“You can’t win them all. You’ve got to try to give them a chance, and if they don’t take it, you cut them out.” He paused. “We’re going to be okay. You don’t need to hold on to every single person you’ve ever met. You’re better off without people who suck.” He means it warmly – or as warmly as sentiment allows. “Keep the door open for the future. For the day the brainwashing clears and they realise how foolish they’ve been.”