Jews We Love: Gabby Deutch of Jewish Insider

Hi there, and welcome to all our new subscribers! 

I’m excited to share our newest feature, Jews We Love. Every few weeks GOLDA will feature an interview with someone whose work is exciting or inspiring or just plain cool. The idea is to introduce you to people you might not have heard of, or show you a different side of someone you’re already following. 

It’s also a chance to return to my journalistic roots: interviewing awesome people. For the past decade I hosted the podcast Unorthodox, where we famously interviewed a Jew and a gentile each week, and I moderate conversations all over New York City and the country. (Be sure to register for next Thursday’s virtual Unpacking the Book event!) 

In addition to asking our Jews We Love all sorts of things about their life and work, I’ll end each interview with GOLDA’s Four Questions—read on to see what they are. 

Our inaugural Jew We Love is Gabby Deutch, the senior national correspondent at Jewish Insider. She covers some of today’s most pressing topics, from antisemitism to how the Trump Administration’s actions affect the Jewish community. It’s not just D.C. she’s focused on, though: she recently profiled San Francisco’s new Jewish mayor and covered the newly sworn in LA district attorney who wears a yellow hostage pin on his lapel. 

You can sign up for Gabby’s newsletter and get her latest work here.

Gabby Deutch, congratulations on being GOLDA’s first ever Jew We Love.

Thank you. I'm delighted.

You're from one of the other Jewish promised lands, South Florida.

Boca Raton, in particular, I would say is the epicenter of that. 

And just for the record, I was born in Cleveland. It’s important, because when I was growing up in Boca, nobody was from here. Everyone had moved from New York, Pennsylvania, somewhere on the East Coast…

They had made aliyah.

Exactly. And now there's still people moving from all those places, but there are more people who were born and raised here and are raising their own kids here. But growing up, I didn't have a sense that Boca was part of the zeitgeist until I went to college and every single Jewish person I met would come here over winter break to see their grandparents. It was amazing; I didn't have to go anywhere, and all of my friends would come to me. 

I loved it. It was like being Jewish was the culture in Boca. There are people here who aren't Jewish…

…who basically are.

That's definitely right. A Catholic girl that I grew up with here now works at the Hillel where I went to college.

So you’re the senior national correspondent at Jewish Insider, covering politics and the Jewish world. You've basically written an article every single day of 2025. Is that Trump-related? Is that the cadence of your work generally? 

More than Trump, it's October 7. 

Before October 7, the issues and news that I wrote about at Jewish Insider were things that people in the Jewish community cared about. But since October 7, it's become front and center for so many people. In some ways, it still feels like we're in crisis mode—even though there’s a ceasefire—with the hostages still in Gaza, and then the antisemitism we've seen here. 

Starting on October 7, we went into overdrive. These are things that I care so much about, and once you get into that mindset of looking for those stories, there's always going to be a million things, and you can't cover most of them. 

What are some of the pieces since October 7 that you're the most proud of? 

I'm often writing multiple times a week, but the stories that I remember the most are not the 400-word article about a speech from Biden or a Trump executive order, but the stories where I got to go out and interview people and find out what's happening and how it's affecting people's lives. 

I wrote a story early last year about how the Israel-Hamas war was showing up on dating apps. I had gone on Twitter and posted about this, so I got tons of people—friends and strangers—sending me screenshots of just crazy things they were seeing on Hinge and other dating apps. One guy starts texting me screenshots from this dating app for people who have unusual sexual fetishes. And even on there, you're seeing people posting “I only hook up with people who want to free Palestine,” or “Am Yisrael Chai is a must for me,” things like that. 

That was a window into something that is all of a sudden so common for young people on these apps that our readers at Jewish insider would just have no idea about. 

Last year I also wrote a story about antisemitism in the mental health field, and that's something that I still think about a lot, and hear from people about. The article was about how for therapists and mental health professionals—which is a field that people go into because they really want to make a difference, and they want to help people make sense of the world and feel comfortable in it—there's been this undercurrent of antisemitism. It started before October 7, but since then it has just totally exploded, where it's become totally normalized for patients or for for therapists to basically say, “I'm not going to refer clients to you because you're a Zionist.” 

The craziest story in the article was about this Facebook group in Chicago for antiracist therapists. And someone went in there—a therapist, a licensed mental health professional—and asked people to give her names of Zionist therapists, and she made a list of them, and said “don't refer your clients here.”

But then I talked to some of those therapists, and almost universally, none of them had posted a single thing about Israel online. They were just Jews with Jewish names. That was just totally alarming to me. It was a story that was interesting to write, but also meaningful to see the outcome, because so many people who are in therapy saw it and started thinking about their own experiences. And Jewish mental health professionals were writing to me and saying “Thank you. I see this every day, and someone needs to pay attention to it.”

You're writing a ton about antisemitism, and then you also have the political stuff. So there's a lot whirling around you at all times. For someone who's writing multiple times a week, often on subjects that are contentious or a little depressing, how do you unplug from all that? How do you keep yourself sane? 

I listen to a lot of dumb podcasts. Friends are always asking me, “Oh, did you listen to this episode of The Daily” or “Did you hear this segment on NPR?” And my answer is almost always “absolutely not.” After work I want to be purely distracted. I sit in front of my computer all day, I read everything in the news. 

How dumb are we talking? Name names.

Not too dumb! I have some standards.

I listen to Normal Gossip. I really like the Prestige TV Podcast from The Ringer that lines up with whatever TV I'm watching lately. Also Pop Culture Happy Hour. Every Friday on Armchair Expert they do this thing called Armchair Anonymous, where they have a prompt and people call in and tell stories related to it, and they're always amazing. The prompt will be something like “worst roommate story,” or “crazy mother-in-law.” And it's just amusing and totally not connected to anything happening in the world.

I also like to run, and I read a lot. 

It's hard, because I care about the stuff that I write about. So it's not like I just turn it off after work and then never talk about it. If I go out with friends who are also Jewish, this is the stuff that we're talking about. So it's not a total separation.

I did decide at the start of this year, and I've made zero progress on this New Year's resolution, so I am now holding myself accountable to everyone reading this: I spend all this time writing about antisemitism and the important-but-depressing stuff, but there's so much more to being Jewish. I want to try and do more Jewish learning and engaging with Jewish content that is not just what I'm encountering at work. 

OK, we're going to do our first ever GOLDA’s Four Questions. First up: who is your favorite Jewish heroine, however you define that? 

Regina Spektor, one of my favorite singers, and one of very, very few people who actually goes on the internet and talks about being a Jew. Her family came here from the Soviet Union. I love her. 

Favorite Jewish ritual or tradition in your life? Again, as broadly defined as you want to make it. 

My favorite Jewish ritual is Shabbat dinner with my family. My mom makes the best challah. I will also add, since we’re talking about my mom, and this is lightly a Jewish ritual, we're in a mother-daughter book club together with all of her college roommates and their daughters, and we read a lot of books with Jewish themes. 

That's amazing, because our next question is what book you’d recommend to our readers. 

What we're reading right now for our book club: The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden. It’s a fabulous book. You don't necessarily expect the Jewish thing that happens. But basically, it's about this family after World War II, making sense of life in the Netherlands and family dysfunction, and there are a lot of twists and turns, and I just loved it.

What’s a Jewish item you've bought recently that you love?

I’m moving to Washington, D.C. soon, so when I was in Israel a few weeks ago, I stocked up on some mezuzahs, which I'm excited about. 

One of them is from an art vendor in Nachalat Binyamin in Tel Aviv, and the other was from a random Judaica place at the shuk in Jerusalem, where I know for a fact I got overcharged, but I felt like that's my duty to the State of Israel in a challenging time.

That is amazing. Gabby Deutch, thank you for being GOLDA’s first ever Jew We Love.

I hope you enjoyed our first installment of Jews We Love! Let me know who you think should be featured in upcoming interviews. And write in with ideas for Gabby’s New Year’s resolution of doing more fun Jewish stuff: [email protected]

Stay GOLDA,

Stephanie