If you’ve heard about the new Seth Rogen comedy An American Pickle, which premiered on HBO Max on August 6, it may be because of the controversy created by Rogen’s remarks about Israel made while he was promoting the movie. During an interview on the popular Marc Maron podcast WTF, Rogen commented freely about his Jewish upbringing, including the “huge amount of lies” he was fed about Israel as a boy attending Jewish schools and summer camps in Vancouver, British Columbia, especially the omission of any mention of displaced Palestinians:

They never tell you that, “Oh, by the way, there were people there.” They make it seem like, “The fuckin’ door’s open.”

Trying to manage the furor that erupted on Twitter, Rogen claimed to have been joking when he said “Israel doesn’t make sense” as a refuge for the Jewish people because “you don’t put all your Jews in one basket.” Supposedly at his mother’s urging, Rogen contacted Isaac Herzog of the Jewish Agency, who made a public effort to smooth things over, saying Rogen had been misunderstood and apologized. Rogen denied apologizing, but added in an interview for Haaretz, “I don’t want Jews to think I don’t want Israel to exist, and I understand how they could have been led to think that.”