I think, for one, the LGBTQ community is just a paragon of leadership, of standing up and saying "these are our rights, and we deserve them." As a model of activism, it's so wonderful what the community has been able to achieve towards goals like marriage equality.

We basically maintain that we can have an America and world that works for all of us, but that we need to really engage, and inform and empower the American voter, who are a bunch of very unhappy campers right now. They deserve to be informed.

According to, for example, one academic by the name of Philip Harvey, whose expertise is basically how do we create a New Deal, today. According to his estimate, these jobs could be created for far less than the [Barack] Obama stimulus package, which cost, you know, $700 or $800 billion, something like that, and produced around 3 million jobs - not a lot. According to his estimates, it would cost less to produce two-thirds of 20 million.

I think we are only going to get it by standing up and voting our values, understanding that the lesser evil doesn't solve the problem. It just prolongs the problem and it paves the way to the greater evil. That the policies of the Clintons, the Wall Street deregulation and NAFTA, created the economic misery that becomes very fertile territory for demagogues like Donald Trump.

I was really intrigued by how - sort of the common themes and sort of the blend among music, and that was sort of my real interest was, at one point, musically, was how you could weave those different kinds of songs and traditions together.

I loved Israeli music, Israeli folk music.

In terms of what is the solution is going forward, in my view, it is the grassroots human-rights groups - both Israeli and Palestinian - that are doing exactly what needs to be done, which is building trust, developing relationships and building that sense of common community which is essential if we're going to figure out how to move forward.