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Jewish-American entrepreneur Mark Cuban revealed in a video for Hillel that as a kid he was the target of an antisemitic physical and verbal attack by another child.
In the resurfaced video — first shared on Hillel International’s Instagram earlier this month, in an effort to uplift Gen Z students facing antisemitism on college campuses — Cuban, 65, shares the “personal story” from his childhood.
The Dallas Mavericks owner says that as a 12-year-old, he was targeted in a park by another kid who “started to fight” him “all of a sudden,” while spewing antisemitic slurs.
The billionaire said that after he “got the best of him, by the way,” he went to his dad to ask what the bully’s hateful words meant, and that his father “did his best to try to explain things to me.”
“I was like why? Why would he want to fight me?” Cuban said he asked his dad as a pre-teen.
“The core understanding and what I wanted to share is that there’s always going to be people who hate us — period, end of story,” he said. “And there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it.”
“But our lives and who we are is not defined by who hates us. It’s defined by who loves us and who we love.
“Because from that comes all of our strength and all of our power,” Cuban said in the Nov. 2 video.
The “Shark Tank” celeb was born and raised in Pittsburgh, where he grew up in a Jewish, working-class family in the affluent suburb of Mount Lebanon, according to the nonprofit, nonpartisan organization American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise.
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