The Frieda Vizel Podcast

Moshe Krakowski American Haredi education and culture, focusing on the relationship between communal worldview, identity, and education. He also works on curriculum, cognition, and inquiry learning in Jewish educational settings. He has written extensively about the Hasidic boys' education controversy, often representing the community from a more favorable perspective. He visited many Hasidic boys...

The book "Hasidism, A New History" is a five-pound tome, but it's an excellent tome. It tells the amazing story of the formation of the Hasidic movement in a way that I found gripping. It is a thoroughly scholarly book, representing the works of eight scholars who are among the foremost important scholars in contemporary Judaism. The book looks not only at the story of Hasidism but also the many h...

QUESTIONS: 01:33 || How can someone visit the Hasidic community respectfully? 02:17 || What do you think of cursing? Hard Questions 04:15 || Are convert Jews discriminated against? 05:56 Pearl first told the story in this video here Video 08:32 || What if someone wants to join the insular Satmar community? 1 1:38 || Why is schooling not a priority for Hasidic boys? 12:23 || Why aren't the boys pre...

QUESTIONS: 0:01:10 What do you think of all the questions we got? On Women and Motherhood in Satmar Hasidism 0:02:00 || Are women LOOKED DOWN in Judaism? 0:04:54 || What is your perspective on women in leadership positions? 0:06:34 || Are there instances when women take on leadership positions? 0:07:20 || What do you think of Hasidic women who have big career accomplishments? 0:08:38 || Do Hasidic...

Most Hasidim don't have pets. Many of us who leave the Hasidic community, like myself and Naomi Seidman, adopt animals and come to love - deeply! - our furry friends. In this long-form conversation, I talk to Naomi about why we grew up without pets, our attitudes towards animals in the past, and how that has changed. Naomi draws from her recent research into Freud and Max Weinreich to look at the...

You might have wondered: do Hasidic Jews get shunned if they leave the faith? Does their family sit "shiva" for them -- meaning, does their Hasidic family consider them as if they are dead, and perform the rituals of mourning? In this long-form interview, I talk to Zalman Newfield. Zalman is a professor, researcher, and fellow exiter from Hasidism. For his research, he set out to answer the above...

If you are new - welcome to my channel! ▶▶ Please subscribe and like! ➡Leave a comment with your thoughts! ❤ This conversation for my long-form series is with my video editor Steve Milligan. We had a good time chatting about the behind-the-scenes, the making of, and a bit of an introduction to Steve, who has done such wonderful work to make this project come to life. Steve's website is https://www...

In this long-form conversation, I talk to Sara about her life journey, from secular Holland to NYC, where she became deeply involved in religious life. She was drawn to the insular Hasidic sects like Satmar, became close friends with families in Kiryas Joel, and her wedding was attended by, among other dignitaries, the Satmar Grand Rabbi's wife Sosha Teitelbaum. Sara was extremely forthcoming in s...

Eli Spitzer is a headmaster of a Hasidic boys' school and a columnist for Mosiac Magazine. In this long-form interview, we talk about the Hasidic boys' controversy, which was recently covered extensively in the New York Times. The issue relates to the very limited secular education Hasidic boys receive. I talked to Spitzer about these big questions and on some other topics in our lengthy Thursday...

In this long-form (podcast-style) interview, I talk to Steve Nolt about Amish life. So many people compare Hasidim to the Amish, and I've known so little about the Amish. This conversation brought so many differences into sharp contrast and left me with a sense that these two insular societies are different in very profound ways. There are also some interesting similarities in regards to modifying...

This is a long-form zoom conversation with Naomi Seidman, host of the wonderful "Heretic in the House" podcast. You can find the podcast here: https://www.hartman.org.il/program/heretic-in-the-house/ Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-frieda-vizel-podcast--5824414/support .

Gerry Albarelli wrote one of the most unique books on the contemporary Hasidic community. It's on the subject of his experience as a secular studies teacher in the Satmar Hasidic boys' school. His book tells the story of how Gerry, as an outsider, navigated the chaos and challenges of teaching Hasidic boys' a bit of math and spelling. Unlike most conversations on Hasidic boys' education, his book...

Williamsburg, Brooklyn has a rich immigrant history. Before the South Side became the Hasidic enclave that it is today, it was a much more eclectic immigrant neighborhood. Among its former residents is the writer Phillip Lopate, who grew up in what's now the heart of the Hasidic "shtetle". Phillip lived in Williamsburg from age 4 in 1947, until he reached about high school, but after his family mo...

I had the great pleasure of doing a live zoom conversation with fellow former-Hasid [OTD] and professional thinker Izzy Posen. Izzy is a prolific personality on Twitter, where he is eager to encourage nuanced, honest dialog among us ex-Haredim as well as with the communities we were raised in. This live zoom was an opportunity to ask what we need to leave behind when we leave, what obligations we...

I'm delighted to be posting another video conversation with a Jewish Williamsburg "old-timer", this one with Harry/Chaim Weiss. Harry Weiss was born September 24, 1949, in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, and he lived there until 1960. Harry's parents, who were from Hungary, survived Auschwitz and the Holocaust. His father opened up a furniture-making factory on Marcy ave and Keap St. in 1955...

In this video post, I explore a very interesting part of Hasidic clothing: the silver decorative strip found on the men's prayer shawls. I talk to Elena Solomon, who, together with Lilly Homer is writing an encyclopedia entry on the special craft involved in making these decorative garments. It's an art style unique to Ashkenazi Jews, and it's called 'shpanyer arbet'. For the video version of this...

I had the pleasure to talk to Nathaniel Deutsch about his new book on Hasidic Williamsburg. Nathaniel Deutsch is a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he holds the Baumgarten Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies. He is the author of a number of books related to Hasidic history and culture, including The Maiden of Ludmir: A Jewish Holy Woman and Her World, The Jewish...

This video is part of a research project to document the way Hasidim came to America after the war and turned Williamsburg into an insular religious enclave. Nelly Grussgott was born in 1930 in Berlin. In 1940, she and her mother fled nazi Germany for NYC, but her father could not make it out. Although Nelly and her mother were relatively modern, in 1946 her mother remarried a very pious Hasidic m...