Return the Key: Jewish Questions for Everyone

In episode #37 I talk with scholar and poet Ben Meyerson about his research and writing surrounding “voice” in diasporic song. Ben researches three musical forms: Troubadour lyric, Sephardic Romanzas, and Flamenco song, all of which originate from the Iberian Peninsula, dating from the 11th century to the present. Ben addresses some of the problems in theories of “voice” from thinkers such as Dele...

In episode #36 I talk with Lebanese-American poet, author, and contemplative educator, Moudi Sbeity. His forthcoming memoir,  Habibi Means Beloved , has many stories including foundational experiences of loneliness which become, for Moudi, sources of wisdom and belonging. Moudi talks about growing up in Lebanon, just after the civil war, as a gay kid who stuttered. He discusses what stutterin...

In episode #35 I talk with ethnic studies scholar Nishant Upadhyay about their book, Indians on Indian Lands: Intersections of Race, Caste, and Indigeneity . Together, we dig into the complexities around “settler colonial frameworks,” thinking about what the category of settler means in cases of forced migration, or migration based on ecocide, genocide, or extreme need. We talk about writing histo...

In episode #34 I talk with poet, artist, translator and scholar Jennifer Scappettone about her new book, Poetry After Barbarism: The Invention of Motherless Tongues and Resistance to Fascism , in which she explores the power of a planetary, xenoglossic poetry of resistance—which is to say, a polyglot poetry that rejects mastery in favor of strangeness, a poetry that exposes how we are all outside...

In episode #33 I talk with Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg about two terms that have been central to her lately: “collapse” and “entanglement.” We read from and discuss Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World , a book that helps think through these themes. Rabbi Jessica talks about what it’s been like on the ground in Minneapolis this winter, how confronting state violence and authoritarianism i...

In episode #32 poet Rob Fitterman reads from and talks about two of his books: Holocaust Museum (Counterpath 2013), made entirely of captions from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s photo archive, and Creve Coeur (Winter Editions 2024), a “translation” of William Carlos Williams’ epic poem Paterson . Following Williams’ form line-by-line, Rob exposes the deep history of anti-Black racism in St. Lo...

In episode #31 I speak with author and investigative journalist Katherine Stewart about her new book, Money Lies and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy . What is Christian Nationalism (and what is it not)? What are the true anti-democratic goals of the “new right” and what are their strategies? How do misogyny and anti-trans rhetoric/policy serve these goals? And are they reall...

In episode #30 with Daniela Naomi Molnar, we begin our wide-ranging conversation by discussing Daniela’s work with the media of “color, water, language, and place,” which is focused around both human and earth-based memory. We talk about and read from her book Protocols: an Erasure , an erasure of Protocols of the Elders of Zion. We discuss this source-text and its ongoing place in the history of...

In episode #29 I speak with multidisciplinary artist Ava Aviva Avnisan about their film, installation, music and performance work. We begin by talking about Aviva’s young childhood in Jerusalem as the descendant of Iraqi, Iranian and Eastern European Jews, and she traces the influence of her father, a professional photographer, on her own development as an artist. We discuss a collaboration we did...

Episode #28 brings a special New Year’s treat: music! We peek behind the scenes as I talk with musician Ben Roberts, who happens to be my son, about the music for Return the Key. Ben talks about his passion for Irish folk music, what goes on in an Irish session, and what he learned playing Bach for people on their porches during the pandemic. We get into the relationship between emotions and music...

In episode 27, I talk with poet Susan Gevirtz about her childhood growing up in Los Angeles, within the two “religions” of Hollywood and Freudian psychoanalysis. We talk about her early experiences in the world of Hollywood films through her grandfather’s work as the musical director for Universal, and her sense, even as a young person, that the world that was presented to her was a made place, in...

In episode 26, I talk with Anas Qutob and Dave Snyder of Minneapolis about their friendship and their work as leaders in the Minnesota chapter of Friends of Standing Together —a grassroots progressive organization of Israeli Jews and Palestinians dedicated to peace, justice, and social transformation. Anas speaks of his childhood growing up during the Israeli invasion of his home city, Nablus, in...

In episode 25, I speak with Benjamin Balthaser about his new book, Citizens of the Whole World: Anti-Zionism and the Cultures of the American Jewish Left, just published by Verso. Benjamin tells me about his beloved communist grandparents and his own background as a labor activist and longtime member of Jewish Voice for Peace. We discuss the historical precedents to the current eruption of anti-Zi...

In episode 24, I speak with Judith Levine, journalist activist, and author of five books. Judith and I (who go way back!) discuss our shared experience of losing parents to Alzheimer’s, asking what makes a self if not language, if not the mind, asking how we can value one another, even when the “self” seems to be gone. We then discuss Judith’s co-authored book (with Erica L. Meiners), The Feminist...

In episode 23, I speak with Lee Medovoi about his astounding new book, The Inner Life of Race: Souls, Bodies, and The History of Racial Power (Duke UP, 2024) . Lee traces the histories of racialization, surveillance, policing, and carcerality from late Medieval Spain, through the development of racial-liberalism and capitalism to the present, asking how these deep histories help us to think of col...

In episode 22, I speak with New York-based multidisciplinary artist Aaron Landsman about his 20-year project, Perfect City, a working group at the intersection of art, organizing, popular education and urban design. We discuss how our relationship to our Jewishness has been affected by the ongoing violence in Gaza, and we think together about the tension between utopian imagining—the “what if...

In episode 21, I speak with writer, musician, and PhD student dena harry saleh. We discuss their father’s childhood experience in the Nakba, their own childhood growing up queer and Palestinian in Denver, and their young-adulthood in New York City. We then turn to two books that take up queer Palestine studies, Decolonial Queering in Palestine , by Walaa Alqaisiya, and Queer Palestine and the Empi...

In episode 20, I speak with esteemed feminist holocaust scholar, Janet Jacobs , about her work on holocaust memorialization and intergenerational trauma. We discuss Janet’s work on women in cults and on the crypto-Jews. We then dig into her books on the holocaust, one of which was recently banned from the US Naval Academy library by the Trump administration , and we get into the larger issue of we...

In episode 19, Jennifer Pap and I talk with American-French poet, novelist, and playwright, Leslie Kaplan (born in 1943), whose revolutionary writing we have been translating. As a student, Kaplan participated in the occupation of French factories in ‘68 and the May uprising and general strike that followed. Several years later she resided and worked at La Borde, a radical non-hierarchical psychia...

In episode 18, I talk with poet and theorist Syd Zolf about two of their recent projects, No One’s Witness: A Monstrous Poetics , a critical book that draws from Black studies as it engages the problem of witnessing atrocity, and NEUTRØIS , a forthcoming book of poems. We talk about grief and loss, intergenerational trauma, the notion of the unanswerable question as a foundational Jewish practice,...

In episode 17, I talk with writer and podcast host David Naimon about his vexed relationship with listening, his childhood experiences of antisemitism, and his decision to leave medical practice behind. Digging into three episodes of his acclaimed literary podcast, Between the Covers, that have deeply affected me—his conversations with Isabella Hammad, Anne de Marcken, and Daniel Mendelsohn—we tal...

In episode 16, I talk with literary scholar Na’ama Rokem about her work-in-progress, Dispatches in Translation: A German-Hebrew Epistolary Network, which studies the correspondences between mid-century Jewish intellectuals writing in and between German and Hebrew. The project focuses on ambivalences and debates surrounding Zionism from the 1930s through the early 70’s. We discuss and read from Han...

In episode #15 I talk with writer Magdalena Zurawski about her research into her great-grandfather, Czeslaw Kowalczyk’s, story. Arrested by the Nazi’s during the Warsaw Uprising, he was taken to a concentration camp. Magdalena spent 2022-23 on a Fulbright Scholarship in Warsaw, tracking what happened next and growing obsessed with twentieth-century avant-garde Polish writer Miron Białoszewski. We...

In this first episode of the spring 2025 season, I talk with dance-artist Sondra Loring about our work together in the ‘90s initiating and running the New York Improvisation Festival, and about Sondra’s work now as a dance maker, a teacher, a prison abolitionist, and a steward of land in the Hudson Valley. We talk about “knowledge” vs. practice in Jewish traditions, the intimacy of knowing a perso...

In this final episode of the season, Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman and I talk with Professor Almút Shulamit Bruckstein Çoruh, beginning with her years in the Neo-Hasidic movement studying with Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi (the founder of Jewish Renewal) and her decades of study in Jerusalem with Talmudic scholar Rabbi HaRav Zev (Walter) Gotthold. We discuss the power and importance of names, the f...