Return the Key: Jewish Questions for Everyone

In the most poetry-rich episode to date, Julie talks with poet and translator Daniel Borzutzky about Daniel’s Chilean and Jewish family, about his close relationship with the Tree of Life synagogue and how he wrote about the 2018 massacre, about writing violence in a time of ongoing mass violence and war—after, before, during after, before, and during Israel’s ongoing massacres in Gaza and beyond—...

Julie talks with Rabbi Caryn Aviv of Denver’s Judaism Your Way . We read and discuss Nelly Sach’s poem “When Day Grows Empty,” talk about how our ancestors leave a “soul-trail” for us to follow, about Jewish Mysticism and Process Theology, about the philosophy of Judaism Your Way, and about Caryn’s book-in-progress Unlearning Jewish Anxiety . Caryn roots American Ashkenazi Jewish anxiety in the ea...

Novelist and diviner Selah Saterstrom talks about growing up in a small town in Mississippi within a family of Christian mystics and diviners and the multi-ethnic multi-racial “spiritual church movement” of the Deep South. We discuss “knowing/unknowing,” dig into “divinatory poetics” and how it shares space with New Narrative, Affect Theory, Feminist hermeneutics, and Queer Theory. What does it me...

Julie and Scott talk about Simone Weil’s astounding biography, including her experiences volunteering for the Spanish Civil War and participating in the French Resistance. We discuss her essays “The Iliad, or, The Poem of Force,” “The Need for Roots,” and “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God.” And we ask, how does war turn us into objects? What is the rela...

Julie and Hilary talk about the effect of 911 on Hilary’s education; Hilary’s scholarship on state education in the early twentieth- century Middle East; nationalism and the classroom; the difference between a victim and a martyr in Israeli and Palestinian literature; what we can learn from the writings of Palestinian novelist Jabra Ibrahim Jabra and Israeli novelist Amos Oz; contested language in...

Julie and Yanara talk about Yanara's childhood in a Jewish-American and German family in Germany, the question of Jewish identity when there is no real practice, walking as a writing practice, the value and problem of silence in the face of rupture, fractured and buried archives, Midrash as methodology, and Walter Benjamin's messianism. We ask whether borders are always a violence, why we cry when...

Julie and Nabil talk about the challenge and honor of being part of a Jewish-Israeli-Arab-Palestinian faculty discussion group. Nabil describes his childhood in Morocco, the beautiful handwriting of a beloved father who died too young, the weight and detritus of colonization, and the power of multilingualism. In what ways might writing and conversation be sacred? What do we learn from Edouard Glis...

Julie interviews novelist Candace Nunag Tardío about her forthcoming debut novel,  Solar Flare . We talk about infinite time, the afterlife of media, and various technologies of memorialization. We discuss Walter Benjamin and Vilém Flusser, suicide and trauma, and the value of movement for movement’s sake. We discuss presence as a way to trouble "homogenous time," and wonder what efforts...

Julie and Jason interview Daniel Eisenberg and Rabbi Dave Yedid. Daniel and Dave talk about establishing Base Denver in their home, the intersection between queer and Jewish identities, Passover as a “coming out” narrative (coming out again and again and again), and the erotic eco-poetics of The Song of Songs. We discuss crying on airplanes and at weddings, the necessary conjoining of sorrow and l...

Julie talks with poet-artist Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman about his project  Wierzba Estery / Esther’s Willow , a collaboration with artists Katarzyna and Marta Sala in Chrzanów (PL), a half-Jewish city until the Nazi genocide and postwar processes that continued a long century of ethnic cleansing. The project gestures into the city’s traumatic recent past to reach an...

Julie and Jason interview philosopher Sarah Pessin about her work on Moses Maimonides and Emmanuel Levinas. What does it mean to know God while not-knowing God? What happens when language fails? How do we “hum with”? How many spheres are there, and how does each have its own intellect? What does Emmanuel Levinas have to tell us about thinking and being with others? How does Levinas imagine a struc...

In this pilot episode of Return the Key, Jason and Julie interview each other about our friendship, the origins of the podcast, and our Jewish upbringings. We list our “Jewish themes,” read a bit from our recent writing, and ask each other to talk about the vexing ideas of “oneness” and “the chosen.”