Talk About Bupkes!

We have been slightly bemused that people suddenly care about “60 Minutes.” We were sure its audience wasn’t alive enough anymore to muster so much lucid enthusiasm. Its creator, Don Hewitt , died as quantitative easing was giving corporate socialism new life. The Trump-attacks-media narrative has become one of tiresome navel-gazing. The problem doesn’t seem to be the repression itself, which has...

“Talk About Bupkes!” is also available on YouTube and most anywhere else your ears go for podcasts. Viktor Orbán is out. Péter Magyar is in. In the doldrums of liberal world ordering, rarely has an election been so fraught, psychologically draining, and full of nervous anticipation. As Europe breathes a sigh of relief, lots of Orbánism still fills the air—in Hungary and beyond. There are instituti...

“Talk About Bupkes!” is also available on YouTube and most anywhere else your ears go for podcasts. We were thrilled to be part of an evening of readings organized by Bupkes Contributor M.E. Grey. If you missed it (and you probably did and we only hold that somewhat against you), you can participate retroactively and virtually with this special episode. The program: Part I: William Noah Glucroft d...

Talk About Bupkes! is also available on YouTube and most anywhere else your ears go for podcasts. To paraphrase a Chinese restaurant federation, we’re not sure why Megan’s Megacan wanted to associate itself with The Bupkes , but we are glad that it did. If Europe can make “deportation” cool again, then “collaboration” is fair game. So we are thrilled to release this special episode of Talk About B...

“Talk About Bupkes!” is also available on YouTube and most anywhere else your ears go for podcasts. London-based artist Arjan Guerrero is the research director of Media Forensis, which seeks to understand how our reality is mediated by agents—both human and non-human. Join us for a wild conversation that takes us to the edge of something, where we find absolutely—yes, you guessed it: bupkes. And t...

“Talk about bupkes!” is also available on YouTube and most anywhere else your ears go for podcasts. Shada Islam is as Brussels as it gets, even if some parts of Brussels might not see it that way. She’s watched the EU grow up, and the ugly duckling has not exactly become the beautiful swan that many once hoped. Still, Shada is long on Europe even if it keeps falling short. To find out why, listen...

“Talk about bupkes!” is also available on YouTube and most anywhere else you get your podcasts. Watch out for the Yiddish professor with a manifesto. Saul Noam Zaritt takes us back to a time when Jewish was German — that is, when Yiddish was taytsh . But taytsh is much more than that; it’s a way of understanding a language and the culture it carries as anything but fixed, stable, and unified. Oy!...

Also available on YouTube and most anywhere else you get your podcasts. When The Bupkes came across Subschtick , we knew we had to do an interview together. Lucky us, the Oxford DPhil behind it just put out a book that we wanted to know more about. Even luckier us, she turned up in Brussels, which meant we got the rare treat of doing an episode IRL. In Don’t Talk About Politics , Sarah Stein Lubra...

Also available on YouTube and most anywhere else you get your podcasts. For a historian, the Second World War and Germany’s genocide of European peoples are the gift — also in the German sense — that keeps on giving. There seems to be no end to stories one can tell. Some of those stories are more bizarre than others. Like how Finland’s Jews ended up fighting, on occasion side-by-side, with Germans...

Also available on YouTube and most anywhere else you get your podcasts. In her young life, state-sanctioned violence is all Shahd Alnaami has ever known. It’s a violence that has only metastasized since 7 October, as she and more than two million of her fellow residents of Gaza have endured Israel’s relentless war of revenge, siege, and collective punishment. In that time, Shahd’s friends and fami...

Also available on YouTube! Writer, activist, and real mentsh Wael Eskandar talks to “Talk about bupkes!” about his experience in Germany protesting for Palestine, why doing anything is more than nothing but less than something, and how that message resonates with all the “Janas” out there. If you’re looking for hope, you’ve come to the wrong place. But if you’re looking for solidarity as you try t...

In a wide-ranging conversation, The Bupkes sits down with the last person in Brussels in August. Manus Carlisle handles media relations for The Left, the European Parliament group that consists of leftist parties from across the European Union. Manus takes stock of the state of European democracy and leftist responses to resurgent forms of nationalism, militarism, and moral panic. On a more cosmic...

From Berlin, Talmudist and philosopher Oded Schechter gives The Bupkes a rare interview about how the nation-state of Israel, as an expression of Jewish nationalism, does not liberate the Jew but, to the contrary, subjugates him. NB: Transcript is auto-generated, so errors — spelling and otherwise — are to be expected. This interview has been edited for clarity. Further reading: Christian Zionism...

A conversation with Wieland Hoban, the chair of Jüdische Stimme für gerechten Frieden in Nahost (Jewish Voice for just peace in the Middle East), about what it’s like to be on the same domestic intelligence list as neo-Nazis, foreign agents, and conspiracy cults — not to mention Germany’s second-largest party in parliament. (NB: Transcript is auto-generated, so errors — spelling and otherwise — ar...

A conversation with writer/researcher Elia Ayoub on simple media narratives, a Hebrew-Yiddish throwdown, and the throughline of the politics of memory (and forgetting). Get full access to The Bupkes at www.thebupkes.com/subscribe