The Joyous Justice Podcast

Send us a message via text message! Link accessible at joyousjustice.buzzsprout.com. ✅ In a return to the studio, April and Tracie use a TikTok video as a jumping off point for a conversation about Jewishness and whiteness, solidarity, the effects of trauma, and the ways that all of these change and shift over time.  We’ve extended the registration deadline (and the listener discount!) for BOTH o...

Send us a message via text message! Link accessible at joyousjustice.buzzsprout.com. ✅ This week’s episode is an excerpt of our recent Taste of Grounded & Growing , in advance of the kick-off of the program later this month. This group-coaching, cohort experience is designed to help you develop or deepen your trauma-informed, Jewish social justice practice. You’ll do so through our S.H.E.M.A....

Send us a message via text message! Link accessible at joyousjustice.buzzsprout.com. ✅ Today, we’re giving you a preview of our program, Shift Your Life in 60 Days and sharing our “Taste of” event from this past Sunday. In this call, April gets into some juicy lessons about the importance of micro-movements and the magic that can happen when we clarify what matters most, support our well-being, a...

Send us a message via text message! Link accessible at joyousjustice.buzzsprout.com. ✅ This week, take a sneak peek of a recent session of our program “Grounded & Growing.” After a lesson about accountability, April and Tracie field a participant's question. Navigating accountable relationships in the context of social justice work, especially when we’re in an oppressor group, can be com...

Send us a message via text message! Link accessible at joyousjustice.buzzsprout.com. ✅ In a recent session of our program Grounded & Growing, April and Tracie realized they have different practices in response to injustices. Though their actual behaviors diverge, what they have in common is that they are using intentional and strategic attention as a form of a social and racial justice practi...

Send us a message via text message! Link accessible at joyousjustice.buzzsprout.com. ✅ As we celebrate Juneteenth, enter the summer and welcome the concluding months of the Shmita year, we think about all the lessons we can learn from this season. There are internal and external insights to be gained from the confluence of these holidays and this season. We can work to balance the desire to contr...

Send us a message via text message! Link accessible at joyousjustice.buzzsprout.com. ✅ This week, we’re bringing you Tracie and Joyous Justice’s wisdom from a recent presentation at a colloquium entitled “Jewish Responses to the Loneliness Epidemic.” These past few years have seen a layering of multiple pandemics: Covid exacerbated and made plain so many injustices. Grappling with the weight of t...

Send us a message via text message! Link accessible at joyousjustice.buzzsprout.com. ✅ In this week’s episode, April and Tracie talk about what it looks like when organizations and communities take on the difficult work of facing the honest truth about racism and oppression within their walls. There is so much shame and fear about problematic dynamics in our communities, it can prevent us from ma...

Send us a message via text message! Link accessible at joyousjustice.buzzsprout.com. ✅ We're rounding off this month's MVPs (most valuable podcasts) with a conversation about the Shmita year (if you haven't been commemorating it, don't worry! There's still time!). As we’re In our current pandemic-, racism-, and climate-change-ravaged times, April and Tracie talk about the...

Send us a message via text message! Link accessible at joyousjustice.buzzsprout.com. ✅ This week, we’re airing an earlier MVP (most valuable podcast) where April and Tracie dig into and challenge the oft-repeated notion that proximity across a line of difference immunizes against bigotry or racism. In other words, the assertion “I can’t be racist, my (fill-in-the-blank) is Black." We discuss...

Send us a message via text message! Link accessible at joyousjustice.buzzsprout.com. ✅ We’re bringing back an oldie but a VERY important goodie! In this week’s episode (or MVP, “most valuable podcast,”) April and Tracie discuss Eric Ward’s Skin in the Game point about the conditional whiteness of Ashkenazi Jews, unpacking (with both/and thinking) the reaction some Jews have regarding their whiten...

Send us a message via text message! Link accessible at joyousjustice.buzzsprout.com. ✅ This week, we’re re-releasing an MVP --one of our Most Valuable Podcasts.  Way back in episode 2, April and Tracie spoke about better alternatives to some of the micro-aggressive things white-identified Jews often say to Jews of Color. So what happens if you overhear someone else saying a micro-aggressive quest...

Send us a message via text message! Link accessible at joyousjustice.buzzsprout.com. ✅ As we commemorate Yom HaShoah, the Jewish-community-designated Holocaust Memorial Day, we talk about balancing the incomprehensible nature of the Shoah with the need to continue to work to process and heal (comrehend?) the collective trauma of the Shoah and its intergenerational effects. What more would be poss...

Send us a message via text message! Link accessible at joyousjustice.buzzsprout.com. ✅ This Passover, there was an ongoing–sometimes heated–conversation on social media about singing the Negro spiritual “Let My People Go” during the Passover seder. In our conversation this week, April explains why she will continue to sing this song at her Seder table and we get into the nuance and the nitty-grit...

Send us a message via text message! Link accessible at joyousjustice.buzzsprout.com. ✅ This Passover, we’re noticing that folks are quick to identify with the Israelites, but what about the circumstances where we’re in the role of the Egyptians? How can we work to dismantle the binary of good and bad, victim and villain and move toward greater wholeness? Can we invite the intervention that will a...

Send us a message via text message! Link accessible at joyousjustice.buzzsprout.com. ✅ As we approach Passover 5782, we’re thinking about the tension inherent in commemorating a moment of acute urgency with practices that require a lot of time, intention, and planning. The Passover story contains multiple moments when our ancestors and predecessors displayed both faith and radical imagination, bu...

Send us a message via text message! Link accessible at joyousjustice.buzzsprout.com. ✅ This week, we’re bringing you our conversation from our live event on March 23. If we’re being real here (which we ALWAYS are), we know that many of us (especially in the Jewish community) are feeling overwhelmed, stressed, and hurt by the state of the world. April and Tracie (and a couple of amazing community...

Send us a message via text message! Link accessible at joyousjustice.buzzsprout.com. ✅ We cover a LOT of ground in today’s conversation, where we get curious about what prevents some folks and groups from accessing joy. We talk about Black joy, the whiteness of white Jews and what often makes embracing joy difficult (and the impact of the historical middle agent role), individual and collective s...

Send us a message via text message! Link accessible at joyousjustice.buzzsprout.com. ✅ Inspired by the holiday of Purim, April and Tracie use the practice of giving mishloach manot or Purim baskets, to unpack the difference between intention and impact. (Who knew you could learn so much from fruit-filled cookies?) They also interrogate the relationship between Vashti and Esther, and use them as a...

Send us a message via text message! Link accessible at joyousjustice.buzzsprout.com. ✅ April and Tracie think about some of the lessons of Purim: hidden identities, the power of 'no,' the power of being in the right place, the importance of joy, and the links between joy and liberation. Find discussion questions for this episode: joyousjustice.com/blog/jews-talk-racial-justice-ep-79 Fin...

Send us a message via text message! Link accessible at joyousjustice.buzzsprout.com. ✅ With all that’s going on in the world right now (and since we’re in the middle of two (2!) months of Adar, we thought it would be good to reprise Episode 10 from the conclusion of election season. Tracie asks April for advice on working through the negative emotions that sometimes accompany justice work. They u...

Send us a message via text message! Link accessible at joyousjustice.buzzsprout.com. ✅ A couple of weeks ago, we did a Facebook Live where we used popular tv shows to help us playfully make a point about how folks sometimes overestimate their skills when it comes to DEI work–or really anything. In this episode, we revisit that conversation and add some additional commentary. If you tuned in the f...

Send us a message via text message! Link accessible at joyousjustice.buzzsprout.com. ✅ In today’s conversation, April and Tracie unpack white Jews’ whiteness, the history of race and Jewish racialized identities, and the benefits of getting clear about who is actually in the ingroup. Using metaphors from physics to sanctuaries, we talk about historic and contemporary intersections of the social c...

Send us a message via text message! Link accessible at joyousjustice.buzzsprout.com. ✅ In this edited version of a Facebook live that April recorded after Whoopi Goldberg’s comments and the controversy that followed, April digs deep into her analysis of the reactions many in the Jewish community expressed. Internalized terror and persisting unhealed trauma–elicited by the Holocaust and centuries...

Send us a message via text message! Link accessible at joyousjustice.buzzsprout.com. ✅ Many of us are learning about racial justice and trying to implement DEI in our lives and workplaces, but sometimes we become so stuck in our questions that it keeps us distanced and prevents us from going–and staying–in the deep end. In this conversation, April and Tracie challenge us to get intellectually int...