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Judith: Hi, everybody. This is Judith Rosenbaum. I'm here with Can We Talk? hosts and producers Nahanni Rous and Jen Richler.

Nahanni: Hi Judith.

Jen: Hi Judith. Hi Nahanni.

Judith: So, we're here today to reflect on the past couple of seasons, which were really unusual and unlike any Can We Talk? has had before. [theme music fades] 

We had just begun the fall season in late September, and then October 7 happened, and so we had to change all of our plans and put aside the material that we'd been working on. We had much of the season in production and had to figure out what was actually going to be meaningful and relevant in the moment, but in a time when we were feeling so much shock and everything was changing all the time, and it didn't feel like there were words that were adequate for the moment.

Nahanni: The episode that we had planned for Tuesday, October 10, we quickly realized we wouldn't be able to use. Not only was it set in Israel, but it was comedic and poignant, but also on a completely unrelated topic. So, Judith, you found a poem by Esther Raab that was written just after the 1967 war.

Judith: Yeah, my response often when I'm feeling lost and feel like I don't have the words is to look at poetry. Somehow, I feel like the precision of the language of poetry and the sparseness of it, it just feels like it's a place that is more accessible to me, often, in really hard times. So I started to think about poetry written by Israeli women, and I found Esther Raab, who is known as the first modern Hebrew poet who was born in the land of Israel. She was born in 1894 in Petah Tikva, and I found this poem that she had written. It was really a prayer for peace and for a different, more hopeful time, and so it felt like it had some of the message that I was feeling.

[Clip of poem being read in Hebrew, fades to Nahanni reading poem in English:] I want beautiful trees/ and not wars!/ And a coat of many colors/ and not uniforms/ for all my dear ones …[fades out]

Nahanni: From that time, one of the things that I remember about this podcast and our conversations was just getting together multiple times per week and saying, "Oh my God, what are we going to do? What are we going to say? What can we add? Everybody is so overwhelmed." We really wanted to tackle things in a way that was helpful, but it's so hard to know sometimes what that is going to be. 

But one of the first things that was very clear was that Vivian Silver, who is somebody that I had interviewed for this podcast in 2017, was one of the people who initially was thought to have been taken hostage by Hamas. So I went back and revisited the interview that I had done with her in 2017, which was at the Knesset with a group of over a hundred women from Women Wage Peace, which Vivian was one of the founders of.

[Clip of Vivian Silver]: My name is Vivian Silver, I live on Kibbutz Beeri, which is right on the border of the Gaza Strip.

Nahanni: And in that interview, she talked about the founding of Women Wage Peace in 2014 during a Gaza war, which at the time was the third Gaza war in the last five years, and the women who founded Women Wage Peace were saying, "If the last three wars haven't solved our problems, why is this war going to be any different?"

[Clip of Vivian]: The paradigm that we have been taught for the last 70 years—that only war will bring peace—clearly hasn't succeeded. And the paradigm has to be changed to…only a political agreement that will bring security. 

Nahanni: And then, just a few weeks later, we found out that she, in fact, had been killed on October 7. 

We're not really set up for the news cycle, you know? We do a lot of historical pieces, a lot of evergreen topics. And then, when history is unfolding in the present on a daily basis, it's a very different kind of turnaround. And I do feel like we rose to the challenge, and I feel proud of the work that we did in the fall around this war.

Judith: Me too, definitely. And I can say also, from my perspective as the CEO, that actually the podcast in the fall was really the main platform for JWA to address the war. I mean, obviously we talked about it also somewhat on social media, but the podcast was where we went deeper and had more substantive conversation. And that was a really purposeful decision. It's a more long-form platform. It's a platform that allows you to have more nuance. In a time when it felt like there were so many places where there wasn't much nuance and where people were so quick to jump on each other, a podcast just has a different, more intimate feel.

Jen: Just to talk a little bit more about our Israel-related episodes in the fall, we did an episode about women working on relief efforts after October 7. So, one of the things we also are always trying to think of is what is the gender dimension? And something that I think was striking to a lot of people is maybe not seeing women's faces or hearing women's voices after October 7 in Israel—at least, like, the war cabinet was all male, and this Knesset under Netanyahu was, I think, the most male-dominated in many, many years. So, just kind of, like, where are the women? And so this was an opportunity to talk about women who are leading efforts to mobilize and help as many people as possible who were affected after October 7, people who had been evacuated, both in the north and the south.

And so Nahanni spoke to Lee Hoffman Agiv from Bonot Alternativa. That's a group we talked about for our "Israel at 75" episode last spring, when the protests against the government's proposed judicial overhaul were at their peak. Some of the very same groups that were leading the protests pivoted to just doing whatever they could to help all of the evacuees and people affected after October 7.

[clip of Lee Hoffman Agiv]: We are managing and leading our community. You have women that are now in touch with every part of the authorities in their own city, and they are the one[s] connecting between all the dots.

Judith: And I would say those things aren't totally unrelated, because the prominence of women and of these protest organizations in providing relief efforts speaks to the fact that they were being run entirely by civil society, not by the government. And so there's a relationship between the protests against the government and the failures of the government to provide the kinds of relief efforts and emergency responses that people needed. And so civil society kind of stepped in, largely led by women, to build those networks and those organizations.

Nahanni: I do think that the hardest—the emotionally hardest piece that we worked on in the fall related to October 7 was the piece about the sexual violence committed by Hamas. And Jen, I'm so glad that you and I decided to work on that one together.

Jen: Yeah. I think that was the hardest piece I've ever worked on as a producer. And I remember just beginning to do some of the research for that episode, reading testimonies, and just not being prepared for what I was about to read.

Judith: And figuring out just, sort of, what was necessary to say and what was gratuitous. And then, of course, part of that story is not just what happened, but the failure of the international community to respond right away and the kind of skepticism that is still pervasive. 

So all told, we, in the fall season, I believe, we did five episodes that focused on October 7 and the war. But we also did manage to return to some of the original content that we had been planning for the fall. We felt like it was important to remember that part of our work is about just the breadth of experience. And so we did release two other episodes, "Kugels and Collards," and the piece with Iris Bahr.

Nahanni: Iris Bahr talking about caring for her mother who has dementia while also parenting a young son and moving her life halfway around the world from California to Israel in order to do that.

Judith: And comedy, and her—

Jen: And turning it into comedy gold.

[clip of Iris Bahr]:  My mom and I have always had a very loving, very enmeshed, highly suffocating, dysfunctional relationship [audience laughs]. I see this resonates with some of you… 

Jen: And then for me, what was interesting about the "Kugels and Collards" episode, which focused on the food of the Jewish South and particularly a new, sort of, recipe book and collective history text that was put together by two women from South Carolina. I ended up going to Charleston right before October 7, and these women, Rachel Gordin Barnett and Lisa Harvey, showed me all the hospitality that they're known for in the South. I ate a lot of delicious comfort food. 

[clip of Lisa Harvey]: Tonight, I'm making okra gumbo. Now, okra is not a very pleasant vegetable to work with. It's slimy, and it's a little prickly, also. Okra is—needs a sunny, kind of hot, moist environment. That would be South Carolina.

Jen: And so I sort of had all these nice associations with that trip, and then came back and the world fell apart. 

But with a little bit of time, I think I certainly felt a hunger for something that was not about Israel and Gaza and a reminder that there are interesting stories about Jewish women all over—and a bit of a respite from the relentlessness of the news cycle. And so we ended up running that story around Thanksgiving, which felt like a good time to talk about getting together at the table over a good meal with loved ones.

Judith: So, we started our spring season with an episode that was based on footage that Jen and I had collected on a trip that we did to Israel in January. I, with two friends and colleagues, had planned a mission to Israel through a gender lens for women leaders of Boston Jewish organizations. From my perch at JWA, I was so aware of the fact that war has very particular gendered elements and that Israeli women were playing a really important role in a lot of the building of the infrastructure to respond. We weren't hearing much about that gender piece of the story. So we went and we recorded and we got to meet with a lot of amazing people. We focused on women's experiences on October 7 and women's leadership in this moment.

When we came back and we thought about, okay, what are the stories—again, this question of, like, what stories can we tell that feel like they are important for people to hear and we're not hearing? And that story of women working on shared society efforts felt so important. And in fact, we got a lot of great feedback to that piece, which we called “A Pocket of Hope,” using words from a Bedouin lawyer, Hanan Al-Sana, who we met with. Um, we did get a lot of feedback from people saying, "Thank you, this was a more hopeful story and a different perspective than what I'm hearing," and to know that there are people who are, um, responding to this moment—yes, also with despair, but also with the belief that things can be different, and actually with action, even if it's a small group of people—that that was just very helpful to hear that.

Nahanni: I wanted to just ask both of you to talk about what it was like to be there in January.

Jen: I think, when you're recording on something very difficult, in some ways, being kind of on the job, in the moment, gives an opportunity to sort of detach a little bit. Like, I felt very emotionally affected by things I was hearing. And then also, I’m on the job and I'm trying to get the best possible audio. And so it was sort of a way that I think some of it, I only processed later, um, for that reason. 

But then, of course, I wasn't just there in a professional capacity. On a personal level, I had really been feeling a drive to want to go and, like, bear witness and also see people I loved there. And and so it was an interesting sort of split between, like, the professional and personal sides for me.

Judith: I felt that, too. I mean, I think as someone who has, you know, family and friends in Israel and has lived in Israel, I often, when things are hard there, feel this desire to be on the ground and see what it actually feels like, as opposed to having to experience it, sort of, from afar or to try to understand what's happening from afar. You know, the trip was so intense, it was only three days, we packed a lot in, and it was really overwhelming and hard. But also, I did feel this sense of hope. As opposed to here, I feel like—here meaning in the United States, um, and in the American Jewish community—I was feeling there was all this panic, that people didn't know how to, sort of, where to direct it. Here, I think a lot of the panic got directed in ways that weren't particularly productive. Um, in Israel I think there was a, you know, a lot of it was put into these emergency relief efforts and people could then feel like they were contributing and accomplishing something.

Um, I was very aware of the fact that, you know, there was much less news about Gaza while we were there. And I had a lot of conversations with friends and family there about how they were still very much in their trauma. And we heard that from so many people who we spoke with who just said, like, "It's still October 7 for us now. Sure, it's January for you, but for us, it's October 7." Um, and it made me think a lot about—and we talked about this in our group—like, what does that mean, then, the responsibilities are for Americans if Israelis are, you know, dealing with the immediate aftermath?

So, you know, those questions, I think very much, we carried them throughout the season, even though most of the season, we chose to focus on other topics. We had begun the season with this episode on shared society and we felt like it was important for us to return to what was happening, um, in Israel and in Gaza and, uh, and particularly to begin to talk about what was happening in Gaza.

Nahanni: So I immediately thought of my friend Jen Marlowe, who is a human rights activist who has spent the past eight months working to help people evacuate from Gaza. There’s nobody whose work I respect or admire more in terms of her commitment to seeing injustice and working to right it, and helping people who are in a desperate situation. I just have complete trust in her humanity and her devotion to helping people.

[clip of Jen Marlowe]: Generally in the world, people try to survive. Communities want to live. People want their children to survive, not only to survive, but to have a chance at a future, to have a chance at being able to thrive. Um, and so escaping the horrors of what's happening in Gaza is one of the only ways that people see their ability to do that.

Judith: I think the humanity piece is the, is the point, right, that like, how, you know, I understand that this is a time of so much fear and trauma and, you know, anger and despair and, um, and that that gets in the way of people being able to just respond as humans to human suffering and it drowns out the things that otherwise I think we can hear, like echoes of Jewish experience, right? Like, I think that was one of the things that I think we all felt in hearing some of Jen's stories of just having grown up, you know, in a post-Holocaust era of hearing the stories of family members and community members trying desperately to get out of Nazi Europe. Not that I'm comparing. I'm not, I don't mean to be saying, you know, I—again, like, every word is so fraught here—but like, without making analogies, just hearing echoes of what it is to be desperate to be in a place where your children will be safe, and what it takes, what you're willing to do to make that happen, and how hard it can be.

And as we expected, there [were], you know, responses from all sides on social media, a lot of, definitely, voices of people saying, "Thank you for covering this," or "Finally, it took you a long time to cover this," and a lot of people who were really upset. You know, I think it was clear from a lot of the comments that most of the people who were commenting, as is the case on social media, hadn't actually listened to the episode. Um, and if they did listen to this one, maybe they hadn't—they didn't realize that we had done previous episodes about the Israeli experience, because there's a lot of response of like, you know, "How come you're not talking about Israelis? How could you not acknowledge what's happened to Israelis?" And of course we had done that.

Nahanni: I think sometimes people look for any excuse not to take in something that's really challenging and devastating. And if they can identify some bias, then it's like they can actually write off the entire story. Probably we all do that to some extent. And I think in this conflict, um, that is really prevalent, um, for everybody. I mean, on, on all sides. It was my hope that this interview with Jen Marlowe about her efforts to help people get out of Gaza would cut through that.

Judith: And part of the point of the podcast to begin with was to kind of expand people's ideas of what it is that Jewish women do in the world and who they are and what they care about. And so that means sometimes telling stories that might seem unexpected or are not the, kind of, mainstream view.

Jen: Sometimes there is this, like, zero-sum quality to the way things are discussed, that if I'm really devastated about what's going on in Gaza, that that means I am not paying enough attention to the hostages or the trauma that people are experiencing in Israel post-October 7. And we partly want to say we can be devastated about all of those things.

Judith: I know we've been talking a lot about our response to October 7, of course, that has felt so significant this year, but let's also just give a few highlights of the rest of the season, which mostly did not—except for the first and last episodes—didn't really focus on the Middle East.

Nahanni: Um, well, so the three oral history episodes that we did were really fun, because it was actually the first time that we've delved into that oral history archive. And I was tasked with listening through a bunch of testimonies to pick out a few that would work on the podcast. And I had a great time listening to them. But, um, you know, the ones that popped out at me that we ended up using were Ronya Schwaab, who was born in Belarus in 1909, talking about her childhood growing up in a shtetl. I mean, these things that we sort of know about superficially, but the details—to hear it directly from her, like, this is a childhood that happened more than a hundred years ago.

[clip of Ronya Schwaab]: The preparations for Pesach were the most joyous event in my young life. We baked our own matzos in conjunction with several of the neighbors. And one day Mama said, “Tomorrow when we bake matzos, you will be allowed to do the perforating.” I didn’t sleep all night at the excitement that I will be perforating the matzos!

Nahanni: Um, Leni LaMarche, who grew up in a Ladino-speaking community in Seattle, also in the '20s and '30s. There was so much Ladino in that testimony, which we were able to use in the episode. She was talking about the role that she played through storytelling and comedy in helping keep that language and culture alive.

[clip of Leni LaMarche]: “Achuncate!”— “Sit your ass down!”  Everybody laughed when they heard that. They haven't heard this since they were children. “Achuncate!” 

Nahanni: Um, and then the last one that we did for the beginning of Pride Month was a woman named Molly Wallick, who was the guidance counselor for LGBTQ medical students at Louisiana State University in the 1980s and '90s, and really created the program, the support program that didn't exist at all before she came in and became an advocate.

Judith: And that piece was interesting because, uh, it was such a reminder of how much has changed in the last few decades, like what she was talking about, which was so cutting-edge and sort of radical at the time—

Nahanni: Right, like she put together panels and she decided on principle that she would only have gay people on the panels. And it was like, well, I mean—

Judith: —about gay people. Right.

Nahanni: Right! [laughs]

Judith: Yeah. I was really excited that we were able to feature some highlights of our oral history collection. We launched our Nikki Newman Tanner Oral History Collection at the very beginning of October, on October 3. I think it was. So, um, if you haven't had a chance to check it out yet, I highly recommend it. We have—not all of our oral histories in there yet, but over 300. Um, it's just this incredibly rich collection, and there's so many great stories and voices and all different kinds of experiences, and we really wanted to give people a little taste of that.

Jen: A couple of other episodes that were quite fun to produce. One was about the resurgence of Ladino. So I interviewed a few people who have taken a real interest in Ladino—speaking Ladino, which is sometimes called Judeo-Spanish, and also learning the history of Ladino in the last few years, which seems to be part of a larger trend that maybe, um, is owing to the pandemic when people were sitting around looking for things to do and people to connect with.

And then another episode we did that felt like a little bit of the same spirit was our episode about queer klezmer, where I interviewed where I interviewed Eve Sicular, who's the leader of a band called Isle of Klezbos, which is a sextet that started in the nineties and really is part of a revival of klezmer music and Yiddish language and culture. What was fun about this episode and interesting to me was the connections between the klezmer revival and queer liberation.

And I think the reason these two episodes felt like, you know, sort of of a piece to me is just, especially in a time where we are focused a lot on the loss and devastation that's happening, that there's exciting things happening in, you know, Jewish communities and especially Jewish communities in the diaspora where people are breathing new life into something sort of the opposite of loss and destruction.

[clip of klezmer song plays]

Judith: Well, somehow we find ourselves in June. We'll be taking the summer off to catch our breath and prepare for the fall season. In case you miss us too much, the summer is a great time to catch up on the episodes you haven't listened to yet. We have a total of 114 now, so, um, that's a lot of listening.

Jen: We also have a newsletter, and that's a good way to hear about upcoming episodes or behind the scenes things that we sometimes talk about. So you can sign up for that and other JWA newsletters at jwa.org/signup.

Nahanni: And if you have ideas for topics or people you think would be great for us to interview, you can get in touch with us over email at podcasts@jwa.org.

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Judith: Before we go, I have a quick ask: June is also the end of JWA's fiscal year, so if you've enjoyed listening to Can We Talk?, please consider making a donation to help us produce more episodes. To contribute, go to jwa.org/donate. Thanks so much for listening and for being part of the JWA community. We hope everyone has a great summer.

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