Return the Key: Jewish Questions for Everyone

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 walls come down, and who witnesses the monster we are when we do not sleep. Texts and authors

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 Glissant’s Poetics of Relation? How might nomadism function in opposition to the violence of borders? Nabil

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," andwonder what efforts toward happiness we might owe to our dead.Candace Nunag Tardíois the author of the forthcoming bookA Solar Flare(FC2,

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 love, queer-time, Jewish-time, and the pleasure and power of submitting and surrendering to the divine

Julie talks with poet-artist Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman about his projectWierzba Estery / Esther’s Willow, a collaboration with artists Katarzyna and Marta Sala in Chrzanów (PL), ahalf-Jewish city until the Nazi genocide and postwar processes that continued a long century of ethnic cleansing. The projectgestures intothe city’s traumaticrecentpast to reach an old and intimate space of transcultural ancestral experience and horizontal implication, where Jewish and Slavic communities in Poland

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 structure of self that helps us to face the world? We also discuss Neoplatonism, phenomenology, the pulse,

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.” Julie Carr is the author of 12 books of poetry and prose, includingClimate,co-written with Lisa Olstein,Real Life: An Installation,Objects from a Borrowed Confession, and Someone Shot my Book. Earlier