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PODCAST

Return the Key: Jewish Questions for Everyone

“We are all…the unchosen, but we are nevertheless unchosen together.” - Judith Butler This is podcast in which Julie Carr and occasional cohosts interview artists, writers, activists, scholars, religious leaders and others, asking questions related to Jewish (and non-Jewish) themes, such as oneness and the one, time and the infinite, home and diaspora, return and renewal, knowing and unknowing, law and practice, text and textuality, the idea of justice and the idea of love.

religion & spirituality judaism

All Episodes

1:03:55

Episode 27: The Desire for an Origin is the Origin:...

Return the Key: Jewish Questions for Everyone ·

2025/11/25

In episode 27, I talk with poet Susan Gevirtz about her childhood growing up in Los Angeles, within the two “religions” of Hollywood and Freudian psychoanalysis. We talk about her early experiences in the world of Hollywood films through her grandfather’s work as the musical director for Universal, and her sense, even as a young person, that the world that was presented to her was a made place, invented and therefore radically open to inquiry. We dig into her ongoing project, The Guide School, a

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1:03:55

Episode 26: One Day We Will be What We Want: Anas...

Return the Key: Jewish Questions for Everyone ·

2025/10/25

In episode 26, I talk with Anas Qutob and Dave Snyder of Minneapolis about their friendship and their work as leaders in the Minnesota chapter of Friends of Standing Together—a grassroots progressive organization of Israeli Jews and Palestinians dedicated to peace, justice, and social transformation. Anas speaks of his childhood growing up during the Israeli invasion of his home city, Nablus, in the West Bank, and about working his way through law school before becoming a labor organizer in

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1:03:55

Episode 25: Citizens of the Whole World: Benjamin...

Return the Key: Jewish Questions for Everyone ·

2025/09/28

In episode 25, I speak with Benjamin Balthaser about his new book, Citizens of the Whole World: Anti-Zionism and the Cultures of the American Jewish Left, just published by Verso. Benjamin tells me about his beloved communist grandparents and his own background as a labor activist and longtime member of Jewish Voice for Peace. We discuss the historical precedents to the current eruption of anti-Zionism among U.S. Jews on the left as we dig into the history, especially from the 1970s, of Jewish

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1:03:55

Episode 24: Freedom from and Freedom to: Judith...

Return the Key: Jewish Questions for Everyone ·

2025/08/16

In episode 24, I speak with Judith Levine, journalist activist, and author of five books. Judith and I (who go way back!) discuss our shared experience of losing parents to Alzheimer’s, asking what makes a self if not language, if not the mind, asking how we can value one another, even when the “self” seems to be gone. We then discuss Judith’s co-authored book (with Erica L. Meiners), The Feminist and the Sex Offender: Confronting Sexual Harm, Ending State Violence. Judith talks about the intense

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1:03:55

Episode 23: Ensoulment: Lee Medovoi on the Security...

Return the Key: Jewish Questions for Everyone ·

2025/08/07

In episode 23, I speak with Lee Medovoi about his astounding new book, The Inner Life of Race: Souls, Bodies, and The History of Racial Power (Duke UP, 2024). Lee traces the histories of racialization, surveillance, policing, and carcerality from late Medieval Spain, through the development of racial-liberalism and capitalism to the present, asking how these deep histories help us to think of color-line racism, antisemitism, and Islamophobia as operating with similar logics, the logic of

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1:03:55

Episode 22: What if? What now?: Aaron Landsman on...

Return the Key: Jewish Questions for Everyone ·

2025/06/08

In episode 22, I speak with New York-based multidisciplinary artist Aaron Landsman about his 20-year project, Perfect City,a working group at the intersection of art, organizing, popular education and urban design. We discuss how our relationship to our Jewishness has been affected by the ongoing violence in Gaza, and we think together about the tension between utopian imagining—the “what if”—and the present-time demand to take care of one another within systemic challenges—the “what now.” We swirl

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1:03:55

Episode 21: dena harry saleh on queer Palestine...

Return the Key: Jewish Questions for Everyone ·

2025/06/01

In episode 21, I speak with writer, musician, and PhD student dena harry saleh. We discuss their father’s childhood experience in the Nakba, their own childhood growing up queer and Palestinian in Denver, and their young-adulthood in New York City. We then turn to two books that take up queer Palestine studies, Decolonial Queering in Palestine, by Walaa Alqaisiya, and Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique, by Sa’ed Atshan, and dena talks about their own research goals surrounding queer and

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1:03:55

Episode 20: “How do we carry that”? Janet Jacobs on...

Return the Key: Jewish Questions for Everyone ·

2025/05/18

In episode 20, I speak with esteemed feminist holocaust scholar, Janet Jacobs, about her work on holocaust memorialization and intergenerational trauma. We discuss Janet’s work on women in cults and on the crypto-Jews. We then dig into her books on the holocaust, one of which was recently banned from the US Naval Academy library by the Trump administration, and we get into the larger issue of weaponizing “antisemitism” in this moment. Janet explores the ethical and psychological challenges of

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1:03:55

Episode 19: “Words Open the Infinite”: Leslie Kaplan...

Return the Key: Jewish Questions for Everyone ·

2025/05/10

In episode 19, Jennifer Pap and I talk with American-French poet, novelist, and playwright, Leslie Kaplan (born in 1943), whose revolutionary writing we have been translating. As a student, Kaplan participated in the occupation of French factories in ‘68 and the May uprising and general strike that followed. Several years later she resided and worked at La Borde, a radical non-hierarchical psychiatric clinic directed by Jean Oury. Oury was a leading figure in the psychothérapie institutionnelle

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1:03:55

Episode 18: And yet, not yet: a trans-poetics: Syd Zolf

Return the Key: Jewish Questions for Everyone ·

2025/03/23

In episode 18, I talk with poet and theorist Syd Zolf about two of their recent projects, No One’s Witness: A Monstrous Poetics, a critical book that draws from Black studies as it engages the problem of witnessing atrocity, and NEUTRØIS, a forthcoming book of poems. We talk about grief and loss, intergenerational trauma, the notion of the unanswerable question as a foundational Jewish practice, and the idea of witnessing from the position of the “no one.” We explore citational writing, procedural

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1:03:55

Episode 17: The Stranger Inside of Us: David Naimon

Return the Key: Jewish Questions for Everyone ·

2025/03/08

In episode 17, I talk with writer and podcast host David Naimon about his vexed relationship with listening, his childhood experiences of antisemitism, and his decision to leave medical practice behind. Digging into three episodes of his acclaimed literary podcast, Between the Covers, that have deeply affected me—his conversations with Isabella Hammad, Anne de Marcken, and Daniel Mendelsohn—we talk about the ethics of encounter, the stranger within the self, the “others” at the heart of Judaism, and

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1:03:55

Episode 16: Towards Another: Na’ama Rokem on Hannah...

Return the Key: Jewish Questions for Everyone ·

2025/02/11

In episode 16, I talk with literary scholar Na’ama Rokem about her work-in-progress, Dispatches in Translation: A German-Hebrew Epistolary Network, which studies the correspondences between mid-century Jewish intellectuals writing in and between German and Hebrew. The project focuses on ambivalences and debates surrounding Zionism from the 1930s through the early 70’s. We discuss and read from Hannah Arendt’s correspondences with Gershom Scholem and James Baldwin, and Paul Celan’s exchange with

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1:03:55

Episode #15: “My Warsaw”: Magdalena Zurawski on the...

Return the Key: Jewish Questions for Everyone ·

2025/02/05

In episode #15 I talk with writer Magdalena Zurawski about her research into her great-grandfather, Czeslaw Kowalczyk’s, story. Arrested by the Nazi’s during the Warsaw Uprising, he was taken to a concentration camp. Magdalena spent 2022-23 on a Fulbright Scholarship in Warsaw, tracking what happened next and growing obsessed with twentieth-century avant-garde Polish writer Miron Białoszewski. We discuss the uprising, which led to the Nazi destruction of Warsaw and the killing of 250,000 Polish

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1:03:55

Episode #14: The Open Tent: Sondra Loring on Dance...

Return the Key: Jewish Questions for Everyone ·

2025/01/19

In this first episode of the spring 2025 season, I talk with dance-artist Sondra Loring about our work together in the ‘90s initiating and running the New York Improvisation Festival, and about Sondra’s work now as a dance maker, a teacher, a prison abolitionist, and a steward of land in the Hudson Valley. We talk about “knowledge” vs. practice in Jewish traditions, the intimacy of knowing a person through movement, Fred Moten’s language, Yoshiko Chuma’s Living Room Projects, prison abolitionists

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1:03:55

Episode #13: To Begin (again) with Justice: Prof....

Return the Key: Jewish Questions for Everyone ·

2024/10/31

In this final episode of the season, Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman and I talk with Professor Almút Shulamit Bruckstein Çoruh, beginning with her years in the Neo-Hasidic movement studying with Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi (the founder of Jewish Renewal) and her decades of study in Jerusalem with Talmudic scholar Rabbi HaRav Zev (Walter) Gotthold. We discuss the power and importance of names, the founding of psychoanalysis, and Shulamit’s English translation of, and commentary on, Hermann Cohen’s

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1:03:55

Episode #11: Are Atheists Allowed to Pray?: Daniel...

Return the Key: Jewish Questions for Everyone ·

2024/10/14

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—and about the tension between our sense of responsibility for and connection to those we share

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1:03:55

Episode #12: “There where the heart has its...

Return the Key: Jewish Questions for Everyone ·

2024/10/11

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 early 20th-century when many Jewish immigrants strived to assimilate to whiteness in a violently

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1:03:55

Episode #10: A Plurality of Intensities: Selah...

Return the Key: Jewish Questions for Everyone ·

2024/09/23

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 mean to work on the edge of the knowable? What does a good divination session really look like? What is

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1:03:55

Episode #9: What are you going through?: Scott Ritner...

Return the Key: Jewish Questions for Everyone ·

2024/09/19

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 relationship between openness to God and openness to the neighbor? What might a society of “attention” look

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1:03:55

Episode #8: “You are Welcome Here”: Hilary Falb...

Return the Key: Jewish Questions for Everyone ·

2024/09/19

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 the classroom; students’ fears and desires to learn; and how to create an inclusive and open college

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27 results

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