"It’s Not a Time for Dialogue. It’s Just a Time for Checking Up on Each Other": The Tragedy of Victim-ism and Other Casualties of War with Coexistence Activist Rabbi Shaul Judelman
Release Date: 12/19/2023
"The Whole Book is Sort of a Meditation, a Prayer Designed to Protect the Person Who is Reading It": The Punk Rock Jewish Life of Author/Filmmaker Jeff Wengrofsky
Bad Rabbi Media
"The whole book is sort of a meditation, of a prayer designed to protect the person who is reading it." Jeff Wengrofsky, the most authentic punk-rock person I personally know, wrote a memoir, and you should buy it and read it. In some ways an unintentional pean to the Lower East Side, Jeff gets into what it was like to grow up feeling like an outsider ("The sensation of feeling like an outsider is not a pleasant one, so I was looking to find some new form of community, and let go of whatever past I had") and why discovering punk was a world-opening revelation ("Punk rock was very theatrical,...
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"How Do We Move People to a Different Place?": Assessing the War While Dreaming Past It with Israeli Citizen Shawn Ruby
Bad Rabbi Media
It was both challenging and illuminating to speak with my old friend Shawn Ruby, an Israeli citizen who is deeply rooted in his Zionist identity (having originated in Canada and raised his family and made his life in Israel, one child a high-ranking IDF officer), firmly anchored in an unwavering pursuit of moral clarity, and overall one of the most thoughtful people I know. We spoke an hour past the time the last group of hostages was supposed to be let out, in the midst of what he described as a great national anxiety, "everyone is sitting by their radios and tvs." "There is enormous...
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"It’s Not a Time for Dialogue. It’s Just a Time for Checking Up on Each Other": The Tragedy of Victim-ism and Other Casualties of War with Coexistence Activist Rabbi Shaul Judelman
Bad Rabbi Media
"One of my Palestinian friends said, Everybody’s pro-Hamas right now. Cause they did something! On an internal level, hamas’ bid to take over leadership of the Palestinian struggle is very strong. On the other hand, I have another Palestinian friend saying, what do you mean — Hamas is a disaster for our people. It’s always been a disaster for our people. We’re all sitting around not working for a month now…" Whenever anything happens in Israel, the person I want to hear from the most is Rabbi Shaul Judelman, Israeli resident of the West Bank town Tekoa, coexistence activist and...
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POETRY BONUS EPISODE! "Do They Sing, or Repeat a Song?": Laws vs. Miracles & the "Jewish Voices Missing from the Gospels," with Poet Atar Hadari
Bad Rabbi Media
Poetry, right? I don't know about you but I'm feeling like I could use some poetry right about now. To that end! Right before the High Holidays started I had a conversation with one of my favorite Jewish writers, poet and translator Atar Hadari. The episode was slated for release on Monday 10/9, and of course intervening world events made it nearly impossible to think about poetry, much less listen to it read aloud, much less claim a moment of open-ended reflection to contemplate, assimilate, absorb. But at this point, I feel like we could all use a bit of poetry in our lives. And Atar's...
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"I Just Couldn't Accept That That Was Something That Was Being Said": Contemplating Humanity & Inhumanity from "A Weird Place," with Joshua Leifer
Bad Rabbi Media
"So now I'm in a weird place" is a sentiment many can relate to these days. Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza, following the latter's barbaric 10/7 torture-rape-massacre of 1400 Israelis, and kidnapping of 240 more, has provoked some of the most acute fissures of my generation, with implications that can't be fully predicted except to say we will be living with them for generations more. Joshua Leifer experienced what he describes as an acute awakening about the nature of left-politics in the wake of the massacre. "I reacted very personally to people I knew personally from the left-journalism...
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HIGH HOLIDAY MOVIE BONUS EPISODE with Daniel Zana from the Jews on Film podcast!
Bad Rabbi Media
“We are all characters in our stories, and we have to look internally, and hopefully at the end of 90 minutes we’ll become a better person. But sometimes the characters don’t change, and you’re just like, ‘Oh, you were offered the opportunity to grow and learn from your experiences, and instead you’re still being the same turd you started out as.’ ” Bonus episode! I've been wanting to interview the awesome Daniel Zana for a while because I'm such a huge fan of the Jews on Film podcast he cohosts with Harry Ottensoser. There are so many different kinds of Jews, and so many ways...
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"What is the Purpose of a Synagogue?": Championing Compassion, Curiosity & Awe with Rabbi Angela Buchdal
Bad Rabbi Media
Since arriving at Central Synagogue almost two decades ago, Rabbi Angela Buchdal has transformed it into a sui generis experience of communal prayer: backed by a professional band and musical director, her own professionally trained singing voice, and a crew of clerical colleagues with similarly formidable vocal skills, not only is Central’s building packed, their livestream boasts an endless scroll of remote participants from around the country and across the world. This has all happened at a time when in general, Jews are exiting Jewish institutions and rejecting traditional...
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"No One Has Screamed for Justice": Can We Summon the Moral Courage to Hold Epstein Abusers Accountable? with Nick Bryant
Bad Rabbi Media
Friends, I can't tell you enough how excited I am to share my most recent Bad Rabbi Media interview with Nick Bryant -- intrepid investigative journalist, author (The Franklin Scandal), interviewer (The Nick Bryant Podcast), and most recently, Director of epsteinjustice.com -- an organization dedicated to pursuing accountability for the scores of victims abused and traumatized by Jeffrey Epstein's government-backed child-trafficking ring. Nick has been investigating and uncovering similar operations, in which children are pandered to social and political elites, who are then permanently...
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"Teaching From the Mud": Wandering, Witnessing, and Awakening with Melanie Landau
Bad Rabbi Media
Early in my conversation with return guest Melanie Landau, I told her that she is one of my favorite wanderers, and she responded that I'm one of her favorite witnesses. Of course, it's an honor to witness such high-level wandering with the intensity of introspection and the commitment to translating insight into practice that Melanie brings to her wandering path. We talked a lot about the deep grief she has worked through since the breakup of her marriage, the host of realizations that emerged from that process, and the work she has done to leverage those realizations into growth. "Like, how...
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“What’s the Jewish Future You Believe In?”: Systemic Strategies for Structural Change with Jordan Mann of the Jewish Liberation Fund
Bad Rabbi Media
I was pretty rapt listening to Jordan Mann articulate the vision for a progressive Jewish future – and not only because “power,” “systemic strategies,” and “structural change” are my love language. Jordan’s personal connection to the work, both the crackling passion he brings to it and the personal journey that brought him there – from his childhood as the son of a Jewish father and black mother in “very white and conservative” central Illinois (“The reform synagogue would have evangelical Christians come in to teach us about Muslims”), to working with college...
info_outline"One of my Palestinian friends said, Everybody’s pro-Hamas right now. Cause they did something! On an internal level, hamas’ bid to take over leadership of the Palestinian struggle is very strong. On the other hand, I have another Palestinian friend saying, what do you mean — Hamas is a disaster for our people. It’s always been a disaster for our people. We’re all sitting around not working for a month now…"
Whenever anything happens in Israel, the person I want to hear from the most is Rabbi Shaul Judelman, Israeli resident of the West Bank town Tekoa, coexistence activist and co-founder/co-director of the non-profit Roots-Shorashim-Judur. That's why he is BAD RABBI's first 3rd-time guest, and why I'm so excited to stop typing right now and get this episode up so you can listen to it already. I basically just dumped out all of my current observations, anxieties, analyses, and critiques on the (metaphorical) table in front of Shaul and asked him to poke, prod, add, subtract, organize, and shed his own considerable light on it. We didn't agree about everything, but imo it would be silly not to take everything he sees and says very seriously.
Here are some salient excerpts from our conversation:
"Society is overflowing with purpose. Because it’s The Home. The Home has been shattered... So there’s this incredible sense of unity…The army failed us. The government is inept in many ways. In general we’ve been on a long slide of losing faith in our national institutions that are supposed to take care of us. But the Israeli society has just stepped up in the most emotive, amazing way, to take care of each other...
"[Prior to 10/7,] the reservists were threatening not to serve. The pilots were threatening not to fly. The leaders on both sides were just fanning all they vitriol. So it looked pretty bad. So when the attack came, I imagine Iran and hezbollah thought we were a society that was falling apart. But we were already enlisted. You had 300,000 people who were already enlisted to show up every Saturday night to fight for the Israeli they believed in. For the values they believe in. For the home they want to live in...By the next day [i.e. 10/8], the big protest movement had organized a control room and were evacuating people under fire from all the border towns, setting up places for people to go, already doing the food package in…it was a matter of sending out a WhatsApp on the channel. Because the network was there…the army at the end of the day turned to them for inspiration."
Why is Bibi still in office?
"The entire north of the country is worries about hiznollah commandos storming in through a tunnel…That day of reckoning is going to come. But the sense of right now, the most important thing to do is that our people in the south can’t go home until Hamas is out of power, until their ability to fight is done. Until that’s done, there’s a big swath of our country that is empty. And we owe it to those people who we’ve already failed to give them the security that they can live their lives within the established borders of the state of Israel."
"Imagine you’re a Palestinian committed to peace, and your Israeli partner says, 'I think we have to hit Gaza, we have to hit Hamas, I don’t see another way out.' The cost of that, whet it means on the Palestinian civilian life is tremendous and how can you possibly say that. But I think that most Israelis have come to that feeling."
"On the Israeli side, people were triggered by Palestinians saying, I don’t think any children were killed, Hamas only attacks military targets, your media is lying to you. And you have someone in our WhatsApp group who just buried her niece."
"For a lot of people, the question of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is, who is the victim? & both sides have a pretty good case. But if you’re a Palestinian and you’ve been watching the world ignore you more and more, and looking at Occupation get worse, and Israel doing this, and the world's not paying attention, and all of a sudden the world is coming out and saying that the Israelis are the victim?…[And at the same time,] if you’re going to look at what happened on Oct 7, and you’re NOT able say that Israelis are the victim??…
"So right there is a very challenging moment.
"People hold onto their victimhood, because they’re some kind of weird thought in the world that whoever is the victim is right. And it’s really a very detrimental perspective on the world. Because it just leads people to claim victimhood."