Bad Rabbi Media – Details, episodes & analysis

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Bad Rabbi Media

Rabbi Charlie Buckholtz

Religion & Spirituality

Society & Culture

Frequency: 1 episode/61d. Total Eps: 34

What does it mean to be a spiritual leader at this critical and chaotic moment in human history? Rabbi Charlie Buckholtz conducts intimate long-form interviews with other rabbis and culture-carriers, change-agents and court-jesters. On topics ranging from spiritual resistance to disorganized religion to Israel/Palestine to creativity to the possibility of individual and collective change, their lively journeys and conversations offer insight, humor, rare perspective and at times rank absurdity for its own sake--in the process sketching the contours of some compelling new possibilities.

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🇩🇪 Germany - judaism
22/06/2026
#86
🇩🇪 Germany - judaism
21/06/2026
#66

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Score global : 53%

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"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

Season 3 · Episode 8

Monday, February 19, 2024 • Duration 52:49

"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, there was the opportunity to recreate oneself; it valorized the outsider…and all those things spoke to me"). He talks about the process of becoming a filmmaker, including a possible encounter with the ghost of a dead punk rocker in the Nola hotel room he died in, and the horror shorts film festival he's curated for the past 11 years in Brooklyn -- interspersed with reminiscinces of his time apprenticing to a Hasidic Kabbalist in the Lower East Side who'd been a beat poet in the '50s. He also gets into his own religious and spiritual journey with Judaism, including the humbling intellectual intricacy of Talmud study. "It absolutely blows me away to see that the parts can fit better in a counterintuitive way…and it makes me also a little humble about my own intuitions…"

"I like films that are surprising…I like to delight the audience by surprising them," he told me, and this in some ways is the headline for his artistic process more broadly -- the canvas of which is not just film, not just writing, not just music, but life itself.

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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

Season 3 · Episode 7

Monday, January 22, 2024 • Duration 01:20:23

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 mourning. I find myself crying all the time. And it's just been like that continuously."

"We were on the way to shul, when a neighbor came and told us something was going on down south, and it's really bad...A good friend of ours lost his life that first day of fighting…this is a kid that we've known forever, we're good friends with his partners. So that's when it became very real."

"I was raised on Holocaust stories and pogrom stories, and it's not like that anymore, we're fighting back—and it's good that we're fighting back…But when you have power, you have responsibility—and we have responsibility also for the lives we're taking now..."

"I am livid at my government for allowing Hamas to sit on our border for the past 15 years…I think the reason was to keep the Palestinians divided. That was immoral and wrong."

"What we're doing is occupying the Palestinians for the past 50 years, and that is a moral stain on our country…and we were powerful enough to figure out how to solve it in some way. We were the more powerful party...We have to make people aware that as the more powerful party there are things we can do to move this thing along."

"How do we move people to a different place? It's not that they don't think the occuparion is immoral—they do think the occupation is immoral. They just think the alternative is national suicide."

"I want to live with these people. I want Gaza to be successful. But not if they're going to keep trying to kill me."

"We Need the Fantasy of a Destination and a Journey and a Path": Living Tangientially with Basya Schechter

Season 2 · Episode 6

Wednesday, May 17, 2023 • Duration 50:36

"I think this is such a great line for your podcast. It's from my third album, Exile. 'I am in exile in my own home. My real home is moving, it's a wandering home. I give birth to contradictions, I give up in indecision, and worry.' "

Basya Schecter is one of my favorite wanderers. From a prolific early singer-songwriter career as the leader of Pharaoh's Daughter, to her nine-year stint as the full-time musical director and then spiritual leader of communities in Manhattan and Brooklyn, to her recent sabbatical and transition to a more fluid mix of communal leadership and "musical adventures," she has embodied an insistence to listening to one's inner voice that I deeply admire. Speaking about the surprising comfort and inspiration she was able to find within the Jewish Renewal community (after a Hassidic upbringing in Borough Park that traumatized her relationship with Jewish community) — and about how the contingencies and demands of single-motherhood pushed her to reconfigure her life in a way that opened unexpected portals to self-connection — she is also frank about he perils of burnout and the non-negotiability of maintaining an active creative life.

"Creativity is finding the thing inside you that you didn't know was inside. To find that thing that's higher and beyond what I can actually do, and yet something that comes through anyway. And it's a surprise. Those are gifts. Those are such gifts. Then those gifts become your friends."

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"How Does it Feel?": Arnoff on Dylan on Empathy as Everything

Season 2 · Episode 5

Monday, March 27, 2023 • Duration 53:55

Dudes: please check out Stephen Daniel Arnoff's podcast and book, Bob Dylan: On Man and God and Law. One of my favorite pop-culture rabbit-holes, the podcast delivers on so many levels: informative, illuminating, a ton of fun and at times breathtakingly insightful. I was super excited to talk to him about how he came to approach song lyrics as sacred text, how music "saves your life and keeps you company," and his esteemed lineage of invaluably "weird" teachers ("Weird is good. I like weird.") He describes his journey from passionate singer-songwriter to pursuing a doctorate in ancient midrash, the Talmud professor who promised to help him "preserve a creative life" in the process, and the very live question that drives his musical-intellectual-spiritual work:

"I want to know if there is any meaningful use for religion? In the way that rock and roll is of use. In the way that love is of use. In the way that feeding people is of use."

He also gives his take on what, ultimately, Dylan's life's work is all about. Spoiler Alert: it's EMPATHY.

"The question How does it feel? is the question of the age. We live in an age where we're either going to fail as a human race for lack of empathy, or we're going to survive. Only those who are empathic will survive…You can't abuse, you can't enslave, you can't belittle another person if you have empathy."

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"If It Doesn't Hit You in the Kishkes It's Worthless": Jon Madof's Universe of Grooves

Season 2 · Episode 4

Monday, February 6, 2023 • Duration 01:16:15

One of the things I love most about Jon Madoff is that on any given day in the midst of of numbly scrolling on my phone to avoid contemplating any number of personal and collective inevitabilities, I can run into a video of him JAMMING TF OUT on his guitar -- alone in his basement with headphones, in a venue backing up a friends band, on an internet show or a clip from a festival leading his own band -- and for a minute or two be reminded of the pure joy of the creative process. As a musican, composer, and band leader, Madoff has made himself into a vehicle for some of the most innovative, virtuosic, and grooveworthy Jewish music being produced today. As a human, Jon opens up about how his creative life has been both crippled and catapulted by a navigation with intense anxiety, how music is a good addiction in the Marley-an sense of, "When it hits, you feel no pain," and why Fugazi hits him directly in the kishkes.

On navigating anxiety as a musician:

"That voice attacks what means the most to you: the overactive critical voice that does not stop telling you you did everything wrong. This barrage of self-criticism and self-doubt, just a million times a minute. The Buddhists call it monkey mind. I could very easily have an anxiety attack just listening to music. I was judging myself against who I was listening to. And I thought somehow that I should be able to analyze this piece of music and know exactly what is going on. And if I can't I'm just a failure!"

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"I'm Not Going to Be Anybody's Disciple": Sacred Nonconformity, Sahara Blues, and the Coming Cantorial Revolution with Jeremiah Lockwood

Season 2 · Episode 3

Tuesday, January 10, 2023 • Duration 36:17

Jeremiah Lockwood is not only the hardest working man in Jewish music, he is one of its truly great living visionaries and practitioners. In this great conversation he describes his journey growing up in a "cantorial family" with a grandfather who was a famous, record-selling star at the end of the "Golden Age" of Jewish cantorial music; to being a teenager obsessed with Southern Blues apprenticed to the great bluesman Carolina Slim; to starting his own band, The Sway Machinery, "singing hazzanus in a hard aggressive rock band that's sort of a hedonistic party band, and also a ritual experience, and also drawing very explicitly and heavily on West African music..." (because of course it does!) He talks about how his initial inspiration for the band came from a nomadic Saharan tribe whose members were transcribing their traditional music into a rock band format. Speaking of indigenous musical traditions (including Ashkenazi hazzanus) as forms of "esoteric knowledge," one of his overarching projects is to uncloister it so that "it should be readily available for people to get joy from it, in terms that are legible."

Listen to the interview, then go listen to his music!

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BAD RABBI VS. BAD RABBI: The Yiddish Press and Lost Models of Jewish Identity with Eddy Portnoy

Season 2 · Episode 2

Monday, December 5, 2022 • Duration 58:58

Check out this incredibly fun and lively live podcast recording I did with historian of Yiddish popular culture Eddy Portnoy. Appropriately enough, this episode, which deals with the lost forms of Jewish identity Eddy Excavated through his research in to the Yiddish Press, was itself temporarily lost. We recorded it in May 2020; in the interim, Eddy's insights about the lost and latent posibilities of Jewish culture and identity -- and the surprisingly moving and off-beat, often darkly hilarious tales they emerge from -- have only become more urgently relevant. Enjoy!

"Family lore conveniently forgets that Zeide the antiques dealer was actually Zeide the beggar; or that Bubbe the saintly seamstress was also Bubbe the hooker, who turned tricks during the slack season to make ends meet. These elisions are the lies we tell ourselves to elevate our pedigree and to make ourselves look palatable in the mirror of history. But along the way if we decide to ignore the sometimes ugly realities of our past, we lose some of the pieces of the story that make us human, and we do a disservice to the historical record."

- Eddy Portnoy, Bad Rabbi: And Other Strange But True Stories from the Yiddish Press

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IMPOSTER STORIES with Hal Niedzviecki

Season 2 · Episode 1

Thursday, November 10, 2022 • Duration 49:43

...the surprising things we learn about ourselves as we get older, the vast territories of unknown self suddenly exposed — eg, the ways our families' immigrant histories impact our live and choices and relationships, every day — and how bracing and humbling it can be to realize we've labored under such partial understandings — was a recurring theme Niedzviecki reflected in with deep insight. The conversation had me revisiting some of my memories about his parents, jovial suburbanites who loved a good barbecue and always had an extra fridge stuffed with canned sodas. Not knowing they were immigrants from Russia who started with nothing except a tin suitcase that remains in the family as an heirloom. "It's so easy to get lost in 21st century life. The first thing is, Who are you? Where do you come from. And if you don't have an answer for that, you're in trouble already."

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"There's a Difference Between Activists and People Working for Change": Rabbi Shaul Judelman on Hope, Despair, and Israel-Palestine PTSD

Monday, December 13, 2021 • Duration 01:21:29

Remember Israel, Palestine, etc.? For a few weeks in May it led most news cycles, between the end of Bibi's 12-year reign and installation of a new leading coalition, to the renewal of Gaza hostilities and the ultra-disturbing flashpoints of violence between Jewish and Palestinian Israelis. If this all feels a bit fuzzy and distant, to be fair it was like, FIVE WHOLE MONTHS AGO. That's why it was so great to recently catch up with Rabbi Shaul Judelman, our first return guest! As co-founder and director of Roots-Shorashim-Judur, which works at the grassroots level to build community among Israelis and Palestinians, Shaul brings a level of nuance, insight, clear-eyed vision and hard-earned experience to the conversation that is rare and indispensable. That's why I love talking to him -- and that's also why I was surprised, heartened, and surprised to be heartened by what he sees as signs of optimism, of all things, in some of the societal initiatives and dynamics that have developed in the aftermath of the violence and the initiation of a new era in Israeli political leadership.

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"We Will Mess Up, and That's Okay": Dasee Berkowitz on Becoming a Soulful Parent

Friday, May 7, 2021 • Duration 01:04:33

Parenting is one of those subjects where it always feels like there's a reverse correlation between how much it's talked about and how well it's understood. Like, the more we talk about it, the dumber we get. This is why I was so happy to read Dasee Berkowitz's new book, Becoming a Soulful Parent, and talk with her about it – because what she offers is a new way of talking about parenting that actually has the potential to make us wiser, and possibly even help us grow as people. Berkowitz, Director of the Becoming a Soulful Parent program at the Ayeka Institute in Jerusalem, explains the essence of her approach as asking ourselves this question, originally posed to the first human by his Creator – Ayeka? Where are you? – as a prompt for introspection: "Where are we as parents? What's triggering us? What's inspiring us? What can we imagine being different? Where are we stuck?" With a model that invites us to "really listen to ourselves and embrace our own vulnerability" – she offers a refreshing contrast to the "parent expert" approach. By her own account of her experience leading parenting workshops, being honest and real about her experience invites other parents to be honest and real about theirs, and listens deeply to each other.

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Bad Rabbi Media – Details, episodes & analysis

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Bad Rabbi Media – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

Recent rankings

Apple Podcasts

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Latest published episodes

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