Return the Key: Jewish Questions for Everyone – Details, episodes & analysis

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Return the Key: Jewish Questions for Everyone

Julie Carr

Religion & Spirituality

Society & Culture

Frequency: 1 episode/22d. Total Eps: 37

“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.

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Apple Podcasts

🇺🇸 USA - judaism
23/08/2026
#97
🇩🇪 Germany - judaism
22/08/2026
#96
🇩🇪 Germany - judaism
21/08/2026
#87
🇩🇪 Germany - judaism
20/08/2026
#73
🇩🇪 Germany - judaism
22/04/2026
#75
🇩🇪 Germany - judaism
21/04/2026
#42
🇩🇪 Germany - judaism
20/04/2026
#35
🇩🇪 Germany - judaism
16/04/2026
#83
🇫🇷 France - judaism
26/03/2026
#97
🇫🇷 France - judaism
25/03/2026
#75

Spotify

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Episode #9: What are you going through?: Scott Ritner on Simone Weil’s Political Philosophy

Season 1 · Episode 7

Thursday, September 19, 2024 • Duration 01:03:55

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 like? What are some of the complexities of pacifism and anti-statism? What might mean to create a society of attention? And finally, how does Scott read Weil as a Jewish thinker, necessary for us today?

Note: For our use of the term “thingification” see Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism.

Other texts and authors discussed:

George Herbert, “Love III”

Kathryn Lawson, Ecological Ethics and the Philosophy of Simone Weil: Decreation for the Anthropocene. Routledge, 2024.

Emmanuel Levinas, “Simone Weil and the Bible” in Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, Trans. Sean Hand. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.

Kenneth Novis.

Scott B. Ritner joined the Political Science department at the University of Colorado Boulder in 2022 following appointments at SUNY Potsdam (2021-2022) and Temple University (2018-2021). He earned his PhD from The New School for Social Research in 2018. Scott's research focuses on 20th and 21st Century Critical Social Theory, Race & Ethnic Politics, and Popular Culture including literature and music. His manuscript in progress is titled Revolutionary Pessimism: The Antifascist Politics of Simone Weil. He is currently President of the American Weil Society (http://www.americanweilsociety.org). He teaches courses in Political Theory, American Politics, and Comparative Politics. When not researching or teaching, you can [try to] find him in the mountains. His work on Simone Weil can be found in Theory & Event, in various edited volumes, and at H-Net France.

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Episode #8: “You are Welcome Here”: Hilary Falb Kalisman on Teaching the History of Israel-Palestine

Season 2 · Episode 8

Thursday, September 19, 2024 • Duration 01:03:55

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 classroom when teaching the histories of Israel /Palestine.

Texts and authors discussed:

Hilary Falb Kalisman, T eachers as State-Builders: Education in the Modern Middle East . Princeton University Press, 2022.

Hilary Falb Kalisman, “`A World of Tomorrow’: Diaspora Intellectuals and Liberal Thought in the 1950s”

Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, "The Palestinian Exile as Writer,” 1979

Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness, 2004.

Textbooks mentioned:

Rashid Khalidi,

Episode #7: What if the border itself began to talk?: Yanara Friedland

Season 1 · Episode 7

Thursday, June 6, 2024 • Duration 01:03:55

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 discussed:

Walter Benjamin: On the Concept of History

The Oneg Shabbat Archive

Bruno Shulz

Yanara Friedland is a writer born in Berlin. She is the author of Uncountry: A Mythology (2016) and Groundswell (2021). Both books have appeared in German translation with Matthes und Seitz Berlin. Her current writing on sleeplessness investigates the relationship between political violence and nocturnal imagination, the aftermath of traumatic events as wakeful presence permeating language. She teaches at Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies.

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Episode #6: An Insurrection of Imaginaries: Nabil Echchaibi

Season 1 · Episode 6

Monday, April 22, 2024 • Duration 01:05:14

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 also discusses the tension between “movement and belonging,” and the desire for opacity in the face of Islamophobia’s demand for revelation.

Texts discussed:

Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation

Nabil’s essays at Al-Jazeera

Nabil Echchaibi is Associate Professor of Media Studies and Director of the Center for Media, Religion and Culture at the University of Colorado Boulder. His research and teaching focus on media, religion, and the politics and poetics of Muslim visibility. His work on Muslim media cultures, diasporic media, and decoloniality has appeared in various journals and in many book publications. He is the author of Voicing Diasporas: Ethnic Radio in Paris and Berlin Between Culture and Renewal and co-editor of International Blogging: Identity, Politics and Networked Publics; Media and Religion: The Global View; and He’s currently writing his book: Drawing on a vast literature in Black and Africana studies, Islamic studies, decolonial theory, cultural studies, and media studies, this book develops a theory of Muslim fugitivity as a practice of imagining a world of possibility that has not been visibilized and documented yet but has existed all along. Is there more to Muslimness, he asks, beyond the tussle of geopolitics, terror talk, and religious orthodoxy?

Episode #5: The Technology of Grieving: Candace Nunag Tardío

Season 1 · Episode 5

Sunday, April 21, 2024 • Duration 54:58

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," and wonder what efforts toward happiness we might owe to our dead.

Candace Nunag Tardío is the author of the forthcoming book A Solar Flare (FC2, 2025). She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Colorado Boulder and is currently working on a PhD in Literary Arts & Creative Writing at the University of Denver. Candace is also the founder and director of Last Writes, a project centered around eulogy and obituary writing advocacy for people with no prior writing or public speaking experience.

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Episode #4: Queer Judaism: Coming out again and again and again: Daniel Eisenberg and Rabbi Dave Yedid

Season 1 · Episode 4

Saturday, April 20, 2024 • Duration 47:17

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 feminine, the shekinah.

Daniel Eisenberg is a somatic therapist & Jewish educator. He is originally from London, UK and had been living in Denver since 2022 where he runs Base Denver with his husband Rabbi Dave Yedid. He is passionate about opening space for multiple identities to coexist.

Rabbi Dave Yedid is the founding rabbi and leader of Base Denver. Originally from New York state, he received his MA in Gender Studies and rabbinic ordination from Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Prior to rabbinical studies, Dave worked as a wilderness guide in therapeutic and camp settings. He is passionate about reclaiming the wild, witchy elements of Judaism.

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Episode 3: The first principle is the principle of Lostness: Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman

Season 1 · Episode 3

Thursday, April 18, 2024 • Duration 01:26:17

Julie talks with poet-artist Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman about his project Wierzba Estery / Esther’s Willow, a collaboration with artists Katarzyna and Marta Sala in Chrzanów (PL), a half-Jewish city until the Nazi genocide and postwar processes that continued a long century of ethnic cleansing. The project gestures into the city’s traumatic recent past to reach an old and intimate space of transcultural ancestral experience and horizontal implication, where Jewish and Slavic communities in Poland mutually, collaboratively, and differently depended on willow trees to treat viruses, diseases, infertility, and bodily pain, exchanging knowledge, treatments, practitioners, and patients at a site of nonhuman mourning that continues, even nominally (“weeping willow”), to mediate between the living and the dead.

We also discuss Robert’s earlier piece, Lost in Jüdischer Friedhof Weißensee. This project came into its most public manifestation in response to the 2018 Great March of Return massacres in Gaza. Robert enacted what he calls a “Counter-Ruin,” in which “Gaza” is written across his back in three languages as he walks through Berlin carrying stones to deposit in Jüdischer Friedhof Weißensee, the largest Jewish cemetery in Berlin.

We discuss the urgent need for a “new universalism” or a “critical universalism,” and the seemingly intractable problem of, and violence inherent within, the nation-state. “Instead of space we have time and text: that’s Judaism,” says Robert, as we seek a principle of the unfinished and unsettled.

Projects discussed:

Esther’s Willow

The Hopkins Review: A Willow (Grave) That Knows a Felled Willow (Mourner) That Knew an Eradicated Square (Woman)

Dream Text: Gaza Walks

Episode 2: Humming with: Dr. Sarah Pessin

Season 1 · Episode 2

Wednesday, April 17, 2024 • Duration 57:14

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, interfaith work, and Sarah’s Jewish childhood in Brooklyn.

Sarah Pessin is Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Thought at the University of Denver. She holds an Interfaith Chair, and works in areas of phenomenology, existentialism, Neoplatonism, interfaith civics, philosophy of religion, ethics, and social justice. She has won a teaching award from the graduate student council of the DU-Iliff Joint Doctoral Program in the Study of Religion, has served as a Fellow with the American Council on Education, and is the new Director of Spiritual Life for DU's Student Affairs and Inclusive Excellence. She is the author of Ibn Gabirol’s Theology of Desire: Matter and Method in Jewish Medieval Neoplatonism (Cambridge University Press, 2013).

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Episode 1: Getting to Know Us: Julie Carr and Jason Lipeles

Season 1 · Episode 1

Tuesday, April 16, 2024 • Duration 38:25

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.”

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Episode #13: To Begin (again) with Justice: Prof. Almút Shulamit Bruckstein Çoruh & House of Taswir

Season 2 · Episode 8

Thursday, October 31, 2024 • Duration 01:03:55

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 Ethics of Maimonides (1908). Cohen finds in Maimonides a “non-foundational, anarchic thinking of origin,” in which justice, lovingkindness, and goodness are demanded of us, in which ethics precedes being. Can we still stand-in for this diasporic Jewish humanist tradition, given the relentlessness of genocidal violence in Gaza (and beyond) now? Can Israel (the people) ever divest themselves of Israel (the state)? Is it still possible to “anticipate” human goodness, when humanity is so defiled? We come finally to an extreme hopefulness, turning to art, community, action, and study as pathways toward a re-occupied non-foundational, non-territorial tradition. Again (and again), says Shulamit, we must find the courage to “switch beginnings.”

Individuals and texts mentioned and discussed:

Almút Sh. Bruckstein Çoruh, “Talmudic War Machine & a Shadow’s Dream”

Prof. Almút Sh. Bruckstein Çoruh, “The Talmudic Bride and her Shadow’s Dream, A Letter to the Psychoanalyst of my Beloved” (2022)

Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childood around 1900, Translated by Howard Eiland

Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi

Rabbi HaRav Zev (Walter) Gotthold

The complete correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Karl Abraham (1907-1925). Translated by Caroline Schwarzacher

Return the Key: Jewish Questions for Everyone – Details, episodes & analysis

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Return the Key: Jewish Questions for Everyone – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

Recent rankings

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

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Publication history

Latest published episodes

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Other99+

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