Talk about bupkes! – Details, episodes & analysis

Also available on YouTube and most anywhere else you get your podcasts.

For a historian, the Second World War and Germany’s genocide of European peoples are the gift — also in the German sense — that keeps on giving. There seems to be no end to stories one can tell.

Some of those stories are more bizarre than others. Like how Finland’s Jews ended up fighting, on occasion side-by-side, with Germans against the Soviet Union. Not in secret, but openly. In some ways, even proudly.

Oula Silvennoinen, a leading Finnish researcher in Holocaust studies and fascism, explains that history as well as the moral and political cognitive dissonance it fomented — for Finns, Germans, and Jews.

This small corner of Holocaust history has implications for our understanding of it, the role antisemitism plays in European memory politics, and our current era of resurgent nationalism and right-wing populism, which has produced its own share of unlikely bedfellows.

If you like this conversation, you may also be interested in The Bupkes’ other recent Finland-adjacent coverage:

Music by The Bupkes’ own Chief Goy Liaison Officer, Wiliam Succumbs. Let us know what you think of it!

NB: Transcript and captions are auto-generated, so errors — spelling and otherwise — are to be expected. The interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Also available on YouTube and most anywhere else you get your podcasts.

In her young life, state-sanctioned violence is all Shahd Alnaami has ever known. It’s a violence that has only metastasized since 7 October, as she and more than two million of her fellow residents of Gaza have endured Israel’s relentless war of revenge, siege, and collective punishment.

In that time, Shahd’s friends and family have been killed, her beloved libraries and university have been shattered, and the bare minimum needed to sustain life has remained dangerously elusive.

Out of grief and trauma, however, grow not anger and disillusionment but hope and persistence. Shahd shared with us a glimpse of what that means.

She read us one of her essays, reprinted here with her permission:

for Dr. Refaat Alareer Sept. 3, 1979 – Dec. 6, 2023 So many of us still hold our phones, read your poems — not losing hope, but we’re tired of sleeping in fear, tired of being displaced, living in tents, haunted by horrors that linger in our minds. A missile pierced the silence, burning all the tents — including you. I have not forgotten. Nights become nightmares, children cry from the cold, their laughter, once bright, now a distant echo. We yearn to return, free from fear. When will these bloody nights end? When will this tragedy stop? When will our normal lives return, and our distant dreams come true? We keep asking, “Will this pass?” And remember how you used to say, “It shall pass… I keep hoping it shall pass…” Still, we wait for the day peace will dawn, and a new chapter open its bleary eyes.

Shahd — a writer, translator, and student of English literature — also gave us some reading recommendations:

* They Called Me a Lioness by Ahed Tamimi and Dena Takruri

* American War by Omar El Akkad

* The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappé

You can order a print or digital copy of her collection of essays here. If you’re interested in supporting Shahd directly, visit this gofundme page.

NB: Transcript and captions are auto-generated, so errors — spelling and otherwise — are to be expected. The interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Also available on YouTube!

Writer, activist, and real mentsh Wael Eskandar talks to “Talk about bupkes!” about his experience in Germany protesting for Palestine, why doing anything is more than nothing but less than something, and how that message resonates with all the “Janas” out there.

If you’re looking for hope, you’ve come to the wrong place. But if you’re looking for solidarity as you try to figure out how to live in an era of exploding pagers, have a listen and give us a share.

NB: Transcript and captions are auto-generated, so errors — spelling and otherwise — are to be expected.

In a wide-ranging conversation, The Bupkes sits down with the last person in Brussels in August. Manus Carlisle handles media relations for The Left, the European Parliament group that consists of leftist parties from across the European Union.

Manus takes stock of the state of European democracy and leftist responses to resurgent forms of nationalism, militarism, and moral panic. On a more cosmic level, he considers what Europe’s left can be in the historical absence of the Jewish thinking that informed so much of it.

NB: Transcript and captions are auto-generated, so errors — spelling and otherwise — are to be expected. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

From Berlin, Talmudist and philosopher Oded Schechter gives The Bupkes a rare interview about how the nation-state of Israel, as an expression of Jewish nationalism, does not liberate the Jew but, to the contrary, subjugates him.

NB: Transcript is auto-generated, so errors — spelling and otherwise — are to be expected. This interview has been edited for clarity.

Further reading:

Christian Zionism

George Eliot, author

Daniel Deronda, novel

The Worms Mahzor

Israel’s National Library and ownership of Palestinian cultural property

The 1956 Suez war

A conversation with Wieland Hoban, the chair of Jüdische Stimme für gerechten Frieden in Nahost (Jewish Voice for just peace in the Middle East), about what it’s like to be on the same domestic intelligence list as neo-Nazis, foreign agents, and conspiracy cults — not to mention Germany’s second-largest party in parliament.

(NB: Transcript is auto-generated, so errors — spelling and otherwise — are to be expected.)

Further reading:

A conversation with writer/researcher Elia Ayoub on simple media narratives, a Hebrew-Yiddish throwdown, and the throughline of the politics of memory (and forgetting).

“Talk about bupkes!” is also available on YouTube and most anywhere else you get your podcasts.

Watch out for the Yiddish professor with a manifesto. Saul Noam Zaritt takes us back to a time when Jewish was German — that is, when Yiddish was taytsh. But taytsh is much more than that; it’s a way of understanding a language and the culture it carries as anything but fixed, stable, and unified.

Oy! A real kopdreyenish for political power and national sovereignty.

In some ways, Yiddish is all the cliches you think it is. In others, it’s a language between languages, extending in all directions; in pursuit of empire, getting crushed by it, only to be reimagined in other times and places.

Want more? Check out Saul’s database of Yiddish popular fiction. And if you like this episode, show your support by sharing and subscribing to The Bupkes.

Music by The Bupkes’ own Chief Goy Liaison Officer, Wiliam Succumbs. Let us know what you think of it!

NB: Transcript and captions are auto-generated, so errors — spelling and otherwise — are to be expected. The interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Also available on YouTube and most anywhere else you get your podcasts.

When The Bupkes came across Subschtick, we knew we had to do an interview together. Lucky us, the Oxford DPhil behind it just put out a book that we wanted to know more about. Even luckier us, she turned up in Brussels, which meant we got the rare treat of doing an episode IRL.

In Don’t Talk About Politics, Sarah Stein Lubrano puts the political together with the sociological together with the psychological to try to figure out why lofty liberal ideals like debate, reason, and persuasion don’t seem to be working anymore — at least in places that really love their liberalism (or claim to), like the United States and the United Kingdom.

And that’s happening all the while economic and technological developments are pushing people into ever deeper isolation. That’s been taking a nasty toll on how we relate to each other as citizens in a shared society.

What could go wrong?

If that sounds grim, and also familiar, it is! Fortunately, Sarah is the talmudic type: If you don’t like what you’re seeing, try looking at it a little differently. She has a few suggestions for how people might act politically in the world just a little bit more effectively.

But who are we to tell you how to act? Take it or leave it, but first of all have a listen to it.

Many thanks to Full Circle for helping make this interview possible.

Music by The Bupkes’ own Chief Goy Liaison Officer, Wiliam Succumbs. Let us know what you think of it!

NB: Transcript and captions are auto-generated, so errors — spelling and otherwise — are to be expected. The interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

“Talk About Bupkes!” is also available on YouTube and most anywhere else your ears go for podcasts.

London-based artist Arjan Guerrero is the research director of Media Forensis, which seeks to understand how our reality is mediated by agents—both human and non-human.

Join us for a wild conversation that takes us to the edge of something, where we find absolutely—yes, you guessed it:

bupkes.

And there’s more!

Don’t miss this week’s Bupkes Broken Clock of the Week. Listen to find out who the winner is—and don’t forget to subscribe, share, like, and tell all your friends (and enemies) about The Bupkes.

We’re excited to have William Noah Glucroft (or Gluhcroft? We can never remember and don’t care enough to double-check) host Talk About Bupkes! William brings The Bupkes some much-needed journalistic integrity and, best of all, he’s not nearly important enough to have anything to do with Jeffrey Epstein. (Plus, we kinda owe him one.)

Music by The Bupkes’ own Chief Goy Liaison Officer, Wiliam Succumbs. Let us know what you think of it!

NB: Transcript and captions are auto-generated, so errors — spelling and otherwise — are to be expected. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.