Daisy Abboudi is a historian and the creator of Tales of Jewish Sudan, an oral history archive documenting the Jewish community of Sudan through interviews, photographs and recipes. She began the project in 2015, initially to record her family's recipes, and went on to interview around seventy former community members living in America, Israel, Geneva and beyond. She has also worked with Sephardi Voices UK, interviewing Jews displaced from across the Middle East and North Africa.
Key Topics
Origins: how Jews from across the Ottoman Empire - Iraqi, Egyptian, Syrian, Moroccan - came to settle in early twentieth-century Sudan
Departure: British colonial administration, Sudanese independence in 1956, and the community's exodus by the mid-1960s
Your Guide
Short definitions and terms referenced in this episode:
Tim Franks has presented Newshour, the flagship news programme on the BBC World Service, since 2013. Before that he spent almost twenty years as a reporter: the Troubles in Northern Ireland, Westminster and the Today programme, then nine years as a foreign correspondent in Washington, Brussels and Jerusalem. He won the Bayeux award for war correspondents for his reporting from Gaza. His book, The Lines We Draw: The Journalist, the Jew and an Argument About Identity, was published by Bloomsbury in 2025. He was raised in Birmingham, and now lives in London.
Key topics
Being a Jew and a journalist,
The Sephardi roads: from Constantinople to Amsterdam,
Reform, status, and who is allowed to say what is authentically Jewish
“Inside the Bubble” with Renato Huarte Cuéllar - Live at Limmud25
Season 3 · Episode 5
Friday, July 24, 2026 • Duration 48:14
Renato Huarte Cuéllar is a philosopher, academic and choreographer based in Mexico City. He works across philosophy of education, philosophy of religion and Jewish studies, co-founded Limmud Mexico, and for nine years led the education programme of Mexico City's Jewish dance festival, Festival Aviv, the largest of its kind outside Israel.
Recorded live at Limmud Festival 2025, this conversation illuminates the Jewish world of Mexico. There are around forty thousand Jews in Mexico, almost all in Mexico City: in communities organised by ethnic origin and gathered not around the synagogue but around a vast sports and cultural centre. Renato calls it the bubble: a world so complete you could be born, schooled, married and buried inside it. The question that runs through the whole conversation is what that completeness costs, and who gets seen, let in, or read as Jewish at all.
Key Topics
Conversos, the Inquisition, and Jews who are only now emerging
Colourism, class and belonging: who gets read as Jewish
Your Guide
Judaizar: the verb used after the 1492 expulsion for conversos who kept Jewish practices, such as secretly lighting Shabbat candles.
Güero: a Mexican word today meaning "blond", carrying a wider sense tied to social and economic class, from an older root meaning "empty of colour".
Poetic Roots - Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca
Season 3 · Episode 4
Friday, June 26, 2026 • Duration 01:06:04
Our Guest
Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca is a poet, teacher and the daughter of Nissim Ezekiel, widely regarded as the father of modern Indian poetry in English. Kavita means ‘Poem’ in Sanskrit. Born in Bombay into a Bene Israel family, Kavita grew up in multilingual family, encouraged to respect the many faiths in her community, and where her father made a deliberate choice not to follow the wave of Bene Israel emigration to Israel. His reason: if everyone goes, who stays and does something for this country? That question runs through this whole conversation.
Kavita now lives in Calgary, where she writes and teaches. Her poetry draws on her Bene Israel heritage, her multilingual childhood, and the kitchens, synagogues and village visits that shaped her sense of who she is. In this episode, she reads her poem Give Me Oil in My Lamp, which quietly captures what Jewish identity can look like when it has nothing to prove.
Key Topics
Growing up Bene Israel in Bombay: religion, community and the world outside the door
Nissim Ezekiel and his choice to stay in India
Poetry as inheritance and practice
Your Guide
Nissim Ezekiel (1924-2004): Indian poet widely regarded as the father of modern Indian poetry in English. Born in Bombay into a Bene Israel family, he published his first collection A Time to Change in 1952 and went on to define a new idiom for Indian writing: rooted in the everyday, sceptical of abstraction, deeply Indian and specifically Jewish at the same time.
Bene Israel: One of the oldest Jewish communities in India, traditionally believed to have arrived on the Konkan coast of Maharashtra over two thousand years ago, possibly following a shipwreck. The community developed distinct traditions, including Marathi as a communal language and the malida ceremony.
Want to Learn More?References and Resources
Baghdad to the Andes: Live! With Jordan Salama and Samantha Ellis
Season 3 · Episode 3
Friday, May 22, 2026 • Duration 01:00:02
Recorded live at Jewish Book Week in March 2026, this conversation brings together two writers whose books map Jewish histories that rarely make it onto the festival circuit. With a sold-out crowd at Kings Place in London, Samantha Ellis and Jordan Salama talk about language, loss, food, family archives, and what it means to carry more than one Jewish story at once.
Our Guests
Samantha Ellis is a playwright, journalist and author, the daughter of Iraqi Jewish refugees. Her books include How to Be a Heroine and Take Courage: Anne Brontë and the Art of Life. Her latest, Chopping Onions on My Heart (published in the US as Always Carry Salt), explores Judeo-Iraqi Arabic, a language on the verge of extinction, and what we can and cannot pass on to our children. She also worked on the first two Paddington films.
Jordan Salama is an award-winning writer whose journalism at The New Yorker covers migration, culture and the environment across the Americas. His second book, Stranger in the Desert, follows his great-grandfather's trail as a Syrian Jewish travelling salesman in the Argentine Andes in the 1920s, beginning with a binder of family history discovered in his grandfather's basement.
Plural and Partial - Linda Dangoor
Season 3 · Episode 2
Friday, May 1, 2026 • Duration 42:46
Our Guest
Linda Dangoor is a designer, painter and ceramicist, and the author of two cookbooks. Flavours of Babylon (first published 2011) celebrates the recipes of her Baghdadi Jewish heritage. Her second book, From the Tigris to the Thames (Green Bean Books, 2025), is part memoir, part cookbook, tracing her journey from Baghdad through Beirut, London, Ibiza and Paris. Praised by Yotam Ottolenghi, Claudia Roden, Giles Coren and Nigella Lawson - and Eylan (!). Linda studied painting and graphic design at the Central School in London and is a member of the Society of Designer Craftsmen.
• Food as identity: Why Linda argues food belongs to the place it comes from, not just the community that cooks it, and why she resists the label 'Jewish food'
• Fear and concealment: What it meant to be Jewish in mid-century Baghdad, the word Israel banned at Passover, and the cost of decades of keeping Jewish identity quiet
• Nostalgia versus memory: The distinction Linda draws between looking back with longing and simply saying how it was
Your Guide
Short definitions and terms referenced in this episode:
• Babylonian Jews: A Jewish community from Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) who trace their origins to the exile of Judahite captives to Babylon in the sixth century BCE. Distinct from Sephardi and Ashkenazi communities, though often grouped under the broader Mizrahi label
He had questions - 4 of them - just in time for Passover.
Questions about the assumptions and biases Eylan has, and what he’s learned from two seasons of conversations.
This is the result: an episode where the host becomes the guest, and is held to account for views on faith, Zionism and liberal values; testing blindspots, and exploring together the evolving sense of what a broader Jewish identity can mean.
About Daniel Jonas
Daniel Jonas has Iraqi-Indian Sephardi heritage and brings a background in corporate innovation and interfaith dialogue to his engagement with Jewish tradition. He thinks seriously about Judaism as a legal and ethical framework, and about what honest inquiry requires. He appeared in Season 2 (S2E3: ‘Everything needs to change’).
Key Topics
The assumptions baked into the podcast
Jewish essentialism: if everything can be Jewish, is anything Jewish?
Zionism: what the word still means, and where Eylan actually stands
In the Season 2 finale, host Eylan Ezekiel pauses to reflect on the journey of Who Jew Think You Are? - from its origins as a personal quest for connection, to a broader exploration of Jewish futures.
Reviewing the contributions of guests across the season, Eylan discusses how the events of October 7th shifted the conversation from recovery to reckoning, the generational divides around Zionism and identity, and how the provocation that "everything needs to change" acts as a guide for future conversations.
About the Host
Eylan Ezekiel is a writer, producer, and the creator of Who Jew Think You Are?. Drawing on his own Indian-Jewish heritage, Eylan created this space to amplify Jewish voices from the margins - exploring how colonialism, nationalism, and migration shape not only who we are, but who we want to be.
October 7th & Its Aftermath: Navigating the intense pain and polarisation within the community.
Generational Shifts: Analysing recent data showing how younger Jews are finding new political homes.
Looking Ahead: How Season 3 of Who Jew Think You Are? will focus on re-imagining Jewish futures, solidarity, and new frameworks for belonging.
Your GuideWant to learn more?References & Resources
Echoes of Aden at the table - Claudia Mendoza
Season 2 · Episode 9
Friday, November 7, 2025 • Duration 49:46
Claudia Mendoza shares the story of growing up in northwest London with a Jewish identity shaped by both Ashkenazi and Adeni (Mizrahi/Sephardi) roots. From Shabbat tables filled with tamarind, fenugreek, and Arabic-inflected Hebrew, to vivid family memories of escape from Aden, Claudia reflects on what it means to carry multiple Jewish histories at once.
Our Guest
Claudia Mendoza is Chief Executive of the Jewish Leadership Council, and has worked for various think tanks as a Research Analyst, focusing on the Middle East with a special interest in Iran and the transitioning Arab states. She has a BSc in Biochemistry from University College London and an MA in Middle East Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She is an alumna of the Adam Science Foundation Leadership Programme.
Key Topics
Heritage & Memory: Growing up between Ashkenazi and Adeni influences
Food & Identity: Tamarind, fenugreek, and overnight breads as cultural markers
Family Histories: Stories of escape from Aden and the importance of oral histories
Representation: Why Mizrahi and Sephardi voices matter in education and leadership
Your Guide
Short definitions and terms referenced in this episode:
Judíos emergentes: the recognised name in Latin America for emerging Jewish communities, groups building their own practice from outside the established world.
Want to Learn More?
If this conversation connected with you, these episodes are close neighbours:
Aliyah: Hebrew for ascent, and a word used for immigration to Israel. Following the Partition of India, and through the 1950s, a significant number of Bene Israel families made aliyah, reducing the Mumbai community considerably.
Konkan: The coastal strip of western India running through Maharashtra. The traditional homeland of the Bene Israel community and the setting of the shipwreck legend that forms part of Bene Israel origin stories. The village of Alibag, which features in Kavita's poem, sits near this coast.
If this conversation connected with you, these episodes are close neighbours:
Memory as Resistance (Season 2, Episode 7): Eliaz Reuben-Dandeker, Bene Israel historian and artist based in Israel, on preserving what remains of Bene Israel material culture and memory.
Being Seen Matters (Season 2, Episode 1): Yaffa Judah on her Bene Israel, Moroccan and English heritage, and the work of making mixed Jewish identity legible in British communal life.
is London’s longest running literary festival, hosted by the Jewish Literary Foundation. It attracts award-winning authors and thinkers every year for an exciting programme of debates, talks, and performances at Kings Place, London and online. Find out more
• T'beet: A traditional Iraqi Jewish Shabbat overnight dish. Recipe here
• 'Our identity is at once plural and partial': A phrase from Salman Rushdie's 1982 essay Imaginary Homelands, published in the London Review of Books.
Explore past episodes that also reflect on displacement, Baghdadi Jewish heritage, and food as identity:
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