Hi, it’s Jen Richler, here with another episode of Can We Talk?.

First, a word from our sponsor, the University of San Francisco’s Swig Program in Jewish Studies and Social Justice. JSSJ is excited to announce the first-ever graduate-level certificate in JEDI—Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion. This program will give you the tools to boost your classroom techniques, bring JEDI skills to your organization, and expand your personal knowledge. Fall classes begin August 27. Learn more and apply at USFCA.EDU/JEDI.

Now, onto the show.  

Jen: Hi everyone, it's Jen Richler here with Nahanni Rous and Judith Rosenbaum, the whole Can We Talk? team. Hello to both of you.

Nahanni: Hey, Jen.

Judith: Hello!

Jen: Okay, so most of our listeners don't realize that we are actually somewhat of a scattered team, at least geographically speaking. So I am recording in Can We Talk? satellite studio in Bloomington, Indiana, also known as my office. Nahanni, where are you?

Nahanni: Oh, well I am in my home office in Washington, DC.

Jen: And how about you, Judith?

Judith: I am in my home office in Newton, Massachusetts, having just come back from the JWA office cause I can record better here, it's a little quieter. Although, my daughter is singing downstairs, so… [laughs] Maybe I should have stayed at JWA’s office.

Jen: So we're here to wrap up our fall and spring seasons, talk about some highlights and some of our favorite moments from the past couple of seasons. One big highlight happened for all of us just the other day. Judith, do you wanna say what happened?

Judith: Yes. Well, Sunday morning I was just taking my Sunday Times out of the bag and starting to open it, and I got a text from my friend Idit saying, “Whoa, did you know that Can We Talk? was gonna be mentioned in the New York Times?”  And I said, “What???” Um, and she sent me a photo, and, in fact, there was a little piece on page two of the Sunday Opinion section that was, uh, responding to the fact that the Southern Baptist Convention voted to bar women from leadership positions in the church last week, and suggesting some places for people to learn more about women's roles in religious leadership, including listening to Can We Talk?. And that was a huge thrill.

Jen: Yes, it was very exciting. Okay, onto talking about the podcast itself. So we're recording this episode at the end of Pride month, and that's a perfect lead-in to talking about the very first episode of our fall season, which was about Linke Fligl, a queer Jewish chicken farm and cultural organizing project in the Hudson Valley in New York.

Um, Nahanni, you were the producer on this episode and actually went to Linke Fligl to record. So, do you wanna say a little bit about what it was like to go there and record for this episode?

Nahanni: I mean, it was so great after, you know, the past couple of years, I guess, of COVID-inspired remote recording, to actually be in the field, and, like, being in a literal field with crickets and birds and lots of people having this very joyful and also bittersweet final gathering of this beautiful thing that they had built together. And it was, um, you know, for me it was kind of reconnecting with interviewing people in person, which I really love to do. And it was also fun because I was there as a reporter, but I was also very swept up in the singing and dancing and the, kind of, celebration of it.

Jen: Yeah, one of my favorite parts of that episode, actually, as I was listening to the tape you gathered, was hearing the singing and then hearing you singing on the track because you—like you said, it's hard not to get swept up in it. It was such,—it was really such beautiful singing.

[clip of singing in Hebrew]

So, after that episode, Nahanni, you went on on hiatus, um, for the rest of the fall to work on a different audio project. Can you tell us a little bit about what you were working on?

Nahanni: Yeah, sure. So, in the fall I was working intensively on a series called Remembering Vilna: The Jerusalem of Lithuania, which is a ten-part audio documentary on Jewish life in Vilna before, during, and in the years immediately following World War II. And it's based on first-person testimonies from Holocaust survivors who were from Vilna that are housed at the Fortunoff  Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale.

And, um, I am actually wrapping up — getting close to wrapping up production of that series and it's gonna be out in the fall. It's kind of an epic project and I'm looking forward to sharing it with people.

Jen: And I'm guessing we'll be able to hear that in all the usual places?

Nahanni: Yeah, so, it's part of a podcast called Those Who Were There. So it's at thosewhowerethere.org, and it's also wherever you get your podcasts.

Jen: Great. Okay, so when Nahani was on leave, that meant that I took up the reins for the season as the main producer with Judith, um, listening to lots and lots of cuts of episodes. And we had a pretty wide range of topics this fall. It was everything from Jewish women leading seances in the 1800s to the problem of get refusal in Israel, where some Jewish women can't obtain a divorce from their husbands and are essentially chained. They're called agunot, which I think literally means chained woman.

We spoke with Kylie Eisman-Lifschitz from Mavoi Satum, an organization in Israel that helps agunot, and something she talked about that really stayed with me is how get refusal affects women in abusive relationships.

[episode clip plays]

Kylie: I mean, an abusive husband, what does he say to his wife? “I'll never let you go. I'll never let you marry anybody else, you'll never have children.” And when the woman gets to the court, the rabbinic courts basically say, “Well, yes, he does have that final say.”

Jen: We've actually gotten some nice feedback from listeners about the range of topics and the choice of topics on the show. One listener said that she likes that we cover both hot topics like the problem of agunot, which she had heard about, but then also lesser-known topics, like women in the spiritualist movement.

Nahanni: I wanna say that I really enjoyed listening to all those episodes, um, and that you did a really great job. You did a great job without me.

Jen: Aw, thank you. [Nahanni laughs]. So one thing I think worth pausing on for a minute is that even though the topics range so much, there's a lot of common themes, I think, running through episodes, and I've even—now that I've worked on a few seasons—I'm even seeing those echoes throughout seasons. So, um, you know, one of the things I think that comes up a lot is making visible certain experiences that maybe aren’t always articulated or lifting up voices that don't get heard often enough or that aren't respected enough.

Judith: I think about it in terms of, like, the interview that I did this year with Samira Mehta on her book The Racism of People Who Love You and wanting to give attention to experiences of Jews of color and, um, and how they're navigating different spaces.

Nahanni: Yeah. Or the episode on Fat Torah, you know, that the, like, fat liberation movement is just not given enough attention, and we had a whole episode about it that I found fascinating including, like, the history of the fat liberation movement.

Judith: And putting it in a Jewish context also. I loved doing that interview with Rabbi Minna Bromberg.

I also was thinking about the fact when you were saying, Jen, that, you know, we cover this really wide range of topics and I was remembering back when we started this podcast about seven years ago and people said, “Oh, so what's your focus gonna be?”

And I remember saying, well actually, like part of the point is that there isn't a focus because one of the goals of this podcast, like the goals of the Jewish Women's Archive as a whole, is really to disrupt people's assumptions about who Jewish women are and what they do, and you know, what they care about, and show the incredible breadth and diversity of Jewish women's experiences and Jewish women as a whole. And so I think if our topics were not kind of all over the place, then we wouldn't be doing a good job of illustrating that.

Jen: So with Nahanni back this spring, we've had a really jampacked and longer season, and it started with an interview with Jodi Kantor about breaking the Harvey Weinstein sexual assault story that helped ignite the MeToo movement.

Nahanni, you talked to Jodi about the book she wrote with Megan Twohey called She Said, which chronicles that work and was recently adapted into a movie by the same name. And I'm curious what it was like for you, um, as an interviewer to interview someone who herself is such an accomplished interviewer in her own right.

Nahanni: Wow. Um, you know, I prep really well for all my interviews, but I might have done just a little bit of extra prep for my interview with Jodi. You know, I just admire her work so much so that was really an honor to get to do that interview.

[episode clip plays]

Nahanni: Why did you call it She Said?

Jodi: Honestly, that's one of my favorite parts because those two little words say everything. And to us, those two little words are not simple at all, they convey all the complex layers of who spoke and who didn’t speak and who are the women who will never come forward about these stories…[clip of Jodi fades]

Jen: Another highlight of the spring season was our episode about three Jewish women from Kentucky who are suing the state for its abortion ban. There are similar lawsuits being brought by Jewish plaintiffs in other states, including where I live in Indiana. But this case is a bit different: In addition to arguing that the ban violates their religious freedom as Jews, the Kentucky lawsuit also argues that it violates the rights of people who use fertility treatment.

Nahanni: I had also not heard that argument or issue about the impact of the decision affecting fertility treatment. But once we did this episode, I feel like I have started hearing it reported that way a lot.

Judith: Right. I mean, really, it's an impact on so many aspects of healthcare in general.

Jen: Yeah, and actually, we're recording this just days from the one year anniversary of the Dobbs decision overturning Roe. And I think part of what this episode really drove home to me is how far reaching the consequences of that decision are.

Nahanni: Yeah.

Jen: Later on in the season we had a series of episodes focusing on Israel.

First we had “Israel at 75”, which came out right on Israel's 75th Independence Day, and we talked to four Jewish women about the protests over the Netanyahu government's proposed judicial reforms, which brought one-and-a[half million Israelis into the streets. We heard their thoughts about why and how the country had arrived at this moment of almost unprecedented upheaval.

[episode clip plays: protest chant in Hebrew]

Rachel Azaria: What does it mean to live in a Jewish democratic country? We don’t have the answer for it yet, and I think this is what we’re trying to figure out now.

Jen: Then for our next Israel-focused episode, I talked with three activists who are trying to make Hebrew more inclusive of women and people of all genders.

And then finally, Judith talked about the pioneering Israeli feminist Alice Shalvi, who moved to Israel soon after the state was established. Um, Judith talked about her life and her work, and we also featured some clips of conversations between Judith and Alice from the last couple of years.

Judith: It was really an honor to get to tell Alice's story. She's someone who I  just admire enormously and who has been doing feminist work for so long and has had a real impact on JWA.

[episode clip plays]

Alice Shalvi: When things need done, you have to be prepared to step up and do them. I have found that most of the things that I have done, and even achieved, if I may say so, have been pure chance—pure chance, nothing planned. The question is how you rise and respond to a challenge.

Judith: I really love that reminder that, you know, all it takes is just responding to a need, um, and you can really make change.

Jen: Yeah. And I love—I mean, this is one of those times where I feel like you hear echoes of the same things, same ideas, across episodes and generations. So Lisa Sobel, who was one of the Jewish women from Kentucky suing the state for its abortion ban, said something so similar.

[episode clip plays]

Lisa: It goes back to Rabbi Hillel who says, “If I'm not for myself, who will be for me? If not now, when?” I constantly read books about feminine heroes and feminists and sheroes, as they're called, to my daughter and when given the opportunity to stand up for something that I believe in, it was sort of a no-brainer to say “Yes, of course.”

Judith: We've heard that through the years on this podcast, I think. I think about this often in our work more broadly too, just, like, challenging the idea of who are the people who make history. It's not necessarily people who set out to make history. It's often just everyday people, you know, responding to the things that they see around them.

Jen:  Okay—well, it's been a great couple of seasons. I think we all will take, like, a deep breath and then get to rolling up our sleeves to start preparing for the fall season.

In the meantime, we have now recorded close to a hundred episodes. I think this one we're doing right now is 96. So if you've missed any, you have plenty to catch up on while you're waiting for the fall season.

Nahanni: And also, we'll be dropping a bonus episode in the feed over the summer. We're not gonna give away what it is, but there's plenty of listening to do while we're on hiatus.

Jen: And something else you can do is to fill out our listener survey. You can find it at jwa.org/podcastsurvey. It's really helpful for us to hear your feedback. And also, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts to help spread the word. It really helps other people learn about what we're doing.

Judith: And finally, as we end the season, I wanna thank all of the wonderful sponsors that we had for the podcast this year. KOLFoods, Joy Stember Metal Arts Studio, and the Swig Program in Jewish Studies and Social Justice at the University of San Francisco. Thank you so much for helping us make this podcast. We're really glad to be able to partner with you. And if any of you listeners out there would like to sponsor an episode or episodes of Can We Talk?, just email us at podcasts@jwa.org. That's podcasts, plural, at jwa.org.

Jen: Okay, that's a wrap. Have a great summer everyone, and we'll talk to you in the fall!