Hard-boiled egg—check. Greens—check. Charoset, maror, shank bone—check. These are the traditional seder plate items that represent the themes of Passover. Many people have also adopted the feminist tradition of including an orange... but what does it symbolize, and how come so many people have the story wrong? In this episode of Can We Talk? , host Nahanni Rous talks with Susannah Heschel, who created the ritual in the 1980s, about the real meaning behind the orange. She also talks with her aunt...
Apr 05, 2022•19 min
Fifty years ago, a group of young Jewish women piled into two cars and drove to upstate New York to crash the annual meeting of the all-male Rabbinical Assembly of the Conservative movement. They called themselves Ezrat Nashim and they had a set of demands that included the right to be counted in a minyan , lead religious services, and attend rabbinical school. Their brief but brave action had ripple effects across American Jewish communities. In this second episode of Can We Talk?' s anniversar...
Mar 29, 2022•30 min
On March 18, 1922, Judith Kaplan made history when she stood in front of her Manhattan congregation and had America's first bat mitzvah ceremony. Judith's bat mitzvah was groundbreaking at the time, but it didn't look like most bat mitzvahs today. In this episode of Can We Talk?, producer Jen Richler talks with Professor Carole Balin about how the bat mitzvah has evolved over the past century, and how girls and their parents have pushed for that evolution. Carole is working on a book based on in...
Mar 15, 2022•29 min
"Pregnant? Don't want to be? Call Jane." That was the catchphrase of the Chicago-based Abortion Counseling Service of Women's Liberation, better known as Jane. Before Roe v. Wade made abortion legal, the women of Jane provided safe, illegal, and affordable abortions to nearly 12,000 women in the Chicago area until seven "Janes" were arrested in 1972. In this episode of Can We Talk? , we hear from Jeanne Galatzer-Levy and Judith Arcana, two of the "Abortion Seven," as well as Jane founder Heather...
Dec 21, 2021•32 min
Dara Horn’s new book is a departure from her usual imaginative fiction. It’s a collection of essays provocatively titled People Love Dead Jews . She also has a companion podcast called Adventures with Dead Jews . In both, Dara explores the subtler side of antisemitism, in which the role Jews play in the non-Jewish imagination has little to do with real Jewish lives. In this episode of Can We Talk? , Dara Horn talks with Nahanni Rous about the way Anne Frank is remembered around the world, how an...
Dec 07, 2021•25 min
"What would it be like if we could daven and engage in Jewish life without having to endure racism?" says Ilana Kaufman, Executive Director of the Jews of Color Initiative. In a recent survey of Jews of Color by Ilana's organization, most respondents report facing racism and discrimination in majority white Jewish communal settings, and they don't think Jewish leadership is doing enough about it. In this episode of Can We Talk? , Nahanni Rous talks with Ilana about the survey and its implication...
Nov 23, 2021•22 min
It's a bird...it's a plane...it's Willow Zimmerman! Willow is a social justice-minded Jewish teenager. She loves a hot salty reuben, bakes her own rugelach, and enjoys hanging out with a stray dog named Leibowitz. She’s also the latest Gotham City superhero. In this episode of Can We Talk? , producer Jen Richler talks with novelist E. Lockhart about creating Willow for DC Comics.
Nov 09, 2021•18 min
In 1971, photographer Joan Biren, also known as JEB, started doing something revolutionary: documenting the everyday lives of lesbians. This was an era when you could lose everything—your job, your apartment, even your kids— if people knew you were gay. Joan published her first book Eye To Eye: Portraits of Lesbians , in 1979, and the book was reissued this year. In this episode of Can We Talk?, Judith Rosenbaum talks with Joan about her photography and the way her Jewish, lesbian, and feminist ...
Oct 26, 2021•24 min
Yael Kanarek wanted a more direct relationship with the Divine than she experienced through male-centric Jewish sacred texts—so she rewrote the Torah. In Toratah, or Her Torah, Yael has switched the genders of each character. The result is a familiar text that resonates very differently, with a new set of matriarchs and patriarchs, and stories that draw new connections and pose new questions.
Oct 13, 2021•24 min
Menstrual justice is the latest front in the global fight for gender equality. Author Anita Diamant's new book, Period. End of Sentence , explores the stigma around menstruation and efforts around the world to ensure that menstruating people are not denied access to education, work, and full participation in society. Anita, whose 1997 best seller The Red Tent imagined a special retreat where the Biblical matriarchs went when they were having their periods, says in the modern day, menstrual justi...
Jun 23, 2021•28 min
The 20th century brought major disruptions, displacement, and annihilation to Jewish communities all over the world. In the Middle East and North Africa, over one million Jews fled or were forced out of places where Jewish communities had existed for over 2,000 years. The San Francisco-based organization JIMENA (Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa) works to preserve the cultural memory and heritage of Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews, and ensure that this history is part of the record o...
Jun 08, 2021•27 min
In 1738, a young Christian man stepped off a boat in the French colony of Quebec and was doubly outed as a Jew and a woman. Esther Brandeau was born around 1718 in Saint Esprit, a Jewish community on the outskirts of Bayonne, France. Brandeau was the first documented Jew to have set foot on Canadian soil, but she didn’t stay long. Historian and performing artist Heather Hermant tells the story for Can We Talk? and for JWA's revised and updated edition of the Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish W...
Jun 01, 2021•15 min
Judy Heumann is a lifelong disability rights activist—from fighting for her own right to live in a college dorm, to lobbying for the Americans with Disabilities Act, to leading major initiatives at the World Bank and State Department. Judy is committed to removing the barriers that prevent disabled people from fully participating in society, a topic she explores in-depth in her memoir, Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist . She tells her story for Can We Talk? and...
May 25, 2021•20 min
In 1976, a military dictatorship seized power in Argentina. The regime systematically kidnapped, tortured and killed 30,000 people who were suspected of opposition. A year into the war, mothers of the "disappeared" began weekly protests in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires demanding to know what had happened to their sons and daughters. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo kept up their protests for over four decades and became a powerful movement for justice and human rights. Many of them were Jewi...
May 19, 2021•15 min
Zohra El Fassia was born around 1905 near Fez, Morocco. She sang from the time she was a girl, and by the mid-20th century, she was a star. El Fassia recorded hundreds of songs for international record labels and performed regularly for the king in Rabat. When she moved to Israel in 1962, her career took a hit, but she sought out smaller venues and was soon rediscovered by younger Moroccan Israeli artists. Zohra El Fassia died in 1994. Writer and ethnomusicologist Tamar Sella tells her story for...
May 11, 2021•15 min
Who keeps track of when the mustard is running low? Who does the laundry? Who takes the call from school when kids are sick? These are some of the questions author Eve Rodsky asks in her book and accompanying card game Fair Play . For decades, feminists have tried to address the unfair burden placed on women in the home. The pandemic has laid bare the injustices in our current system—but could this be a moment to re-examine and "re-deal the deck" as we rebuild our society? In this episode of Can...
May 04, 2021•26 min
"We don’t want to exist, we want to thrive and create a better world." In this episode of Can We Talk? , three young Jewish women reflect on how they became active in fighting climate change, how their identities influence their activism, and what inspires them to keep going. Isha Clarke is an activist with Youth vs. Coal and Youth vs. Apocalypse; Noa Gordon-Guterman is an Avodah Service-Corps member working with Interfaith Power and Light; and Tali Deaner is the campaigns director at Jewish You...
Apr 20, 2021•15 min
"They were women who carried cash in their garter belts and dynamite in their underwear," says Judy Batalion, the author of The Light of Days , a new book about Jewish women resistance fighters in World War II who "blew up Nazi supply trains and shot and killed Gestapo men." She's also co-writing the screenplay for a Steven Spielberg movie based on the book. In this episode of Can We Talk? , we talk with Judy about what made some women well suited to certain roles in the resistance and why their...
Apr 06, 2021•25 min
We kick off Can We Talk? 's spring season just in time for Passover... and about a year since we began living with the global pandemic. This time has been rough on so many people, for so many reasons—hard on working parents with kids in remote school, hard on people who have lost jobs, human contact, and loved ones. In this podcast episode, Judith Rosenbaum and Nahanni Rous—and our podcast listeners—get a breathing lesson from Janice Stieber Rous, founder of Body Dialogue (and Nahanni's aunt). T...
Mar 23, 2021•24 min
In this season wrap, host Nahanni Rous recaps Can We Talk? 's Fall 2020 episodes—from the history of Jewish and African American women's participation in the fight for voting rights, to a tribute to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, to Jewish women's voting stories, a mini-series on creativity in pandemic times, and more—and gives a sneak peak at some of what's to come in the spring.
Jan 13, 2021•7 min
The election of Kamala Harris to the Vice Presidency has sparked excitement in the Jewish community. Not only will she be the first woman and person of color to serve in the role, but she also has Jewish family. Kamala and the Harris/Emhoff family highlight an important demographic reality in the American Jewish community: the majority of Jewish families in America today include women who don’t identify as Jewish. In this episode of Can We Talk? , we’ll hear the stories of three women who, like ...
Dec 17, 2020•21 min
Writer and poet Sabrina Orah Mark joins us for the final episode in our four part series on creativity in pandemic times. Her monthly essays in The Paris Review are loosely based on motherhood and fairy tales, and their texture is a rich weave of fairy tales, politics, the past, and her children’s voices. She describes her prose as having little poems folded up inside of it. In our conversation, Sabrina draws parallels between the ways that motherhood and quarantine have shaped her creative proc...
Dec 09, 2020•22 min
Siona Benjamin’s art dances with vibrant colors and mythical figures—Lilith wrapped in a prayer shawl, Vashti with angels wings, a blue-skinned woman with multiple arms held up like a menorah. Siona is an Indian Jew from Mumbai now living in the US, and her art reflects her transcultural identity: it's Jewish, feminist, Indian, American, and influenced by the Hindu and Islamic cultures she grew up in. Siona Benjamin joins us for the third in our series on creativity in the global pandemic....
Dec 02, 2020•14 min
Alicia Svigals is the world’s leading klezmer fiddler and has played a central role in the klezmer revival. Alicia was a co-founder of the Grammy-Award winning band, the Klezmatics, and she has recorded, performed, and collaborated with countless artists over nearly four decades. In our second episode on creativity in the pandemic, Alicia joins us to talk about how music is helping her get through this difficult time.
Nov 24, 2020•22 min
Stand-up comedian Liz Glazer left a successful career as a tenured law professor six years ago to pursue comedy full time. "It's the usual route to stand-up," she says. As a result of the pandemic, Liz has been performing for online audiences only and reconnecting with the roots of her sense of humor. This is the first in our four-part series on creativity during the global pandemic.
Nov 17, 2020•22 min
As history unfolds in this election season, we talk with Jewish women about their voting stories—past and present. We hear from a poll watcher in Georgia, a young voter whose name was nearly wiped from the voter rolls, and a rabbi who said a blessing as she slipped her ballot in the ballot box. We'll also hear from a 92-year-old voter in Florida who remembers meeting suffragist Alice Paul in the 1970s, and a candidate for US Congress who talks about the dilemma she faced in sixth grade—whether t...
Oct 27, 2020•17 min
Gail Carson Levine is famous for writing retellings of classic fairy tales with a modern twist—like her best-selling novel Ella Enchanted —but her most recent book, A Ceiling Made of Eggshells , takes readers back to a real time and place. It's set in Spain in the decade leading up to the expulsion of the Jews in 1492. It's a tenuous time for Spanish Jews: They're being scapegoated for the Black plague, taxed out of economic viability, coerced into converting to Christianity, and threatened with...
Oct 06, 2020•17 min
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the first Jewish woman to sit on the nation’s highest court, died on the eve of Rosh Hashanah. Justice Ginsburg was an American and feminist icon and a Jewish hero. Her experiences as a Jew and as a woman helped her identify with outsiders and see the gap between American ideals and the realities that so many people live every day. Justice Ginsburg was a role model... and she had her own role models too. In this episode, we dig into JWA's archive and sh...
Sep 24, 2020•10 min
Back in April, many of us celebrated Passover with a virtual Seder, or two. Now, five months later, we enter the High Holidays in much the same predicament. It’s hard not to feel disconnected when we can't be at our synagogues or share big festive meals with our communities. But, of course, Jews are not the only ones who have experienced this. Our Muslim friends have already gone through several major holidays, including the month of Ramadan, in quarantine. In this special Rosh Hashanah mini-sod...
Sep 15, 2020•10 min
No sound is more iconic for the Jewish New Year than that of the shofar blast. This year, many Jews will hear the sound of the shofar virtually. Can We Talk? producer Sarah Ventre is one of hundreds of shofar blowers who will share their shofar blasts with their congregations over Zoom. In this special Rosh Hashanah mini-sode, Sarah ventures into the urban desert in Phoenix, Arizona to practice blowing her shofar. She shares her thoughts on what the shofar blast means to her this year, during th...
Sep 15, 2020•8 min
