Return the Key: Jewish Questions for Everyone

Julie Carr
  • 5.0 (7)
  • JUDAISM
  • UPDATED WEEKLY

“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.

  1. 3D AGO

    Episode 31: On Money, Lies, and God with Katherine Stewart

    In episode #31 I speak with author and investigative journalist Katherine Stewart about her new book, Money Lies and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy. What is Christian Nationalism (and what is it not)? What are the true anti-democratic goals of the “new right” and what are their strategies? How do misogyny and anti-trans rhetoric/policy serve these goals? And are they really trying to take away women’s right to vote? Katherine delineates five categories of actors in the nihilistic war against democracy: the funders, the thinkers, the sergeants, the power-players, and the foot soldiers. She exposes how “the thinkers” frequently rely on the ideas of Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt, and Julie dips into “the thinkers” who have worked towards these goals on her own campus (remember John Eastman?). A note: This conversation is shorter than many. Because of time constraints we were not able to talk about all of the major topics in this book. I highly recommend listeners read the book to learn more. Texts, institutes, and people mentioned and discussed: Katherine Stewart, Money Lies and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism Katherine Stewart, The Good News Club: The Religious Right's Stealth Assault on America's Children God and Country (film), directed by Dan Partland, written by Katherine Stewart The April Institute Andrew Perez, Andy Kroll and Justin Elliott, “How a Secretive Billionaire Handed His Fortune to the Architect of the Right-Wing Takeover of the Courts” (article on Barre Seid, Leonard Leo and the Marble Freedom Trust) Carl Schmitt The Claremont Institute The Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization, University of Colorado Boulder The National Organization for Marriage (editorial note: they are still going after Disney) Doug Wilson, Christian Nationalist pastor (Wall Street Journal video) Abby Johnson, anti-abortion activist on head-of-household voting (tweet) Joseph Porter and Adam Gibbons, “Existential Risk and Equal Political Liberty” Music by Ben Roberts : Benjamin.Roberts447@gmail.com Comments and ideas to Juliealicecarr@gmail.com Katherine Stewart’s latest book, Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy, is one of Foreign Affairs magazine’s Best Books of 2025. Her previous, award-winning title, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy, formed the basis of the documentary feature God & Country, produced by Rob Reiner. She has covered the intersection of faith and politics for over 17 years; her work appears in The New York Times, Religion News Service, New Republic and others. Find her at @katherinestewart.bsky.social, @kathsstewart, substack.com/@katherinestewartbooks, and katherinestewart.me.

    1h 4m

  2. JAN 25

    Episode 30: "Memory of a Larger Mind"

    In episode #30 with Daniela Naomi Molnar, we begin our wide-ranging conversation by discussing Daniela’s work with the media of “color, water, language, and place,” which is focused around both human and earth-based memory. We talk about and read from her book Protocols: an Erasure, an erasure of Protocols of the Elders of Zion. We discuss this source-text and its ongoing place in the history of antisemitism, and what it meant to engage it so deeply. We then move into the multi-modal project, “Memory of a Larger Mind.” Daniela speaks about her four grandparents, all of whom survived Nazi concentration camps, and how her very close relationship with her grandmother, Rosalie, pressed her to work directly with the land of former camps where she makes pigments from what is now found there— flowers, weeds, rocks, and bones. In recent projects, Daniela works with glaciers and former glaciers as material for pigments, poems and other artworks. Along the way we talk about two kinds of power, that which feeds on fear and leads to violence, and that which resides in the unknowable, the invisible, and the nothing (the ein sof) that is in and all around us. This leads to a conversation about mysticism and “justice” and how they might be entangled. Music by Ben Roberts : Benjamin.Roberts447@gmail.com Comments and ideas to Juliealicecarr@gmail.com Links Rabbi Lawrence Kushner: “Kabbalah and Everyday Mysticism.” On Being podcast, May 15, 2014. Tilke Elkins Dany S. Adams, PhD “The Face of a Frog” (video) Daniela Naomi Molnar is a poet and artist who creates with color, water, language, and place. Her art centers on memory — planetary, cultural, familial, and personal. She works with pigments she makes from plants, bones, stones, and specific waters such as rainwater and glacial melt. Poems and essays are created alongside the visual art; the practices overlap and influence each other. Her debut bookCHORUS won the 2024 Oregon Book Award for Poetry, followed by PROTOCOLS: An Erasure, currently shortlisted for the National Jewish Book Award. Forthcoming books include Memory of a Larger Mind, a book written with glaciers (Omnidawn, 2026), Light / Remains, a book of visual art, poems, and essays, and The World is Full, a book considering love as a political, relational, and internal force. Her work has been published and shown widely, is in public and private collections internationally, and is featured in theLos Angeles Times,PBS Oregon Art Beat,Oregon Encyclopedia,The Creative Independent, andPoetry Daily. She founded the Art + Ecology program at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2016 and helped start and run the backcountry artist residency Signal Fire from 2008-2023. Her work leads her to far-flung places but she loves orbiting back to her studio where the forest meets the city in Portland, Oregon. www.danielamolnar.com / Instagram: @daniela_naomi_molnar A note: In this episode I mention the murder of Renee Nicole Good, which had just occurred, though I fail to name her. May her memory be a blessing.

    1h 4m

  3. JAN 17

    Episode 29: Thresholds

    In episode #29 I speak with multidisciplinary artist Ava Aviva Avnisan about their film, installation, music and performance work. We begin by talking about Aviva’s young childhood in Jerusalem as the descendant of Iraqi, Iranian and Eastern European Jews, and she traces the influence of her father, a professional photographer, on her own development as an artist. We discuss a collaboration we did with the poet Amaranth Borsuk many years ago, even without knowing each other (Real Life: An Installation). We get into the technology Aviva uses in much of her work, lidar scanning, and how it helps her create “a visual vocabulary of haunting.” Digging into two of Aviva’s recent projects, “Among Relatives: Indigenous Voices in the Cuyahoga Valley” (with Leila Khoury), an immersive audio visual installation, and “Specters of Home: Prologue” (with Doug Rosman) a ten-minute film, we discuss the legacy of settler-colonialism in Israel-Palestine and North America, the gender binary, and the very painful ways in which contemporary politics tear families apart. Aviva talks about her own struggles with members of her family who are unable to accept her gender transition or her anti-Zionism. She speaks throughout about her spiritual development and her gender transition, and how these transformations have changed her work and its motivations, opening and softening toward greater compassion and receptivity. We end with a short dip into the collaborative project Nobo’s Muse, a two-person art-pop band with Judd Morrissey, and we listen to one of their (fantastic) songs, as we disappear into the divine/work. Other artists, writers and projects mentioned: Karen River Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning TransMaterialities: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings What Flashes Up: Theological-Political-Scientific Fragments Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History” (Theses on History) Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International Chris Marker, Sans Soleil Kelly Reichardt, Certain Women Ava Aviva Avnisan (she/they) is a multidisciplinary, research-based artist whose work integrates installation, performance, film, writing, sound, and emerging technologies to create embodied, time-based encounters. Working with tools such as 3D scanning, augmented and virtual reality, and generative AI, Ava’s practice explores how language, technology, and lived experience shape meaning and memory. Recent highlights include the international festival circulation of Specters of Home—Prologue, a short film selected for the 10th Beyond Borders | Kastellorizo International Documentary Festival in Greece and screened at the 8th Independent Film Festival of Mexico City as part of the CINE X MUJERES program. In 2025, Ava also presented new work created in collaboration with Judd Morrissey at SAIC Galleries in Chicago, debuting a large-scale, site-specific installation that expanded her practice into recorded music alongside photography, poetry, and 3D imaging. Ava is an Assistant Professor of Art and Design at San Diego State University, with a co-appointment in the School of Journalism and Media Studies.

    1h 4m

  4. JAN 6

    Episode 28: And everything else just melts away

    Episode #28 brings a special New Year’s treat: music! We peek behind the scenes as I talk with musician Ben Roberts, who happens to be my son, about the music for Return the Key. Ben talks about his passion for Irish folk music, what goes on in an Irish session, and what he learned playing Bach for people on their porches during the pandemic. We get into the relationship between emotions and music and the mystery of melody as we listen to and discuss four of our favorite RTK pieces. What is the difference between “fixing” and “exploring”? What happens when we orient toward the good? And what does it mean to feel “at home” in a music from another culture far away? At the end of the hour, Ben performs a Ukrainian folk tune on his cello, with a nod to our Jewish Ukrainian ancestors. Ben Roberts is a multi-instrumentalist and composer living in New York City. He has performed or recorded with Jon Battiste, MGK, Zoe Loyd, Esperanza Spalding, Flamenco dancer Tara Laraway and many others, and has led nearly every mainstay Irish session in New York and Boston. You can hear him on Tuesdays from 8-11 at Putnam’s Pub, 419 Myrtle Avenue, Brooklyn NY. https://www.instagram.com/benroberts447/

    1h 4m

  5. 11/25/2025

    Episode 27: The Desire for Origin is the Origin

    In episode 27, I talk with poet Susan Gevirtz about her childhood growing up in Los Angeles, within the two “religions” of Hollywood and Freudian psychoanalysis. We talk about her early experiences in the world of Hollywood films through her grandfather’s work as the musical director for Universal, and her sense, even as a young person, that the world that was presented to her was a made place, invented and therefore radically open to inquiry. We dig into her ongoing project, Guide School, a multi-faceted blended-genre manuscript that interrogates the longing for a “homeland,” and the unsatisfiable and therefore motivating desire for “origins” of all kinds - epistemological, historical, textual, and spiritual. Susan talks about her travels in Eastern Europe, the phenomenon of “the guide schools” in which tour guides are trained to present particular versions of history, and her encounters with the YIVO archive for Jewish Research of both Vilnius Lithuania and New York City. We end by discussing our somewhat vexed curiosity about Kabbalah, and mystical traditions in general, thinking together about how reading/writing as a practice of unknowing and infinite encounter might itself be a mystical tradition. Books and institutions mentioned Moses Maimonides: The Guide to the Perplexed: a New Translation, Translated and with Commentary by Lenn E. Goodman and Phillip I. Lieberman Marc-Alain Ouaknin, The Burnt Book: Reading the Talmud Jeffrey Veidlinger, In the Midst of Civilzed Europe: The 1918-1921 Pogroms in Ukraine and the Onset of the Holocaust YIVO Institute for Jewish Research Music by Ben Roberts: Benjamin.Roberts447@gmail.com Comments and ideas to Juliealicecarr@gmail.com

    1h 4m

  6. 10/25/2025

    Episode 26: We Will be What we Want

    In episode 26, I talk with Anas Qutob and Dave Snyder of Minneapolis about their friendship and their work as leaders in the Minnesota chapter of Friends of Standing Together—a grassroots progressive organization of Israeli Jews and Palestinians dedicated to peace, justice, and social transformation. Anas speaks of his childhood growing up during the Israeli invasion of his home city, Nablus, in the West Bank, and about working his way through law school before becoming a labor organizer in Minneapolis. Dave, the grandson of Holocaust survivors, and a longtime social justice organizer, speaks of his journey toward deep commitment to the Palestine justice movement. We talk what Standing Together means to us and about the sacred work of friendship grounded in listening, in mutual recognition of suffering, and in working relentlessly for change. We end by reading a section of one of Mahmoud Darwish’s final poems, “Mural,” in both Arabic and English. “One day I will be what I want” is a line from “Mural” in John Berger and Rema Hammami’s translation. Standing Together’s Theory of Change Mahmoud Darwish, Mural, trans. John Berger and Rema Hammami Music by Ben Roberts: Benjamin.Roberts447@gmail.com Comments and ideas to Juliealicecarr@gmail.com Anas J. Qutob was born and raised in Nablus (Shechem), Palestine. The son of a repatriated refugee born in exile in 1969, his family returned from Jordan to the Old City of Nablus in 1974, where they lived until 2007. His father, a tailor, supported the family through years of political and social upheaval. Anas earned his law degree in 2017 and joined the Palestinian Bar Association in 2020, practicing civil and criminal law in the West Bank until moving to the United States in 2023. He now works as an Organizer with SEIU Healthcare Minnesota & Iowa’s Member Action Center and is a Co-founder of Minnesota Friends of Standing Together (FoST–Israel/Palestine). He currently lives in Minneapolis with his turtle shell cat.  Dave Snyder grew up in Minneapolis, the grandson of Holocaust survivors who fled Austria in 1939. He has spent the last 30 years as a campus living wage activist, labor organizer with the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union local 7, housing justice organizer and then deputy director of Jewish Community Action (JCA), convenor of the Minnesota Asset Building Coalition (MABC), then statewide program director for “Family Assets for Independence in Minnesota” (FAIM). Dave has served on the Board of Directors of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC), and currently serves on the Board of Directors of Unidos MN, and as co-founder of the MN chapter of Friends Of Standing Together (FOST) - Israel/Palestine. Dave lives in Richfield with his wife Kristy, plus two massive teens, two obnoxious puppies, and two persnickity cats.

    1h 4m

  7. 09/28/2025

    Episode 25: Citizens of the Whole World

    In episode 25, I speak with Benjamin Balthaser about his new book, Citizens of the Whole World: Anti-Zionism and the Cultures of the American Jewish Left, just published by Verso. Benjamin tells me about his beloved communist grandparents and his own background as a labor activist and longtime member of Jewish Voice for Peace. We discuss the historical precedents to the current eruption of anti-Zionism among U.S. Jews on the left as we dig into the history, especially from the 1970s, of Jewish diasporism as a political identity. Benjamin shows us how diasporism grew out of the practical politics of the 1970s in response to the collapse of the New Left, the Jewish institutional turn towards Zionism, and the emergence of “identity politics.” We end by talking about the challenges of intersectional solidarity then and now, asking what we can learn from these earlier generations about maintaining our commitments to the liberation of all people, even when contradictions arise. This episode was recorded in two sections; you will notice a shift in sound quality after the musical break. We reference a future episode on the history of the red scare and its effects on Jewish institutions. Stay tuned! Books, movements and groups mentioned or discussed: Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning Peter Beinart and Angela Davis, “What a Lifetime of Struggle Taught Angela Davis” on The Beinart Notebook podcast Daniel Boyarin, The No State Solution: A Jewish Manifesto Judith Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism Abraham Cahan, The Rise of David Levinsky Marjorie N. Feld, The Threshold of Dissent: A History of American Jewish Critics of Zionism Michael Gold, Jews Without Money Geoffrey Levin, Our Palestine Question: Israel and American Jewish Dissent, 1948-1978 Shaul Magid, The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint Myron Perlman and The Chutzpah Collective Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Black Power movement Music by Ben Roberts: Benjamin.Roberts447@gmail.com Comments and ideas to Juliealicecarr@gmail.com

    1h 4m

  8. 08/16/2025

    Episode 24: Freedom From and Freedom To

    In episode 24, I speak with Judith Levine, journalist activist, and author of five books. Judith and I (who go way back!) discuss our shared experience of losing parents to Alzheimer’s, asking what makes a self if not language, if not the mind, asking how we can value one another, even when the “self” seems to be gone. We then discuss Judith’s co-authored book (with Erica L. Meiners), The Feminist and the Sex Offender: Confronting Sexual Harm, Ending State Violence. Judith talks about the intense backlash to her earlier book, Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex, and about her sustained and ethical critique of the sex offender registry and of the carceral/surveillance/police state writ large. We reflect on #MeToo and various kinds of liberation, noting together that liberation is a central Jewish value (one that I’d oddly neglected to include in this podcast’s list of Jewish themes). We end with a nod to Orwell’s roses and Rebecca Solnit’s book of that title, affirming that we must continue to live and find moments of joy even now, especially now. A note: in this episode, we discuss sexual violence. Books, essays, movements and ideas discussed: Margaret Atwood, “We are double-plus unfree” Elizabeth Bernstein on “Carceral Feminism” Tarana Burke and #MeToo adrienne maree brown, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good Angela Davis, Abolition. Feminism. Now. Mariame Kaba and Andrea J. Ritchie, No More Police: A Case for Abolition Paul Lafargue, The Right to be Lazy Judith Levine, Do You Remember Me: A Father, a Daughter and the Search for the Self Judith Levine, Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex Judith Levine, “Remy Charlip’s Postmodernism for Kids” Judith Levine, Today in Fascism (substack) Judith Levine and Erica Meiners, The Feminist and the Sex Offender: Confronting Sexual Harm, Ending State Violence George Orwell, 1984 Stephen Post, The Moral Challenge of Alzheimer’s Disease: Ethical Issues from Diagnosis to Dying Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933). Rebecca Solnit, Orwell’s Roses Judith Levine is an award-winning journalist, essayist, and author, whose work resides in the territory where the body meets the body politic and intimate relations meet public life. She explores the intersections of sex, gender, race, reproduction, and dis/ability; the law, the economy, and consumer desire; social movements and public emotion. Levine is an anti-racist feminist activist and restorative justice volunteer, a forever intermediate cross-country skier, forever amateur pianist, and a lover of French and cats.

    1h 4m
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Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
7 Ratings

About

“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.

Information

  • Creator
    Julie Carr
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    31
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Return the Key: Jewish Questions for Everyone copyright Julie Carr. The original music is composed and performed by Ben Roberts.
  • Show Website
    Return the Key: Jewish Questions for Everyone

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