Return the Key: Jewish Questions for Everyone

Julie Carr
  • 5.0 (8)
  • 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. 4d ago

    Episode 40: The Torah of Not Knowing

    In Episode 40 I talk with Berlin-based visual artist, performer, and researcher Julie Weitz. After dipping into Julie’s childhood in a religious Jewish family in Chicago, we discuss her substack essay, “I don’t know, Adonai,” in which she wrote movingly about the late songwriter and musician David Berman in the context of a ritual she led at the Walter Benjamin memorial in Port Bou, Spain. We think together about walking backwards, the Angel of History, and the metaphysics and politics of not-knowing. We then discuss two of Julie’s other projects grounded in her deep research into Yiddish folk culture and history. In the site-specific performance work, “Holy Names for our Dybbuk,” Julie performs as a dybbuk (possessive spirit) at sites of historical violence in Poland, including a former Nazi concentration camp in Kraków and the former Warsaw Ghetto. In “Hereland,” an ongoing educational and activist project, Julie, Daniel Voskoboynik and their collaborators have been deeply studying the early-twentieth century pacifist Rabbi Aaron Samuel Tamares (1869–1931), whose prophetic anti-political-Zionist views and embrace of the condition of exile are vital to us today. We discuss “Hereland” and its many incarnations including the film, “A Grenets-Mayse | A Border-Story,” soon to be exhibited at the Polin Museum in Warsaw. Along the way we talk about the overlap between ritual and performance, the Jewish practice of speaking directly to the dead, the relationship between grief and land, the need to reclaim our anti-Zionist ancestors, and the memories of trees. Texts, works, artists and activist groups mentioned and discussed: Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History Yudith Berg David Berman and the Silver Jews B'nai Avraham Chaia Annie Guthrie Cohen Molly Crabapple, Here Where we Live is our Country Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes this World: Mischief, Myth and Art Dani Karavan, “Passages”: Hommage to Walter Benjamin Daniela Naomi Molnar: Return the Key Episode “Memory of a Larger Mind” Benjamin Moser, Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History Magdalena Przybysz Jenny Romane at Klez Canada: walking backward ritual Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization Abraham Sutzkever, “What Will Stay Behind” translated by Zackery Sholem Berger Rabbi Aaron Samuel Tamares, A Passionate Pacifist: Essential Writings, edited, translated and introduced by Everett Gendler Michael Waszynski, The Dybbuk (film) Julie Weitz, “I don’t know, Adonai” Julie Weitz “Holy Names for our Dybbuk” Julie Weitz and Daniel Voskoboynik, Hereland: Reforesting Diasporic Jewish Imagination; A Grenets-Mayse | A Border-Story Julie Weitz is a visual artist, performer, and researcher whose interdisciplinary practice moves between site-specific performance and participatory ritual, extending into video, photography, textiles, drawing, writing, and cultural organizing. Across these forms, she translates between archival and embodied research, activating ancestral memory and folklore as living, improvisational methodologies for collective experience. Weitz approaches diasporic culture as an experimental field shaped by rupture, transmission, and reinvention, where performance and material form become tools for re-sensing how histories persist in the present. Weitz is a Fulbright Scholar (2023–24) and a Wallis Annenberg Helix Fellow at Yiddishkayt (2020–23). Her performances have been presented at Jewish Museum (Amsterdam), Dokumentale (Berlin), ExtraCity Kunsthal (Antwerp), and Harvard Divinity School (Cambridge), among other venues. Her artwork has been exhibited at the Contemporary Jewish Museum (San Francisco), POLIN Museum (Warsaw), Jewish Museum (Vienna), Coaxial Arts Foundation (Los Angeles), and the Jüdisches Museum (Augsburg). Weitz has been featured in Artforum, Art in America, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, BOMB, and Hyperallergic. She is currently based in Berlin. For regular updates, follow Weitz on substack. Music by Ben Roberts : Benjamin.Roberts447@gmail.com Comments and ideas to Juliealicecarr@gmail.com

  2. Oct 10

    Episode 39: This Desire that You Are

    “Spinoza’s universe is crisscrossed by flows of power like tides that sweep into space before departing.” This sentence, from a talk Kenneth Novis recently gave about Gilles Deleuze and Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) frames our conversation about Spinoza’s theories of God-nature-substance, virtue and ethics, power, self-contentment, joy, sadness and especially desire. We begin with Kenneth’s education in Edinburgh and Oxford, his work on Spinoza, Simone Weil, Deleuze and Bayle. After briefly discussing the ideological stranglehold on the study of Marxism in the UK and the special brilliance of twelve-year-olds, we turn to Spinoza’s biography—his early life in the Sephardic Jewish community of Amsterdam, the writ of herem against him, and his subsequent life spent mostly in solitude in The Hague. We touch on the question of whether Spinoza was a theist, a pantheist, or an atheist and we query the influence of Maimonides and Kabbala on his thinking. In the second half of the conversation Kenny explains that for Spinoza, desire (which for him can be objectless!) is both one of the primary affects and our essence. We “undergo desire “but “it is also what we are, it is our essence.” Not only this, desire is also the essence of all things, from animals to trees to even chunks of granite! How might ethics or virtue derive from such a capacious understanding of desire and its status? This episode was recorded during the day before Yom Kippur. For this reason, we end with Ben playing Kol Nidre. Texts / scholars mentioned and discussed: A.W. Moore Caroline Warman A Philosopher and a Child: Does Infinity Exist? (Warning: if you click on this you might not be able to leave) Louis Althusser on Spinoza  Pierre Bayle, An Historical and Critical Dictionary  (pub date is 1697, not ‘99 as stated) Simone Weil, First and Last Notebooks Steve Nadler René Descartes, Principles of Philosophy Alexander Douglas, The Philosophy of Hope: Beatitude in Spinoza Matthew Kisner Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Music by Ben Roberts : Benjamin.Roberts447@gmail.com Comments and ideas to Juliealicecarr@gmail.com

  3. Sep 1

    Episode 38: Light Desires to Overflow

    In episode #38 I talk with painter, poet, and renowned scholar of philosophy and Jewish mysticism, Elliot Wolfson. We begin by touching on Elliot’s relationship with Kabbalah “beyond” the scholarship, even while he insists that no absolute division can be made between the practitioner and the scholar: “textual interpretation itself is a modality of ecstatic experience.” After acknowledging the short barrier of celebrity fascination with Kabbalah, Elliot offers a general history of Jewish mysticism, and defines some key Kabbalist terms: ein sof, sephirot, emanation, tzimtzum, reshimu, and the “breaking of the vessels.” We then move to a conversation about the concept of the infinite and the dynamic between the infinite and the finite, which includes questions about the relationship between good and evil and between judgment (din) and loving-kindness (chesed). Bob Dylan comes up (“there is violence in the eyes, girl”) as we think about the problem of desire. We touch on Elliot’s description of time as a “linear circularity,” and on the problem of speaking about what cannot be said except by un-saying. As Elliot has written on the first page of his newest book, Apophasis and Envisioning the Invisible: Unveiling Veils of Infinity, “Whatever scheme the inquisitive mind proposes to corroborate the contours of infinity, it is always at an infinite distance from the goal it seeks to achieve,” which is to say, this conversation is of necessity unfinished. We hope to continue. A note: towards the end of the conversation, we talk briefly about tikkun olam (to repair the world) and Jewish messianism. We did not have time to go into these important themes in any depth, but it should be said, as a corrective to my too quick summary, that the concept of tikkun olam is at the heart of the long traditions of Jewish commitments to social justice and is not the same thing as Jewish messianism, which itself has a wide range of interpretations and applications. For some past conversations that touch on these themes see episodes 33 with Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg, 30 with Daniela Naomi Molnar, and 13 with Almút Shulamit Bruckstein Çoruh. Future conversations will return to these themes and their endlessly complex meanings and manifestations. Texts / authors mentioned and Discussed: Sefer Yetzirah at the Sefaria Library Moses Maimonides, The Guide to the Perplexed Translated and with Commentary by Lenn E. Goodman and Phillip I. Lieberman Plotinus, The Six Enneads The Zohar Daniel C. Matt Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and its Symbols Emmanuel Levinas, introduction to French editions of Nefesh ha-Hayyim, L'Âme de la Vie Nathaniel Mackey, Splay Anthem Elliot R. Wolfson, a Fellow of the American Academy of Jewish Research and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, is the Marsha and Jay Glazer Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies and Distinguished Professor of Religion Emeritus at University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of many publications including most recently The Duplicity of Philosophy’s Shadow: Heidegger, Nazism and the Jewish Other(2018); Heidegger and Kabbalah: Hidden Gnosis and the Path of Poiēsis(2019); Suffering Time: Philosophical, Kabbalistic, and Ḥasidic Reflections on Temporality(2021); The Philosophical Pathos of Susan Taubes: Between Nihilism and Hope(2023); Nocturnal Seeing: Hopelessness of Hope and Philosophical Gnosis in Susan Taubes, Gillian Rose, and Edith Wyschogrod(2025); Apophasis and Envisioning the Invisible: Unveiling Veils of Infinity(2026). His most recent work is Mystical Nihilism, Theopolitical Agnosis, and the Atheology of Faith: A Philosophical Defense of Nothing. Music by Ben Roberts: Benjamin.Roberts447@gmail.com Comments and ideas to Juliealicecarr@gmail.com

  4. Jun 29

    Episode 37: How Loss Refuses Itself

    In episode #37 I talk with scholar and poet Ben Meyerson about his research and writing surrounding “voice” in diasporic song. Ben researches three musical forms: Troubadour lyric, Sephardic Romanzas, and Flamenco song, all of which originate from the Iberian Peninsula, dating from the 11th century to the present. Ben addresses some of the problems in theories of “voice” from thinkers such as Deleuze and Adriana Cavarero, who, he argues, in seeking to universalize “voice” risk losing track of individual, historical, cultural and physical voices. Ben’s interest lies in the complex ways that the singing voice can both protest particular historical losses and draw listeners into its community. We discuss and read from an essay we both deeply revere, Nathaniel Mackey’s “Sound and Sentiment, Sound and Symbol” and we talk about Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation as articulating how voice/voices can both be “in relation” while also maintaining “rootedness.” Finally, Ben reads one of his own poems and speaks about how his research is connected to his Jewish identity. In this poetics-enthusiast’s episode, we also touch on Kristeva, Doug Kearney, Lorca, and Moten. A special treat: we listen to a live recording of New York-based Flamenco singers Juan Pedro Jimenez, Barbara Martinez, and Jackson Scott, courtesy of Tara Laraway’s Salon of the Bittersweet. Listen to the end for that! Texts / authors mentioned and Discussed Adriana Cavarero, For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza Gilles Deleuze,Difference and Repetition Federico García Lorca,Theory and Play of the Duende Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation Douglas Kearney, Optic Subwoof Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language Nathaniel Mackey, “Sound and Sentiment, Sound and Symbol” Nathaniel Mackey, Splay Anthem Benjamin Meyerson, Seguiriyas Benjamin Meyerson, “Over-Abundance and Ineffability: Flamenco, Mysticism and the Joyful Language-Game” Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening Michel Serres, The Birth of Physics Steven J. Zipperstein, Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History. Ben Meyerson is the author of the poetry collection Seguiriyas (Black Ocean, 2023) and five prior chapbooks: Near Enough (Seven Kitchens Press, 2023), After Boabdil (The Alfred Gustav Press, 2023), An Ecology of the Void (Above/Ground Press, 2019), Holcocene (Kelsay Books, 2018) and In A Past Life (The Alfred Gustav Press, 2016). He holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Minnesota and an MA in philosophy from the Universidad de Sevilla. He is currently a PhD candidate in comparative literature at the University of Toronto, where he studies oral poetries of the Iberian Peninsula and philosophies of material complexity.  INTRO Music by Ben Roberts : Benjamin.Roberts447@gmail.com Comments and ideas to Juliealicecarr@gmail.com

  5. May 28

    Episode 36: My Country is the Page

    In episode #36 I talk with Lebanese-American poet, author, and contemplative educator, Moudi Sbeity. His forthcoming memoir, Habibi Means Beloved, has many stories including foundational experiences of loneliness which become, for Moudi, sources of wisdom and belonging. Moudi talks about growing up in Lebanon, just after the civil war, as a gay kid who stuttered. He discusses what stuttering teaches him about the value and power of words, their ability to not just describe but to create our reality. We talk about his process of coming out in Lebanon and why he felt he had to “break up with God” in order to do so. At age 18, because of the 2006 Israel-Lebanese war, Moudi (an American citizen) was evacuated to live with family in Utah. We talk about Moudi’s complicated feelings about being a plaintiff in Kitchen v. Herbert, the case which brought marriage equality to Utah and the 10th circuit states. In 2020, Moudi found his way back to Islam through Sufism, and on his own terms. I ask him what God is to him (and he answers!). We end by asking whether “God-stuff” is “only” language, and if so, what does that actually mean? And then, we read each other some poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins and by Moudi! Poems read or cited Wendel Berry, Our Real Work Gerard Manley Hopkins, Pied Beauty John O'Donohue, Fluent Moudi Sbeity, Bread and Salt Moudi Sbeity, "My Country Is This Page" Music by Ben Roberts : Benjamin.Roberts447@gmail.com Comments and ideas to Juliealicecarr@gmail.com

  6. May 22

    Episode 35: "What exactly are we doing here?"

    In episode #35 I talk with ethnic studies scholar Nishant Upadhyay about their book, Indians on Indian Lands: Intersections of Race, Caste, and Indigeneity. Together, we dig into the complexities around “settler colonial frameworks,” thinking about what the category of settler means in cases of forced migration, or migration based on ecocide, genocide, or extreme need. We talk about writing history with a focus on one’s own positionality, how that has been important to both of us. Nishant speaks specifically about Brahminism and Hinduism in India and how these violently hierarchical structures have in some ways migrated with Indian immigrants in Canada and the US, and even within post-colonial and transnational feminist studies. We ask what real solidarity with indigenous struggles (across Turtle Island, South Asia, Palestine, and beyond) might look like in the contexts of our hyper-capitalist societies and the rise of fascism across the globe, and we locate pockets of optimism in our everyday intimacies, acknowledging that we must fight for our right to be together. People and groups mentioned or discussed Key figures in South Asian and Postcolonial Studies: Gayatri Spivak Partha Chatterjee Dipesh Chakrabarty Dalit Scholars: Chinnaiah Jangam M.S.S. Pandian Braj Raj Mani Hawai'i scholar and activist: Haunani-Kay Trask Indigenous nations of the Toronto area include: the Mississaugas of the New Credit, Anishinaabe, Chippewa, Haudenosaunee, Wendat, Métis peoples, and many other diverse Indigenous communities. Music by Ben Roberts : Benjamin.Roberts447@gmail.com Comments and ideas to Juliealicecarr@gmail.com

  7. Apr 29

    Episode 34: Beat Down the Barriers

    In episode #34 I talk with poet, artist, translator and scholar Jennifer Scappettone about her new book, Poetry After Barbarism: The Invention of Motherless Tongues and Resistance to Fascism, in which she explores the power of a planetary, xenoglossic poetry of resistance—which is to say, a polyglot poetry that rejects mastery in favor of strangeness, a poetry that exposes how we are all outside of language, speaking and writing in waywardness and errancy. We begin with Jen’s multicultural and translingual upbringing on Long Island, her childhood obsession with the Statue of Liberty, and her time living in Japan as a young adult. We recall our years together as graduate students, and I take the opportunity to confess how I envied and was intimidated by Jen during that time, emotions that eventually transformed into admiration and love. We talk about the complexities of “contamination”: the powerful and necessary contaminations of all languages and cultures as they interact, counterposed against a literal contamination that forms one of Jen’s other obsessions, registered in her work on environmental injustice: the dangerous and often deadly contamination of the land. Jen reads us a poem by the Italian-Jewish poet and musician/musicologist Amelia Rosselli and speaks about Rosselli’s remarkable biography growing up in an antifascist Irish-English/Italian family. Along the way we (of course) speak of our mothers, ask how we might wrest a complicated and difficult beauty from the diseases of our time, and somehow arrive at Genesis I:2 (in multiple translations) and the question of the plurality (infinite) of God(s). Texts and people discussed: Etel Adnan Theodor Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society” Don Mee Choi Lyn Hejinian, The Language of Inquiry Lyn Hejinian, The Beginner Amelia Rosselli: Locomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose of Amelia Rosselli, a Bilingual Edition Sawako Nakayasu Jennifer Scappettone, The Republic of Exit 43: Outtakes & Scores from an Archaeology and Pop-Up Opera of the Corporate Dump Jennifer Scappettone works at the confluence of the literary, translational, visual, and scholarly arts, and is Professor of English and romance languages, gender studies, and the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization at the University of Chicago, where she directs the Environmental Arts+Humanities Lab. She is the author of five full-length books, including the scholarly monographs Poetry After Barbarism: The Invention of Motherless Tongues and Resistance to Fascismand Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice. Her chapbooks include SMOKEPENNY LYRICHORD HEAVENBRED: 2 Acts(The Elephants) featuring librettos for mixed-reality performance with Judd Morrissey and Ava Aviva Avnisan, and as curating poet, with Etel Adnan and Lyn Hejinian, Belladonna Elders Series #5: Poetry, Landscape, Apocalypse (Belladonna, 2009). Both are available for download, free of charge. Her current project devoted to the “copper lyre” subtending telecommunications networks, Pennies from Nether, was a finalist for the 2024 Creative Capital Award in Literature.  Music by Benjamin Roberts: benjamin.roberts447@gmail.com comments and questions: juliealicecarr@gmail.com

  8. Mar 19

    Episode 33: Neighbor

    In episode #33 I talk with Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg about two terms that have been central to her lately: “collapse” and “entanglement.” We read from and discuss Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World, a book that helps think through these themes. Rabbi Jessica talks about what it’s been like on the ground in Minneapolis this winter, how confronting state violence and authoritarianism in real-time by caring for her neighbors has been both terrifying and profound in how it’s changed her sense of what “entanglement” really means. We discuss how accepting that we are in a time of collapse (of institutions, structures, and climate) might paradoxically help us get out of bed in the morning, rather than paralyzing us with fear. I bring up my obsession with “Longtermism” (not a fan), and Rabbi Jessica shares her thinking around “spiral time” in the context of the Jewish calendar, insisting that we can think long term while “holding the collective liberation of all people on the planet right now in our minds and hearts.” We end by talking about what both personal and collective grief can teach us, awakening us to the now. Texts and people discussed: Ross Gay, Inciting Joy: Essays poupeh missaghi, “When Bombs Fall: Saying Yes to Life” Aurora Levins Morales Susan Raffo with Kelly Hayes, “‘Minneapolis Community Defense Is “Riding on the Learning Edge of a Whirlwind’” (Interview) Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg, For Times Such as These: A Radical’s Guide to the Jewish Year Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg, “Spiral Time in Collapse: Dvar for Erev Rosh Hashana 5786” Émile P Torres, “Against Longermism” (Note: I mistakenly credited this essay to Sam Dresser. Dresser edited it, but It was authored by Torres in 2021.) Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins Music by Ben Roberts : Benjamin.Roberts447@gmail.com Comments and ideas to Juliealicecarr@gmail.com

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Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
8 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
    40
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • 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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