"The whole book is sort of a meditation, of a prayer designed to protect the person who is reading it." Jeff Wengrofsky, the most authentic punk-rock person I personally know, wrote a memoir, and you should buy it and read it. In some ways an unintentional pean to the Lower East Side, Jeff gets into what it was like to grow up feeling like an outsider ("The sensation of feeling like an outsider is not a pleasant one, so I was looking to find some new form of community, and let go of whatever...

It was both challenging and illuminating to speak with my old friend Shawn Ruby, an Israeli citizen who is deeply rooted in his Zionist identity (having originated in Canada and raised his family and made his life in Israel, one child a high-ranking IDF officer), firmly anchored in an unwavering pursuit of moral clarity, and overall one of the most thoughtful people I know. We spoke an hour past the time the last group of hostages was supposed to be let out, in the midst of what he described...

"One of my Palestinian friends said, Everybody’s pro-Hamas right now. Cause they did something! On an internal level, hamas’ bid to take over leadership of the Palestinian struggle is very strong. On the other hand, I have another Palestinian friend saying, what do you mean — Hamas is a disaster for our people. It’s always been a disaster for our people. We’re all sitting around not working for a month now…" Whenever anything happens in Israel, the person I want to hear from the most is...

Poetry, right? I don't know about you but I'm feeling like I could use some poetry right about now. To that end! Right before the High Holidays started I had a conversation with one of my favorite Jewish writers, poet and translator Atar Hadari. The episode was slated for release on Monday 10/9, and of course intervening world events made it nearly impossible to think about poetry, much less listen to it read aloud, much less claim a moment of open-ended reflection to contemplate,...

"So now I'm in a weird place" is a sentiment many can relate to these days. Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza, following the latter's barbaric 10/7 torture-rape-massacre of 1400 Israelis, and kidnapping of 240 more, has provoked some of the most acute fissures of my generation, with implications that can't be fully predicted except to say we will be living with them for generations more. Joshua Leifer experienced what he describes as an acute awakening about the nature of left-politics in...

“We are all characters in our stories, and we have to look internally, and hopefully at the end of 90 minutes we’ll become a better person. But sometimes the characters don’t change, and you’re just like, ‘Oh, you were offered the opportunity to grow and learn from your experiences, and instead you’re still being the same turd you started out as.’ ” Bonus episode! I've been wanting to interview the awesome Daniel Zana for a while because I'm such a huge fan of the Jews on Film podcast he...

Since arriving at Central Synagogue almost two decades ago, Rabbi Angela Buchdal has transformed it into a sui generis experience of communal prayer: backed by a professional band and musical director, her own professionally trained singing voice, and a crew of clerical colleagues with similarly formidable vocal skills, not only is Central’s building packed, their livestream boasts an endless scroll of remote participants from around the country and across the world.   This has all...

Friends, I can't tell you enough how excited I am to share my most recent Bad Rabbi Media interview with Nick Bryant -- intrepid investigative journalist, author (The Franklin Scandal), interviewer (The Nick Bryant Podcast), and most recently, Director of epsteinjustice.com -- an organization dedicated to pursuing accountability for the scores of victims abused and traumatized by Jeffrey Epstein's government-backed child-trafficking ring. Nick has been investigating and uncovering similar...

I was pretty rapt listening to Jordan Mann articulate the Jewish Liberation Fund’s (JLF) vision for a progressive Jewish future – and not only because “power,” “systemic strategies,” and “structural change” are my love language. Jordan’s personal connection to the work, both the crackling passion he brings to it and the personal journey that brought him there – from his childhood as the son of a Jewish father and black mother in “very white and conservative” central Illinois (“The reform...

“I think this is such a great line for your podcast. It’s from my third album, Exile. ‘I am in exile in my own home. My real home is moving, it’s a wandering home. I give birth to contradictions, I give up in indecision, and worry.' ” Basya Schecter is one of my favorite wanderers. From a prolific early singer-songwriter career as the leader of Pharaoh’s Daughter, to her nine-year stint as the full-time musical director and then spiritual leader of communities in Manhattan and Brooklyn, to...

Dudes: please check out Stephen Daniel Arnoff’s podcast and book, Bob Dylan: On Man and God and Law. One of my favorite pop-culture rabbit-holes, the podcast delivers on so many levels: informative, illuminating, a ton of fun and at times breathtakingly insightful. I was super excited to talk to him about how he came to approach song lyrics as sacred text, how music “saves your life and keeps you company,” and his esteemed lineage of invaluably “weird” teachers (“Weird is good. I like...

One of the things I love most about Jon Madoff is that on any given day in the midst of of numbly scrolling on my phone to avoid contemplating any number of personal and collective inevitabilities, I can run into a video of him JAMMING TF OUT on his guitar -- alone in his basement with headphones, in a venue backing up a friends band, on an internet show or a clip from a festival leading his own band -- and for a minute or two be reminded of the pure joy of the creative process. As a musican,...

Jeremiah Lockwood is not only the hardest working man in Jewish music, he is one of its truly great living visionaries and practitioners. In this great conversation he describes his journey growing up in a "cantorial family" with a grandfather who was a famous, record-selling star at the end of the "Golden Age" of Jewish cantorial music; to being a teenager obsessed with Southern Blues apprenticed to the great bluesman Carolina Slim; to starting his own band, The Sway Machinery, "singing...

Check out this incredibly fun and lively live podcast recording I did with historian of Yiddish popular culture Eddy Portnoy. Appropriately enough, this episode, which deals with the lost forms of Jewish identity Eddy Excavated through his research in to the Yiddish Press, was itself temporarily lost. We recorded it in May 2020; in the interim, Eddy's insights about the lost and latent posibilities of Jewish culture and identity -- and the surprisingly moving and off-beat, often darkly...

...the surprising things we learn about ourselves as we get older, the vast territories of unknown self suddenly exposed — eg, the ways our families’ immigrant histories impact our live and choices and relationships, every day — and how bracing and humbling it can be to realize we’ve labored under such partial understandings — was a recurring theme Niedzviecki reflected in with deep insight. The conversation had me revisiting some of my memories about his parents, jovial suburbanites who...

Remember Israel, Palestine, etc.? For a few weeks in May it led most news cycles, between the end of Bibi's 12-year reign and installation of a new leading coalition, to the renewal of Gaza hostilities and the ultra-disturbing flashpoints of violence between Jewish and Palestinian Israelis. If this all feels a bit fuzzy and distant, to be fair it was like, FIVE WHOLE MONTHS AGO. That's why it was so great to recently catch up with Rabbi Shaul Judelman, our first return guest! As co-founder...

"How can we blend the sense that the ecstatic, the effervescent, the beyond, is our human birthright, and we can also be modern liberal people thinking about intersectionality and social justice?" We're stuck, dudes; it's no joke. That's why I needed to keep talking about the transformative potential of psychedelics to facilitate real healing, on both individual and collective levels. And that's why Rabbi Zac Kamenetz was the perfect person to talk to. As founder and CEO of Shefa, an...

Dudes. In the midst of a pandemic, deep economic crisis; shocking and mean-spirited governmental incompetence, abuse, and neglect; deep cultural malaise punctuated by eruptions of collective indignation and outrage at the systemic racial injustice embedded in U.S. society – what could possibly be worth talking about? What could possibly help? There’s only one thing I can think of: a shift – an expansion – of consciousness. That’s why I wanted to talk to my old friend Aaron Genuth, a...

I really needed to talk to Raffi Magarik. Whenever the subject of anti-Semitism erupts into the news, the public discourse around it immediately and invariably become combative, contested, confusing, and confused. Are there different kinds of anti-Semitism or just one kind that shapeshifts through history, adapting to the parameters of its new host? If there are different kinds, should we call them all out equally, or are some inherently more evil and dangerous and merit greater vigilance and...

Aaron Potek is one of the only rabbis whose job is actually *being a rabbi* (shul, holidays, weddings, funerals, etc) who I still talk to on a regular basis. At least part of the reason for this is his deep investment in comedy. Aaron started doing standup in high school and then got into improv, which he still performs. We talk about how the mindset of improv has shaped his spiritual worldview and how it impacts his role as a communal rabbi. He get into how he thinks the "there's no such...

What's it like to serve a community in the role of the Rebbetzin, the Rabbi's wife? I was honored -- and at times deeply moved, at others deeply disturbed -- with the bracingly honest sharing of a women who spent forty years in this role, serving a traditional suburban Jewish community in the Midwest. There are stories of connection, and stories of abuse; stories of friendship and betrayal; stories of uplift, and stories whose implications are sobering to contemplate. It was an extremely...

I really, really needed to speak with my old pal Aryeh Bernstein about how to participate LOCALLY in effective activism--both as a general practice, and specifically in this urgent moment organizing to oppose the concentration camps at the border and other insidious ICE actions around the country. What I loved about our conversation was that Aryeh both had tons of accumulated wisdom and practical advice to pass on, and offered both a) compelling Big Picture framing of the issues at stake and...