I was SO PSYCHED to sit down with author Yossi Klein Halevi fresh off two solid months of touring and dialoguing around his super engaging and worthwhile book Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor. Yossi describes his transformative experience, in the past year since it was published, of Inviting the voices and narratives of Palestinians into his home, head, and heart (as well as into the newly out paperback edition of the book, which features in-depth responses from some of the very neighbors...

I REALLY wanted to speak with public opinion expert, political strategist, and writer Dahlia Scheindlin. The timing hardly could have been better: Dahlia has worked on 5.5 election campaigns in Israel and many more in countries across the world. Though a couple weeks before the latest wrinkle of Bibi's failure to form a coalition, triggering new elections, Dahlia's hard-earned, deeply observed insights about this moment of the Israel-Palestine Conflict -- especially around what kind of...

I caught author & pop culture archeologist Josh Frank in the midst of touring for his great new book Giraffes on Horseback Salad, a graphic novel that bills itself as the legendary unmade film collaboration between real-life friends and absurdist kindred spirits Salvador Dalí and Harpo Marx. Josh gives the fascinating background to how the project — his fourth in a series of ‘lost histories’ (the second of which was coauthored by yours truly) — came to be, and many times almost didn’t. He...

Melanie Landau's story is a gripping illustration of what she now teaches as an intimacy coach, spiritual teacher, and group facilitator: how to approach "life as a constant opening and deepening to the presence of the existence of what is." From a deeply traditional, patriarchal upbringing in Australia to a life in Jerusalem embedded in the rhythms of religious ritual, spiritual growth, and political engagement as a group facilitator of "Deep Listening" around the Israel/Palestine...

Judith Rosenbaum – historian, educator, Executive Director of the Jewish Women’s Archive (JWA) – discusses the critical work of JWA in collecting and showcasing Jewish women’s stories, and her own path to becoming an activist-historian and public thinker. We get into what it means to talk about feminism as spiritual leadership, the power of knowing our stories to enhance personal and collective resilience, and her mission to enable people to bring the fullness of who they are to the...

Eric Kaplan's career as a TV writer (Big Bang Theory, Simpsons, Drinky Crow), book author (Does Santa Exist? A Philosophical Examination) philosopher (Ph.D, U.C. Berkeley), and religious seeker spans decades and at times seemingly lifetimes. In this episode we follow the fascinating and multiple expressions of his lifelong quest to grasp and navigate the space between the embodied (subjective/finite) and "free" (objective/eternal) dimensions of human life--including his definition of...

From a childhood in ultra-Orthodox Brooklyn to a deep discography as singer-songwriter-composer Pharoah's Daughter to leading a community through the alchemy of liturgical song, Hazzanit Basya Schechter shares her many inner- and international journeys through creative loopholes, constructive ruptures, indigenous cultures, motherhood and more. She brings up Abraham as a role-model of wandering totally unprompted by me, and shares living snapshots from the path of moving forward while always...

Shefa Siegel spends most of the year far removed from Jewish life - teaching and writing about the history, morality, and politics of humanity's relationship with natural resources. But once a year he steps back into synagogue to do the thing he cares about most: praying for, before, and on behalf of a Jewish community. We talk about how this idiosyncratic existence came to be, about the High Holiday melodies that came to him in a dream after visiting a Florence shul, and the profundity of...

Rabbi, Artist, Musician Ariel Burger discusses his nearly lifelong relationship with Elie Weisel—as a sensitive, searching teenager navigating a life of Talmud and comic books; an undergraduate jostling between college and rabbinical studies; as his Teaching Assistant while pursuing a doctorate on an approach to conflict resolution based on Hasidic spirituality; and finally as a student-colleague and teacher-artist forging his own pathways of activism, identity, and the ethics and metaphysics...

Rabbi Shaul Judelman traces his journey from WTO protester in search of his own indigenous culture, to Orthodox rabbi doing local peace work with Israelis and Palestinians in the Territories and beyond as co-founder and -director of Roots/Shorashim/Judur. Shaul talks about the hard, hard work of holding the truth and legitimacy of multiple narratives while living a life deeply committed to one in particular. In short, we get INTO IT.