In episode 18, I talk with poet and theorist Syd Zolf about two of their recent projects, No One’s Witness: A Monstrous Poetics, a critical book that draws from Black studies as it engages the problem of witnessing atrocity, and NEUTRØIS, a forthcoming book of poems. We talk about grief and loss, intergenerational trauma, the notion of the unanswerable question as a foundational Jewish practice, and the idea of witnessing from the position of the “no one.” We explore citational writing, procedural writing, and finding language outside of language. How can we respond to other people’s pain? What is the difference (is there one?) between “living” and “thinking”? How might we find our way to a secular messianic hope? And how can we recognize and remember that we are “already here, already connected, already dancing”?

Texts, interviews, and authors mentioned or discussed

Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History

Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation

Almút Shulamit Bruckstein Çoruh, Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman and Julie Carr, “To Begin (again) with Justice: Prof. Almút Shulamit Bruckstein Çoruh & House of Taswir” on Return the Key

Paul Celan, “Ashglory” translated by Pierre Joris

Denise  Ferreira da Silva, "On Difference Without Separability"

Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx

Laura Harris, “What Happened to the Motley Crew?: C. L. R. James, Hélio Oiticica, and the Aesthetic Sociality of Blackness”

Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions, translated by Rosemary Waldrop

Bhanu Kapil, Schizophrene, The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, Ban En Banlieue

Robert Majzels, Apikoros Sleuth

Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study

M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong!

Jalal Toufic, The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster

Nancy Stark Smith

Rosemary Waldrop, Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabès

Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human

Larry Zolf vs. Germaine Greer

Syd Zolf, Her absence, this wanderer; Masque; Neighbour Procedure; No One’s Witness: a Monstrous Poetics; Janey's Arcadia

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Music composed and performed by Ben Roberts: Benjamin.roberts447@gmail.com

Comments and ideas to: juliealicecarr@gmail.com

In episode 17, I talk with writer and podcast host David Naimon about his vexed relationship with listening, his childhood experiences of antisemitism, and his decision to leave medical practice behind. Digging into three episodes of his acclaimed literary podcast, Between the Covers, that have deeply affected me—his conversations with Isabella Hammad, Anne de Marcken, and Daniel Mendelsohn—we talk about the ethics of encounter, the stranger within the self, the “others” at the heart of Judaism, and language itself as an other that makes us and is not ours. Along the way we wind ourselves through many writers and topics, from Derrida to Pádraig Ó Tuama, from Edward Said to Judith Butler, from Hélène Cixous to Lyn Hejinian. What Jewish stories might guide us toward an ethical response to Palestine now? What is it to face our own wrongness? Is there such thing as a radical humanism? How are our wounds also our genius? And how might we find ourselves less alone?

Music composed and performed by Ben Roberts: Benjamin.roberts447@gmail.com

For comments and ideas: juliealicecarr@gmail.com

Texts, interviews and events mentioned and discussed (too many to list)

Martin Buber, I and Thou

Judith Butler, “Violence, Mourning, Politics,” in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence

Julie Carr, Real Life: An Installation

Hélène Cixous and David Naimon, “Rêvoir” in Between the Covers podcast

Anne de Marcken, It Last Forever and then it’s Over

Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation and “Tympan” in Margins of Philosophy

Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism

Natasha Gill, “The Original “No”: Why the Arabs Rejected Zionism and Why it Matters”

Isabella Hammad, Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative

Isabella Hammad and David Naimon, “Recognizing the Stranger” on Between the Covers podcast

Edmond Jabès, in Rosemary Waldrop’s Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabès

Naomi Klein and David Naimon, “Doppelganger: Part Two” on Between the Covers podcast

Ursula K. Le Guin, “Telling is Listening”

Emmanuel Levinas, “Ethics and Politics” in The Levinas Reader, edited by Sean Hand

Daniel Mendelsohn, Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate

David Naimon, “Let’s Feel the Pain Together”

Pádraig Ó Tuama and Glenn Jordan, Border and Belonging: The Book of Ruth: A Story for Our Times

Pádraig Ó Tuama and David Naimon, “In the Shelter * Borders and Belonging” on Between the Covers podcast

Edward Said, Freud and the Non-European

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“A Middle East Mediator’s Murder in Palestine 1948” video from UN Story

Operation Cast Thy Bread (Wikipedia)

“Israel Poisoned Palestinian Land To Build West Bank Settlement in 1970s” in Haaretz

Martin Buber’s cultural Zionism

In episode 16, I talk with literary scholar Na’ama Rokem about her work-in-progress, Dispatches in Translation: A German-Hebrew Epistolary Network, which studies the correspondences between mid-century Jewish intellectuals writing in and between German and Hebrew. The project focuses on ambivalences and debates surrounding Zionism from the 1930s through the early 70’s. We discuss and read from Hannah Arendt’s correspondences with Gershom Scholem and James Baldwin, and Paul Celan’s exchange with Yehuda Amichai. We get into two of Celan’s poems, “Discus” and “Mandorla,” as we think about the ethics of orienting “towards another,” of dwelling in the dynamic between presence and absence, between something-ness and nothingness.

Discus,

starred with premonitions,

throw yourself

out of yourself.

- Paul Celan, trans. Washburn & Guillemin

In episode #15 I talk with writer Magdalena Zurawski about her research into her great-grandfather’s story. Arrested by the Nazi’s during the Warsaw Uprising, he was taken to a concentration camp. Magdalena spent 2022-23 on a Fulbright Scholarship in Warsaw, tracking what happened next and growing obsessed with twentieth-century avant-garde Polish writer Miron Białoszewski. We discuss the uprising, which led to the Nazi destruction of Warsaw and the killing of 250,000 Polish people in just two months. We also discuss the earlier Warsaw Ghetto uprising and the burning of the ghetto that followed. Where do history and the imagination meet? What is the nature of truth? And how can you get older Polish women to talk to you on buses? Maggie reads from her powerful (and very funny) work-in-progress.

Original music by Ben Roberts: Benjamin.roberts447@gmail.com

In this first episode of the spring 2025 season, I talk with dance-artist Sondra Loring about our work together in the ‘90s initiating and running the New York Improvisation Festival, and about Sondra’s work now as a dance maker, a teacher, a prison abolitionist, and a steward of land in the Hudson Valley. We talk about “knowledge” vs. practice in Jewish traditions, the intimacy of knowing a person through movement, Fred Moten’s language, Yoshiko Chuma’s Living Room Projects, prison abolitionists Dean Spade and Ruthie Wilson Gilmore, the anarchist Peter Kropotikin, Sondra’s new dances and her work teaching dance in prisons. What does it mean to be “on the land” in the context of settler colonialism? What is the mutual in mutual aid? How do we find ourselves “at home”?

In this final episode of the season, Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman and I talk with Professor Almút Shulamit Bruckstein Çoruh, beginning with her years in the Neo-Hasidic movement studying with Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and her decades of study in Jerusalem with Talmudic scholar Rabbi HaRav Zev (Walter) Gotthold. We discuss the power and importance of names, the founding of psychoanalysis, and Shulamit’s English translation of, and commentary on, Hermann Cohen’s Ethics of Maimonides (1908). Cohen finds in Maimonides a “non-foundational, anarchic thinking of origin,” in which justice, lovingkindness, and goodness are demanded of us, in which ethics precedes being. Can we still stand-in for this diasporic, non-territorial Jewish humanist tradition, given the extremity of violence in Gaza (and elsewhere) now?

—

Original music by Ben Roberts: Benjamin.roberts447@gmail.com

comments and ideas to: juliealicecarr@gmail.com

In the most poetry-rich episode to date, Julie talks with poet and translator Daniel Borzutzky about Daniel’s Chilean and Jewish family, about his close relationship with the Tree of Life synagogue and how he wrote about the 2018 massacre, about writing violence in a time of ongoing mass violence and war—after, before Israel’s ongoing massacres in Gaza and beyond—and about the tension between our sense of responsibility for and connection to those we share identities with and a more universalist sense of care, grief, and solidarity. Daniel talks about what reading and translating Raúl Zurita has meant to him and asks whether atheists are allowed to pray. This episode was recorded over zoom.

Julie talks with Rabbi Caryn Aviv of Denver’s Judaism Your Way. We read and discuss Nelly Sach’s poem “When Day Grows Empty,” talk about how our ancestors leave a “soul-trail” for us to follow, about Jewish Mysticism and Process Theology, about the philosophy of Judaism Your Way, and about Caryn’s book-in-progress Unlearning Jewish Anxiety. Caryn roots American Ashkenazi Jewish anxiety in the early 20th-century when many Jewish immigrants strived to assimilate to whiteness in a violently white-supremacist society, citing works by Jud Brewer, Eric Goldstein, Avery Gordon, and Resmaa Menakem. Caryn offers alternatives to the “persecuted-yet striving” “virtue narrative” in embodied Jewish practices. In a final question we talk about the difficulty of the High Holidays in this year of terrible violence and pain. Caryn emphasizes the need to take responsibility for harm and repair and the imperative that we learn how to forgive.

The closing music is Kol Nidre by Max Bruch, performed by Benjamin Roberts

Novelist and diviner Selah Saterstrom talks about growing up in a small town in Mississippi within a family of Christian mystics and diviners. We discuss “knowing/unknowing,” dig into “divinatory poetics,' and ask what does it mean to work on the edge of the knowable? What does a good divination session really look like? What is prayer and what is it for? How do we “respond in kind” in our writing when facing traumas, such as sexual assault and rape? And what does it mean for writing to be a eucharistic event? Selah reads from her book Rancher and from her novel-in-progress! (Conducted over zoom)

Julie and Scott talk about Simone Weil's mysticism, her participation in the Spanish Civil War and the French Resistance, and her ideas surrounding pacifism, anti-statism (maybe!), and the politics of attention. And Scott tells us why despite it all, she is a Jewish thinker.

Julie asks Hilary to talk about her scholarship surrounding education in the Middle East and how she creates an inclusive classroom when teaching the history of Israel/Palestine. We talk about the contested language of "genocide," "river to the sea," and "intifada" in educational settings, and what gives us hope during this terrible time.

Julie and Yanara talk about Yanara's childhood in a Jewish-American and German family in Germany, the question of Jewish identity in a secular household, walking as writing practice, the value and problem of silence in the face of rupture, fractured and buried archives, Midrash as methodology, and Walter Benjamin's messianism.

This interview was conducted over zoom with sketchy internet.

Julie and Nabil talk about the challenge and honor of being part of a Jewish-Israeli-Arab-Palestinian faculty discussion group. Nabil describes his childhood in Morocco, the beautiful handwriting of a beloved father who died too young, the weight and detritus of colonization, and the power of multilingualism.

Julie interviews novelist Candace Nunag Tardío about her forthcoming debut novel, Solar Flare. We talk about infinite time, the afterlife of media, and various technologies of memorialization.

Julie and Jason interview Daniel Eisenberg and Rabbi Dave Yedid. Daniel and Dave talk about establishing Base Denver in their home, the intersection between queer and Jewish identities, Passover as a “coming out” narrative (coming out again and again and again), and the erotic eco-poetics of The Song of Songs.

Julie talks with poet-artist Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman about his project Wierzba Estery / Esther’s Willow, a collaboration with artists Katarzyna and Marta Sala in Chrzanów (PL), a half-Jewish city until the Nazi genocide and postwar processes that continued a long century of ethnic cleansing.

Julie and Jason interview philosopher Sarah Pessin about her work on Moses Maimonides and Emmanuel Levinas.

In this pilot episode of Return the Key, Jason and Julie interview each other about our friendship, the origins of the podcast, and our Jewish upbringings. We list our “Jewish themes,” read a bit from our recent writing, and ask each other to talk about the vexing ideas of “oneness” and “the chosen.”