Can We Talk?

By Jewish Women's Archive

Society & Culture History Religion & Spirituality Judaism

What's Can We Talk? about?

In each episode of Can We Talk?, the Jewish Women’s Archive features stories and conversations about Jewish women and the issues that shape our public and private lives. Visit us at jwa.org.

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Can We Talk? episodes:

04.16.2024
Episode 109: Oral History Showcase: Ronya's Liberation Story
When Ronya Schwaab was a young girl, the highlight of her year was preparing for Pesach—the snow was melting, and she got to help bake matzos. Ronya was born in 1909 in Belarus. She grew up amidst the violence and...
04.02.2024
Episode 108: Queer Klezmer with Isle of Klezbos
A lot of people love klezmer music and know that it made a big comeback a few decades ago. But not a lot of people know that the klezmer revival of the '70s and '80s was connected to queer Jewish...
03.29.2024
Bonus Episode: The Nightingale of Iran
Last time on Can We Talk?, we spoke with Danielle and Galeet Dardashti about their new podcast, The Nightingale of Iran, which tells the story of their Persian family's musical legacy. Now, we're sharing the whole first episode with you. Enjoy!
03.19.2024
Episode 107: A Persian Family's Musical Legacy
Danielle and Galeet Dardashti grew up in a very musical family—they had a family band, their father was a cantor, their mother was a folk singer, and their grandfather was a famous singer in “the golden age” of Iran in...
03.05.2024
Episode 106: A Pocket of Hope: Israeli Women Building a Shared Future
“From the deepest crises come the clearest visions…We're fighting for our lives. We're fighting for our future,” says Sally Abed of Standing Together, a grassroots political movement in Israel. In this episode of Can We Talk?, we hear from Jewish and Palestinian...
12.12.2023
Episode 105: Hear Their Voices: Sexual Violence on October 7
When Hamas terrorists attacked Israel on October 7, they raped, tortured, and mutilated women’s bodies in unimaginable ways. News about the sexual violence emerged within days, but few women’s organizations spoke up to condemn it. Some even questioned whether the...
12.04.2023
Episode 104: Crying and Doing: Iris Bahr and her Aging Mother
Iris Bahr was halfway around the world when she saw her mother having a stroke over video chat. Within days, she was on an airplane, uprooting her life to become her mother’s primary caregiver. The stroke led to vascular dementia–...
11.21.2023
Episode 103: Kugels and Collards: The Southern Jewish Table
Food can be a vehicle for telling stories, connecting with people, and understanding our history—including the uncomfortable parts. In this episode of Can We Talk?, Jen Richler heads to Charleston, South Carolina to learn about Southern Jewish history through the...
11.07.2023
Episode 102: One Month Later
Today, November 7, 2023, marks one month since the Hamas attacks on Israel, when 1,400 people in Israel were killed. A month has passed, which feels both like a lifetime and like one long, terrible day. This tragedy is present, and raw...
11.02.2023
Episode 101: The Women's War Room
Israel has been at war with Hamas for nearly a month. Israeli and Palestinian casualties are devastating–and mounting. In Israel, women are on the front lines of a major grassroots mobilization: providing emergency relief to a country in crisis. An...
10.19.2023
Episode 100: Missing Vivian Silver
Vivian Silver has been missing since October 7, the day Hamas terrorists murdered more than 1,400 people in Israel and took more than 200 hostages to Gaza. Since then, more than 3,000 Palestinian civilians have been killed by Israel's air strikes in...
10.10.2023
Episode 99: A Wish in Dark Days
It's been a terrifying week of violence in Israel. Instead of our planned episode of Can We Talk?, this week we offer a poem called “Mishalot”—requests, or wishes—by Esther Raab, one of modern Hebrew’s first female poets, born in Israel in...
09.26.2023
Episode 98: By Disabled Jews, For Disabled Jews
What did JOIN for Justice, the Jewish Organizing Institute and Network, do when the pandemic made its in-person community organizing fellowship impossible? It turned the obstacle into an opportunity, shifting to a virtual fellowship specifically for people with disabilities. Over seven months...
09.12.2023
Episode 97: Golda Reconsidered
Golda Meir is known as Israel's "Iron Lady": gruff, chain-smoking, and fiercely ambitious. In the eyes of many, she was also responsible for the Yom Kippur War, which cost thousands of lives. But Golda's story is far more complex. In this...
08.14.2023
Bonus Episode: Granfran in the Uber
While we’re hard at work on our fall season, which launches Sept 12, enjoy this bonus episode from Joia Putnoi. Joia recorded this conversation with her grandmother Fran Putnoi, or “Granfran,” for a college class. It's about passing recipes and stories...
06.27.2023
Episode 96: Can We Talk? 2022-23 Season Wrap
That's a wrap! In this episode of Can We Talk?, Nahanni Rous, Jen Richler, and Judith Rosenbaum recap the Fall 2022 and Spring 2023 seasons—from a celebration at a queer Jewish chicken farm to the fight for Israel's "chained women"...
06.20.2023
Episode 95: Word of the Week: Shiksa
From Portnoy’s Complaint to Seinfeld, the word shiksa is firmly embedded in popular culture. Where does the word come from, and how has its meaning changed over time? In this episode, we’re bringing you another installment of our “Word of...
06.05.2023
Episode 94: Rebbetzins in America
What did talented, dedicated Jewish women do before they could become rabbis? Some became rebbetzins. In this episode of Can We Talk?, we’re looking at the changing role of the rebbetzin—the rabbi’s wife. Women have been rabbis in America for just over half a...
05.22.2023
Episode 93: Alice Shalvi: Israeli Feminist Pioneer
Alice Shalvi has been an Israeli feminist pioneer for decades. Born in Germany and raised in England, she moved to Israel in 1949, a young woman excited to help build a new state. She’s spent her life there, working for gender equality...
05.09.2023
Episode 92: Beyond the Binary: Making Hebrew More Gender-Inclusive
Hebrew is a very gendered language; every noun in Hebrew is either feminine or masculine. So are pronouns, including “I” and “you.” This makes it nearly impossible to utter a sentence in Hebrew without using gender. So as a Hebrew speaker, how...
04.21.2023
Episode 91: Israel at 75: Voices of Protest
Israel turns 75 this week. This milestone comes at a moment of unprecedented upheaval in Israeli society and escalating violence between Israelis and Palestinians. Over the past few months, around 1.5 million Israelis have poured into the streets to protest...
04.10.2023
Episode 90: Reproductive Rights After Roe
When the Supreme Court issued the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v Wade, it eliminated the constitutional right to an abortion. As of April 2023, it is now essentially illegal to have an abortion in 15 states. That means limited to...
03.27.2023
Episode 89: Samira Mehta On The Racism of People Who Love You
Samira Mehta is the daughter of a white American mother and a South Asian immigrant father. She’s also a Jew by choice and a scholar of American religious history and women’s and gender studies. Her new book, The Racism of People Who Love...
03.14.2023
Episode 88: Jewish Women Behind the Mic
Here at Can We Talk?, we’re podcast fanatics. And we especially like shows that feature Jewish women’s voices. So we decided to bring together some of our favorite Jewish women podcasters to talk shop. In this episode of Can We...
02.28.2023
Episode 87: Jodi Kantor Said
In 2017, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey broke the New York Times story about producer Harvey Weinstein’s sexual abuse of women. Their reporting lit a fire under the #MeToo movement, led to Weinstein’s conviction, and prompted a national reckoning with...
12.20.2022
Episode 86: Fat Torah with Minna Bromberg
It all started at a preschool Hanukkah party a few years ago. That's when an offhand remark led Rabbi Minna Bromberg to start Fat Torah, a project to end fat stigma in Jewish communal life. In this episode of Can We...
12.05.2022
Episode 85: Teens and Mental Health in the (Post)Pandemic
Teens were already struggling before COVID. When the pandemic hit, things just got worse. In this episode of Can We Talk?, we speak with Vanessa Kroll Bennett, co-host of The Puberty Podcast, parenting writer, and mother of four, about teens and mental health—before,...
11.22.2022
Episode 84: Modern Loss with Rebecca Soffer
For a long time, Rebecca Soffer, co-founder of the website Modern Loss, had been planning to write a guide to coping with grief. Then the pandemic hit, and the need felt especially urgent. So she wrote The Modern Loss Handbook:...
11.08.2022
Episode 83: Fighting for Israel's "Chained Women"
In Israel, marriage and divorce are governed by Jewish law and controlled by the ultra-Orthodox rabbinical courts. If a Jewish woman wants a divorce, she has to get permission from her husband, in the form of a document called a...
10.24.2022
Episode 82: When Jewish Women Talked to the Dead
In this season of ghosts and haunted houses, we’re taking you back to a time when communicating with the dead was a popular way to spend an evening. Séances were the main practice of the spiritualist movement, which is based...
10.11.2022
Episode 81: Linke Fligl Ends With Love
On a hot, humid day in late August, Nahanni Rous joined a gathering at Linke Fligl, a queer Jewish chicken farm and cultural organizing project in New York's Hudson Valley. (Linke Fligl is a pun—Yiddish for "left wing.") For the past seven years, queer Jews...
08.23.2022
Bonus Episode: A Bintel Brief: For Richer or Poorer
While we're hard at work preparing for Can We Talk's fall season, enjoy this episode of A Bintel Brief, an advice show with a Jewish twist, from our friends at The Forward. In this episode, For Richer or Poorer, hosts Ginna Green and Lynn...
06.28.2022
Can We Talk? 2021-22 Season Wrap
That's a wrap! In this episode of Can We Talk?, Nahanni Rous, Jen Richler, and Judith Rosenbaum recap the Fall 2021 and Spring 2022 seasons—from the story of an underground abortion collective in the years before Roe to the 100-year history...
06.21.2022
Episode 80: Toxic Hookup Culture in Jewish Youth Groups and Summer Camps
Jewish summer camps and youth movements are a time-honored tradition—tens of thousands of Jewish teens participate. But a group of young Jews is calling out what they say is a “toxic hookup culture” in many of these institutions. In this...
06.14.2022
Episode 79: Word of the Week: Eshet Chayil
"A woman of valor, who can find? Her worth is far beyond rubies..." So begins a 22-verse acrostic poem from the Book of Proverbs. The poem showers praise on an unnamed woman of valor—eshet chayil, in Hebrew—and is sung in some...
05.31.2022
Episode 78: Word of the Week: Gaslighting
From MSNBC to Fox News, the word "gaslighting" is everywhere these days. But where does it come from and what does it mean? This time in our Word of the Week series, we dig into the ubiquitous term: its roots...
05.24.2022
Episode 77: Word of the Week: Yenta
How did a popular Yiddish woman's name come to mean gossip and busybody? In the first of our new Word of the Week mini-series, we trace the evolution of the word yenta. Producer Jen Richler talks with Fiddler on the Roof scholar...
05.10.2022
Episode 76: Message From Ukraine
Vlada Nedak lives in Kryvyi Rih in central Ukraine, only an hour's drive from the front lines of the war. She's a wife and mother and the owner of a menagerie of household pets. She's also the Executive Director of...
04.26.2022
Episode 75: Eleanor Reissa's Invisible Birthmark
After a career spent telling other people's stories, Eleanor Reissa has finally uncovered her own. It started with 56 letters she found in a drawer while cleaning out her late mother's apartment. They were letters from her father to her mother,...
04.12.2022
Episode 74: A Half-Century of Women Rabbis
Fifty years ago, Rabbi Sally Priesand made history by becoming the first woman rabbi in America. In this episode of Can We Talk?, women rabbis from three Jewish denominations reflect on the milestone. We speak with Rabbi Dianne Cohler-Esses, Rabba Sara Hurwitz,...
04.05.2022
Episode 73: An Orange Belongs on the Seder Plate Like...
Hard-boiled egg—check. Greens—check. Charoset, maror, shank bone—check. These are the traditional seder plate items that represent the themes of Passover. Many people have also adopted the feminist tradition of including an orange... but what does it symbolize, and how come...
03.29.2022
Episode 72: Ezrat Nashim Confronts the Rabbis
Fifty years ago, a group of young Jewish women piled into two cars and drove to upstate New York to crash the annual meeting of the all-male Rabbinical Assembly of the Conservative movement. They called themselves Ezrat Nashim and they...
03.15.2022
Episode 71: Bat Mitzvah at 100
On March 18, 1922, Judith Kaplan made history when she stood in front of her Manhattan congregation and had America's first bat mitzvah ceremony. Judith's bat mitzvah was groundbreaking at the time, but it didn't look like most bat mitzvahs today....
12.21.2021
Episode 70: Jane: Abortion Before Roe
"Pregnant? Don't want to be? Call Jane." That was the catchphrase of the Chicago-based Abortion Counseling Service of Women's Liberation, better known as Jane. Before Roe v. Wade made abortion legal, the women of Jane provided safe, illegal, and affordable abortions...
12.07.2021
Episode 69: Dara Horn: People Love Dead Jews
Dara Horn’s new book is a departure from her usual imaginative fiction. It’s a collection of essays provocatively titled People Love Dead Jews. She also has a companion podcast called Adventures with Dead Jews. In both, Dara explores the subtler...
11.23.2021
Episode 68: Beyond the Count: Talking to Jews of Color
"What would it be like if we could daven and engage in Jewish life without having to endure racism?" says Ilana Kaufman, Executive Director of the Jews of Color Initiative. In a recent survey of Jews of Color by Ilana's organization, most...
11.09.2021
Episode 67: E. Lockhart's New Jewish Superhero
It's a bird...it's a plane...it's Willow Zimmerman! Willow is a social justice-minded Jewish teenager. She loves a hot salty reuben, bakes her own rugelach, and enjoys hanging out with a stray dog named Leibowitz. She’s also the latest Gotham City...
10.26.2021
Episode 66: Eye to Eye with Joan Biren
In 1971, photographer Joan Biren, also known as JEB, started doing something revolutionary: documenting the everyday lives of lesbians. This was an era when you could lose everything—your job, your apartment, even your kids— if people knew you were gay....
10.13.2021
Episode 65: Regendering the Torah
Yael Kanarek wanted a more direct relationship with the Divine than she experienced through male-centric Jewish sacred texts—so she rewrote the Torah. In Toratah, or Her Torah, Yael has switched the genders of each character. The result is a familiar text that resonates very differently,...
06.23.2021
Episode 64: Anita Diamant Talks Menstrual Justice
Menstrual justice is the latest front in the global fight for gender equality. Author Anita Diamant's new book, Period. End of Sentence, explores the stigma around menstruation and efforts around the world to ensure that menstruating people are not denied...

What's Can We Talk? about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Can We Talk? episodes:

Episode 109: Oral History Showcase: Ronya's Liberation Story

Episode 108: Queer Klezmer with Isle of Klezbos

Bonus Episode: The Nightingale of Iran

Episode 107: A Persian Family's Musical Legacy

Episode 106: A Pocket of Hope: Israeli Women Building a Shared Future

Episode 105: Hear Their Voices: Sexual Violence on October 7

Episode 104: Crying and Doing: Iris Bahr and her Aging Mother

Episode 103: Kugels and Collards: The Southern Jewish Table

Episode 102: One Month Later

Episode 101: The Women's War Room

Episode 100: Missing Vivian Silver

Episode 99: A Wish in Dark Days

Episode 98: By Disabled Jews, For Disabled Jews

Episode 97: Golda Reconsidered

Bonus Episode: Granfran in the Uber

Episode 96: Can We Talk? 2022-23 Season Wrap

Episode 95: Word of the Week: Shiksa

Episode 94: Rebbetzins in America

Episode 93: Alice Shalvi: Israeli Feminist Pioneer

Episode 92: Beyond the Binary: Making Hebrew More Gender-Inclusive

Episode 91: Israel at 75: Voices of Protest

Episode 90: Reproductive Rights After Roe

Episode 89: Samira Mehta On The Racism of People Who Love You

Episode 88: Jewish Women Behind the Mic

Episode 87: Jodi Kantor Said

Episode 86: Fat Torah with Minna Bromberg

Episode 85: Teens and Mental Health in the (Post)Pandemic

Episode 84: Modern Loss with Rebecca Soffer

Episode 83: Fighting for Israel's "Chained Women"

Episode 82: When Jewish Women Talked to the Dead

Episode 81: Linke Fligl Ends With Love

Bonus Episode: A Bintel Brief: For Richer or Poorer

Can We Talk? 2021-22 Season Wrap

Episode 80: Toxic Hookup Culture in Jewish Youth Groups and Summer Camps

Episode 79: Word of the Week: Eshet Chayil

Episode 78: Word of the Week: Gaslighting

Episode 77: Word of the Week: Yenta

Episode 76: Message From Ukraine

Episode 75: Eleanor Reissa's Invisible Birthmark

Episode 74: A Half-Century of Women Rabbis

Episode 73: An Orange Belongs on the Seder Plate Like...

Episode 72: Ezrat Nashim Confronts the Rabbis

Episode 71: Bat Mitzvah at 100

Episode 70: Jane: Abortion Before Roe

Episode 69: Dara Horn: People Love Dead Jews

Episode 68: Beyond the Count: Talking to Jews of Color

Episode 67: E. Lockhart's New Jewish Superhero

Episode 66: Eye to Eye with Joan Biren

Episode 65: Regendering the Torah

Episode 64: Anita Diamant Talks Menstrual Justice