In episode 24, I speak with Judith Levine, journalist activist, and author of five books. Judith and I (who go way back!) discuss our shared experience of losing parents to Alzheimer’s, asking what makes a self if not language, if not the mind, asking how we can value one another, even when the “self” seems to be gone. We then discuss Judith’s co-authored book (with Erica L. Meiners), The Feminist and the Sex Offender: Confronting Sexual Harm, Ending State Violence. Judith talks about the intense backlash to her earlier book, Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex, and about her sustained and ethical critique of the sex offender registry and of the carceral/surveillance/police state writ large. We reflect on #MeToo and various kinds of liberation, noting together that liberation is a central Jewish value (one that I’d oddly neglected to include in this podcast’s list of Jewish themes). We end with a nod to Orwell’s roses and Rebecca Solnit’s book of that title, affirming that we must continue to live and find moments of joy even now, especially now.

A note: in this episode, we discuss sexual violence.

Books, essays, movements and ideas discussed:

Margaret Atwood, “We are double-plus unfree”

Elizabeth Bernstein on “Carceral Feminism”

Tarana Burke and #MeToo

adrienne maree brown, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good

Angela Davis, Abolition. Feminism. Now.

Mariame Kaba and Andrea J. Ritchie, No More Police: A Case for Abolition

Paul Lafargue, The Right to be Lazy

Judith Levine, Do You Remember Me: A Father, a Daughter and the Search for the Self

Judith Levine, Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex

Judith Levine, “Remy Charlip’s Postmodernism for Kids”

Judith Levine, Today in Fascism (substack)

Judith Levine and Erica Meiners, The Feminist and the Sex Offender: Confronting Sexual Harm, Ending State Violence

George Orwell, 1984

Stephen Post, The Moral Challenge of Alzheimer’s Disease: Ethical Issues from Diagnosis to Dying

Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933).

Rebecca Solnit, Orwell’s Roses

Judith Levine is an award-winning journalist, essayist, and author, whose work resides in the territory where the body meets the body politic and intimate relations meet public life. She explores the intersections of sex, gender, race, reproduction, and dis/ability; the law, the economy, and consumer desire; social movements and public emotion. Levine is an anti-racist feminist activist and restorative justice volunteer, a forever intermediate cross-country skier, forever amateur pianist, and a lover of French and cats.

In episode 23, I speak with Lee Medovoi about his astounding new book, The Inner Life of Race: Souls, Bodies, and The History of Racial Power (Duke UP, 2024). Lee traces the histories of racialization, surveillance, policing, and carcerality from late Medieval Spain, through the development of racial-liberalism and capitalism to the present, asking how these deep histories help us to think of color-line racism, antisemitism, and Islamophobia as operating with similar logics, the logic of security/threat or friend/enemy. After a brief foray into Trump’s deployment of the “snake story” and the role of white womanhood in racist fear mongering, we dive into Lee’s main arguments. We discuss the racialized figure of the “converso,” (forcibly converted Jews) and how mistrust and surveillance of the conversos, and also the “mariscos” (forcibly converted Muslims) in the Iberian Peninsula in the 1400s was connected to the rise of the Ottoman Empire and a prelude to the colonization of the Americas. We unpack Lee’s use of the term “ensoulment” as a way to describe how power projects enmity and threat onto certain populations, justifying increased uses of violent policing and political control, such as we saw in the War or Terror and see now under Trumpian fascism. Finally, we turn to nonviolence and abolitionism as the necessary answer to these entrenched systems that target and deeply harm vulnerable populations and our collective hopes for living-with and belonging together.

Books mentioned and recommended:

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family

To access Lee’s work, go HERE.

Music by Ben Roberts: [email protected]

Comments and ideas to [email protected]

Lee Medovoiis a Professor in the Department of English at the University of Arizona and Founding Chair of the Graduate Interdisciplinary Program in Social, Cultural and Critical Theory. Lee is the author of Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity (Duke 2005) and of The Inner Life of Race: Bodies, Souls and the History of Racial Power (Duke 2024). He has published widely on global American studies, biopolitical theory, critical race studies, and the environmental humanities. He has also co-edited  a special issue of the journal Social Text with Keith Feldman (UC Berkeley) on the topic of “Race/Religion/War.”

Between 2013 and 2016 he was the Principal Investigator for a three-year international Mellon Grant that explored the changing vectors of religion and secularism’s imbrications in political life across the globe. This project resulted in a collection co-edited with Elizabeth Bentley titled  Religion, Secularism and Political Belonging  (Duke, 2021). In 2020, Lee was also the Principal Investigator for a Mellon-funded Sawyer Seminar titled Neoliberalism at the Neopopulist Crossroads that explored the social, economic and cultural underpinnings of the rise of far-right populist movements around the world. In 2021-22, he was a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. He is currently developing plans for a new book on the environmental unconscious of far-right politics of populist racism. He is also actively involved in the University of Arizona’s Environmental Humanities Consortium.

In episode 22, I speak with New York-based multidisciplinary artist Aaron Landsman about his 20-year project, Perfect City, a working group at the intersection of art, organizing, popular education and urban design. We discuss how our relationship to our Jewishness has been affected by the ongoing violence in Gaza, and we think together about the tension between utopian imagining—the “what if”—and the present-time demand to take care of one another within systemic challenges—the “what now.” We swirl around the topic of “communion,” both as a gathering together and as an imbibing of the holy through joyous embodied practice. We then turn to Aaron’s multi-platform theater piece, “Night Keeper,” which takes up loneliness and insomnia’s horrors. Finally, we talk about the suicides of friends and about embracing unruly faith practices: where is the way when there is no way?

Books, texts, and spaces mentioned or discussed

Aaron Landsman, “This is a Rehearsal”

Aaron Landsman, Norman Westberg, and Jehan Young, “Night Keeper” (album)

Emmanuel Lévinas, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis

Emmanuel Lévinas, “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” trans. Sean Hand

Henry Street Settlement

Music by Ben Roberts: [email protected]

Comments and ideas to [email protected]

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Aaron Landsmanis a multidisciplinary artist. Born in Minnesota, living in New York City, he is obsessed with cities, shadows, anonymity and how we perform power. His parents are a Jewish teacher and legal scholar and a non-Jewish teacher and writer. Aaron's recent work Night Keeper premiered at The Chocolate Factory Theater in 2023, and is now out as an album on Hallow Ground Records, created in collaboration with composer Norman Westberg (ex-SWANS) and performer Jehan Young. He is working on a game that is a performance score about algorithms. His prior work has been commissioned and presented in the US, Netherlands, UK, Australia, Norway, Serbia and Belarus. Aaron is the founder of Perfect City, a working group at the intersection of art, organizing, popular education and design. His awards include a Creative Capital Grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Princeton Arts Fellowship. He is the instigator of Perfect City, a 20-year working group dedicated to uplifting local knowledge in cities and changing power dynamics in communities. He co-authored The City We Make Together with Mallory Catlett, published by The University of Iowa Press. Additional pieces of writing have appeared recently, or will soon, in Urban Omnibus, Longleaf Review, The Iowa Review, Spoon River Poetry and Theater Magazine. He is a Lecturer at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts. 

In episode 21, I speak with writer, musician, and PhD student dena harry saleh. We discuss their father’s childhood experience in the Nakba, their own childhood growing up queer and Palestinian in Denver, and their young-adulthood in New York City. We then turn to two books that take up queer Palestine studies, Decolonial Queering in Palestine, by Walaa Alqaisiya, and Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique, by Sa’ed Atshan, and dena talks about their own research goals surrounding queer and trans decolonial praxis in Palestine and in the Palestinian diaspora. We think together about the challenges surrounding decolonial imagining in this time of horrific unspeakable violence in Gaza. dena reads two of their poems as our conversation turns toward both grief and radical hope. We end on the beauty and difficulty of the idea of “utopia” (now and always) and on the concept of “oneness”—how it ties into both Judaism and Islam for us, and how it might offer us a way to think about complicity, responsibility, solidarity, repair and above all, mercy.

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Books and other media mentioned or discussed

Walaa Alqaisiya, Decolonial Queering in Palestine

Sa’ed Atshan, Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique

Sa’ed Atshan and Katharina Galor, The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, Palestinians

Peter Beinart, The Beinart Notebook (substack)

José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity

dena harry saleh, “The Intersection of Disability and Genocide”

Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman and Julie Carr “The First Principle is the Principle of Lostness” (RTK podcast)

In episode 20, I speak with esteemed feminist holocaust scholar, Janet Jacobs, about her work on holocaust memorialization and intergenerational trauma. We discuss Janet’s work on women in cults and on the crypto-Jews. We then dig into her books on the holocaust, one of which was recently banned from the US Naval Academy library by the Trump administration, and we get into the larger issue of weaponizing “antisemitism” in this moment. Janet explores the ethical and psychological challenges of writing about and representing atrocities. How do we avoid re-objectifying victims when we represent or study them? What does it do to us individually and collectivity to engage these histories? How do future generations carry the fear, trauma, and even hate that stem from genocide? What does Frantz Fanon teach us and about how victim-groups can become perpetrators, such as in Israel/Palestine now? We end with both the value and complexity of holocaust memorialization in our moment, and we affirm the necessity of continuing to teach genocide in our classrooms

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Books and other texts mentioned or discussed

Janet Jacobs, Hidden Heritage: The Legacy of the Crypto-Jews

Janet Jacobs, Victimized Daughters: Incest and the Development of the Female Self

Janet Jacobs, Memorializing the Holocaust: Gender, Genocide, and Collective Memory

Janet Jacobs, The Holocaust Across Generations: Trauma and its Inheritance Among Descendants of Survivors

Taffy Brodesser-Akner, “The Holocaust Story I Said I Wouldn’t Write” NYT, April 6, 2025

Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust

Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

Music by Ben Roberts: [email protected]

Comments and ideas to [email protected]

In episode 19, Jennifer Pap and I talk with American-French poet, novelist, and playwright, Leslie Kaplan (born in 1943), whose revolutionary writing we have been translating. As a student, Kaplan participated in the occupation of French factories in ‘68 and the May uprising and general strike that followed. Several years later she resided and worked at La Borde, a radical non-hierarchical psychiatric clinic directed by Jean Oury. Oury was a leading figure in the psychothérapie institutionnelle movement. La Borde attracted major thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze and Frantz Fanon who were forging meeting places between anti-fascism, revolutionary politics, and psychoanalysis. We read from and talk with Leslie about her first book, Excess-The Factory, about her experience working in the factories, and her third, The Criminal, set at La Borde, both of which we translated into English. Along the way we discuss Leslie’s close relationship with an Auschwitz survivor, the entwining of justice and love, the relationship between the “limit” and the “infinite,” Leslie’s interest in theater and “play,” and the multiple and necessarily unfinished revolutions demanded by our time.

We want to acknowledge the very sad passing of writer and revolutionary thinker Joshua Clover (1965-2025), whose press Commune Editions (with Juliana Spahr and Jasper Bernes) published Excess-The Factory in 2018. We remember Joshua with great respect and gratitude.

Books and other texts mentioned or discussed

Leslie Kaplan, Excess—The Factory, translated by Julie Carr and Jennifer Pap

Leslie Kaplan, The Book of Skies, translated by Julie Carr and Jennifer pap

Leslie Kaplan, Ms. Nobody Knows, translated by Jennifer Pap

Leslie Kaplan, Mathias et la Révolution

Jean Oury, “The Hospital is Ill” (interview in Radical Philosophy 143 (May /June 2007)

More on Jean Oury and La Borde

“Jean Oury and Clinique de La Borde: A Conversation with Camille Robcis”

La clinique psychiatrique de La Borde (1971) (Film)

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Music by Ben Roberts: [email protected]

Comments and ideas to [email protected]

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

Music composed and performed by Ben Roberts: [email protected]

Comments and ideas to: [email protected]

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?

Texts, interviews and events mentioned and discussed

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

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Music composed and performed by Ben Roberts: [email protected]

Comments and ideas to: [email protected]

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, or between something-ness and nothingness.

Discus,

starred with premonitions,

throw yourself

out of yourself.

- Paul Celan, trans. Washburn & Guillemin

Texts and events mentioned and discussed

The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem, edited by Marie Luise Knott, translated by Anthony David

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, On Revolution

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism

James Baldwin, Letter from a Region in my Mind

Paul Celan, “Mandorla” and “Discus” in Breathturn Into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry: A Bilingual Edition, translated by Pierre Joris

Paul Celan, “Discus” in Last Poems: A Bilingual Edition, translated by Katharine Washburn and Margret Guillemin

Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena, translated by Philip Boehm

David D. Kim: Arendt’s Solidarity: Antisemitism and Racism in the Atlantic World

Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, translated by Sean Hand

Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”

Stanford Conference on Hannah Arendt’s Jewish Questions

In episode #15 I talk with writer Magdalena Zurawski about her research into her great-grandfather, Czeslaw Kowalczyk’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.

People and histories mentioned and discussed

Miron Białoszewski, Poems and Song

Miron Bialoszewski, A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

The Warsaw Uprising

Czeslaw Milosz, Campo dei Fiori

Ilya Kaminsky, We Lived Happily During the War

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Original music by Benjamin Roberts: [email protected]