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. We discuss crying on airplanes and at weddings, the necessary conjoining of sorrow and love, queer-time, Jewish-time, and the pleasure and power of submitting and surrendering to the divine feminine, the shekinah.

Daniel Eisenberg is a somatic therapist & Jewish educator. He is originally from London, UK and had been living in Denver since 2022 where he runs Base Denver with his husband Rabbi Dave Yedid. He is passionate about opening space for multiple identities to coexist.  

Rabbi Dave Yedid is the founding rabbi and leader of Base Denver. Originally from New York state, he received his MA in Gender Studies and rabbinic ordination from Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Prior to rabbinical studies, Dave worked as a wilderness guide in therapeutic and camp settings. He is passionate about reclaiming the wild, witchy elements of Judaism.

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. The project gestures into the city’s traumatic recent past to reach an old and intimate space of transcultural ancestral experience and horizontal implication, where Jewish and Slavic communities in Poland mutually, collaboratively, and differently depended on willow trees to treat viruses, diseases, infertility, and bodily pain, exchanging knowledge, treatments, practitioners, and patients at a site of nonhuman mourning that continues, even nominally (“weeping willow”), to mediate between the living and the dead. 

We also discuss Robert’s earlier piece, Lost in Jüdischer Friedhof Weißensee. This project came into its most public manifestation in response to the 2018 Great March of Return massacres in Gaza. Robert enacted what he calls a “Counter-Ruin,” in which “Gaza” is written across his back in three languages as he walks through Berlin carrying stones to deposit in Jüdischer Friedhof Weißensee, the largest Jewish cemetery in Berlin.

We discuss the urgent need for a “new universalism” or a “critical universalism,” and the seemingly intractable problem of, and violence inherent within, the nation-state. “Instead of space we have time and text: that’s Judaism,” says Robert, as we seek a principle of the unfinished and unsettled. 

Projects discussed:

Esther’s Willow

The Hopkins Review: A Willow (Grave) That Knows a Felled Willow (Mourner) That Knew an Eradicated Square (Woman)

Dream Text: Gaza Walks

Julie and Jason interview philosopher Sarah Pessin about her work on Moses Maimonides and Emmanuel Levinas. What does it mean to know God while not-knowing God? What happens when language fails? How do we “hum with”? How many spheres are there, and how does each have its own intellect? What does Emmanuel Levinas have to tell us about thinking and being with others? How does Levinas imagine a structure of self that helps us to face the world? We also discuss Neoplatonism, phenomenology, the pulse, interfaith work, and Sarah’s Jewish childhood in Brooklyn.

Sarah Pessin is Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Thought at the University of Denver. She holds an Interfaith Chair, and works in areas of phenomenology, existentialism, Neoplatonism, interfaith civics, philosophy of religion, ethics, and social justice. She has won a teaching award from the graduate student council of the DU-Iliff Joint Doctoral Program in the Study of Religion, has served as a Fellow with the American Council on Education, and is the new Director of Spiritual Life for DU's Student Affairs and Inclusive Excellence. She is the author of Ibn Gabirol’s Theology of Desire: Matter and Method in Jewish Medieval Neoplatonism (Cambridge University Press, 2013).

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.”