Tablet Studios

This week on Unorthodox, we’ve got two Jewish guests. First up is Scott Feinberg, the awards columnist for The Hollywood Reporter and host of the Awards Chatter podcast, and one of the “most informed Oscarologists,” according to the New York Times. He tells us how he makes his Oscar predictions and where he'll be Sunday night as the winners are announced.

Our next guest knows the way to our hearts: homemade hamantaschen filled with sprinkles. Molly Yeh is the author of Molly on the Range, one of the New York Times’ top fall cookbook releases of 2016, and the creator of my name is yeh, named Saveur’s 2015 Blog of the Year. She tells us about fielding questions from strangers about her ethnicity (her father is Chinese and her mother is Jewish), leaving Brooklyn for a sugar beet farm on the North Dakota-Minnesota border, and how far she has to go for a good bagel with lox these days.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get new episodes, behind-the-scenes photos, and more! Email us at [email protected]—we'll share our favorite notes on air.

This episode is sponsored by Harry’s. Enter code UNORTHODOX at checkout to get a free post-shave balm.

Music Credits

"Unorthodox Theme Song" by Golem

"Come Get Me" by Nas

"Klezmer Happy Birthday" by Gypsy Jive Band

"Hooray for Hollywood" by Richard A. Whiting and Johnny Mercer

"Hi, Stephanie" by 임형복, ft. David Duchovny & iOS7, prod. by Squish Turner

"Home on the Range" written by Daniel E. Kelley and Brewster M. Higley, performed by Roy Rogers

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode was recorded live at Temple Israel in West Palm Beach, Florida.

Our Jewish guest is Igor Shteyrenberg, director of the Miami Jewish Film Festival, which in five years he grew from an annual event with 4,000 attendees to the third largest Jewish film festival in the U.S. He tells us his favorite new Jewish films, the most controversial film the festival has screened (hint: there were zombies), and the Jewish movie he’d make if he were given carte blanche to choose from all the actors and directors in the world.

Our Gentile of the Week is Rocco Mangel, the restaurateur behind Rocco’s Tacos and Tequila Bar, which has six locations in Florida and one in Brooklyn. He tells us about getting his start in the business working in his family’s New York restaurants as a teenager, studying tequila in Mexico before opening his first location, and which South Florida location is the rowdiest (sorry, Boca).

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get new episodes, behind-the-scenes photos, and more! Email us at [email protected]—we'll share our favorite notes on air.

Music Credits:  

"Unorthodox Theme Song" by Golem

"We'll Meet Again" by Johnny Cash

"Odessa" by Golem

"Prince Igor, Act II: Polovtsian Dance" by Alexander Borodin, performed by Bolshoi Theater Choir

"Amor Verdadero" by The Afro-Cuban All Stars

"Volver, Volver" by Vincente Fernandez

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week on Unorthodox, we’re getting into the Valentine’s Day spirit. Or as we call it around here, Secular Tu B’Av.

Our Jewish guest is Israeli-American novelist and essayist Ayelet Waldman, whose latest book, A Really Good Day chronicles her experience taking microdoses of LSD to treat her mood disorder. She explains what microdosing is and how it helped her and her marriage, and tells us what it’s like to be married to another writer.

Our second guest is a self-described “pizza bagel”—half Jewish, half Italian. Andrea Silenzi is the host and producer of “Why Oh Why,” a podcast about dating and relationships. She tells us how people use emojis to signal their Jewishness on dating apps like Tinder, whether it’s hard to date while hosting a podcast about dating, and the challenges educated women in New York City face when seeking a partner.

Our Gentile of the Week would call us gentiles, too. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is a history professor at Harvard and a practicing Mormon. Her latest book is A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women’s Rights in Early Mormonism. She tells us the unexpected ways in which plural marriage empowered the women involved in it, and why the practice was ultimately abolished.

We're also joined by Noam Osband, who performs some original love-themed songs on the ukulele.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get new episodes, behind-the-scenes photos, and more! Email us at [email protected]—we'll share our favorite notes on air.

Sponsors:

HelloFresh: For $35 off your first week of deliveries, enter code UNORTHODOX35 when you subscribe.

Harry’s: Enter code UNORTHODOX at checkout to get a free post-shave balm.

Music Credits:

“Mack the Knife” by Louis Armstrong

“Chervona Ruta” by Golem

“Lysergic Bliss” by Of Montreal

“Why, Oh Why” by Woodie Guthrie

“Tomorrow is a Latter Day” from The Book of Mormon

“The Luna Moth Song” by Noam Osband

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week’s episode was recorded live at JCC Manhattan. Our first Jewish guest is Canadian transplant and longtime "This American Life" contributor Jonathan Goldstein, who now hosts the podcast Heavyweight. He tells us about mining his personal life for stories to tell on his show and gives us a definitive (if very Canadian) answer on Montreal bagels vs. New York bagels. Our Gentile of the Week is Catholic New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, who tells us about being a conservative voice writing for a largely liberal audience, why so many voters on the Christian right supported Trump despite mounting evidence of his moral failings, and why conservatives love fantasy novels like Lord of the Rings. Our second Jewish guest is Jen Spyra, comedian and writer on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. She tells us about her Late Show audition, the challenges of writing jokes during a Trump administration, and when she first realized she was funny.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get new episodes and more. Email us with comments, questions and kvetches at [email protected]—we'll share our favorite notes on air. 

This episode is dedicated to the memory of J.J. the dog.

Special thanks to our live band, the Jewbadourians: Jim Knable, Sunny Knable, and Claudia Mogel.

Music Credits: 

“Unorthodox Theme Song” by Golem

“Swing Gitane” by The Underscore Orkestra 

“Jonathan Goldstein” by The Jewbadourians

“If Your Dad Doesn’t Have A Beard, You’ve Got Two Mums” by The Beards

“Ross Douthat” by The Jewbadourians

“Bad Religion” by Frank Ocean

“Jen Spyra” by The Jewbadourians

“LA Jews” by The Jewbadourians

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, in addition to our regular Thursday episode, we’re doing something a bit different. President Trump’s Executive Order on immigration struck us as so troubling, so decidedly antithetical to the Jewish values we hold dear—and such a disappointment given our own paths to this country—that we were moved to respond. On this mini-episode, Liel Leibovitz, Stephanie Butnick, and producer Elissa Goldstein offer brief reflections.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get new episodes and more. Email us at [email protected]—we'll share our favorite notes on air.

Song credits:

“Unorthodox Theme Song” by Golem

“Ten Years Before” by Lobo Loco

“Waiting for my Man” by The Velvet Underground

“What Would You Do?” from the Original Cast Recording of Cabaret

“Cylinder Six” by Chris Zabriskie

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our Jewish guest this week is actor David Duchovny, whose latest novel, Bucky F*cking Dent, follows a Red Sox-loving father and son during the 1978 World Series. He tells us how fox Mulder, the fictional FBI agent he played on The X-Files, would feel about James Comey right about now, his favorite X-Files meme, and his long-lost Yale Ph.D. thesis on magic and technology in 20th century fiction.

Our Gentile of the Week is John Cleese, whose memoir, So, Anyway, is out in paperback. The legendary British comedian and actor tells Liel about the first time he heard a good Jewish joke, why The Hangover is a terrible movie, and how the Black Knights from Monty Python and the Holy Grail might just be a metaphor for Jewish history.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get new episodes and more. Email us with comments, questions and kvetches at [email protected]—we'll share our favorite notes on air.

Sponsored by Harry’s: Enter code UNORTHODOX at checkout to get a free post shave balm.

Music Credits:

“Unorthodox Theme Song” by Golem

“Egg Man” by The Beastie Boys

"Main Title Theme from Californication" by Tree Adams & Tyler Bates

“David Duchovny” by Bree Sharp

“Mailtime” from Blues Clues

“Planta Baja” by Tres Tristes Tangos

“Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” by Eric Idle, performed by the Traditional Jazz Band of Brasil

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In anticipation of our Wednesday (1/25) live show at the Manhattan JCC (tickets available here), we thought we'd share the season finale of Jonathan Goldstein's Heavyweight podcast. Jonathan is a radio storytelling legend and he'll be one of our guests on Wednesday night, so if you're coming to the show, listen up, and if not, listen anyway. If you like us, we bet you'll like him too.

In this episode (#8 Jeremy), Jonathan revisits his tricky relationship with Judaism by reconnecting with an acquaintance he hasn't heard from in decades. 

Heavyweight is a production of Gimlet Media. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week on Unorthodox, Bernie Madoff's prison hot chocolate scheme. We've got two Jewish guests this week: our first is return visitor Rosie Gray, who covered the election for BuzzFeed and is now a staff writer at the Atlantic. Our second guest is Charlie Brotman, who has announced every inauguration parade from Eisenhower to Obama but was snubbed by the Trump inauguration committee.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get new episodes and more. Email us with comments, questions and kvetches at [email protected] (we may share your note on air!).

Music credits: 

“Unorthodox Theme Song” by Golem

“NPR’s Morning Edition Theme” by BJ Liederman

“Le Hustle” by Polyrhytmics

“Rosie” by Jackson Browne

“Alley Cat” by Bent Fabric

“Hail to the Chief” by American Patriotic Music Ensemble

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week on Unorthodox: We’ll always have Casablanca (except Mark).

Our Jewish guest is writer and comedian Lynn Harris, founder of Comedy GOLD, which teaches girls and women how to empower themselves through comedy. Our Gentile of the Week is author and Bloggingheads founder Robert Wright, who was raised Southern Baptist but now practices Buddhism.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get new episodes and more. Email us with comments, questions and kvetches at[email protected] (we may share your note on air!).

Sponsors:

HelloFresh: For $35 off your first week of deliveries, enter UNORTHODOX35 when you subscribe.

Harry’s: Try a shave set for free—just cover shipping when you sign up. Enter code UNORTHODOX at checkout to get a free post shave balm.

Music Credits:

"Unorthodox Theme Song" by Golem

“As Time Goes By” by Herman Hupfeld, from the soundtrack to Casablanca

“Goodbye Columbus” by The Association

“Crate Diggin’” by Ari De Niro

“Send in the Clowns” by Stephen Sondheim, as performed by Herschel Krustofsky

“Rythme Gitan” by Latche Swing

“Hotel California” by The Eagles

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week on Unorthodox, Jared and Ivanka go shul shopping in Washington, D.C.

Our Jewish guest is renowned biblical scholar Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, whose latest book examines the life of Moses, one of the most enigmatic biblical figures (you can read an excerpt here). She tells us about exploring the often overlooked aspects of Moses’s life—his speech impediment, for example–and why she believes Moses is one of the most compelling literary characters of all time. (This segment is sponsored by Yale Jewish Lives.)

Our Gentile of the Week is linguist John McWhorter, author of the forthcoming book, Talking Back, Talking Black. He tells us the latest linguistic trends he's noticed among his college students, why there’s no such thing as a safe space (or at least an unironic one), and why it’s OK to say ‘like’ a lot, as long as you’re not in a meeting.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get new episodes and more. Email us with comments, questions and kvetches at [email protected]. We may share your note on air. 

Thank you to all our listeners for your support and encouragement throughout 2016. We can’t wait to see what 2017 brings!

Music credits; 

"Unorthodox Theme Song" by Golem

“Freedom Drops” by Ari De Niro

“A Partir Desse Dia” by Dark Sunn

“Go Down, Moses” performed by Louis Armstrong

“Words” by Boyzone

“Ballad of the Jewbadour” by Jim Knable

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices