In this episode Ben sits down Sydney Levy, a longtime activist and organizer who has worked with JVP, formerly as advocacy director, CJNV (Center for Jewish Nonviolence), JSWANA Bay and other organizations. Throughout the conversation, Sydney speaks about his experiences growing up within the insular Venezuelan Jewish community, before moving to Jerusalem as an "accidental settler" while studying at the Hebrew University before moving to the US.

Sydney leads us toward an understanding of how experiences of diaspora, displacement and immigration, can layer upon one another to create a tapestry of multirooted identities. We also explore the context-dependent nature of identity labels and their significance in relation to struggles toward a better world.

Read some of Sydney's recent writing in Gazoz de Frambuaz.

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In this episode we speak with three organizers of the United Jewish Peoples Order (UJPO) to explore their organization's storied century-long history, and its present work as a community organization committed to developing secular socialist Jewish life in Toronto (and Canada more broadly) through educational, cultural and social events and programs.

Join UJPO, Naomi Klein and others on June 11th for UJPO's Centennial Celebration (Available virtually and in person)

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Ben and Zach are joined by Emanuel Ovadia, creator and editor of Gazoz De Frambuaz, a Ladino-centering zine based in Miami Florida. Gazoz De Frambuaz (Raspberry Soda) serves as a metaphor for the cultural exchange that's served as a a wellspring for Sephardic culture across the region that Sephardic Jews made their home after the Spanish Inquisition: Southwest Asia and North Africa. Our conversation grounds us in the history of the Ladino language, before exploring contemporary Sephardi cultural institutions to situate the contribution of Gazoz De Frambuaz to modern Sephardi culture.

Follow Gazoz De Frambuaz on Instagram to stay up to date on all their work!

Print your own copies!

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Ben and Zach speak to Daniel Grossman, a member of Na'amod and fellow (former?) organiser within the British Jewish community, including the Union of Jewish Students and Board of Deputies. Our paths have crossed before...

Member of UK Jewish body resigns over failure to call out Israel on Gaza | UK news | The Guardian (That's Dan!)

yourparty.jewishdiasporist.com

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Zach speaks to Leah Robbins, one of the organisers behind the Achvat Olam Community Day School, the groundbreaking project to establish the first diasporist Jewish day school in Boston.

(apologies for the audio being a bit rusty - Z)

Learn more about Achvat Olam

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Chaia of Kleztronica and Rabbi Chel Mandell of Santa Cruz CA's Tzimtzum Community the first ever episode of the Jewish Diasporist recorded with a live audience. This episode was recorded live on September 15th.

Chaia is an electronic composer working at the intersection of Yiddish culture and electronic club music. She weaves archival Yiddish samples with techno and ambient frameworks, creating hybrid folkloric-electronic compositions that situate ancestral sound within global and liberatory rave ecologies.

We work closely to partner with radical communities like Tzimtzum and cultural activists like Chaia to create Jewish spaces like this which foster the world to come both on the earth and across cyberspace.

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Check out Chaia's website or stream her music on Spotify!

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Naomi Seidman, Director of the University of Toronto's Center for Diaspora and Transnational Studies joins us to explore the young academic discipline of Diaspora Studies, its history and contents, and its relationship to other academic fields.

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In this episode, we are joined by Deatra Cohen and Adam Siegel, authors of "Ashkenazi Herbalism" and recently: "Woven Roots; Recovering the Healing Plant Traditions of Jews and their Neighbors in Eastern Europe." Their new book expands on their earlier work by foregrounding the ways plant medicine served as a medium for coexistence in a land that's often only remembered as a place of Jewish suffering.

Through concrete examples, we explored the implications of diaspora for herbal and medicinal traditions. These traditions, often considered backwards and lost to history, can continue to teach us about what it means to be in right relations with all of our neighbors.

Get your copy of Woven Roots from Jewitches!

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Rabbi Chel Mandell of the Tzimtzum Community and Jewish educator and Diasporist Podcast Co-Host, Ben Yanowitz were invited on to local Santa Cruz radio station KSQD for an Interview for “Talk of the Bay,” hosted by Meilin Obinata, to explore the complexities of Jewish communal life in Santa Cruz, CA.

The Jewish community in Santa Cruz is a microcosm of our diaspora at large. Change is happening and legacy communal institutions are lagging behind at best, and actively hostile at worst. Thankfully independent communities like Tzimtzum, which embody a queer diasporist Jewishness, are organizing to ground our quest for collective liberation in Jewish ritual and spirituality.

Throughout the discussion we explored different religious and secular Jewish traditions which inform our understanding of the non-Zionist and diasporist Jewish future we are building, and how the pandemic and the post-10/7 Gaza genocide and international political environment have accelerated political polarization and transformed the way people engage with Judaism/Jewishness.

Check out Meilin's work on KSQD here!

Learn about the Tzimtzum Community here!

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We made it to Episode 50! Today, it's just Zach and Ben talking about the recent elections to the World Zionist Congress. They start discussing by how Zionism can (and should) be defined, followed by an overview of the voting process, the participating slates, they pros and cons of voting, and some possible alternatives to Jewish self-determination.

Zach's ongoing "Bundism Today" series can be found here

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