The Jewish Diasporist

Ben Serrousi is the Artistic Director of Casa Do Povo, an anti-fascist diasporic Jewish Community center in Sao Paolo, Brazil that was envisioned as a living memorial in 1946. Over the decades Casa Do Povo has been home to an experimental “Sholem Aleichem School”, Yiddish Theater Companies and choirs, a publication, in addition to serving as a meeting place for grassroots social movements within and beyond the Jewish community.

Through our conversation we discussed the long history of Jews in Brazil and Casa Do Povo’s place within it. We explored themes including: ways to productively relate to legacy left-wing, as well as mainstream, Jewish institutions, the value of physical space in community organizing, cross-cultural diasporic solidarity, and much more.

Learn more from Casa Do Povo's website

Read Nossa Voz

Subscribe to our shared YouTube channel

Follow us on Instagram

If you like the work we're doing here, please consider supporting us on Patreon!

Thank you to Arto Lindsay for his arrangement of Zog Nit Keynmol in our intro and outro. Check out music produced by Casa Do Povo, including this song, on Soundcloud!

We wish you a Yom Kippur and a Happy New Year

Rabbi Andy Kahn talks to us about being a Reform Rabbi, his political journey, involvement with the ACJ and JDM, and more!

American Council for Judaism and its beautiful new website

Jewish Diaspora Movement

Zach's everlasting wisdom on the Bund

Subscribe to our shared YouTube channel

Follow us on Instagram

If you like the work we're doing here, please consider supporting us on Patreon!

Big thank you to Aly Halpert for continuing to allow us to use her music!

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.

Subscribe to our shared YouTube channel

Follow us on Instagram

If you like the work we're doing here, please consider supporting us on Patreon!

Big thank you to Aly Halpert for continuing to allow us to use her music!

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)

Follow the UJPO on instagram!

Subscribe to our shared YouTube channel

Follow us on Instagram

If you like the work we're doing here, please consider supporting us on Patreon!

Big thank you to Aly Halpert for continuing to allow us to use her music!

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!

Subscribe to our shared YouTube channel

Follow us on Instagram

Big thank you to Aly Halpert for continuing to allow us to use her music!

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

Subscribe to our collaborative YouTube

Follow us on Instagram

Big thank you to Aly Halpert for continuing to allow us to use her music!

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

Subscribe to our collaborative YouTube

Follow us on Instagram

If you like the work we're doing here, please consider supporting us on Patreon!

Big thank you to Aly Halpert for continuing to allow us to use her music!

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.

Subscribe to our collaborative YouTube

Follow us on Instagram

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

If you like the work we're doing here, please consider supporting us on Patreon!

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.

Subscribe to our collaborative YouTube

Follow us on Instagram

If you like the work we're doing here, please consider supporting us on Patreon!

Big thank you to Aly Halpert for continuing to allow us to use her music!

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!

Subscribe to our collaborative YouTube

Follow us on Instagram

If you like the work we're doing here, please consider supporting us on Patreon!

Big thank you to Aly Halpert for continuing to allow us to use her music!