In this final episode of the season, Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman and I talk with Professor Almút Shulamit Bruckstein Çoruh, beginning with her years in the Neo-Hasidic movement studying with Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and her decades of study in Jerusalem with Talmudic scholar Rabbi HaRav Zev (Walter) Gotthold. We discuss the power and importance of names, the founding of psychoanalysis, and Shulamit’s English translation of, and commentary on, Hermann Cohen’s Ethics of Maimonides (1908). Cohen finds in Maimonides a “non-foundational, anarchic thinking of origin,” in which justice, lovingkindness, and goodness are demanded of us, in which ethics precedes being. Can we still stand-in for this diasporic, non-territorial Jewish humanist tradition, given the extremity of violence in Gaza (and elsewhere) now?

In the most poetry-rich episode to date, Julie talks with poet and translator Daniel Borzutzky about Daniel’s Chilean and Jewish family, about his close relationship with the Tree of Life synagogue and how he wrote about the 2018 massacre, about writing violence in a time of ongoing mass violence and war—after, before Israel’s ongoing massacres in Gaza and beyond—and about the tension between our sense of responsibility for and connection to those we share identities with and a more universalist sense of care, grief, and solidarity. Daniel talks about what reading and translating Raúl Zurita has meant to him and asks whether atheists are allowed to pray. This episode was recorded over zoom.

Julie talks with Rabbi Caryn Aviv of Denver’s Judaism Your Way. We read and discuss Nelly Sach’s poem “When Day Grows Empty,” talk about how our ancestors leave a “soul-trail” for us to follow, about Jewish Mysticism and Process Theology, about the philosophy of Judaism Your Way, and about Caryn’s book-in-progress Unlearning Jewish Anxiety. Caryn roots American Ashkenazi Jewish anxiety in the early 20th-century when many Jewish immigrants strived to assimilate to whiteness in a violently white-supremacist society, citing works by Jud Brewer, Eric Goldstein, Avery Gordon, and Resmaa Menakem. Caryn offers alternatives to the “persecuted-yet striving” “virtue narrative” in embodied Jewish practices. In a final question we talk about the difficulty of the High Holidays in this year of terrible violence and pain. Caryn emphasizes the need to take responsibility for harm and repair and the imperative that we learn how to forgive.

The closing music is Kol Nidre by Max Bruch, performed by Benjamin Roberts

Novelist and diviner Selah Saterstrom talks about growing up in a small town in Mississippi within a family of Christian mystics and diviners. We discuss “knowing/unknowing,” dig into “divinatory poetics,' and ask what does it mean to work on the edge of the knowable? What does a good divination session really look like? What is prayer and what is it for? How do we “respond in kind” in our writing when facing traumas, such as sexual assault and rape? And what does it mean for writing to be a eucharistic event? Selah reads from her book Rancher and from her novel-in-progress! (Conducted over zoom)

Julie and Scott talk about Simone Weil's mysticism, her participation in the Spanish Civil War and the French Resistance, and her ideas surrounding pacifism, anti-statism (maybe!), and the politics of attention. And Scott tells us why despite it all, she is a Jewish thinker.

Julie asks Hilary to talk about her scholarship surrounding education in the Middle East and how she creates an inclusive classroom when teaching the history of Israel/Palestine. We talk about the contested language of "genocide," "river to the sea," and "intifada" in educational settings, and what gives us hope during this terrible time.

Julie and Yanara talk about Yanara's childhood in a Jewish-American and German family in Germany, the question of Jewish identity in a secular household, walking as writing practice, the value and problem of silence in the face of rupture, fractured and buried archives, Midrash as methodology, and Walter Benjamin's messianism.

This interview was conducted over zoom with sketchy internet.

Julie and Nabil talk about the challenge and honor of being part of a Jewish-Israeli-Arab-Palestinian faculty discussion group. Nabil describes his childhood in Morocco, the beautiful handwriting of a beloved father who died too young, the weight and detritus of colonization, and the power of multilingualism.

Julie interviews novelist Candace Nunag Tardío about her forthcoming debut novel, Solar Flare. We talk about infinite time, the afterlife of media, and various technologies of memorialization.

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.

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.

Julie and Jason interview philosopher Sarah Pessin about her work on Moses Maimonides and Emmanuel Levinas.

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.”