Jews Talk Racial Justice - Ep. 83: Beyond the Brisket: Creating a Liberatory Passover Practice

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As we approach Passover 5782, we’re thinking about the tension inherent in commemorating a moment of acute urgency with practices that require a lot of time, intention, and planning. The Passover story contains multiple moments when our ancestors and predecessors displayed both faith and radical imagination, but when ritual becomes rigid, it can limit beliefs and imagination. April and Tracie investigate how we can use the Passover holiday, ritual, and greater awareness, to nurture and apply our own radical imagination toward liberation.

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Jews Talk Racial Justice - Ep. 82: Showing up for justice when life gets hard (LIVE)

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This week, we’re bringing you our conversation from our live event on March 23. If we’re being real here (which we ALWAYS are), we know that many of us (especially in the Jewish community) are feeling overwhelmed, stressed, and hurt by the state of the world. April and Tracie (and a couple of amazing community members!) give us some helpful framings and tips for processing and moving through our hurt, process our emotions, and get through to the other side. And spoiler alert: you don’t have to suffer in order to powerfully show up for justice!

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Jews Talk Racial Justice - Ep. 81: Middle Agent Status, Alternatives to Whiteness, and Radical Imagination

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We cover a LOT of ground in today’s conversation, where we get curious about what prevents some folks and groups from accessing joy. We talk about Black joy, the whiteness of white Jews and what often makes embracing joy difficult (and the impact of the historical middle agent role), individual and collective safety, and imagining our liberated selves and living into that. What would it look like for white Jews choose the side of liberation over whiteness?

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Jews Talk Racial Justice - Ep. 80: Cookies, Impact, and False Competition

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Inspired by the holiday of Purim, April and Tracie use the practice of giving mishloach manot or Purim baskets, to unpack the difference between intention and impact. (Who knew you could learn so much from fruit-filled cookies?) They also interrogate the relationship between Vashti and Esther, and use them as a metaphor for differently-positioned Jewish Leaders of Color today. The megillah (Scroll of Esther) positions them as competitors, but we imagine what it would look like if they recognized they have more to gain by working together and rejecting the externally-imposed division between them.

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Jews Talk Racial Justice - Ep. 79: On Purim, Joy, and Liberation

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April and Tracie think about some of the lessons of Purim: hidden identities, the power of 'no,' the power of being in the right place, the importance of joy, and the links between joy and liberation.

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Jews Talk Racial Justice - Ep 78: Feeling Rage, Finding Joy: Managing Emotions in Justice Work

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With all that’s going on in the world right now (and since we’re in the middle of two (2!) months of Adar, we thought it would be good to reprise Episode 10 from the conclusion of election season. Tracie asks April for advice on working through the negative emotions that sometimes accompany justice work. They unpack the ways we've been taught to associate anger or rage with justice work (and anxiety with intelligence), and April shares suggestions for achieving the positive effects of BOTH feeling your feelings AND cultivating joy and presence.

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Jews Talk Racial Justice - Ep 77: When you think you’re The Good Place 😇 but you’re really Schitt’s Creek 😮

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A couple of weeks ago, we did a Facebook Live where we used popular tv shows to help us playfully make a point about how folks sometimes overestimate their skills when it comes to DEI work–or really anything. In this episode, we revisit that conversation and add some additional commentary. If you tuned in the first time around, stick around for a whole lot more. And, fair warning, there are some definite spoilers of the tv show the Good Place in our follow up conversation.

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Jews Talk Racial Justice - Ep 76: Jewishness is a particle AND a wave

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In today’s conversation, April and Tracie unpack white Jews’ whiteness, the history of race and Jewish racialized identities, and the benefits of getting clear about who is actually in the ingroup. Using metaphors from physics to sanctuaries, we talk about historic and contemporary intersections of the social construct of race and lived identities of Jews.

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Jews Talk Racial Justice - Ep 75: Whoopi Goldberg, the Oppression Scale, and the Emotional Thermometer

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In this edited version of a Facebook live that April recorded after Whoopi Goldberg’s comments and the controversy that followed, April digs deep into her analysis of the reactions many in the Jewish community expressed. Internalized terror and persisting unhealed trauma–elicited by the Holocaust and centuries of persecution–among white Ashkenazi Jews has caused an understandable misalignment between those folks’ emotional thermometer and the actual thread of danger on the oppression scale. Despite the elevated blood pressures the situation has caused, it seems clear to April that compassion (for ourselves and others!), healing, and solidarity across lines of difference will lead us toward the future we want.

Trigger Warning: This episode is not for you in this moment if as a result of this controversy, you are feeling terror or are in a panic mode.

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Discussion and Reflections Questions for Ep. 74 of Jews Talk Racial Justice: Intellectual intimacy and interdependent intellectual independence

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Many of us learn about racial justice and try to implement DEI in our lives/workplaces, but sometimes we become so stuck in our questions that it keeps us distanced and prevents us from staying in the deep end. April & Tracie challenge us to get intellectually intimate with the learning and to use our systems of accountability/partnership to stay in close relationship while also taking ownership.

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