Return the Key: Jewish Questions for Everyone

Episode 35: “What exactly are we doing here”?: Nishant Upadhyay on settler colonialism and its complexities

In episode #35 I talk with ethnic studies scholar Nishant Upadhyay about their book, Indians on Indian Lands: Intersections of Race, Caste, and Indigeneity [https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p088216]. Together, we dig into the complexities around “settler colonial frameworks,” thinking about what the category of settler means in cases of forced migration, or migration based on ecocide, genocide, or extreme need. We talk about writing history with a focus on one’s own positionality, how that has been important to both of us. Nishant speaks specifically about Brahminism and Hinduism in India and how these violently hierarchical structures have in some ways migrated with Indian immigrants in Canada and the US, and even within post-colonial and transnational feminist studies. We ask what real solidarity with indigenous struggles (across Turtle Island, South Asia, Palestine, and beyond) might look like in the contexts of our hyper-capitalist societies and the rise fascism across the globe, and we locate pockets of optimism in our everyday intimacies, acknowledging that we must fight for our right to be together. People and groups mentioned or discussed Key figures in South Asian and Postcolonial Studies: Gayatri Spivak [https://english.columbia.edu/content/gayatri-chakravorty-spivak] Partha Chatterjee [https://anthropology.columbia.edu/content/partha-chatterjee] Dipesh Chakrabarty [https://history.uchicago.edu/directory/dipesh-chakrabarty] Dalit Scholars: Chinnaiah Jangam [https://carleton.ca/history/people/chinnaiah-jangam/] M.S.S. Pandian [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._S._S._Pandian] Braj Raj Mani [https://www.roundtableindia.co.in/braj-ranjan-mani/] Hawai'i scholar and activist: Haunani-Kay Trask [https://awpc.cattcenter.iastate.edu/directory/haunani-kay-trask] Indigenous nations of the Toronto area include: the Mississaugas of the New Credit, Anishinaabe, Chippewa, Haudenosaunee, Wendat, Métis peoples, and many other diverse Indigenous communities. Music by Ben Roberts : Benjamin.Roberts447@gmail.com Comments and ideas to Juliealicecarr@gmail.com

Episode 34: Beat Down the Barriers: Jennifer Scappettone on “Poetry After Barbarism”

In episode #34 I talk with poet, artist, translator and scholar Jennifer Scappettone about her new book, Poetry After Barbarism: The Invention of Motherless Tongues and Resistance to Fascism [https://cup.columbia.edu/book/poetry-after-barbarism/9780231212090/], in which she explores the power of a planetary, xenoglossic poetry of resistance—which is to say, a polyglot poetry that rejects mastery in favor of strangeness, a poetry that exposes how we are all outside of language, speaking and writing in waywardness and errancy. We begin with Jen’s multicultural and translingual upbringing on Long Island, her childhood obsession with the Statue of Liberty, and her time living in Japan as a young adult. We recall our years together as graduate students, and I take the opportunity to confess how I envied and was intimidated by Jen during that time, emotions that eventually transformed into admiration and love. We talk about the complexities of “contamination”: the powerful and necessary contaminations of all languages and cultures as they interact, counterposed against a literal contamination that forms one of Jen’s other obsessions, registered in her work on environmental injustice: the dangerous and often deadly contamination of the land. Jen reads us a poem by the Italian-Jewish poet and musician/musicologist Amelia Rosselli and speaks about Rosselli’s remarkable biography growing up in an antifascist Irish-English/Italian family. Along the way we (of course) speak of our mothers, ask how we might wrest a complicated and difficult beauty from the diseases of our time, and somehow arrive at Genesis I:2 (in multiple translations) and the question of the plurality (infinite) of God(s). Texts and people discussed: Etel Adnan [https://www.whitecube.com/artists/etel-adnan] Theodor Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society” [https://cup.columbia.edu/book/notes-to-literature/9780231063326/] Don Mee Choi [https://www.donmeechoi.com/] Lyn Hejinian, The Language of Inquiry [https://www.ucpress.edu/books/the-language-of-inquiry/paper] Lyn Hejinian, The Beginner [https://www.abebooks.com/signed-first-edition/Beginner-Hejinian-Lyn-U.S.A-Tuumba-Press/17784988801/bd] Amelia Rosselli: Locomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose of Amelia Rosselli, a Bilingual Edition [https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/L/bo12620076.html] Sawako Nakayasu [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/sawako-nakayasu] Jennifer Scappettone, The Republic of Exit 43: Outtakes & Scores from an Archaeology and Pop-Up Opera of the Corporate Dump [https://www.oikost.com/books/poetry/the-republic-of-exit-43] Jennifer Scappettone [https://www.oikost.com/] works at the confluence of the literary, translational, visual, and scholarly arts, and is Professor [https://english.uchicago.edu/people/jennifer-scappettone] of English and romance languages, gender studies, and the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization at the University of Chicago, where she directs the Environmental Arts+Humanities Lab [https://cegu.uchicago.edu/research/environmental-humanities-arts/]. [https://cegu.uchicago.edu/research/environmental-humanities-arts/]She is the author of five full-length books, including the scholarly monographs Poetry After Barbarism: The Invention of Motherless Tongues and Resistance to Fascism [https://cup.columbia.edu/book/poetry-after-barbarism/9780231212090/]and Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice [https://cup.columbia.edu/book/killing-the-moonlight/9780231164337/]. Her chapbooks include SMOKEPENNY LYRICHORD HEAVENBRED: 2 Acts [https://www.oikost.com/books/poetry/4904-2](The Elephants) featuring librettos for mixed-reality performance with Judd Morrissey and Ava Aviva Avnisan, and as curating poet, with Etel Adnan and Lyn Hejinian, Belladonna Elders Series #5: Poetry, Landscape, Apocalypse [https://www.belladonnaseries.org/chaplets/p/122-the-elders-series-etel-adnan-lyn-hejinian-jennifer-scappettone] (Belladonna, 2009) [https://www.belladonnaseries.org/chaplets/p/122-the-elders-series-etel-adnan-lyn-hejinian-jennifer-scappettone]. Both are available for download, free of charge. Her current project devoted to the “copper lyre” subtending telecommunications networks, Pennies from Nether, was a finalist for the 2024 Creative Capital Award in Literature.  Music by Benjamin Roberts: benjamin.roberts447@gmail.com [benjamin.roberts447@gmail.com] comments and questions: juliealicecarr@gmail.com

Episode 33: Neighbor: Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg on Collapse, Entanglement, Spiral Time & Minneapolis 2026

In episode #33 I talk with Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg about two terms that have been central to her lately: “collapse” and “entanglement.” We read from and discuss Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World, a book that helps think through these themes. Rabbi Jessica talks about what it’s been like on the ground in Minneapolis this winter, how confronting state violence and authoritarianism in real-time by caring for her neighbors has been both terrifying and profound in how it’s changed her sense of what “entanglement” really means. We discuss how accepting that we are in a time of collapse (of institutions, structures, and climate) might paradoxically help us get out of bed in the morning, rather than paralyzing us with fear. I bring up my obsession with “Longtermism” (not a fan), and Rabbi Jessica shares her thinking around “spiral time” in the context of the Jewish calendar, insisting that we can think long term while “holding the collective liberation of all people on the planet right now in our minds and hearts.” We end by talking about what both personal and collective grief can teach us, awakening us to the now. Texts and people discussed: Ross Gay, Inciting Joy: Essays [https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/ross-gay/inciting-joy/9781643753959/] poupeh missaghi, “When Bombs Fall: Saying Yes to Life” [https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/when-bombs-fall] Aurora Levins Morales [https://www.auroralevinsmorales.com/] Susan Raffo with Kelly Hayes, “‘Minneapolis Community Defense Is “Riding on the Learning Edge of a Whirlwind’” (Interview) [https://organizingmythoughts.org/minneapolis-community-defense-is-riding-on-the-learning-edge-of-a-whirlwind/] Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg, For Times Such as These: A Radical’s Guide to the Jewish Year [https://www.fortimessuchasthesebook.com/] Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg, “Spiral Time in Collapse: Dvar for Erev Rosh Hashana 5786” [https://www.wtctc.org/blog/spiraltime] Émile P Torres, “Against Longermism” [https://aeon.co/essays/why-longtermism-is-the-worlds-most-dangerous-secular-credo] (Note: I mistakenly credited this essay to Sam Dresser. Dresser edited it, but It was authored by Torres in 2021.) Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins [https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691220550/the-mushroom-at-the-end-of-the-world?srsltid=AfmBOoq9X6zQw6JxSUGLbBW8UrSprecTlaCuXfTKev4ADR6ota_hBjFN] Music by Ben Roberts : Benjamin.Roberts447@gmail.com Comments and ideas to Juliealicecarr@gmail.com

Episode 32: A Passenger on the Bus: Rob Fitterman

In episode #32 poet Rob Fitterman reads from and talks about two of his books: Holocaust Museum [https://asterismbooks.com/product/holocaust-museum-robert-fitterman] (Counterpath 2013), made entirely of captions from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s photo archive, and Creve Coeur [https://www.wintereditions.net/home/creve-coeur] (Winter Editions 2024), a “translation” of William Carlos Williams’ epic poem Paterson. Following Williams’ form line-by-line, Rob exposes the deep history of anti-Black racism in St. Louis, especially in regards to housing policy. Along the way we discuss his experiences growing up in a lower middle-class Jewish family in suburban St. Louis and his youthful (and continued) fascination with the poetry of “coterie” or group. We revisit the heated conversation around appropriation in poetry and art and consider the “empire-impulse” of some US conceptual poetry. How does “failure hallucinate repair” (Paul Chan’s line)? Why does some art about atrocities elicit a feeling of responsibility and not just empathy? And how might the “I” in a poem be just another “passenger on the bus” and not its driver? Texts, films, videos and people mentioned and discussed: Paul Chan [https://greenenaftaligallery.com/artists/paul-chan] Rob Fitterman reading [https://counterpathpress.org/holocaust-museumrobert-fitterman] from Holocaust Museum, Counterpath Denver, 2013 (video) Walter Johnson, The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States [https://shop.shsmo.org/basic-books/] Jacques Ranciere The Emancipated Spectator [https://www.versobooks.com/products/2105-the-emancipated-spectator?srsltid=AfmBOopp0lcVHMk1KsFnSp_3SuN577pl9PnPbyRG1aGLIwNtuQqmh7YN] Charles Reznikoff, Holocaust [https://archive.org/details/holocaust0000rezn_n2p0] Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law [https://wwnorton.com/books/the-color-of-law/] Andrzej Wajda, Katyn [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0879843/] (film) Frederick Wiseman films [https://mubi.com/en/cast/frederick-wiseman] William Carlos Williams, Paterson [https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/paterson_william-carlos-williams/306213/item/7577382/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=us_shopping_zombies_hvs_21811042479&utm_adgroup=&utm_term=&utm_content=717415192734&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=21811042479&gbraid=0AAAAADwY45iQP6QCPJOBEDzl0UrF7YuEm&gclid=Cj0KCQiAwYrNBhDcARIsAGo3u30L9pW_JC6dKNC6ERCRcQVIb8jG5A3j6EHZ-UWrroQR46IAKDr_zXQaAktUEALw_wcB#idiq=7577382&edition=399254] 1917 East St. Louis Massacre (video) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAXhNhRW1uI] Music by Ben Roberts : Benjamin.Roberts447@gmail.com Comments and ideas to Juliealicecarr@gmail.com Robert Fitterman is the author of 16 books of poetry. His most recent book, Creve Coeur, is a long poem published with Winter Editions (2024). Other titles include: This Window Makes Me Feel (Ugly Duckling Presse), No, Wait. Yep. Definitely Still Hate Myself. (UDP), Nevermind (Wonder Books) and Rob the Plagiarist (Roof Books). His long poem, Metropolis, was published in 4 volumes between 2000-2010: Sprawl: Metropolis 30A (Make Now Press, 2009), Metropolis 30: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Edge Books, 2004), Metropolis 16-29 (Coach House, 2002), Metropolis 1-15 (Sun & Moon Press, 2000), He has collaborated with several visual artists, including Serkan Ozkaya, Nayland Blake, Sabine Herrmann, Natalie Czech, Tim Davis, and Klaus Killisch. He is the founding member of the artists-poets collective, Collective Taskwww.collectivetask.org [http://www.collectivetask.org]. Fitterman's poetry has been described as reaching for a new lyricism by composing with found language reconstructed to articulate a subjective, “personal” relationship to social themes. His books are often single book-length poems with broad critiques of institutions: e.g., social media, online forums, museums, reviews, etc. He lives in New York City and teaches writing at New York University.

Episode 31: On Money, Lies, and God with Katherine Stewart

In episode #31 I speak with author and investigative journalist Katherine Stewart about her new book, Money Lies and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy. What is Christian Nationalism (and what is it not)? What are the true anti-democratic goals of the “new right” and what are their strategies? How do misogyny and anti-trans rhetoric/policy serve these goals? And are they really trying to take away women’s right to vote? Katherine delineates five categories of actors in the nihilistic war against democracy: the funders, the thinkers, the sergeants, the power-players, and the foot soldiers. She exposes how “the thinkers” frequently rely on the ideas of Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt, and Julie dips into “the thinkers” who have worked towards these goals on her own campus (remember John Eastman?). A note: This conversation is shorter than many. Because of time constraints we were not able to talk about all of the major topics in this book. I highly recommend listeners read the book to learn more. Texts, institutes, and people mentioned and discussed: Katherine Stewart, Money Lies and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy [https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/money-lies-and-god-9781635578546/] Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism [https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/power-worshippers-9781635577877/] Katherine Stewart, The Good News Club: The Religious Right's Stealth Assault on America's Children [https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/katherine-stewart/the-good-news-club/9781610392198/?lens=publicaffairs] God and Country [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt29259251/] (film), directed by Dan Partland, written by Katherine Stewart The April Institute [https://aprilinstitute.org/] Andrew Perez, Andy Kroll and Justin Elliott, “How a Secretive Billionaire Handed His Fortune to the Architect of the Right-Wing Takeover of the Courts” [https://www.propublica.org/article/dark-money-leonard-leo-barre-seid](article on Barre Seid, Leonard Leo and the Marble Freedom Trust) Carl Schmitt [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schmitt/] The Claremont Institute [https://www.claremont.org/] The Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization, [https://www.colorado.edu/center/benson/] University of Colorado Boulder The National Organization for Marriage [https://nationformarriage.org/] (editorial note: they are still going after Disney) Doug Wilson, Christian Nationalist pastor (Wall Street Journal video) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zlz_0kwno0c] Abby Johnson, anti-abortion activist on head-of-household voting (tweet) [https://x.com/AbbyJohnson/status/1256604827569860611] Joseph Porter and Adam Gibbons, “Existential Risk and Equal Political Liberty” [https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s44204-024-00177-4] Music by Ben Roberts : Benjamin.Roberts447@gmail.com Comments and ideas to Juliealicecarr@gmail.com Katherine Stewart’s latest book, Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy, is one of Foreign Affairs magazine’s Best Books of 2025. Her previous, award-winning title, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy, formed the basis of the documentary feature God & Country, produced by Rob Reiner. She has covered the intersection of faith and politics for over 17 years; her work appears in The New York Times, Religion News Service, New Republic and others. Find her at @katherinestewart.bsky.social, @kathsstewart, substack.com/@katherinestewartbooks [substack.com/@katherinestewartbooks], and katherinestewart.me [http://katherinestewart.me/].