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Optimism of the Will: Arielle Angel on 8 years of Jewish Currents
A conversation with Rabbi Andy Kahn on what eight years in the work has taught her, and what she wants us to know now.
After eight years as editor in chief of Jewish Currents, Arielle Angel has stepped down. Under her leadership, the magazine has become one of the most influential voices on the Jewish left, shaping how a generation thinks about Jewish life, Zionism, Palestine, and the failure of mainstream Jewish institutions.
This conversation is a chance to hear what she has learned as she has spent nearly a decade in the trenches of Jewish public life, writing and editing through Gaza 2014, the Trump years, October 7th and its aftermath, and the slow unraveling of American Jewish institutional consensus on Israel. She has highlighted both grief and rage without blunting either, and she has held to the conviction that honesty is itself a catalyst.
Rabbi Andy Kahn sits down with Arielle to ask what eight years in the work have taught her, and what she can teach us. We'll learn what she has come to know about hope, despair, the Jewish landscape now, and what she wants us to carry forward.
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Hidden in Plain Sight: Zohare Jacobi on Jewish Magic Beyond Nationalism
On August 7th at 2pm Eastern, Rabbi Andy Kahn sits down with Zohare for a conversation about diaspora, magic, comparative religion, and what it means to teach Judaism rooted in scholarship and love when so many mainstream institutions have collapsed it into ahistorical nationalism.
Her shop, jewitches.com, carries ethically sourced ritual goods, herbs, books, and Judaica drawn from across the diaspora. Worth a browse before or after the conversation.
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A Multi-Rooted Movement — Devin Naar on Sephardic Memory and Jewish Futures
What gets lost when Jewish history is told from a single root?
Devin Naar, the Isaac Alhadeff Professor in Sephardic Studies at the University of Washington, has spent two decades recovering the Ladino-speaking Jewish world that American institutional memory mostly left out. His scholarship draws on multi-rootedness, a concept describing communities that come from more than one lineage at once, rather than the familiar frame of a single homeland and a single dispersal. That idea offers a different starting point than the usual diaspora and homeland narrative, one shaped by Mediterranean Jewish socialism, Sephardic illegibility within American racial categories, and a long tradition of solidarity built sideways rather than upward.
Join Andy Kahn and Devin Naar for a conversation about Sephardic memory, Ashkenormativity in Jewish left spaces, and what new Jewish institutions can look like when they draw on more than one root.
This is a recorded, virtual conversation. Registrants will receive the Zoom link ahead of the event.
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Who Counts as a Jew? Hebrew Israelites and American Judaism
Most Americans first encounter the words "Hebrew Israelite" through a street corner encounter, a news story, or a Southern Poverty Law Center label. Rabbi Walter Isaac, PhD, has spent two decades documenting an entirely different reality: a global, centuries-old tradition with roots in the Atlantic slave trade, ties to figures from throughout United States history, and a population the Manhattan Institute conservatively estimates at 22 million in the United States alone. In this conversation, Rabbi Isaac will walk us from the foundations of the tradition through its painful entanglement with the slave and sex trade, the wide variety of people who claim Hebrew Israelite identity today, and what an honest truth-and-reconciliation process between Hebrew Israelite and predominantly white rabbinic Jewish communities could actually look like.
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