Podcasts about new york jewish

On today's episode of #SumudPodcast, we uplift, empower, and amplify pro-Palestinian and New York Jewish native Jacob Berger. Jacob is a TV and film actor, comedian, rapper, content creator, and social media influencer. He is well-known for his strong and unwavering pro-Palestinian stances. Although he could greatly benefit from being on the other side, Jacob chose to be on the right side of history after a prolonged research into the truth. In today's interesting episode, host Dr. Ed Hasan talks with Jacob about why and how he became pro-Palestinian. We also discuss #Israel's attempts to lure Jewish Americans into becoming pro-Israeli as well as his thoughts on what's happening in #Gaza and #Lebanon among other things. Make sure to listen to the full episode and stay tuned with all things Sumud on our Linktree: https://linktr.ee/sumudpod Connect with Dr. Ed Hasan on Instagram @dredhasan or LinkedIn to join the conversation. Connect with Jacob on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok @jacobbergeractor Chapters 2:32 Jacob talks about his acting career 6:41 Jacob's flashback to his 'birthright visit' to Israel as a Jewish-born man 11:26 Jacob receives death threats and hate for his pro-Palestinian stance after Oct. 7th 14:01 Jacob explains what he means by "People's revolution to start in our minds" 34:46 Jacob and Ed discuss American presidential candidates 37:33 Jacob Berger sends a heartfelt message to the Palestinian people

Purchase on Bookshop:Iconic New York Jewish Food: https://bit.ly/3BJmpxiFood, Hope & Resilience: https://bit.ly/486JFRYShare, rate, & review the podcast, and follow Zibby on Instagram @zibbyowens! Now there's more! Subscribe to Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books on Acast+ and get ad-free episodes. https://plus.acast.com/s/moms-dont-have-time-to-read-books. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Where does the Las Vegas Jewish community go to wind down the high holidays and fill up for the coming ones? Co-hosts Dayvid Figler and Sarah Lohman—also an award-winning food historian who has worked closely with the New York Jewish food scene—go into a brief history of Jewish food in Las Vegas, the little things Dayvid and Sarah look for when they walk into a Jewish deli, and where Dayvid's mother would have liked to go in town to sit down for a bowl of matzo ball soup. We didn't get into bagels in this episode because we've already done a deep dive on the best bagels in town—check that out here. Want to get in touch? Follow us @CityCastVegas on Instagram, or email us at lasvegas@citycast.fm. You can also call or text us at 702-514-0719. For more Las Vegas news, make sure to sign up for our morning newsletter, Hey Las Vegas. Looking to advertise on City Cast Las Vegas? Check out our options for podcast and newsletter ads at citycast.fm/advertise. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Ventura Pier reopens to the public after a year and a half. A famous New York Jewish deli imports its famous pastrami sandwiches to West Hollywood today -- and today only. A local beach camp for siblings of children with special needs and chronic illness facilitates fun in the sun paired with deep conversations with one another. Plus, more.Support The L.A. Report by donating at LAist.com/join and by visiting https://laist.com.      Support the show: https://laist.com

Starting another Brand-New Hour— of The Steve Gruber Show—Coming to you Live from Studio G in the heart of AMERICA—I'm Steve Gruber—Fighting for you from the Foxhole of Freedom— AND revealing the real Deep Fake of the Deep State every. single. Day!   AND HERE ARE YOUR THREE BIG STORIES TO START THIS HOUR AMERICA!   Number One— It was 85 degrees on Saturday—and I was getting warnings on my phone about heat advisories—seriously? Have all the adults decided to throw in the towel? How about a heat advisory from June thru early September—Whatever, I still call it Summer—   Number Two— Republicans are getting massive infusions of Cash these days—so much in fact that the GOP is rolling out massive spending on advertising—and that includes places like Minnesota—WOW!   Number Three— This could very well be the calm before the storm—and the storm is coming—that I can guarantee—but much like the weatherman—I am still working out the final details in my forecast—   So, Let's start this show out today with a new vocabulary word;   "P-O-G-R-O-M"     It's pronounced "PUH-GRUM"    It means a violent riot against Jewish people, a scary tactic perfected in Czarist Russia, which is why "PUH-GRUM" is a Russian word, but it's now part of the English language too.    It's a word worth knowing these days... SADLY... because it sure looks like a big PUH-GRUM is brewing in New York City this week—and the fuse has been lit—   You'd be hard pressed to think any differently after the wild and scary rally for squad member Jamal Bowman in the Bronx Saturday—   You remember Jamal, he's the Congressman from a district in New York that combines the Bronx and suburban Westchester County, who pulled that fire alarm in the Capitol Building last October in order to delay a vote—then lied about it—   No, HE wasn't seriously charged with an insurrection or even a felony for that... OF COURSE— Democrats don't generally go to jail in America anymore... remember?    Well, it turns out that Bowman is way behind in all of the polls in New York's congressional primary coming up tomorrow—He's expected to get crushed by the only slightly more moderate George Latimer, who is still a big Biden supporter, Trump-hater, America last socialist etc.    But Bowman and his fellow squad members aren't going down without a fight... A NASTY fight— And it got REALLY nasty at that Bronx rally Saturday where fellow squad member Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Squad-master Bernie Sanders also showed up to entertain the crowd—   Bowman was the wildest of them all— Here is how a sitting member of Congress spoke at that rally and apparently thought this was appropriate:   Well, we already know who you are Mr. Bowman— A total fraud, who was never qualified to be a teacher, let alone a school principal, let alone a U.S. Congressman—But again, you won't be one for much longer—thank God for small miracles—   Maybe AOC will be the next to go, God willing,  though probably not this election cycle— This is how she de-based herself at that rally, but we warn you... this jibberish you're about to hear won't be easy to decipher: Yeah, I couldn't really understand much of that either... and the crowd didn't as well. But who cares? They were in a frenzy, a hate-filled frenzy and things got even worse from there—    Bowman and AOC started jumping around like kids on speed at a rave... By the way, who *DIDN'T* know the video of THAT embarrassing jumping visual wasn't going to go viral... because it did—   But DON'T WORRY, in a few days, I'm sure "reliable fact-checking outfits" like ‘CBS NEWS CONFIRMED' will tell us that video is a "deep fake" or a "cheap fake." They'll SAVE US from all that mis-information—   Bernie Sanders also showed he's still the king of stupid when it comes to the hordes of hateful mobs he's unleashed— He actually said Israel has a right to defend itself during that hate rally on Saturday.... gee THANKS Bernie!... but he was dumb enough to think those haters would be okay with that. Just listen:   Bite #3   Sounds like Bernie isn't such a good student of Soviet history after all— Doesn't he KNOW what happened to the Jews who were originally part of the Bolshevik revolution?    Yep, they were purged by Lenin and Stalin— Trotsky was Jewish—and he got an icepick in the back of his head—   Bernie will NOT be spared by this anti-semitic mob just because he created the monster and he's the Dr. Frankenstein—   Maybe he's betting on dying of old age before that mob gets to him— That's a risk he's taking while probably planning to hide out in one of his four opulent houses— He's the best kind of communist, isn't he?    To be clear, there were only TWO HUNDRED people at that rally Saturday— The reason it was so LOUD was because the crowd was livid— Hate makes you stupid and do stupid things— But hate also makes you LOUD—VERY LOUD—   It's that hatred and that VOLUME that has some of the more wisely vigilant New Yorkers on edge today…   They know that if Bowman goes down Tuesday, the chances are high that those 200 people and more will *suddenly* be mobilized to attack Jewish synagogues, community centers, schools, and even private homes… HATE is loose— In short, a PUH-GRUM.   Some Jewish groups in New York are trying to prepare for this... but this could spill over nationwide.    Sound familiar?    That's right, defeating an African American, Jew-hating Congressman who *denies* the rapes by Hamas of Jewish women on October 7th & uses demonic phrases to describe Israel, could very likely be used to try to set off George Floyd-like street riots across the country…   The dates are almost in line with the exact moment the George Floyd riots started in 2020… They started at the end of May four years ago and this could tip off at the end of June… close enough for government work—    Most of you know George Floyd was no hero, but just in case you think Jewish voters are WRONG to target Bowman… Check out what he had to say about October 7th:    There is NO evidence of rape? It's on the VIDEO Hamas members took of THEMSELVES committing the rapes! My God!    Oh, and Jamal... the word is "PROPAGANDA" not "PROPER-gander," you are a complete imbecile—    Some of New York's Jewish groups get this—   You've heard some of my guests on this program— and will hear more— some who have already begun training their New York Jewish communities in self-defense, first aid, firearms defense, and that movement is growing fast—   But is the NYPD ready for this? Has Mayor Eric Adams issued any pre-emptive warnings to the violent hordes set to pounce?    No, not really.    AND just you wait, America... it may only start in New York, but the chances of violence spreading to "avenge" a likely election loss by this ignorant bigot Bowman could easily spill out to other cities.    Because this isn't just about Bowman…    It's about how since October 7th, the Democrat Party has been waging an internal Holy War for the soul of its soulless party.    It's trying to balance the concerns of many of its more old school liberal Jewish and non-Jewish voters and donors, with the rising hordes of blood thirsty "progressives" who are quite RE-GRESSIVELY cheering on the old school murders of Jews by Hamas.    Fighting this holy war for Democrats in power in Congress and the White House is like tap dancing down a razor blade.    That's why President Joe Biden keeps ping ponging us with comments about how he's a "Zionist" one day and then falsely accuses Israel of "indiscriminately" bombing Palestinian civilians the next.    Joe KNOWS that part about indiscriminate bombing isn't true... the Pentagon is monitoring all the painstaking efforts Israel takes to avoid civilian deaths and has been using it in its own training programs! Joe knows this.... But he's just trying to placate his Democratic Party mob—   Here's the other story unfolding before us: That leftist mob is fully prepared to take the credit if Biden is re-elected. AND fully prepared to use a Biden loss as an excuse to wage a violent war on more traditional Democrats they will blame for the defeat—yes it really is a Holy War—    And if you don't think so—   The remaining 75 days or so of the summer of 2024 could well be defined by that War in the Democrat Party… It won't be pretty, because this is the same party that's okay with illegal migrants killing and raping Americans…    The same Democrat Party that's okay with grown men in your young girl's locker rooms… The same Democrat Party that's okay with violent shop-lifting frenzies and releasing mass numbers of criminals onto the streets with no bail or ever facing any charges at all—   They've shown us their M.O. Which is why the emotions and shouting at that Bowman rally in the Bronx Saturday MUST elicit a defensive response from all of us.    So here is one key response to issue and BACK UP with actions and preparations right NOW:   If any group in America comes into a peaceful neighborhood and begins to physically attack its people...    Be prepared for some of those supposedly weak-looking ordinary people to be ready THIS TIME AROUND... they might just fight back, they might know you are coming and they might just kill YOU— so be careful what you wish for—   You have been warned!    

It's 2024 and we still don't have flying cars. The Pope called for a universal ban on surrogacy, there was a riot in a New York Jewish center over an illegal 50-foot tunnel, and the Peregrine mission to the moon is a failure (probably because the earth is flat and the rocket hit the firmament). There's also a Bible verse of the week and there's a birthday at the Bee! Become a champion for freedom today and join with ADF to protect all our rights: http://joinadf.com/bee  

Learn more at TheCityLife.org --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/citylifeorg/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/citylifeorg/support

The Nosh of Beverly Hills is a renowned delicatessen that has become a culinary landmark in Southern California over the last 48 years. With the acquisition of Mort's Deli, The Nosh will redefine the deli experience while preserving the cherished traditions of the past. Mort's Deli City: Los Angeles Address: 18452 Clark St Website https://www.MortsDeliLA.com Phone +1-818-345-3700 Email ron@thenosh.com

Thanks to all who joined us for our recent Book Lunch" livestream featuring a book from 1992 by the late Neil Postman called “Technopoly”. We loved your insightful thoughts and questions. I took the deep dive into one of the last great polemical works on culture and technology - Neil Postman's Technopoly. I situate Postman as one of the greatest examples of New York Jewish intellectual life of the twentieth century more generally, as well as possessing totally unique perspective on what technology can and can't do in particular. More on this recent livestream event, here: This “Book Lunch” will feature a book from 1992 by the late Neil Postman called “Technopoly”. At once a humanities and liberal arts based and informed historical survey of attitudes towards technology in the United States as well as a cultural polemic, rereading it in our current moment makes it is some ways a book that could have been written his very month even - as its examples are incredibly "dated" in a technical sense. I will do the deep dive into Technopoly, the title word being Postman's neologism for a new kind of totalitarianism, one where machines rather than we humans would be in charge. I situate the author's attitudes and perspectives within the context of the legacy of Marshall McLuhan in particular and the liberal artsand humanities in general, the latter being in many respects the foundation of our very podcast. #booklunch #techopoly #NeilPostman #author #amwriting #mitchhampton #podcasts --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/mitch-hampton/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/mitch-hampton/support

Many of the foods brought by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe to New York have become some of the most iconic foods associated with New York City. Their popularity spread across the country and are often referred to as New York food. Author June Hersh joins Linda to discuss the history of many of these specialties which she has written about in her book, Iconic New York Jewish Food.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support A Taste of the Past by becoming a member!A Taste of the Past is Powered by Simplecast.

“What Matters” is a collaborative initiative by New York Jewish institutions enabling individuals to have conversations about — and document — end-of-life preferences … and engage Jewish values along the way. Rabbi Nicole Auerbach, Dir. of Congregational Engagement at Central Synagogue in New York, and Howard Sharfstein, Honorary President at Central, describe the program and […] The post “What Matters”: Rabbi Nicole Auerbach and Howard Sharfstein of Central Synagogue appeared first on Plaza Jewish Community Chapel.

Each year, the Jewish Museum and Film at Lincoln Center hosts the New York Jewish Film Festival (NYJFF), presenting documentary, narrative, and short films from around the world that explore the Jewish experience. NYJFF director Aviva Weintraub joins us to talk about the slate they have planned for the 32nd annual festival running through Monday, January 23.

Karen sits down with Yoav Davis, the founder of Jews of NY, where he shines a light on the beautiful diversity of Jewish life in the Big Apple. Yoav's commitment to Jewish joy and positivity is so refreshing, and his conversation with Karen about owning your Jewishness, uniting the Jewish world, and the importance of finding your own path in Judaism is sure to inspire. You'll find out:   - How Yoav's platform balances showcasing the beauty of Judaism with calling out antisemitism  - Yoav's mission for Jews of NY in 2023 - What inspired Yoav to start Jews of NY  - The things that bring Yoav Jewish joy - How Jews of NY allows Yoav to connect with the full spectrum of the New York Jewish community  - Yoav's tips for feeling confident in your Jewish identity  LINKS:   Jews of NY https://www.instagram.com/jews_of_ny/    Smashing The Glass https://www.smashingtheglass.com/    Smashing Life, my Jewish community https://smashinglife.club/    Buy the Jewish Joy Journal - use code JEWISHJOYPODCAST for 10% discount https://jewishjoyjournal.com/    Congregation Beit Simchat Torah https://cbst.org/ 

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://thecitylife.org/2022/12/27/the-jewish-museum-and-film-at-lincoln-center-announce-the-32nd-annual-new-york-jewish-film-festival/ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/citylifeorg/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/citylifeorg/support

Joshua Mack and Gabriel Sanders sat down with "The Shmooze" to share a preview of what's on for the 2022 New York Jewish Book Festival. On Sunday, December 11, the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City will present its first-ever New York Jewish Book Festival, featuring talks, panels, and author signings. Joshua and Gabriel tease out some of what's planned for the daylong event. Episode 342 November 30, 2022 Amherst, MA

In this week's episode, Daniel & Harry are joined by PJ Grisar, Culture Writer for The Forward, to discuss the 1971 hidden gem "The Plot Against Harry," directed by Michael Roemer and starring Martin Priest as the eponymous Harry.Listen along as they chronicle Harry's ”teshuva” journey following his time in prison, dive into the authentic representation of a ‘70s New York Jewish community, and lose track of all the movie's weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, and other Jewish celebrations.As always, they end the episode by ranking the film's Jewishness in terms of its cast & crew, content, and themes.IMDb PageMovie TrailerPJ Grisar on TwitterPJ's “125 Greatest Jewish Movie Scenes” Article Series on The Forward

Time travel through the life of a 80 year-old New York Jewish grandma Linda as she tells the stories of how she met, loved, and lost all three of her husbands.

This year's New York Jewish Film Festival, which is presented by The Jewish Museum and Film at Lincoln Center, started on January 12, and is running through January 25. To help us preview the final weekend of the 31st edition of the festival, and recap what has screened so far, we are joined by Aviva Weintraub, director of the NYJFF.

In this episode I interview Jenny Goldfarb, founder of vegan meat company Mrs Goldfarb's Unreal Deli in Los Angeles. After becoming vegan, Jenny craved the familiar flavors of her family's New York Jewish delis from her youth. The former tech entrepreneur began experimenting in her tiny kitchen, trying out the recipes on vegan and meat-eating family and friends. Encouragement from them quickly led to Jenny shopping around her first plant-based meat products and getting placed in all the major Los Angeles delis. The products – made in LA from whole ingredients from local farms – are now available in major grocery stores nationwide, Jenny landed a spot on Shark Tank in 2019 where she got an investment from Mark Cuban, who recently went vegetarian, for more than double what she asked for. The company took revenue from $10k in profits to $100k shortly afterwards and continues to expand. In this interview Jenny discusses: • How she got the attention of restaurant chains, grocers and one of the biggest food brokers in the US very early on • Why she decided to go on Shark Tank, even though she'd already had several plant-based investors offering her money • What's involved in the application process and preparation period for the show • The benefits of media coverage on the company's bottom line after her Shark Tank appearance • How Covid forced her to pivot the business from focusing on restaurant chains to getting products into retail outlets • Why she uses both ‘vegan' and ‘plant-based' in her branding and marketing • And more Visit the Mrs Goldfarb's Unreal Deli website RESOURCES: My Online PR Course for Vegan Business Owners & Entrepreneurs: Vegans in the Limelight My book Vegan Ventures: Start and Grow an Ethical Business Follow Vegan Business Media on: Facebook   Twitter  Instagram  Connect with me personally at: Facebook  Twitter  LinkedIn

Tori Piskin is a 30-year-old comedian, producer, editor and podcaster from Los Angeles, California. Ms. Piskin was raised in a traditional close-knit New York Jewish familial environment. Her family was activated to help as soon as her chronic symptoms presented during her senior year of college. She was diagnosed and in treatment with a well-known Lyme Literate Medical Doctor (LLMD) within months of the onset of her symptoms. After graduating from college, Ms. Piskin returned home to earn a "graduate degree in Lyme disease" by dedicating herself to "full time healing." During that time, she and her family filmed and posted the highs and the lows of her Lyme journey on YouTube. YouTube served to channel Ms. Piskin's talents and to validate the Lyme experience for others in the community. Today, Ms. Piskin describes her health as "87 percent" improved and she is "taking care of herself" by "listening to her body." If you would like to learn more about how an entertainer and media professional is dedicating her vast talents to sharing the humorous love and support she received on her healing journey, then tune in now!

Why is an oil pipeline hooked up to the internet? Israel keeps committing atrocities against Palestine and Andrew Yang things he can use that to win political points among New York Jewish people. Weird flex but okay. We talk about all this and more. All of the Last Minute Politics links you could want: LastMinutePolitics.com https://www.patreon.com/LastMinutePolitics  EMAIL US: LastMinutePoliticsPodcast@gmail.com Pay us: Paypal.me/LastMinutePolitics

On this week’s episode, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) joins the podcast to share her thoughts on representing the New York Jewish community, combatting antisemitism, Iran, and the recent allegations against New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Plus, Rich and Jarrod discuss sanctions on the International Criminal Court and Secretary of State Tony Blinken’s letter to the American Zionist Movement. Source

On this week's episode, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) joins the podcast to share her thoughts on representing the New York Jewish community, combatting antisemitism, Iran, and the recent allegations against New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Plus, Rich and Jarrod discuss sanctions on the International Criminal Court and Secretary of State Tony Blinken's letter to the American Zionist Movement. Source

This week we are "traveling" to upstate New York to the land of mountain resorts of yore in the Catskill Mountains in New York. Fadra Nally from All Things Fadra fills us in on what is different in this region from the times of Dirty Dancing and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and why it makes a great spot for an outdoor-focused girlfriend getaway with waterfalls, wine, and shopping or a family vacation destination with hiking, kayaking and more. About Fadra Nally Fadra is a blogger and podcaster focusing on the lighter side of cars, entertainment, and travel. Her favorite destinations are as close as West Virginia and as far away as Saudi Arabia. You can find her online at AllThingsFadra.com, or on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter. Tips for Visiting the Catskills The Catskills are located just about two hours north of New York City and cover 700,000 acres over four counties, with the Hudson River creating the eastern border. While the Catskills were popular in the 1950s, especially with families in NYC, many of those all-inclusive type of family resorts are no longer there. Dirty Dancing was based on a resort called Grossinger's, which is no longer operating, but it was actually filmed in Virginia and North Carolina. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel episodes in the Catskills were filmed at a family-run resort called Scott's Family Resort at Oquaga Lake. The Catskills are a good four-season destination, with skiing and winter sports in the winter, great hiking year-round, and beautiful fall foliage in October. However, some activities and attractions may only be open from May to October. There are a lot of breweries, wineries, and distilleries in the Catskill region. Kaaterskill Falls is one of the tallest in New York State at 260 feet, which is higher than Niagara Falls. It is approximately a one-mile hike, including a series of stairs, to reach the top and an overlook. Some trail heads may be closed so look online to find alternatives. There are many cute towns with great bookstores, restaurants, and boutiques for shopping. There are many cabin rentals that you can find on Airbnb that are perfect for a self-contained getaway where you can either cook or bring in take out. Mohonk Mountain House near New Paltz is a great hotel to stay at or even visit for brunch and then enjoy the hiking trails on the grounds. Catskill, Kingston,and Hudson are all great little towns to set up a home base. Fadra stayed in Cocksackie on the water, which has a smaller downtown that is undergoing a revitalization to make it a wedding destination. Cocksackie has a great bottle shop and Chez Figata is a good restaurant to try for dinner. If you go further west in the Catskills you will find more resorts and mountains. It is a great destination for a girlfriend getaway, romantic getaway, or a family vacation. The Kartrite Resort in the Catskills is great for families and has an indoor waterpark. Fadra stayed at an Airbnb called Heron's View. Be sure to plan in advance if you are going to rent a cabin or vacation home. [00:00:00.150] - Kim Where can you find Waterfalls, wine and shopping just a couple of hours from New York City? Stay tuned to find out.   [00:00:18.730] - Announcer Welcome to Vacation Mavens, a family travel podcast with ideas for your next vacation and tips to get you out the door. Here are your hosts, Kim from Stuffed Suitcase and Tamara from We3Travel.   [00:00:33.700] - Kim So, Tamara, we are in February. And, you know, things are starting to change a bit in the travel sector. I feel like we've been in a pretty standard operating procedure. But we recently had some big news come out for people that are planning to fly into the United States, and that is that they are going to require a negative covid test.   [00:00:56.890] - Tamara Yeah, and I think that's a big deal. I'm thinking of people that have done some trips like to the Caribbean especially. I've been seeing a lot of that or Mexico. And now to think about how you are going to get that test on the way back, otherwise you're not going to be allowed home. Tt's something you have to really take into consideration. I think in the past, we've thought about testing to leave, but not testing to come back. So definitely a change.   [00:01:23.920] - Kim Yeah, I think it makes sense. It seems good. I'll be honest where we're at with not traveling at all. It seems odd that people are traveling to the Caribbean and Mexico.   [00:01:34.420] - Kim But I know that some people are choosing to do that and definitely still planning vacations and traveling and stuff. But I think this is definitely going to be an extra layer of logistics that they have to consider. I know you had mentioned some testing might be done at airports or such, but I know I've received a couple of press releases from major hotels such as the Palace Resorts, where we had stayed at one Moon Palace in Jamaica.   [00:02:03.400] - Kim But they are offering free testing to their guests that will help them further. You know, American guests are flying back into the states so that that is one thing that you might consider is checking for hotels that are offering it. I think they know how much they rely on that tourism dollar. And so they're doing whatever they can to make sure that American tourists keep coming down and visiting.   [00:02:27.030] - Tamara Yeah, especially because I imagine they could get pricey. I mean, if you think about some of the private testing that is available tends to be 100 dollars or more a person, so that can definitely add to the vacation cost. I was just talking to friends of ours and we were talking about their 25th anniversary in October, and they wanted to do like a four day getaway to the Caribbean. And I was like, here are some things to think about.   [00:02:49.900] - Tamara And they're like, do you think that's still going to be in place? And I have no idea. And that's the thing is like we don't know how long. So, maybe people are thinking about a spring break trip, maybe they're thinking about summer. We just don't know how long these things are going to be in place. And it's definitely, for a four day trip, you think about the time it takes you away from your little vacation to have to deal with testing.   [00:03:12.130] - Tamara And even before you go, like even though testing is more widespread, I know here a lot of the testing that I can get easily and that they encourage us to get regularly now is the rapid test and the rapid test is not going to qualify for what most countries will we will need.   [00:03:27.640] - Tamara They'll need a PCR test for coming in, so if I try to get a PCR test, it doesn't have the same guaranteed turnaround time. And so then that could really mess up your trip. And so then you have to think about, OK, maybe I have to do private testing. Like when we talked to Amber about her trip to Hawaii, she used a company called Vault Health to do private testing before she left.   [00:03:49.570] - Tamara And so now you might be paying for testing on both sides, plus taking time away from your vacation like I was just thinking about in Mexico when we went to Riviera Maya, it was about an hour from the Cancun airport. And transportation was pretty expensive because we weren't going to rent a car because we were planning on staying on the resort and then, getting back and forth to the airport. If that's where you have to do your testing, that that's going to be time consuming out of your trip.   [00:04:17.830] - Kim So, yeah, a lot of considerations.   [00:04:20.410] - Tamara And then I think also there's things to think about. Obviously, every country has their own rules. And I mean, pretty much most of them are still off limits. But even the ones that are accepting visitors from the U.S., which are a lot of the Caribbean islands and Mexico, Costa Rica. I know I was just following our friend Sarah that talked to us about kind of where the Caribbean was and they're reopening of the islands to go to. And we talked to her back in the summer. She does a lot of reporting from down there.   [00:04:50.020] - Tamara So she's just in Anguilla and it looks like she had to have a PCR test before she left a PCR test when she arrived. And then you're quarantined in your hotel room until the results of that get back, which are supposed to be within 12 hours.   [00:05:04.690] - Tamara But then even beyond that, there's a 14 day quarantine within certain resorts or properties or a restaurant.   [00:05:11.850] - Tamara So basically they've created this little like traveler's bubble so that if you are a visitor and your negative, but you're still have a red wristband that you're in a 14 day quarantine and you can go to certain hotels, certain restaurants, but only on certain days. And then they're accessible to locals on other days to keep the locals and the visitors, I guess, a little separated. And I mean, it seems to be working. They've had no deaths and very few cases.   [00:05:38.650] - Tamara But, wow, that's a huge I don't know I don't want to say restriction on your vacation because, you know, frankly, just being able to travel at all right now is a huge privilege and so but it's really it's not everyone's like, oh, I want to go on vacation. I wanted to be feel normal. Well, you know, maybe not.   [00:05:57.250] - Kim Yeah, I think that's the thing is, it's I mean, we're still not looking at what normal is going to be for a while. And I think that's that's the big thing. I know. You know, we I do feel lucky that we have such great summers here in the Pacific Northwest and we could say, hey, we can, you know, go explore our own area again. But I think everybody is getting kind of sick of that. I know I'm you know, we love California and I'm typically down there a couple or few times a year. And we I just miss, you know, pool lounging and, you know, sunsets on the beach and all of that, you know, palm tree lifestyle. And so I don't know. And, you know, Disneyland is still not open. And I don't think it has any chance of opening for spring break, in my opinion.   [00:06:44.260] - Kim So what that must be doing to that economy and all those workers, I mean, I can't even imagine.   [00:06:49.030] - Kim So it's kind of a crazy, crazy world still. I mean, I can't believe we're coming on one full year of it.   [00:06:55.630] - Tamara And yeah, I know it's it's beyond depressing, but I'm thinking mostly about summer and I just need a change of scenery, like, desperately. And so we're going to go somewhere. You know, our plan was to go to Greece, which we wanted to do last year, this year. And that may just never happen. So my strategy right now is I'm creating backup plans.   [00:07:22.300] - Tamara So I'm just booking things that are cancelable and will go where we can go. I mean, I'm not going to book like airfare or whatever, but like I did for Greece, but it is changeable without a fee and it was a good deal. So I don't know I don't know what it will happen with that eventually.   [00:07:40.870] - Tamara And the hard thing is, like everything is contingent on everything else. And that's what drives me crazy in my life because I am a planner and have a really, really hard time like not knowing what the future holds, not being able to plan for not having anything in my control. So even just talking to Hannah about like her summer plans, like last year, she was going to do this like counselor in training year at the camp that she's gone to and then do this Israel trip.   [00:08:07.090] - Tamara And obviously that was canceled and all she did was stay home and take summer optional classes and face time with friends and go for runs with me. And then we did a couple little trips, but it was just not good. And so she was thinking that this year would be something entirely different. But then the camp said, well, we're just going to kind of push it out a year.   [00:08:30.820] - Tamara So you have another chance. You know, she'd kind of like given up on that hope that she was going to do that. So now the camp is like, well, you know what, we're just like adding an extra year to camp. So now you can do it as a rising senior as well. And everything she's ever heard has been that that's like the best year of camp. And so she really wants to do it.   [00:08:48.610] - Tamara But then we were kind of thinking this year she might focus on something a little bit more like a job or like an academic program or internship, something like that. And so it's like all these things like, is that camp, is it going to move forward? Because if it doesn't doesn't should you do this? And here are these other, like, astronomy related things that she wanted to do. But like one by one, those are getting canceled, too.   [00:09:08.830] - Tamara So they're off the table. And then we are like, if you do that, then you'd be around here. But if you're not doing that, then you wouldn't be around here and maybe you want to do a family trip versus a you know, Glenn and I go on a trip.   [00:09:20.680] - Tamara And then there's also like, well, coming back are there's still going to be quarantines and restrictions in place because like right now, especially with our school, there's very strong rules about, you know, what's allowed.   [00:09:30.460] - Tamara And so it's like, well, if we did something when you came back from camp, but you need to have time to quarantine or whatever before you would have to start up soccer practice in like mid-August. And we're also trying to look at colleges like all over the country.   [00:09:46.510] - Tamara And it's like, oh, gosh, it's just there's so many feel overwhelming. And it just feels overwhelming to get locked in, you know. Yeah. The one thing that I can then like, plan things around.   [00:09:57.220] - Kim I get it. Yeah.   [00:09:58.840] - Tamara And unfortunately it'll be like last year where it will literally be June, you know, like days before something where you finally know what the situation is.   [00:10:07.780] - Kim Yeah. Who knows. We can hold out hope and just see what's going to happen the next couple of months. But I think it's important for us all to just try and like. You said earlier it's it's still a very privileged worry and a lot of ways with what's going on, so long as we keep that in mind that it is a privilege to travel and we all miss it and we will get to it when we can, and we just all support each other and do the best we can to follow rules.   [00:10:33.250] - Kim I think the rules are there to keep everyone safe on both like visitors and locals. So I think just be following rules and make sure that you're educated about rules before you make plans. I think that's the thing to focus on right now, certainly.   [00:10:46.450] - Tamara And I think also, if you are considering doing one of those like Caribbean, Mexico, whatever trips, it seems like Canada is on the verge of telling people like if you go out of the country, you may not be able to come back in. So it's like, who knows? That could happen here as well.   [00:11:01.570] - Tamara Like right now there's bans on travel for people that are not U.S. citizens. But there's a lot of considerations to travel right now.   [00:11:13.360] - Kim Well, I mean, the Tokyo Olympics have completely been scrapped, which is just so sad and hard on that country. And I'm sure. So it's it's affected so much of, you know, I mean, it's not like they can't delay it another year like they did. So it's very sad for all those situation.   [00:11:33.010] - Tamara Yeah.   [00:11:34.000] - Kim Well, we are going to try and not focus on the sad and we are going to talk about a New York state escape. So for many people, depending on, like you've said, travel restrictions and quarantine requirements, it is a possible escape because it sounds like it's a lot of small towns, kind of keep to yourself, go outdoors, hike destination. So we are going to be talking about the Catskills.   [00:11:58.930] - Tamara Yes. Let's let's go to the Land of Dirty Dancing, right?   [00:12:02.080] - Kim Yeah, exactly.   [00:12:12.650] - Tamara Today, we're here with Fadra Nally. Fadra is a blogger and podcast author who focuses on the lighter side of cars, entertainment and travel, her favorite destinations are as close as West Virginia and as far away as Saudi Arabia. So welcome, Fadra.   [00:12:26.660] - Fadra Thank you. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to talk to you today about a location that's pretty close to where I am, but I've actually only been a few times.   [00:12:35.450] - Tamara We're going to talk about the Catskill Mountains, but some of our listeners may have only heard of the Catskills for movies like Dirty Dancing or I think The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, they spend some time in the Catskills. But can you explain to our listeners, like, where are the Catskill Mountains and what are some of the towns in their area if you're going to look it up on a map?   [00:12:53.000] - Fadra Well, I'll tell you, before I went last time, last November, for the first time, I only knew that I knew it from Dirty Dancing. And that was pretty much it. And, you know, it's it was kind of well known back in the 50s. It was a big sort of like a summer location for wealthy, usually Jewish families from New York City. They would head out to the Catskills and it's it's considered upstate New York.   [00:13:16.520] - Fadra It is west of the Hudson River. And it actually encompasses it's about 700,000 acres and takes up four different counties. So it's a pretty large region. It's kind of in southeast New York state. So it's a very big area. It's a mountainous area. It's actually part of the Appalachian Mountains. So there's there's a lot to see and do there. And it's kind of funny that you mentioned the entertainment aspect, because I do cover entertainment as well as travel.   [00:13:45.680] - Fadra And so it was kind of fun just to read a little bit more about it. And just a quick side note on Dirty Dancing. So the resort in that film is called Kellerman's, and it was inspired by a resort called Grossinger's, which is it's now gone. It's long gone, actually. So they actually shot that movie in Virginia and North Carolina.   [00:14:07.850] - Fadra So they didn't even shoot it in the Catskills. But Mrs. Maisel, they did actually shoot there. There's a place called Scott's Family Resort at Oquaga Lake, and it's a family run hotel. I haven't been to the one in the Catskills. I've been to similar type hotels where it's sort of like an all inclusive, rustic, family friendly family activity type place. And that one, they actually chose to film it there because that's remained largely unchanged since the 50s.   [00:14:35.060] - Tamara Yeah, it was funny. You talk about the 50s because I think my husband would get upset because growing up he always went to the Catskills and it was not in the 50s.   [00:14:43.280] - Tamara But I always call him old, so. Yeah, but but he was definitely one of the New York Jewish families that always went to the Catskills. They went to the Concord, was like the big resort then. And he tells me about like some of the comedians that came in. And so, like the whole Mrs. Maisel thing, like definitely ties into that. But it's really funny because one of the first times we went skiing together, his only experience skiing was at the Concord, which I guess is like just a small little hill that you would take like a tow rope up.   [00:15:10.310] - Tamara And so when we were going up the lift, I think it was in Mount Snow in Vermont, he was like, how high are we going? Like, how long is this lift? And I was like, I don't know. I'll take about like 10, 15 minutes. He's like, What? And then I was like, well, how long is it going to take to get down? I'm like, I don't know, like half an hour or so.   [00:15:27.590] - Tamara And he was just like so shocked because it was, you know, his experience was, you know, very much going to the Concord in the winter and skiing there. But skiing was more like, you know, that most five minutes down the hill.   [00:15:39.390] - Fadra So his idea of skiing sounds more like my idea of. So that's good to know. If I want to go skiing, I'm going to go to the Catskills.   [00:15:47.160] - Tamara Yeah, I think there are some some tougher hills or mountains, I should say now. But anyway, it's funny because he definitely always talked about his experience in the Catskills.   [00:15:57.530] - Kim That's funny. So speaking of winter and seasons, you had mentioned that you went in November, which would have been the fall. So it's it seems like maybe it's a seasonal destination. Do you know anything about some of the things that you can do around the different seasons and maybe the best time you think for people to visit?   [00:16:14.480] - Fadra Well, you know, the great thing about the Catskills are that it's really a four season area. So I think it just depends on what you like to do.   [00:16:23.150] - Fadra So I am not a skier, as you might have inferred from like those small little hills. I actually grew up doing some ski trips to Pennsylvania, which are also, you know, nice little hills, and I can handle that. So I'm not a big winter sports fan. They do have skiing there. So if that's something that you like to do, that is something that you can do in the Catskills. But the other three seasons are where you're really going to be able to take advantage of a lot of the outdoor activities.   [00:16:49.370] - Fadra So, for example, I love to kayak and we actually stayed at a place right on the Hudson River. So you do have access to the river and you do have access to the mountains. So depending on what you like to do, we stayed right by the river, which would be great for warmer weather activities. And then, of course, all the mountain activities are, you know, just a short drive away.   [00:17:09.590] - Fadra But I found November was just a bit too chilly for any activities on the river, and when you get into fall in an area like New York and in the mountains, you know, it's kind of hit or miss. You're going to have some warmer days and then you're going to have some really cold days. So I was actually content to just sit on the shore of the river. And for people that don't know, the Hudson River is a major waterway for cargo ships.   [00:17:32.850] - Fadra And so, it's kind of fun just sitting out there. In fact, our first night there, I looked out the window.   [00:17:38.610] - Fadra I'm like, oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. And my friends were like, what's wrong? What's wrong? I said, there's a giant ship on the river.   [00:17:47.730] - Fadra So it was totally unexpected to see them go up and down. So that was kind of fun. But, you know, fall and spring are great for hiking, as is summer.   [00:17:55.270] - Fadra I mean, you could do anything in the summer, but fall, fall or spring. It was perfect for us to do some brisk hiking. And then, like I said, if if you don't mind snow and you like skiing, there are opportunities in the winter as well. So, you know, it really just depends on what you like to do. But I would definitely consider it a four season area.   [00:18:13.560] - Kim Is it really like tree heavy snow would fall be have a lot of fall colors like you hear so much about in the Northeast, or is it a little too far north for that?   [00:18:22.680] - Fadra No, I think it depends. Again, it depends on where you go. Keep in mind that the Catskill region is huge and it goes all the way from the Hudson River, pretty far west. So if you start driving up, I think you're talking about maybe elevation wise, it is it you don't get a lot of trees. No, it was actually most of the leaves were gone by the time we went. We went mid to late November.   [00:18:44.220] - Fadra So, you know, of course, the further north you go, the earlier the foliage season is. But no, the area is definitely popular for fall foliage and they definitely encourage that. In fact, it's still a big area for New York City people, even though it's a couple hours away, you'll get a lot of the leaf peepers in the fall. So, yeah, it's a beautiful area for that.   [00:19:05.050] - Tamara Yeah, I was thinking I was in the Finger Lakes in September, like late September of this year. And so they are not too different in terms of how high up they are. So feel like October would probably be prime leaf season.   [00:19:24.690] - Tamara And I definitely think that the Catskills have a lot of agritourism because when I was there for a family reunion, this was, oh, gosh, maybe 15 years ago almost. We went in the summer and there were like a lot of farms to visit. So I imagine in the fall that could be really, you know, an excellent time to like do all the pumpkin patches and stuff like that.   [00:19:49.200] - Kim I'm betting if it's near the it has a lot of trees and it's near the river, it's probably really good for birdwatching. Not that I'm into that, but I'm thinking spring time would probably be really popular.   [00:19:58.230] - Fadra I actually love bird watching, but I can't say it was something that occurred to me because along the river. So if you're going to stay along the river, you're probably going to stay in a town which is going to be a little bit more developed.   [00:20:10.740] - Kim OK, but it's more I'm picturing like Pacific Northwest Rivers, but that's more like when I lived in Kansas. It's like the Missouri River, like transport river type.   [00:20:19.020] - Fadra Exactly. Exactly.   [00:20:20.680] - Tamara Okay. Yeah. When you were talking about kayaking, I'm like, wow, the Hudson, that's that's huge. And I'm not quite sure I'd want to kayak on that.   [00:20:27.900] - Fadra You know, it's kind of funny because my husband grew up a little further south, but right along the Hudson River and he used to tell me stories of how they would jet ski all the time on the Hudson River. And you just you don't really grasp it until you're there. And you see, OK, it's a pretty big it's a pretty wide river. And then you see these massive ships going up. And I came home and I said, you were jet skiing on that river with these giant cargo ships.   [00:20:52.260] - Fadra And he said, yeah, we used to you know, they would go behind the ships and catch the wake of the ships and jump them. And, you know, I was like, we are different people. He also did black diamond skiing trails. So, you know, he's more of a thrill seeker.   [00:21:06.540] - Fadra I'm more of a I'm going to sit over here with my glass of wine and just, you know, take a look at the the world going by.   [00:21:12.090] - Fadra But, yeah, I would I would definitely do some kayaking. I'd probably be more inclined to keep it, you know, close to the shore. And there are rules on the river. So, you know, they do have buoys, so you don't go out past a certain place and there are shipping lanes. So it's not like you can just cut straight across.   [00:21:28.890] - Kim So, yeah, funny when you said that, it reminds me, I don't know if either of you are. Well I know not on TikTok, but I'm, I like TikTok sometimes and there's a thing and it's like, the best relationships always have one really boring person and one really crazy person because the it works. It's the only it's the only way that matches up.   [00:21:49.110] - Fadra Did you just call me boring?   [00:21:50.670] - Fadra Yeah, I'm, I'm with you. Compared to my look compared to my husband. I like different types. You know, I might try and exotic fish.   [00:22:01.530] - Fadra You know, you live you live large. He's done everything jump out of airplanes. Motorcycles that I'm like, let's stay in a nice luxury hotel.   [00:22:17.900] - Tamara I'm just thinking, I think that we're both the boring ones, which leaves Hannah to be the wild one.   [00:22:23.900] - Tamara But, yeah, so we talked about kayaking and, you know, maybe some hiking, things like that. Are there any other, like activities? Are there attractions that you should see in the Catskills?   [00:22:33.890] - Fadra So, you know, keep in mind that I went in November and we are, you know, in the midst of this thing called a pandemic. So, you know, I didn't get to explore everything that I wanted to see because, you know, there are reduced hours and reduced availability. And also there are some things that are open seasonally. So I would say, you know, the biggest activities are probably open from May to October. So keep that in mind.   [00:22:58.790] - Fadra I was there in November. But with that said, I think the biggest things that I would recommend are waterfalls and wineries. And even if you're not into wineries, they have a lot of distilleries that are pretty well known. They have a lot of breweries. And so we didn't actually get a chance to hit any of those. But there are some you know, there are a couple really well-known distilleries that we were looking to get to. But waterfalls, of course, are, you know, available.   [00:23:24.830] - Fadra That's that's a four season thing as well. I don't know that I would go in the winter, but it was a nice brisk hike to do the waterfalls. And, of course, you know, you have the mountains, you have the water. So you're going to get a lot of waterfalls. One of the places that we went that I absolutely loved, it's called Catskill Falls. And keep in mind that this area was founded by the Dutch.   [00:23:45.380] - Fadra So you'll get that skill like Fishkill and Peekskill and which I think I think that I think Kill actually refers to River. I think that's what I think that's what it means. So it's a Dutch word. But Catskill Falls is a it's one of the largest the highest waterfalls in New York State. It's 260 feet tall.   [00:24:05.000] - Fadra So it's actually higher than Niagara Falls. It's the tallest cascading waterfall in New York State. And it's really popular. And we went and it was it's about a one mile hike to get to the base of the waterfalls. And then you can actually go up a series of stairs to take you to the top of the waterfall. And it's a it's a beautiful overlook. It's a nice hike. And, you know, the only thing to keep in mind, again, during the pandemic, if you look online, it'll say the falls are closed.   [00:24:38.180] - Fadra And what that means is some of the trailheads are closed. So you have to be a little bit more strategic about, you know, where you park and how you access it. But Catskill Falls was really amazing. And if you're not a super outdoorsy person, if you just wanted like a nice relaxing getaway, there are all kinds of cute little towns with shopping and eating.   [00:24:59.300] - Fadra And again, you know, availability during this time is really going to vary by towns. But we found great bookstores and cute little coffee shops and restaurants and just like boutique shops, unique artsy shops. And one of the things that that I like to do when I travel is I like to stimulate the local economy and I like to try and find things that I couldn't find other, you know, in other places. So I do a lot of boutique shopping.   [00:25:26.150] - Fadra And so, yeah, they had some really unique stuff there. So I definitely recommend the shopping as well. It's great.   [00:25:32.310] - Kim It sounds like a kind of the type of place that you'd pick a nice hotel and maybe get a spa treatment and enjoy a lazy breakfast and then stroll around and maybe do a hike or two. And that's the kind of vacation I'm dreaming of right now as a kind of nice for a girlfriend getaway.   [00:25:47.630] - Tamara Yeah, exactly. A romantic getaway. I think you definitely sold both of us on the waterfalls and wine.   [00:25:52.100] - Kim Yeah, exactly. Tamara and I, those are it's like we're sold. We're in.   [00:25:56.330] - Fadra And actually that's why I went in November. So last year was a big birthday for me. And I had decided going into the year that this is going to be my year to travel. And as you know, the world had other plans. And so two of my friends actually said, let's do just a local getaway. You know, it's drivable for all of us. And so we it was three girlfriends and we stayed in a little Airbnb, beautiful Airbnb on the water with three bedrooms.   [00:26:26.870] - Fadra And it was just, you know, it was a perfect getaway for us. And, you know, the thing is right now that you can go out, but you can also, you know, get some takeout and have a girls night in and just be away from home.   [00:26:39.020] - Tamara And it was really, really nice. Yeah, well, I share that big birthday with you, and I was also planning a year of travel, so I'm going to make up for it. We are definitely eventually I kept saying we're going to do in twenty, twenty one. I'm like, uh, maybe the latter half of 2021.   [00:26:55.970] - Fadra So yeah. Still holding out hope.   [00:26:58.550] - Kim So is there any, special area, you know you've, you've just been the one time. But I know with your research and probably what you plan, what about any favorite areas to stay because you said it's a huge region, so. What would you like, what towns or areas do you think are the the winning winning spots? So, you know, I've actually been up that way, you know, quite a few times because my I have family that lives up in Fishkill, New York, which is a little further south of the Catskills, and it's on the east side of the Hudson River.   [00:27:29.620] - Fadra So my husband and I go up there almost every year and we do a lot of day trips. And so I've done things like hiking and biking and brunching at Mohonk Mountain House. I don't know if you're familiar with.   [00:27:41.260] - Tamara Oh, yeah, I've wanted to stay there.   [00:27:42.850] - Fadra Yeah, it's beautiful in New Paltz, New York.   [00:27:45.160] - Fadra So that's a place where normally you can only go there if you are a guest. But, you know, fun little secret. If you make a brunch reservation, then you could spend the whole day there. You know, they'll let you in as long as you have brunch reservations or something. And so they have some great trails that go all the way around the lake. So I've done that.   [00:28:04.960] - Fadra But this time I stayed further north in a town called. If you were to read it, it looks like it's Cock Sakey, which is a horrible name, but they pronounce it Cook Soki. .   [00:28:19.270] - Fadra I thought it was really just the perfect location. It's not too far from Albany. It's a really easy drive. I live, you know, close to Baltimore and drove up there and it was actually a really, really easy drive. I thought it was a good location and it was kind of a good place where we could go to the east side of the river if we wanted to visit. Some towns over there like Hudson is a really cute town there.   [00:28:45.370] - Fadra If we wanted to go as far south to a town called Kingston, we went there or if we wanted to stay closer, you know, there there is actually a town called Catskill. And then, of course, the town we stayed in Cocksackie and just in the little downtown area, there's not there's not a ton there.   [00:29:03.040] - Fadra They're actually doing a lot of revitalization there. They have some investors coming in. And, you know, I think they're going to kind of try and make it a wedding destination. But there were some great restaurants we ate at this place called Chez Figata, and they were open for business. There was a great bottle shop, which we call them wine stores. But I guess up there it's a bottle shop and really great wines and just some small little little shops that we were able to walk to from where we were staying.   [00:29:31.540] - Fadra So I actually really love staying there and I wouldn't mind staying there again, but I would love to explore the areas further west. So the Catskills go much further west, a little bit deeper into the mountains, and that's where you're going to find the resorts and the ski areas and so on.   [00:29:49.450] - Tamara And what about Woodstock, Woodstock's part of the Catskills, isn't it? Or is that further South?   [00:29:53.350] - Fadra It is. Well, it's further south, but it's very close to New Paltz. So, you know, Woodstock, as in the Woodstock is right up there, which was actually just a big, you know, farming area, big farm where they had it.   [00:30:06.400] - Fadra So you'll find that there's pretty, how shall I say, crunchy towns up that way.   [00:30:13.270] - Tamara Yeah, those are fun. Like you said, though, bookstore's like unique boutiques like I love that kind of things.   [00:30:20.710] - Tamara I again I keep going back to like maybe more girlfriend getaway a romantic getaway. But at the same time like I know that we've done family things there and there are definitely I feel like there's like amusement park.   [00:30:32.410] - Tamara I'm trying to think of like all the things my nieces and nephews did when we were on that family reunion quite a few years ago.   [00:30:39.760] - Fadra Well, let me just say that right now, especially to the moms out there, we're pretty much home with everybody almost all the time. And it's OK to take a little time for yourself and do do a girlfriend getaway. I know it's easy to think like, well, if we're spending the time or the money, we should do a family trip. But it's really worthwhile to just kind of refresh and recharge and take that back home to your family.   [00:31:09.310] - Tamara Yeah, I think especially this should be a year where there should be less guilt about that because we're like, oh, I never see them. We're so busy. I'm like, no, you've seen them.   [00:31:18.910] - Fadra So we need to spend more time as a family. No, we don't.   [00:31:24.880] - Kim I have to say, I was, you know, really thankful that we never, you know, embrace the RV or tiny home lifestyle, you know? But then I was thinking of our friend Brianna, who runs Crazy family adventure, and they've been living in their RV with her, you know, kids for six years now or something. And I'm like, I guess this pandemic's really not that different for them.   [00:31:48.280] - Fadra So my friend Andrea Updyke, I don't know if you know Andrea, they recently bought an RV. By the way, RVs are hard to come by right now because because because of the pandemic, everyone's like, let's get on the road. So they bought an RV and they actually just did a trip out to the Grand Canyon from North Carolina. And it was a three week trip and I said, how was it, and she said, actually, you know, it's great, we had a wonderful trip, we all got along really well.   [00:32:15.450] - Fadra But it's funny because when she's home and I think when you're away with your family, it's a little bit different. So she says when we're home, a lot of times they'll plug the RV in on their driveway. And she uses that as her little like oasis away from her family.   [00:32:30.630] - Kim It's like her, she shed. I think it's funny.   [00:32:37.050] - Tamara So, you know, we were talking about that its kind of good for the girlfriend getaway, a romantic getaway. I remember when Glenn and I were dating, when we lived in New York and we went up to the Catskills, we stayed to someplace I wish I could remember.   [00:32:48.570] - Tamara It was like a B&B, but we stayed in like a loft in the barn and it was on a pond that was supposed to be like, I don't know where they filmed on Golden Pond or something like that. And I remember like rowing in a rowboat was so romantic.   [00:33:03.150] - Tamara But there are you know, there are still some family resorts up there. Do you have any that, you know, kind of heard of or know about? I think the one that I've that comes to mind for me is Kartrite, which has like the water park inside, kind of like a great wolf kind of thing.   [00:33:19.170] - Tamara But are there some more of those kind of the traditional like what used to be Catskill family resorts?   [00:33:24.870] - Fadra There are there are about 25 different mountain resort.   [00:33:29.760] - Fadra So if you're looking for a mountain resort in particular, they all have a little bit of a different focus. So some are that family oriented, all inclusive, where it's, you know, three meals a day or whatever it is. And they have all the family activities and everything is right there. Others are casino resorts and some are ski resorts. So I think it really just depends on what you're looking for.   [00:33:53.620] - Kim It's good to know that there's probably a lot of options out there.   [00:33:56.230] - Kim I seem to recall I recently wrote a post and I was referencing like some All-Inclusive in the United States, and I seem to recall one that's there. And I can't think of which one now, but I know it was in that upstate New York area and it's probably in that region, I'm guessing. And it's one of the all inclusive that kind of attracts families.   [00:34:13.360] - Fadra Yeah. And when you when you mention all inclusive, I mean, here's the thing. Depending on the resort, I've stayed at a couple in the U.S., not up in the Catskills. And, you know, the one thing I want people to keep in mind is you're probably not going to get the all all inclusive experience at, say, like in the Caribbean. So it's it's a little bit different. Some that are more old fashioned and more family oriented.   [00:34:37.200] - Fadra To me, they feel more like summer camp for families. Right. And then others, I've been to some I've been to some in the Poconos, and that's more like a cruise ship on land. So it's still not quite that Caribbean feel. But I think it's important to kind of reset your expectations for what an all inclusive is if you're doing something within the U.S..   [00:34:58.290] - Tamara That's true. Very true. It's definitely not a yeah. Not the same. You know, bring me my drink by the poolside.   [00:35:04.820] - Fadra Exactly, exactly.   [00:35:06.870] - Kim It's more of just like a meal package included. Yes, exactly.   [00:35:10.380] - Fadra So it's also a good area for camping. And by camping, I mean tent camping. We talked about RV camping. I got to be honest, for years I wanted that to be my thing. It's not my thing. In fact, I mentioned my friend when she got an RV and it was just very exciting. And I mentioned it to my husband. I said, what would you think about this? And he looks at me and he goes, No.   [00:35:32.850] - Fadra And I said, Really? He's like, Do you really think that's us? We're more like luxury hotel kind of people, which makes me sound sort of snobby. It doesn't have to be a luxury hotel, but I like places like you said, like something that's a little bit unique, like staying in a loft in a barn or something that's just that feels really clean and modern and comfortable. So we actually rented the first time ever that I stayed in an Airbnb and I absolutely loved it.   [00:36:00.570] - Fadra And I'm really worried now because I don't know if all experiences are that good. So we stayed at a place called Heron's View, which is right on the Hudson River in Cocksackie. And like I said, it was an older home. They completely renovated it. So it still had character, but it was modern and clean and I just loved it. So I definitely recommend that.   [00:36:23.610] - Fadra But again, I hate to keep referring to the P word, but in the time of the pandemic, these kind of things actually book up because a lot of people who maybe would have, you know, done their European vacation or gone on a cruise, they're not they're looking for these smaller, family oriented, more accessible type vacations. So these things actually fill up fairly quickly. In fact, the place where we stayed, Heron's view, I think for the entire month of August, it was rented by three working women out of New York City that just wanted to get out of the city.   [00:36:59.460] - Fadra And so it wasn't really a vacation. It was just a place for them to stay while they were working. So you'll find a lot more of those kinds of things. So I definitely recommend planning in advance for whatever it is. That you want to do?   [00:37:10.920] - Tamara Yeah, and we had that when we went to the Adirondacks over the summer and I definitely think it's going to continue. I think people are already looking at some of that this year, even if it's their backup plan.   [00:37:22.580] - Tamara You know, like if other things can't happen, at least they have something. So the better properties, like you said, like the ones that have those unique characteristics or the views or the you know, they're lakeside like that type of thing, if you're looking for that. I agree. They definitely book it up early. Those I think it's going to continue to be a very popular way to travel throughout 2021.   [00:37:44.600] - Fadra I think so, too. And, you know, I want to mention that because a lot of people feel like they can't travel.   [00:37:51.470] - Fadra And, you know, of course you have to pay attention to state requirements and state restrictions and your personal level of comfort as well. But, you know, because we all work in the travel industry, you know, I want to make sure that people know that you can travel, you can travel safely. You know, it just depends on where you're going and how you're choosing to travel. I think we went out to eat maybe once, maybe twice.   [00:38:15.440] - Fadra But we we did takeout and we brought it back. You know, we all made sure that we were safe before we traveled together. We brought takeout back. We brought board games with us. You know, we went to the bottle shop and got bottles of wine. And it was really about spending time with each other in a different destination. So you can do it. I don't think that you have to put off travel. You just have to figure out more creative ways to do it.   [00:38:39.530] - Kim Yeah, that's what we're starting to see. I mean, these these towns and tourist districts, I mean, as travel writers, we're seeing what they how they've been impacted. And I don't know if many of them can go through another summer or even spring into summer facing this.   [00:38:56.030] - Kim So I think it is smart for us to figure out where our level is and make sure, of course, that you're following any rules and restrictions, but then do what works best for your family and help try and support the local economy. I love that you talk about buying from the local shops. And, you know, we've been trying to do that locally, just eating at our local restaurants and getting order out instead of, you know, visiting as many chains and little things like that.   [00:39:21.290] - Kim So I think there are ways that if you're comfortable and you're following the rules and restrictions Tamara do you know, does New York State have any current travel restrictions?   [00:39:31.400] - Tamara They do. They have had for quite a while. So definitely check their website. They had some quarantine restrictions. There's a form that you need to fill out. Yeah. So definitely before you go, make sure you understand what the restrictions are. The good side is that I don't know what your experience was, Fadra, but I know when we were in the Adirondacks, it's like because New York has taken things very seriously, we saw a lot of compliance, you know, like we didn't have many issues.   [00:39:59.420] - Tamara It was it felt like a pretty safe place to go, you know, so that I really appreciate it.   [00:40:06.610] - Fadra I mean, I felt comfortable. But it's one of those things where if you're walking around town, you're having a mask on. Whether you're inside or outside, you just you wear the mask. And when even when we went hiking, there were people that wore masks. We chose not to wear them outside. But you make sure if if that's how someone feels comfortable, you give them a wide berth when you pass them on the trail, right?   [00:40:29.090] Yeah, definitely. We we would usually have something that we would like pull up if you're passing someone. But I definitely appreciated the people that didn't have it and they made sure they stepped far off the trail and that was good.   [00:40:43.670] - Kim So do you have any final tips that you'd like to share for, you know, if someone's thinking of planning a trip to the Catskills?   [00:40:50.840] - Fadra Well, just to kind of recap some of the things we talked about, I'd say planning it in advance, you know, make sure there's availability for where you might want to stay, especially right now. Make sure you know what's open, whether it's something that's closed for seasonal reasons or it's closed because of, you know, pandemic reasons, because you don't want to get your heart set on something. You'd be like, oh, well, we can't do that now and then.   [00:41:13.610] - Fadra You know, you don't know. You don't know what to do. I also want to mention that just because it's outside doesn't mean it's easily accessible. This is true, honestly, throughout the country, there are some trailheads that are closed primarily to reduce the number of people, you know, a lot of the national parks, which drives me a little crazy that, you know, some of the parking lots are closed and the shops are closed and some of the attractions are closed.   [00:41:39.230] - Fadra But more importantly, the bathrooms are closed. That's the only thing that bothers me.   [00:41:44.690] - Fadra But they do that because they want to kind of discourage, you know, large crowds of people gathering together. The other thing, and I sort of hinted at this is be prepared for any kind of weather. Even in the summer, it can get very chilly in the mountains. So we were staying right on the water and it it was actually nice during the day and then it would drop down at night. But, you know, a lot of places are used to having you know, we had a fire pit, we had an outdoor heater.   [00:42:10.760] - Fadra So but we definitely brought layers as well.   [00:42:14.340] - Tamara Yeah, very good point. I mean, even in the summer when you're in the mountains, it gets colder. Well, speaking of layers of question that we ask, all of our guest is, what do you wear when you travel? Do you have any favorite brands or gear?   [00:42:29.400] - Fadra Well, for me, it changes by season. So, for example, in the summer, I love fit flops and I wear them pretty much everywhere I go.   [00:42:39.000] - Fadra If I'm hiking, I'm more of a I wear new balance hiking shoes. If if I'm hiking, I don't do hiking boots, I do hiking shoes. But in the summer I do flip flops. This winter I've been wearing a lot of toms and I don't mean the little canvas toms. Toms makes some nice, they're kind of like sneaker ankle boots and I love them and I also have some wool clogs from earthier. Can you tell that footwear is important to me.   [00:43:05.400] - Fadra I like to be comfortable. And I also did a little shopping in Kingston, New York, which is a little bit south of Catskill, and I bought a shirt from a boutique. Between us, it's the most expensive shirt I've ever bought, but I love it. It's from a brand called Faherty. It's hard to say f h e r t y. And I've heard that it's my new favorite shirt. It's just like it looks like it's a gray wool shirt, but it's just a button up shirt with just the right fit, the right stretch.   [00:43:34.110] - Fadra And so like that's my go to shirt.   [00:43:36.150] - Tamara Now that's what I love about boutique shopping, though. It's I mean, I rarely do it here because I can't afford it on a regular basis. But it's just so nice to have something that's unique and like you said, that has like that special fit.   [00:43:50.130] - Tamara And you're going to remember going to remember where you got it. Going to remember the time that you had it with your girlfriends and all of that.   [00:43:54.870] - Fadra So every time I put it on, I text my friends and say I'm wearing my special shirt today and I know exactly what I'm talking about. That's awesome.   [00:44:02.820] - Kim Well, thank you so much for all these awesome tips. And why don't you let our listeners know where they can find you online? Sure.   [00:44:09.390] - Fadra Well, I have a blog called All Things Fadra, and you can find it at all things Phaedra dot com. It's spelled FADRA and I also produce a lot of videos. So I do have I do have quite a few travel videos on my YouTube channel and that's YouTube.com/allthingsfadra and I'm a sometime podcast store where I talk about TV in movies and you can find all the info on that at StingerUniverse.com.   [00:44:36.510] - Tamara And I've gotten a lot of tips from you guys on things to watch, so I enjoy listening.   [00:44:42.480] - Fadra Pandemic is a perfect time to really dig into entertainment.   [00:44:46.200] - Kim Can you believe how long ago Tiger King was like four years ago? That was still. That was it.   [00:45:12.690] - Kim Yes, but Fadra, you have to make time for Bridgton, OK?   [00:45:16.500] - Fadra Not with my son around though.   [00:45:18.180] - Kim No, definitely not. Well, you know, if you're into entertainment, you can't pass that by.   [00:45:26.790] - Tamara I kind of thought I was a teen drama kind of thing. And then I started watching. I'm like, oh, OK.   [00:45:33.150] - Fadra Isn't it sort of like a period teen drama, though?   [00:45:35.580] - Tamara Well, yeah, yeah it's yeah. It's like what the eighteen hundreds supposed to be.   [00:45:40.350] - Kim Well I mean it's just back to like when I mean I think the problem is the fact that girls used to be married off when they turned 17 and 18 like you come into your first season and you better get married then are you going to be on the shelf, you know, type mentality, then you'll be an old old maid or.   [00:45:56.100] - Fadra Yeah, well, we just got a new elliptical so I need something to motivate me and get my heart rate up so that if I don't work nights.   [00:46:06.360] - Tamara So have you ever watched Reign?   [00:46:09.540] - Kim No, I haven't is it ok? I need to watch that one.   [00:46:12.030] - Tamara If you liked Bridgton then you will definitely like that.   [00:46:15.750] - Kim I've been thinking I need to watch that, but I want to watch Queen's Gambit first and I just started. I haven't watched it yet and I was debating because I was trying to start watching the office, which Paul really liked the office years ago, like when it was out and I never really got into it with him, but a couple of times I would see some episodes. And so I thought I should go back and start it like season one and watch it. Yeah, but then I was just like I loaded it and I watched the pilot last night. I was like, there's like nine seasons and they're twenty some episodes per season. I mean, it's a lot.   [00:46:48.210] - Tamara We've watched all of those with Hannah like a few years ago we went through it. But I will say like I love the office. But the things that Michael did that were cringeworthy then are like a hundred times more cringeworth now. And you're like, how did they ever put that on the air? You know?   [00:47:06.060] - Kim I watched the first one. I'm like, oh my goodness, this is sort of hard to watch.   [00:47:09.640] - Fadra Pretty sure I worked for Michael Scott, so. I think we've seen every single episode about 17 times, so we're well versed in the office.   [00:47:22.480] - Tamara What I want is just a compilation of all of the practical jokes that Jim plays on Dwight like that would just make me laugh, like I would roll over, you know, just like watching an hour straight of all of those.   [00:47:35.920] - Fadra You know what? Let me just give one plug for a little show you guys should watch. Speaking of the office, it's a show on Netflix called We Are the Champions. If you haven't watched it, it's I think like a six or seven is running through my head. Yeah, it's like a six or seven episode docu series by Rainn Wilson, who played Dwight on the office. And, you know, I'm mentioning it because it goes to all different parts of the world and and the country so we can kind of tie it back to travel a little bit.   [00:48:03.820] - Fadra And it's really about unique competitions. It's like there's one and I think it's England, a cheese rolling competition where they roll a wheel of cheese down a very steep hill in this small town. And it's a big competition for who can get to the bottom and catch the cheese first. There's another one about the frog jumping competition in Calberas County, California. So it's just a really fun show. And, you know, even the kids would like it.   [00:48:31.870] Great recommendation. Well, thanks so much, Fadra, for spending time with us. And yeah, we look forward to hopefully chatting with you again soon and maybe eventually we'll see each other again on a vacation or somewhere..   [00:48:49.360] - Kim Well, as always, thanks for listening. And we have something exciting if you go to on Instagram, if you go to Stuffed Suitcase or We3Travel, go to one of our Instagram pages and check out our post.   [00:49:01.390] - Kim We are actually doing a giveaway with a lot of amazing books that will help you at least be inspired. If you are thinking of planning a vacation, it'll help you get some things figured out and started on your vacation planning. So go to our Instagram and check that out.   [00:49:17.620] - Tamara Yep. And stay tuned, because next week we're going to be talking about tips for saving for travel. And I think this is a big one because as we've talked about before, like budget is certainly an issue. And I think we're going to be trying to share as many tips as we can in the next few episodes and from different people about ways to save on travel and for travel. We'll chat with you again in two weeks.  

Manhattan-born, but raised in Miami, Jenny Goldfarb never really shook off her New York-Jewish deli sensibilities. It may be because it runs in the blood - beginning with her great grandfather, an immigrant from Romania who spoke no English coming into America but went on to own several delis in his lifetime. Though Jenny eventually found herself living in the West Coast with her husband and their three daughters, she never lost her love for authentic East Coast deli sandwiches.  Growing up eating meat her whole life, Jenny’s journey into a plant-based lifestyle started when a friend introduced her to videos of how animals suffered in service of the food industry. Dodging doubts from her husband and in-laws, Jenny nevertheless pursued her newfound passion of going vegan, which led her to create her own food vlog, Count Your Colors. Her hubby, a 3-time Emmy winning film editor, gamely supported her on this. Her vlogs didn’t exactly turn her into a Youtube star, but Jenny felt that she was doing her contribution in making the world a better place. But it wasn’t until she made her own vegan corned beef using easy to find ingredients that things really picked up speed.  Encouraged by friends and family, Jenny slowly scaled up the production of her vegan corned beef business and soon found her way into Whole Foods. Just when she thought that her food business had finally found it’s turning point, she decided to pitch for Shark Tank. Before she knew it, Jenny found herself standing in front of the sharks! She deftly handled the challenging questions from the sharks and walked away with a cool $250,000 investment from Mark Cuban, more than double what she was asking for.  Today Jenny shares the amazing story of how she grew her vegan food business, Mrs. Goldfarb’s Unreal Deli from her kitchen to a thriving business that allows her to still be a full-time mom and wife and do her part in protecting animals. Plus a whole lot of practicality on how she continues to maneuver her business in this pandemic.   

Ronnie Grinberg speaks with Pamela S. Nadell, the Patrick Clendenen Chair in Women's and Gender History and director of Jewish studies at American University. Her books include America's Jewish Women, winner of the Everett Family Foundation Book of the Year Award from the Jewish Book Council, and Women Who Would Be Rabbis, a National Jewish Book Award finalist. Prof. Nadell lives in North Bethesda, Maryland. In America's Jewish Women: A History from Colonial Times to Today (W. W. Norton, 2019), Pamela Nadell surveys varied experiences of Jewish women who made America their home. In elegant prose, she introduces readers to a fascinating cast of characters from the seventeenth century to the present day. This interview provides a brief overview of the book's arguments and archival research, before turning to important questions of how women's history, Jewish history and American history can work together. It also calls attention to some distinctive features of Judaism in America, the social roots of Jewish women's political activism, and a shared passion for mah jong! Please enjoy this conversation between two colleagues with a deep admiration for each other's work. Ronnie Grinberg is Assistant Professor in the History Department and Schusterman Center for Judaic and Israel Studies at the University of Oklahoma. She is completing a manuscript on New York Jewish intellectuals in the twentieth century to be published with Princeton University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ronnie Grinberg speaks with Pamela S. Nadell, the Patrick Clendenen Chair in Women’s and Gender History and director of Jewish studies at American University. Her books include America's Jewish Women, winner of the Everett Family Foundation Book of the Year Award from the Jewish Book Council, and Women Who Would Be Rabbis, a National Jewish Book Award finalist. Prof. Nadell lives in North Bethesda, Maryland. In America’s Jewish Women: A History from Colonial Times to Today (W. W. Norton, 2019), Pamela Nadell surveys varied experiences of Jewish women who made America their home. In elegant prose, she introduces readers to a fascinating cast of characters from the seventeenth century to the present day. This interview provides a brief overview of the book’s arguments and archival research, before turning to important questions of how women’s history, Jewish history and American history can work together. It also calls attention to some distinctive features of Judaism in America, the social roots of Jewish women’s political activism, and a shared passion for mah jong! Please enjoy this conversation between two colleagues with a deep admiration for each other’s work. Ronnie Grinberg is Assistant Professor in the History Department and Schusterman Center for Judaic and Israel Studies at the University of Oklahoma. She is completing a manuscript on New York Jewish intellectuals in the twentieth century to be published with Princeton University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ronnie Grinberg speaks with Pamela S. Nadell, the Patrick Clendenen Chair in Women’s and Gender History and director of Jewish studies at American University. Her books include America's Jewish Women, winner of the Everett Family Foundation Book of the Year Award from the Jewish Book Council, and Women Who Would Be Rabbis, a National Jewish Book Award finalist. Prof. Nadell lives in North Bethesda, Maryland. In America’s Jewish Women: A History from Colonial Times to Today (W. W. Norton, 2019), Pamela Nadell surveys varied experiences of Jewish women who made America their home. In elegant prose, she introduces readers to a fascinating cast of characters from the seventeenth century to the present day. This interview provides a brief overview of the book’s arguments and archival research, before turning to important questions of how women’s history, Jewish history and American history can work together. It also calls attention to some distinctive features of Judaism in America, the social roots of Jewish women’s political activism, and a shared passion for mah jong! Please enjoy this conversation between two colleagues with a deep admiration for each other’s work. Ronnie Grinberg is Assistant Professor in the History Department and Schusterman Center for Judaic and Israel Studies at the University of Oklahoma. She is completing a manuscript on New York Jewish intellectuals in the twentieth century to be published with Princeton University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ronnie Grinberg speaks with Pamela S. Nadell, the Patrick Clendenen Chair in Women’s and Gender History and director of Jewish studies at American University. Her books include America's Jewish Women, winner of the Everett Family Foundation Book of the Year Award from the Jewish Book Council, and Women Who Would Be Rabbis, a National Jewish Book Award finalist. Prof. Nadell lives in North Bethesda, Maryland. In America’s Jewish Women: A History from Colonial Times to Today (W. W. Norton, 2019), Pamela Nadell surveys varied experiences of Jewish women who made America their home. In elegant prose, she introduces readers to a fascinating cast of characters from the seventeenth century to the present day. This interview provides a brief overview of the book’s arguments and archival research, before turning to important questions of how women’s history, Jewish history and American history can work together. It also calls attention to some distinctive features of Judaism in America, the social roots of Jewish women’s political activism, and a shared passion for mah jong! Please enjoy this conversation between two colleagues with a deep admiration for each other’s work. Ronnie Grinberg is Assistant Professor in the History Department and Schusterman Center for Judaic and Israel Studies at the University of Oklahoma. She is completing a manuscript on New York Jewish intellectuals in the twentieth century to be published with Princeton University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ronnie Grinberg speaks with Pamela S. Nadell, the Patrick Clendenen Chair in Women’s and Gender History and director of Jewish studies at American University. Her books include America's Jewish Women, winner of the Everett Family Foundation Book of the Year Award from the Jewish Book Council, and Women Who Would Be Rabbis, a National Jewish Book Award finalist. Prof. Nadell lives in North Bethesda, Maryland. In America’s Jewish Women: A History from Colonial Times to Today (W. W. Norton, 2019), Pamela Nadell surveys varied experiences of Jewish women who made America their home. In elegant prose, she introduces readers to a fascinating cast of characters from the seventeenth century to the present day. This interview provides a brief overview of the book’s arguments and archival research, before turning to important questions of how women’s history, Jewish history and American history can work together. It also calls attention to some distinctive features of Judaism in America, the social roots of Jewish women’s political activism, and a shared passion for mah jong! Please enjoy this conversation between two colleagues with a deep admiration for each other’s work. Ronnie Grinberg is Assistant Professor in the History Department and Schusterman Center for Judaic and Israel Studies at the University of Oklahoma. She is completing a manuscript on New York Jewish intellectuals in the twentieth century to be published with Princeton University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ronnie Grinberg speaks with Pamela S. Nadell, the Patrick Clendenen Chair in Women’s and Gender History and director of Jewish studies at American University. Her books include America's Jewish Women, winner of the Everett Family Foundation Book of the Year Award from the Jewish Book Council, and Women Who Would Be Rabbis, a National Jewish Book Award finalist. Prof. Nadell lives in North Bethesda, Maryland. In America’s Jewish Women: A History from Colonial Times to Today (W. W. Norton, 2019), Pamela Nadell surveys varied experiences of Jewish women who made America their home. In elegant prose, she introduces readers to a fascinating cast of characters from the seventeenth century to the present day. This interview provides a brief overview of the book’s arguments and archival research, before turning to important questions of how women’s history, Jewish history and American history can work together. It also calls attention to some distinctive features of Judaism in America, the social roots of Jewish women’s political activism, and a shared passion for mah jong! Please enjoy this conversation between two colleagues with a deep admiration for each other’s work. Ronnie Grinberg is Assistant Professor in the History Department and Schusterman Center for Judaic and Israel Studies at the University of Oklahoma. She is completing a manuscript on New York Jewish intellectuals in the twentieth century to be published with Princeton University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ronnie Grinberg speaks with Pamela S. Nadell, the Patrick Clendenen Chair in Women’s and Gender History and director of Jewish studies at American University. Her books include America's Jewish Women, winner of the Everett Family Foundation Book of the Year Award from the Jewish Book Council, and Women Who Would Be Rabbis, a National Jewish Book Award finalist. Prof. Nadell lives in North Bethesda, Maryland. In America’s Jewish Women: A History from Colonial Times to Today (W. W. Norton, 2019), Pamela Nadell surveys varied experiences of Jewish women who made America their home. In elegant prose, she introduces readers to a fascinating cast of characters from the seventeenth century to the present day. This interview provides a brief overview of the book’s arguments and archival research, before turning to important questions of how women’s history, Jewish history and American history can work together. It also calls attention to some distinctive features of Judaism in America, the social roots of Jewish women’s political activism, and a shared passion for mah jong! Please enjoy this conversation between two colleagues with a deep admiration for each other’s work. Ronnie Grinberg is Assistant Professor in the History Department and Schusterman Center for Judaic and Israel Studies at the University of Oklahoma. She is completing a manuscript on New York Jewish intellectuals in the twentieth century to be published with Princeton University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Katie and Sara make KOO history by having the same obsession and the results are complete hysteria. Then they welcome Peter Shelsky, owner of Shelsky’s of Brooklyn and Shelsky’s Bagels and the leader(ish) of the Jewish food revolution in NYC. Peter talks with such passion about all sorts of incredible flavor sensations that Sara may or may not sound like she’s having an orgasm. Peter schools us on the history of the iconic New York Jewish deli and what makes a good bagel. This episode will definitely make your mouth water!

On December 10, 2019, shoppers in a Kosher market in Jersey City, N.J., became the targets of anti-Semitic violence. Two men opened fire in the grocery store, killing four people. Just a few weeks later, a man wielding a machete broke into a rabbi’s home in Monsey, New York, and stabbed five people who were in the midst of celebrating Hanukkah. One victim, 72-year-old Josef Neumann, was the most seriously injured and currently remains in a coma. These two atrocious incidents are just a fraction of a trend anti-Semitic attacks in the United States. In a letter written to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, four New York Jewish officials wrote that, “Simply stated, it is no longer safe to be identifiably Orthodox in the State of New York. We cannot shop, walk down the street, send our children to school, or even worship in peace.’’ Not even a full century after the Holocaust, anti-Semitism is once again rearing its ugly head. What's causing the outbreak and what can be done to counteract this hatred? Rev. Ben Johnson, managing editor at Acton, breaks it down. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In the inaugural episode of Adventures in Jewish Studies, host Jeremy Shere explores the New York Jewish food tradition of “appetizing” with guests culinary ethnographer Eve Jochnowitz, NYU history professor Hasia Diner, former 3rd generation owner of the appetizing store Russ & Daughters Mark Russ Federman, and Concordia University professor of religions and cultures Norma Joseph. Appetizing is a distinctly American, distinctly New York, distinctly Jewish, food tradition. Introduced as a counterpart to the meat-selling deli, and carrying fish, dairy, and related foods, appetizing stores have been around since the early 1900s. Appetizing played an important role in the history of Jewish foods and is an integral part of the story of Jewish New Yorkers – how they lived, how they ate, and how they evolved.

Professor Deborah Dash Moore, who will lead the Yiddish Book Center's upcoming weekend course (October 26-28, 2018), discusses the cluster of New York Jewish photographers who pictured the city, their home, in the middle decades of the 20th century. As young men and women, mostly the children of immigrants, they picked up cameras and walked the streets, capturing its human drama. Episode 0197 September 30, 2018 Yiddish Book Center Amherst, Massachusetts

Episode 9 : Stanley Kubrick New York Jewish Intellectual with Nathan Abrams. Professor Nathan Abrams talks about his new book Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual. Nathan is Professor in film and Director of Research for the School of Creative Studies and Media at Bangor University in Wales. Nathan also lectures, writes and broadcasts widely on UK and American popular culture, history film and intellectual culture. He co-founded Jewish Film and New Media: An International Journal and has also written several books on the subject of Jewishness in popular culture including; The New Jew in Film: Exploring Jewishness and Judaism in Contemporary Cinema (2012) and Hidden in Plain Sight: Jews and Jewishness in British Film, Television, and Popular Culture (2016). He is currently finishing work on an upcoming book for 2019 titled Eyes Wide Shut: Stanley Kubrick and the Making of His Final Film but it’s his current book, just released Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual (2018) that he is talking about in this episode. The following interview with Nathan is being conducted by Rabbi Dr. Raphael Zarum at the launch of his latest book at JW3 in London on the 26th April 2018. Audio Clips : Spartacus (1960) / Dr. Strangelove (1964) / Barry Lyndon (1975) / 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) Music : Kubrick's Universe Theme composed, performed and produced by Jason Furlong Main Title from Spartacus composed by Alex North / Performed by The Filmation Orchestra Links : Buy Nathan's Book (Amazon) : https://www.amazon.com/Stanley-Kubrick-York-Jewish-Intellectual/dp/0813587107 Listen to Spartacus Soundtrack (iTunes) : https://itunes.apple.com/ie/album/spartacus-original-film-soundtrack/433684542 The Stanley Kubrick Appreciation Society (SKAS) - Facebook Group : https://www.facebook.com/groups/TSKAS/ The Stanley Kubrick Appreciation Society (SKAS) - YouTube Channel : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRdeqrFNoOrYtWbxwR_GXPA The Stanley Kubrick Appreciation Society (SKAS) - Twitter Page : https://twitter.com/KubrickAS Contact us : stephenrigg.skas@gmail.com

How does the way that you communicate affect your ability to connect, and be understood? Can you change your communication style to become a more effective communicator? We don’t all use language the same way, and in today’s episode, we’re going to see exactly how those differences play out in our interactions with the people we care about most. And by the end of the conversation, you’ll have some strategies for bridging the communication gap in any situation when things aren’t going quite as you had planned. Our guest is Deborah Tannen, Georgetown Professor and author of You Just Don’t Understand, the classic book on gender differences in communication. Her latest book, You’re the Only One I Can Tell, is about the language of friendships between women. Deborah Tannen’s specialty is how we use language - and identifying exactly where differences in the way that we communicate connect us, and get in our way. And, as always, I’m looking forward to your thoughts on this episode and what revelations and questions it creates for you. Join us in the Relationship Alive Community on Facebook to chat about it! During the course of my conversation with Deborah Tannen, we also mention a few other Relationship Alive episodes that will help you with your communication: Episode 59: How to Make Difficult Conversations So Much Easier - with Sheila Heen Episode 22: Essential Skills for Conscious Relationship - with Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt Episode 69: How to Be Completely Alive in Your Relationship - with Hedy Schleifer Resources: Check out Deborah Tannen's website Read Deborah Tannen’s Book - You Just Don’t Understand and her latest book You’re the Only One I Can Tell You can also visit Deborah Tannen’s author page on Amazon FREE Relationship Communication Secrets Guide www.neilsattin.com/language Visit to download the transcript, or text “PASSION” to 33444 and follow the instructions to download the transcript to this episode with Deborah Tannen Amazing intro/outro music graciously provided courtesy of: The Railsplitters - Check them Out Transcript: Neil Sattin: Hello and welcome to another episode of Relationship Alive. This is your host, Neil Sattin. We’ve spoken a lot about communication on this show - and in today’s episode we’re going to cover how the specific language that you use affects your relationships. The words that you choose matter - and today you’re going to find out why. Neil Sattin: This podcast was actually born, in some ways, more than 20 years ago, when I was in a class in college called the Psychology of Interpersonal Relationships. In this class, I gathered with a bunch of students there, in a circle, and we basically dealt with the shit that came up between us, right then and there. If you’ve ever heard of an encounter group - well, that’s what it was. One of the books that was on the required reading list was called “You Just Don’t Understand”  by Deborah Tannen - about the different ways that Men and Women communicate. This book, after it came out, spent 4 YEARS on the NYT bestseller list. So you can imagine the effect that it’s had on our culture, and what we’ve come to know about language, and gender, how we create meaning and understanding with each other. When I started Relationship Alive, one of the people I knew I had to interview was Deborah Tannen, and it took us two years to coordinate this time together. She’s here on the heels of releasing her new book, “You’re the Only One I Can Tell: Inside the Language of Women’s Friendships” - and I’m so excited to have her here with us today to discuss how language impacts our connections - and what you can do to improve the way you communicate with the people who matter to you most. Neil Sattin: If you’d like to download a complete transcript for today’s episode, please visit neilsattin.com/language, or you can always text the word “PASSION” to 33444 and follow the instructions. Deborah Tannen, thank you so much for joining us today on Relationship Alive. Deborah Tannen: Hi. What a pleasure and privilege to speak with you. Neil Sattin: Thank you so much. The feeling, as you can tell, is mutual. Let's start with You Just Don't Understand. We were talking for a few moments before we officially got started, and, as you mentioned, it's a classic. It's something that has defined how we look at gender dynamics in communication. I'm wondering for you what you've noticed about how that book as impacted people in the world around you, and also how you've seen it affect culture? Neil Sattin: I know that for me, personally, not only did it give me a much deeper understanding of what was happening and how I communicated, but it made me want to change. It made me want to shift so that I could find more common ground, whether I was talking to men in my life, women in my life, and at this point, people all over the spectrum of gender. So, how have you seen that book shift what is actually happening in our culture? Deborah Tannen: It has been overwhelming to notice how much of what I wrote about in that book has become part of the landscape, I would say, of how people think about relationships and conversation. I guess the most striking one is, "Why don't men ask directions?" When I put that in the book, I don't think anyone had talked about it, but a number of the interviews that I had very early on had picked up on that. Then it became so much a part of the culture people were sending me cocktail napkins, "Real men don't ask directions"; jokes going around, "Why did Moses wander in the desert for 40 years?"; maybe one of my favorites, "Why does it take so many sperm to find just one egg?" Deborah Tannen: You hear a little bit less about that now that we all have GPS devices, but it really doesn't change things that much. Just recently, this is really funny ... My research method is asking people about their own lives, listening to people. More and more for the current book I actually interviewed people, but in the beginning I didn't do what. The idea of them not asking directions, which is one example that a friend of mine gave me, I just asked her, "What do you and your husband argue about?" Deborah Tannen: She mentioned, "He won't stop and ask directions. We get lost and it frustrates me." Deborah Tannen: I was talking to just that friend not long ago and asked her, "Well, now there's a GPS that doesn't happen, right?" Deborah Tannen: She said, "It still happens. He doesn't want to use the GPS. He says, 'I don't need her to tell me where to go. I know how to go.'" Deborah Tannen: So, that's a long answer. I think just the idea that women and men might have different ways of speaking has become almost like it's just accepted for many people, clearly not everybody. Several of the scenarios I talked about are now very much a part of the public knowledge-base, or something like that. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Do you want to touch for a moment on ... Because there, of course, have been critiques of your work. What have you seen in terms of when people stand up and say, "Nah, this isn't really how it is?" Where are they typically coming from? Deborah Tannen: Oh, yes. Absolutely. I should say, I guess for maybe about a year after the book came out, my book was very frequently criticized, especially in the academic world. It was criticized for generalizing, for saying all women and men are alike, for downplaying, or some people thought I was ignoring power differences. Deborah Tannen: By the way, that led me to write the book The Argument Culture, because it was so surprising and shocking to me that people in the world of academia ... which had been my intellectual home for so many years at that point and really my oasis, you might say, in this wild world. I loved my academic job, my academic colleagues. So, it was shocking to me that what I saw a search for truth was leading people to accuse me of saying things I had never said. Led me to ask, "Why would they do that?" Deborah Tannen: I ended up writing the book The Argument Culture in which I just dissected a bit our tendency to approach everything as a fight, a debate, an argument. Then, you're motivated to look for arguments to make the other person look bad, ignore things the other person actually wrote or said that would make them look good. So that's the background. Deborah Tannen: To answer those complaints, obviously I know that there are power differentials in our culture between women and men. In fact, I do write about how the style differences that we often have -- and I never say all women all men; I always say tend to, many, often, most -- how these very style differences can lead to reinforcing the power of those who use the styles that I associate with men. I actually wrote a whole book about the workplace, that was the next book after You Just Don't Understand. That book was called Talking From 9 to 5, and I showed there how styles that are common among women when used in the workplace lead them to be underestimated, to be seen as less confident than they often are, to be overlooked, to not receive credit that they deserve. Clearly, there's also just sexism, so I would never say that all discrimination is simply based on style, obviously; that's not the case, just that this is one thing that has a role to play there. Deborah Tannen: As for generalizing, there's almost an irony there. I did not start out as an expert on gender; my field was cross-cultural difference. My dissertation and my first book were about New York as compared to California conversational style. I grew up in New York City, Eastern European Jewish background -- I think that's relevant -- and was getting my PhD at Berkeley in California, and my dissertation was an analysis of a conversation involving three New York Jewish speakers and I was one of them, and two Californians who are not Jewish, and one British woman, who actually was half-Jewish but I don't think that affected her style much. Deborah Tannen: I had so much to say about how cultural influence had an effect on the ways people were using language in conversation, and therefore the effects of their ways of speaking on the conversation. I had written much about Greek compared to American conversational styles. I had lived in Greece and I speak Greek. So, clearly I knew that gender was only one of many influence on our styles. Deborah Tannen: The first book that I wrote for general audiences, and, maybe kind of interestingly, the one I really had ambitions for, the one that I thought, "This is going to change the world; people are going to see they're thinking psychology and sometimes it's linguistics, it's use of language," that book was called That's Not What I Meant. It was about all of the ways that our conversational styles, our ways of speaking, our ways of using language, are influenced by ethnic background, regional background, class background, age. How all these influences on style affected our ways of speaking, having conversations, and of course the way people see us, the way we see them. Clearly I knew that gender was not the whole story. Neil Sattin: Yeah. I think why we're here is to get more of the meat around the ways that we use language, how that has an impact. When I read You Just Don't Understand, I identified a lot with some of the more feminine speaking styles. Probably had to do with how I was raised and interacting with my mom. I don't know exactly, my dad was a psychologist so he encouraged me to talk about my feelings. There you have it. It probably doesn't take much more than that. Deborah Tannen: Yes- Neil Sattin: And- Deborah Tannen: Sorry. Neil Sattin: Go ahead. Deborah Tannen: Absolutely, yeah. I never actually would say feminine style, masculine style. I tend to say, "Ways of speaking associated with women, ways of speaking common among women, or men." As I said, although I would say something like, "Tend to, maybe, may, most." But, I think it seems to be the way our minds work, that people walk away thinking, "Women do this, men do that. This is feminine, that's masculine." But I would never put it that way, and you are so right, no two women and men are alike. Think of all the people you know. We've all got so many other influences on our style. Deborah Tannen: I'll give you an example right up front. One of the things that I wrote about in that book, and it traces back to my work in That's Not What I Meant, when I wasn't focusing only on gender, was the use of indirectness. So there was a conversation I discussed there, a couple are riding in a car and the woman turns to the man and says, "Are you thirsty dear? Would you like to stop for a drink?" Deborah Tannen: He's not, so he says, "No." Then later, when they get home, it turns out she's kind of frustrated. She had wanted to stop. It was the man who told me this anecdote and he said, "Why does she play games with me? Why didn't she just tell me she wanted to stop?" Deborah Tannen: My response was, "Well she probably didn't expect a yes/no answer. So if she said, 'Are you thirsty? Would you like to stop for a drink?' She probably expected you to say something like, 'I don't know, how do you feel about it?' Then she could say, 'I don't know, how do you feel about it?'" Then they could talk about how they both feel about it. If he ended up saying, "I'm kind of tired, do you mind if we don't?" that would have been fine. Or if he said, "Well, I'm not thirsty, but if you want to we could," that would have been fine, that would have been great. Deborah Tannen: That's where I began talking about message and meta-message. The meaning of the words, the message, was an information question, "Do you want to stop for a drink?" But the meta-message, what it means that she asks him in that way is, "I don't want to make a demand. I want to know how you feel about it before we make a decision." It's starting a negotiation, and then after you find out how everybody feels about it, you make a decision taking everybody's preferences into account. Deborah Tannen: When she gets an answer, "No," she hears a meta-message, "I don't care what you want, we're only going to do what I want." Of course, he didn't mean it that way; he had a different idea about how a conversation could go. He assumed he could say no and if she wants to she could say, "Yeah, well I'm thirsty. Do you mind if we stop?" That would have been fine with him too. It was these different ways of going about that. Deborah Tannen: Now, it's kind of interesting, I included that example in the book That's Not What I Meant. I repeated it in the introduction to You Just Don't Understand, in the context of saying, I think it was in the introduction, I had said, "Here's an example I had given. Both styles are equally valid." It had been included in a review of the book, it was actually a Canadian newspaper, I think, where they said, "So women have to understand how men mean it," and they didn't put the second part, "Men have to understand how women mean it." I use that to say it's very easy for people to hear my examples as one is right and the other's wrong, and I never take that position. I always take the position: Styles work well when they're shared and don't work well when they're not. Deborah Tannen: This is the long way of leading up to what I was going to say in answer to your question about generalizing. The conclusion of that whole discussion is that women tend to be more indirect when it comes to getting their way. That is, you have something you want, but you don't want to impose it so you open a negotiation. I have lots more examples of that in this new book about women friends, You're the Only One I Can Tell. I have lots of examples of how that creates problems between women and men, and just among women friends. So we can give examples of that if you're interested. Deborah Tannen: But, the very first paper I ever wrote and ever published in linguistics was based on conversations that I had been part of where I was the one who was direct, talking to a man who was indirect. My explanation was cultural differences. I thought of it at the time as American versus Greek, Greeks tend to be more indirect than Americans. Looking back, I would say the fact that it's a New York Jewish style, probably partially explaining my tendency to be more direct. All of this is by way of saying that not only are these generalizations not applying to everybody, but that even in my own experience something that is associated with women and is more typical of women in this country when it comes to getting your way ... I know because even the first paper I ever wrote, I instantiated the opposite style. Neil Sattin: Yeah, I'm just struck in this moment by how I think it would be common to assume that that means just kind of like what you were saying, that the direct style is more effective. So, when you're having communication issues in your marriage, let's say, try to be more direct. What I'm hearing in this moment is this question of how do we develop an appreciation for different styles of communication so that we're able to bridge the gap in styles more effectively. Deborah Tannen: I think the most important thing is to be aware of style differences. Being more direct might help, but being more indirect or attuned to indirectness might also help. I'll give you this example that came up in a class I was teaching at Georgetown, it was a graduate seminar and it was about workplace communication. Deborah Tannen: It came up that papers had been written -- Charlotte Linde is someone who wrote one -- analyzing interaction that is conversation in the cockpit of airplanes that led to accidents. These were studied in order to find out whether there were ways that the pilot and co-pilot were using language that could improve to prevent future accidents. There was one in which this was real. The pilot had not suspected a problem, the co-pilot had suspected the problem; he called attention to it but didn't say it in a direct way. He said it in a kind of indirect way, and so the pilot overlooked it and the plane crashed. This is the most extreme example of a negative result from indirectness. Deborah Tannen: In the class we were discussing that co-pilots were now being trained to be more direct. There was a Japanese grad student in the class and he said, "Well, why don't they just train the pilots to be more attuned to listen for indirect meaning?" It was not surprising to me that this came from a Japanese speaker. Much has been written about how indirectness plays a very significant role in Japanese communication, and there is lots written about the purpose that it serves, that people feel that they understand each other. You could say, maybe, a meta-message of understanding, of closeness, comes from the indirect communication. We understand each other so well, we can get meaning without having to say it outright. Deborah Tannen: In fact, someone named Haru Yamada, she was a student of mine who's written a book about Japanese compared to American communication, she says that the most highly valued communication would be translated into English as belly talk. That is silent communication, where you get your meaning across without having to put it into words at all. Deborah Tannen: So, I'm suspecting the people listening, depending on their own styles, and how they've been raised, and how they've come to view language, some are going to be thinking, "Yes! Yes! Yes! Indirectness is great." Others are thinking, "No, no, no! This is would be a better world if everybody just said what they mean." Deborah Tannen: I think it's really tricky because the ways we tend to communicate are self-evident. Can I give you an example of this? Neil Sattin: Yeah, please. Deborah Tannen: So, I showed up for a conference where I was going to be a primary speaker. Another friend of mine, her name was Judy, was also going to be a primary speaker. That conference organizer, when I arrived, said, "Judy is not going to give her paper. She called me this morning and she said, 'I'm coming down with something. I feel horrible. If you really need me I'll come, but I'm feeling very bad today.'" Deborah Tannen: The organizer said to me, "I told her, 'I need you to stay home and take care of yourself.'" Now, that's indirect, right? Deborah Tannen: I thought, "This is terrific. What a great example of indirect communication and how well it worked." I said to the organizer, "Hey, can I use that in my talk today?" Deborah Tannen: She said, "Yes. Yes, you should. It was excellent, perfect, direct communication." Deborah Tannen: Now, why did she think it was direct? Because the meaning was clear, and it worked. Judy felt better that she didn't have to make a demand, didn't have to let her friend down. The organizer felt better because she could feel that she made the choice to accommodate her friend. I have so many examples like that, where it just works so well. Deborah Tannen: But then, I also have examples (again, in my book about women friends) where it can lead to confusion if you have different styles. So here's an example. This was two women, they had gone to college together so they knew each other. A third person who had gone to college with them was in town visiting the one. When he was with her he said, "Hey, are you in touch with so-and-so? I understand that she lives here." Deborah Tannen: She said, "Yeah, I'm in touch with her." Deborah Tannen: "Hey, I'd like to see her, too." Deborah Tannen: "Okay," she said. "I'll find out if she's free." She called the friend, said, "So-and-so's in town. He'd like to see you. If you're free I can bring him over, would you like that?" Deborah Tannen: She said, "Yeah, sure. Bring him over." And she did. She thought everything was fine. The next day, she got a call from that friend and the friend was livid, "Why did you bring him over? I hate him. You know I hate him." Deborah Tannen: She was so puzzled. She said, "But you said I should bring him." Deborah Tannen: She said, "You should have known by the way I said it I didn't mean it." Now, that sounds insane for people who don't share the style, but it would have been self-evident to people who do. Deborah Tannen: I have one more example that's a self-example. I was talking to a friend- Neil Sattin: This is the I don't know much about that person? Deborah Tannen: Yes. Neil Sattin: I love this. Deborah Tannen: Yes. So, I was talking to a friend from South Carolina. I asked her about a guy that we had some slight dealings with but wasn't a close friend, and I asked her what she thought of him. She said, "I don't really know him." Deborah Tannen: I said, "I think he's a jerk." Deborah Tannen: She said, "That's what I just said." Deborah Tannen: I said, "Huh?" Deborah Tannen: So she explained, "In South Carolina, you cannot say someone is a jerk. You have to proceed on the assumption that if you knew him long enough you would find something to like. So, 'I don't really know him,' means, 'I haven't found anything to like about him.'" Deborah Tannen: Now, this made sense to me, and I believed her, but I was a little bit incredulous. But, luckily, before too long I had met someone who at a gathering for a first time, and he said he was from South Carolina. So I asked him, this is research opportunity now, I asked him, "What would it mean if you asked someone what they thought of someone, and the person said, 'I don't really know him'?" Deborah Tannen: He said, "That means he's a no good, no account." Deborah Tannen: The meaning was completely clear to him, would have been to someone else from South Carolina, was opaque to me. So I could complain, "That's no way to communicate, she should have been more direct." But think about it for a moment, being more direct would have made her come across to other people in South Carolina as an unacceptable person. I cringe to think what she would have thought of me if she didn't know me. When I say about somebody, "I think he's a jerk," I'm saying something that you simply cannot say in that culture. Deborah Tannen: There are ramifications of saying things directly and outright. The thought that you can reduce meaning to the message level and ignore the meta-message level, it's a fantasy. That's not how language works. We're judging people as people by the way they use language. Neil Sattin: That brings me to, I think, a really important question. Though, I have to, just as an aside, say that I'm not sure that there was anything more traumatizing to me as a three-year-old than coming to Maine, where I grew up but I was born in Tennessee. I learned how to talk in Tennessee and when I got to Maine there was a lot about how I communicated that people didn't seem to understand. Neil Sattin: I have very vivid memories of having to shift my language patterns, and also hearing things that people said, particularly the word "wicked" which people from New England will maybe laugh about. But, the first time I heard someone saying something was wicked something-or-other, I got freaked out because my only association with wicked was some horrible witch. It turns out that in Maine, anyway, wicked means more or less like "very". So if something's wicked awesome, then it's really, really awesome. So, just kind of a funny cross-cultural experience that I had. Neil Sattin: Anyway, so the important question, apart from my silly anecdote is: How do we tune in more to the meta-message, particularly in the moment when it's crucial to be understood? Deborah Tannen: It's a great question. I believe awareness of style differences is probably the best thing and the only thing that we can hope for. We are going to respond automatically, "You must mean what I would mean if I spoke in that way in this context." Now when styles are relatively similar, that's going to be okay, and probably most of the time. We're doing it every minute, every time we talk to someone and they say something, we have some automatic way that we think we know what they mean and draw conclusion about their intentions. Deborah Tannen: But, when something goes awry, when you have a negative response when you think they're reacting in a way that's kind of weird, the hope is that you could step back and ask yourself, "What's going on?" But it's tough to do, and then sometimes you can do what I call meta-communication, talk about the communication. Deborah Tannen: An example where I had to do this myself, and again, it's almost embarrassing because it's something I had written about for decades. But I had this op-ed in the New York Times about a month ago where I had a friend over for dinner and she kept offering to help, and then kept getting up and helping. I really didn't want her to and I kept telling her not to, and she kept doing it anyway. I was really frustrated. I was really rattled by it. Deborah Tannen: Normally, I wouldn't had said anything, but since I was writing this book about friends I felt like I needed to know her perspective. So, I meta-communicated; I talked to her about it. I told her how I had responded, how it bothered me that she was ignoring my telling her that I really didn't want her to help. She was astonished and explained to me that in her family were expected to help, and when people say, "I don't want you to help," they don't mean it. They mean something like, "You're a guest and you shouldn't help, therefore I appreciate it all the more when you do." Deborah Tannen: Now, I'd written extensively about indirectness, it still never crossed my mind that she thought I was being indirect, that she thought I didn't mean it. And, it never crossed her mind that I did mean it. But we solved it by meta-communicating, by talking about it. Deborah Tannen: I think many of us, maybe women especially, but probably all of us, don't like to introduce a contentious note into a relationship or a conversation. So, my impulse was not to tell her that what she was doing was bugging me, but I think it served both of us really well to have that conversation. I feel like my consciousness was raised. Any resentment I might have felt because I thought she was behaving in a way that made no sense, that dissipated. She tells me that it's a huge relief to her to know she doesn't have to do all the work when she goes to somebody's house for dinner. Neil Sattin: Yeah, yeah. I feel like there's this frame of reminding yourself not to take everything personally, especially when it's perplexing. To recognize, "Oh, this might not mean what I think it means. This person might not mean what I think they mean when they're making this request, or when they're saying something that I'm finding to be incredibly offensive, or hurtful, or scary even." Deborah Tannen: Well, realizing what the parameters are is helpful. For example, are you a good person by asking questions to show interest? Or are you a good person by not asking questions because they would be intrusive? So, again, coming from my book about women friends, a woman told her friend that her mother was in the hospital and then was hurt that the friend never asked. But they did meta-communicate and the friend said, "Well in my family that would be considered intrusive. People will tell you if they want to talk about something personal, but you shouldn't ask." Deborah Tannen: Or friends that were taking a walk, one was telling the other about a problem. She was listening, but when they passed something really pretty like a gorgeous flower, she said, "Oh, look at that." To her, that didn't mean, "I'm not listening. I'm not interrupting the story." It's kind of like you're at the dinner table and you're telling a story, and somebody needs the salt. They can murmur, "Pass the salt," they're not interrupting your story. Deborah Tannen: But the friend was hurt. She thought, "You're not listening to me." But the other friend was hurt because she so clearly was. If they could talk about that, realize for some people you can throw in interjections and it doesn't mean you're not listening; for other people you really can't, the listener should be quiet. So just knowing that these differences are common makes it possible to give a friend a benefit of the doubt, whereas beforehand it would be self-evident to you that your way of thinking about it is the only way to think about it. Neil Sattin: I have to say, in reading your latest book, You're the Only One I Can Tell, I had several moments where I was confused, actually. I think it was that I would read something and I'd be like, "Okay, that's the way it is." Then in the very next paragraph I'd be like, "Oh! Now this is how that thing completely malfunctions." It's interesting that there are really no hard, fast rules around how to communicate. What seems to be a hard and fast rule is "assume that there's more than meets the eyes". Neil Sattin: I'm curious about having those meta-conversations. Do you have hints about ways to invite people into it, particularly as, as so often happens when you're having that conversation, you're almost undoubtedly having it with someone who couldn't imagine how anything could be other than how they see the world? So, do you have hints on how to invite people into that level of conversation? Deborah Tannen: It's a good question. I guess I feel like the first thing is be aware that there are these differences, so that you can talk about it as a style and not as right and wrong. Then you have to be open to a compromise that might not be the one you would have chosen. People often ask me, this goes way back to You Just Don't Understand and the book before that, "Can people change their conversational styles?" Usually what they have in mind is sending their partner in for repair. They're not thinking, "How can I change my style?" Of course, they could if they wanted to. But they're thinking, "Can I get the other one to change their style?" Neil Sattin: Right. Deborah Tannen: So I think really, you can start by saying, "I want to talk to you about this because I think I might not completely understand your perspective." So, if you frame it as trying to listen and understand, I think that will be better. But you do have to realize, and this came up in my book about mothers and daughters called You're Wearing That?, and my book about sisters, which is called You Were Always Mom's Favorite, as well as friends. There were some women who felt you've got to talk about any kind of a problem or point of contention and work it out. There were others who felt talking about it is a problem in itself, "A friend who wants to constantly process is oppressive, and I don't want to be that person's friend." Deborah Tannen: Now, of course with sisters you can't say, "I don't want to be your sister," but you might distance yourself. But I definitely, in both contexts, talked to people who were frustrated because the friend or the sister didn't want to process, to talk about it. They felt you have to or you can't get past it. So in that context, I would try to raise awareness that it's quite legitimate. Other people feel talking about it only makes it worse, it brings up all the conflict that I felt in the first place, we're both going to end up stating our perspectives that makes the other one angry. Let's just let it lie, move on, and once the emotions have receded in some way, they may never go away, but receded into the background, then we'll just pretend it never happened. I think it often comes down to respecting others differences, and respecting that there could be more than one way of approaching both a problem or the interaction about it. Neil Sattin: Yeah, yeah. A classic relationship problem is one person being conflict avoidant and the other person being someone who engages. That's a set-up for so many problems that people have in relationship. I could see that both people getting to a point where they feel understood and feel resolution, how it would help to have acknowledgement that either one is okay, in both directions. We talked about this in an episode with Sheila Heen, who wrote the book Difficult Conversations as part of the Harvard Negotiation Project. We talked about how so much of getting past any sort of disagreement is really about the other person, so if you put yourself in your own shoes, it's your ability to help the other person feel like you understand them and like you want to understand them. Deborah Tannen: Yes, absolutely. I guess it's kind of like what I said earlier. I know many others are saying something similar, that often our idea of working something out is to convince the other person of our perspective. We want to talk, get them to understand us; but they want to talk and get us to understand them. So I think if we both come in with, "I want to understand your perspective. I want to listen to your perspective," the chances of coming out more happy on the other end are increased. Deborah Tannen: I know that psychologists have many methods for this that can be very effective, like actually articulate the other person's perspective. Because if you keep saying yours they're going to want to keep saying theirs and so you're going to want to say yours again. But if you each articulate the other's perspective, then you're starting with that mutual understanding and you won't have to waste your breath, trying to say your perspective over and over again. Neil Sattin: Right, right. Yes, and we actually, we had a great episode with Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt, talking about the Imago approach to that kind of dialogue. Hedy Schleifer was on talking about a different flavor of that. I'm curious, that idea that we could be trapped in this cycle of wanting to be understood, and how that drives people apart reminded me of the topic that you bring up in your book that is called complimentary schismogenesis. I'm not sure if I said that right. Deborah Tannen: You did. Neil Sattin: This idea that you can find yourself in a dynamic where you're driven further and further apart from the other person in the way that you're communicating. Deborah Tannen: Yes. That term comes from the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, but he used it for a cultures in contact. I've adapted it to everyday conversation. The idea is: If something is not going well, your impulse is try harder and do more of whatever you're doing. That can drive the other person into more and more extreme examples of the other style. Deborah Tannen: So, very quick examples. To start with, what we were doing with indirectness. Say you asked somebody, "Do you want to have lunch?" Deborah Tannen: They say, "Oh, I'm really busy this week." So you ask them again, and they say, "I'm not feeling very well this week." Deborah Tannen: You start to wonder, "Are they being indirect?" So you're going to try to solve it by making them be direct and say, "First you were busy, and then you didn't feel well, do you just not want to have lunch with me ever?" Deborah Tannen: Well, a person who started by being indirect probably cannot bring themselves to say, "I don't want to have lunch with you, ever." They will probably become more indirect. "Oh, gee, I don't know. It's just been a tough time now." Deborah Tannen: So you say, "Well, what is it?" They're going to get even more indirect. Deborah Tannen: Just a couple of other things that we haven't brought up before that are very prone to this complimentary schismogenesis. Let's say you're talking to someone, you tend to talk a bit more loudly than the other does, and they tend to talk a lot more softly. You might raise your voice to set a good example to let them know they should speak up. Well, you're now offending them even more so they're going to talk even lower because they want to set a good example for you. You're going to end up with one shouting and one whispering. You're talking more loudly than you normally would, they're talking more at a lower volume than they normally would in response to what the other is doing. Deborah Tannen: Something that turned out to be very important in a conversation with regard to cultural differences, not gender differences, is how long a pause is normal between turns? When this normal length of pause, when you're approaching it, you'll start to think, "Gee, I guess I should take the floor, the other one has nothing to say." But if your sense of pause is somewhat shorter, you're going to be interrupting. You're going to think the other person is done when they're not and they're going to start thinking you don't want to hear them talk, you only want to hear yourself talk, you're interrupting. Deborah Tannen: You're thinking, "What's wrong with this person? Do they not have anything to say? Do they not like me?" You're coming from Maine, speaking to me, who grew up in Brooklyn. I've got to be really careful and wait, perhaps, a longer length of time than would normally feel right to me, to make sure that you have nothing to say. You might have to push yourself to start speaking before feels completely comfortable. Otherwise, by complimentary schismogenesis, we end up in a situation where I'm doing all the talking and you never get a word in edgewise. Neil Sattin: I was going to ask you why you keep interrupting me? Deborah Tannen: Believe me, I've been holding it back. Neil Sattin: What are some other ... I like how we're flavoring this soup with possibilities in terms of what kind of meta-messages could be operating, what kind of styles could be operating. I'm wondering if there are others, in particular, that come to mind around how people talk to each other. Perhaps, the difference between rapport and reporting, that's one thing that comes to me. But I'm sure you have lots that have been like, "These are the things that we've got to be aware of, because they're most likely happening in your dynamics." Deborah Tannen: Yes, so a difference that I wrote about in You Just Don't Understand was rapport talk and report talk. So report talk is a conversation where really it's the message level meaning of the words that's most important and it's focused on information, impersonal information. Rapport talk is where a lot of what you're saying is to create social connection. It really doesn't matter that much what the specific answer is. I did, there, find that women probably tended to be more likely to do rapport talk in a situation where a man might do report talk. But this can happen between friends of the same sex, even at work. Deborah Tannen: I'll give you an example where, because I have a book about the workplace, it's called Talking From 9 to 5, where one person felt when you have a business meeting you should start with personal talk. The other ones feels, in a business meeting get right down to business that's report talk. Well, the one who is starting with general talk might give the impression, and I had examples where this happened, "Well, there really isn't anything important to talk about. There's nothing I have to pay that much attention to. This is just a social meeting." So then, when that person, the rapport talk person gets to the report talk, the other one has switched off, figures this isn't all that important because it's coming as an afterthought, would be an extreme example from the workplace. Deborah Tannen: I'll give you another example, too. It's kind of like rapport talk and report talk. One of the scenarios from the book You Just Don't Understand that really got a lot of attention, and I think has kind of become part of the culture, a conversation where a woman tells a man about a problem and he tells her how to fix it, and then she's frustrated. What I said about it in that book and what is often said about it is, "She didn't want a solution. She wanted to talk about it." Deborah Tannen: He's frustrated because he's thinking, "Why do you want to talk about it if you don't want to do anything about it?" Both are frustrated because someone they're close to, who should understand how they mean what they say, seems to be misjudging them. Deborah Tannen: I would actually say something somewhat different now, and in the book about women friends I do. I really wish for us to go back and think about that some more. How might the conversation go if it were women friends? Well, I tell you about a problem, you might say, "Gee, why do you think he said that?" And then, "Well, what did you say after he said that? What do you think you might do?" "Yeah, I would probably feel the same thing. I'd probably feel the same way, but what do you think of doing this?" Deborah Tannen: In the end, you do give advice. So when I say, "She didn't want a solution," that's probably not accurate. It's just that we don't want the solution right off the bat, because the very act of talking about it has a meta-message of caring. The fact that you're willing to spend time talking to me about my problem means you care about me. It's a kind of rapport talk. Deborah Tannen: Taking it as, "Here's a problem, I want a solution," that's approaching it as report talk. Perhaps the frustration is not so much that she didn't want a solution as that she didn't want it right off the bat, because the solution shuts down the conversation. Starting that kind of conversation was probably her motivation in the first place. Neil Sattin: Yeah. I'm getting the sense, and this comes up with another strategy that we don't really have time to talk about today called The Ways That We Energize Our Partners. But one element of this strategy, I think gets at helps us clarify meta-messages, which is for you to reflect how what someone is ... Let's see if I can say this well. Neil Sattin: Let's say you say something to me, for me to reflect back to you, "You just said this to me, and what that means to me is ... blank". I think it would be so interesting to use that to flavor a conversation, especially when you sense it going awry. So if you were in that typical scenario where let's say someone just wants to be heard first, before the fixing happens, if you were able to say in that moment, "Wow, you're offering me these solutions. What that means to me is you don't actually really want to hear about what's going on with me, you just want to get past it," it becomes an opportunity for the other person to say, "Well that's not what I meant at all." And at least gives you a window into that dialogue around meaning and how meanings can be misconstrued, and getting at what's important. Like you were just establishing that what's important is setting the stage of caring to help frame a conversation where then someone can actually contribute a solution to it. Deborah Tannen: Yes. That's why I feel that understanding these parameters, understanding that they can be different and often are different among speakers of the same language, that's what I see as essential. Then, once you have that understanding, you, and maybe you with a particular friend or partner, can come up with a way to handle it. Deborah Tannen: A quick example: There are many ways that my husband is not typical and I am not, and there are many ways that we are. For example, he's the one who likes to ask directions and I'd rather use waze or a map. But, this is one where he and I often get frustrated. He once said to me, "I know you don't want a solution, but it's too frustrating for me to listen to you go on and on when I know the solution. So, how about I tell you the solution and you listen. Then if you want to keep talking about it you can." Deborah Tannen: I think that's just as good a compromise as my teaching him to not give me the solution right off the bat. The key is, he and I both understand that this is a difference. Then, we can come up with all different ways of accommodating that difference. Neil Sattin: Yeah, I like that. I really like that. Because your latest book really focuses on friendship, and friendship is such an important part of feeling balance in our lives, feeling fed and supported by the community, I'm wondering if you can touch for a moment on the interplay of how we communicate with our friends versus how we communicate with our spouses, our beloveds? Deborah Tannen: Many of the patterns that I observed in considering conversations among friends were quite parallel to the kinds of things that happen in family relationships and romantic relationships. Some of the things that were different had to do with the level of choice that goes on with friends. This can be both good and bad. Deborah Tannen: As I said earlier, you can decide not to be a friend, you can't decide not to be a sister. You can decide to separate from a romantic partner, but that's quite a big deal, although cutting off a friendship with a same sex friend or other sex friend is also a very big deal. I have a lot to say about that because so many of the women that I interviewed, I interviewed 80 girls and women from this book, so many of them told me about cut-offs, or what we now call ghosting. A friend suddenly disappears, or they decided, "This friendship is really not good for me, I'm just going to cut it off." Deborah Tannen: Somebody pointed out to me, "With a romantic relationship, you kind of have to have that closing conversation, 'I don't think we should see each other anymore because ...'" Certainly if it's a marriage, or living together situation like that, you would have to say, "This isn't working." You would have to have that conversation. But it's so common among friends to just cut it off with no closing conversation, no, "I decided this isn't working for me because ..." So I think that's a huge difference. Deborah Tannen: I guess there's two ways to look at it. One is it was so hurtful when people told me that others had cut them off and they didn't know why. The not knowing why was really, really hurtful. On the other hand, you could say that it's one of the gifts of friendship that you have more volition, that you can decide, "This is causing me more pain than it's giving me pleasure and I want out." I guess you could think of it as a positive or negative thing, but that certainly is a big difference. Neil Sattin: Yeah, and I will say too that some of the more poignant moments in your latest book for me were when the circle did get completed, when people were able to follow up and tell those stories of what they discovered about why cut-offs happen. Deborah Tannen: Yes, and since it is such a common thing and the cause of so much hurt, I do have a bit about it. It could be ... Maybe this is something, in a way, about the whole book, or maybe about all my books, it's a great relief to know that something you've experienced has also been experienced by many other people. You're not alone, nobody's crazy, but these are inherent in human relationships. These cut-offs, yeah, sometimes someone would come back years later and say, "I was just going through a tough time then," or "I was cutting everybody off at that time." Deborah Tannen: I have an example of my own from high school. Very exciting when half a century later I actually found the person who had cut me off, and discovered that it actually wasn't anything I had done or anything she really was going through. It was her older brother who insisted that she end our friendship. Neil Sattin: Wow, yeah, I remember that- Deborah Tannen: I had actually written about that, that yeah, if you're a young person living at home, older people living with you who have that kind of power over you, sometimes they're the ones that make the decision. Often they're right; they may well see that a certain friend is not good for you. But on the other hand, sometimes they're just jealous. Neil Sattin: Yeah, plus I think it's worth highlighting in this moment that I think you might have the title for your next book: You're Not Alone and Nobody's Crazy. Deborah Tannen: Maybe that should be the title of every book. Neil Sattin: Deborah, before we go I'm wondering if we can just touch for a moment on the influence of digital communication on how we communicate? In particular, how much gets sacrificed through texting and Snapchatting? Maybe if you have some ideas on strategies other than, "Don't try to have any meaningful communication that way," which is often what I would just say, but strategies for people to help them sift through the possibility for missing the meta-message when it's just a few characters on your iMessage that's doing the communicating. Deborah Tannen: Yes, I do have a chapter on social media, so I'll just say a little bit from that chapter. I believe that all these social media ramp up both the positive and the negative of friendships. On the positive side, you can stay in much more constant touch. There's this sense of absent presence, so that you feel you're together even though you're not. You send these pictures, it's a way of saying, "Hey, look at that," and you feel as if you're together. Deborah Tannen: One of the big risks is fear of being left out. We all can be hurt if we discover that our friends are doing things without us. Women seem particularly sensitive to that kind of hurt. Well, with social media, your chances not only of knowing what they were doing, but of seeing pictures of what they were doing without you goes way up. It could be you missed it because maybe you were invited but you couldn't make it; maybe you missed it because you didn't check your phone in time; maybe you weren't invited. But the changes of being exposed to this and hurt by it are ratcheted up. Deborah Tannen: As you say, the risks of missing the meta-message, or mistaking the meta-message because you don't have tone of voice, facial expression, although we're extremely creative at using emojis, emoticons, memes, and pictures. There's more and more use of that. My students look at all the creative uses of ha, ha-ha, ha-ha-ha, lol, all these ways that we say, "Don't take what I just said literally." So, I think that people can be very creative about it. Deborah Tannen: Maybe one of the biggest risks is the sense that ... Again, it's a kind of conversational style difference. One friend thinks texting is a good way to talk about problems, the other thinks it's not so she gives minimal responses. The one who's talking about the problem that way thinks, "Where's my supportive, caring friend?" Deborah Tannen: Of course, I think you kind of implied this in your question, just the sense of overload. So many different platforms that you have to check, the fragmentation of attention, the temptation to be looking at your phone rather than the person that you're with. All of these are challenges that we have to be aware and find ways to overcome. Neil Sattin: Yeah, my hope is that as people become more sensitized to how it's affecting them, that it actually spawns even more authenticity and integrity. It's really calling people to the table to be more aligned in terms of how they communicate, because the consequences are so easily seen or experienced, of not being clear. Deborah Tannen: You know, I often find myself defending the use of social media, because I think it has a lot of positive things that we can lose track of. There are many people who can be more authentic when they're typing on a screen than if they're facing a person. Many people find it easier to reveal their real feelings, something personal, some emotion, when they don't have a person staring them down. Many close friendships have evolved, some who never meet, just by talking on the screen, Facebook or some other such medium, and reveal things they wouldn't reveal to somebody that's in the same room with them. Deborah Tannen: I think it's just a matter of awareness and finding what works, and tempering if you feel that things are becoming out of hand. But often those people who are looking at their screen rather than talking to you are really, importantly, avoiding being rude to the person who texted them and need that answer right away. So, a bit of it might be being more tolerant of that. But then, I know there are groups of people who when they get together they all put their phones in the middle, and then the first one who grabs his phone pays the bill. Neil Sattin: I love that. That's a great solution. I can already imagine the meta-meaning conversations. Like, "So, honey, when you're texting on your phone and we're in bed together, what that means to me is ... " Then you get to get more clear about it. Deborah Tannen: You certainly can have parameters that you agree on for your relationship. Neil Sattin: That's what we hope, that's what we hope. Well, Deborah, thank you so much for being here with us today. I'm just so appreciative of your time and your wisdom. For me it's just such a treat, considering how much of an impact your work had on me oh so long ago. It was really fun to revisit today, 20 something years later, and just see how your work has permeated the way that I think, the way that I communicate and interact, and the way that I hope to help others, both as a coach and through this podcast. So, just thank you so much for  being here with us today, and for such a vast contribution to our knowledge about how we communicate with each other. Deborah Tannen: Thank you so much, it's really been a great pleasure to talk to you. Resources: Check out Deborah Tannen's website Read Deborah Tannen’s Book - You Just Don’t Understand and her latest book You’re the Only One I Can Tell You can also visit Deborah Tannen’s author page on Amazon FREE Relationship Communication Secrets Guide www.neilsattin.com/language Visit to download the transcript, or text “PASSION” to 33444 and follow the instructions to download the transcript to this episode with Deborah Tannen Amazing intro/outro music graciously provided courtesy of: The Railsplitters - Check them Out  

As Watford Palace Theatre gets set to revive Arthur Miller’s Broken Glass, JR's arts editor Judi Herman spoke to the team behind the production. The powerful play details the reactions of a New York Jewish family to the news of Kristallnacht coming out of Germany in November 1938 – a horrific night that sees its 80th anniversary this year. Listen in as Charlotte Emerson and Michael Matus, who play the couple at the heart of the play, read an extract recorded especially for JR OutLoud. Plus hear from the production’s director, Richard Beecham, and actor Clara Francis, who tells the moving story of how her great-grandparents were caught up in the violence of Kristallnacht.

Alison S. M. Kobayashi joins Kathryn Yu to talk about Say Something Bunny, a feat of theatrical documentary that draws audiences into the lives of a New York Jewish family in the 1950s. It is quite unlike anything else on stage in NYC, and it drew the attention of our New York team. Plus: Noah without his coffee.

Menashe is a new film set in the Hasidic Jewish community in New York with almost the dialogue in Yiddish. It's a story about a hapless father trying to bond with his son and also conform to religious expectations Parliament Square is the 2017 Bruntwood Prize winning play at London's Bush Theatre about a woman on a mission Her Body and Other Parties is a collection of short stories by American author Carmen Maria Machado The story of the creative minds behind Winnie The Pooh - AA Milne and EH Shepard - are the subject of a new exhibition at London's Victoria and Albert Museum Marvelous Mrs Maisel is a TV drama series about a New York Jewish housewife in the 1950s who decided to become a stand-up comedian Tom Sutcliffe's guests are Lionel Shriver, Bridget Kendall and Michael Arditti. The producer is Oliver Jones.

“Murderers with the power to murder descended upon a defenseless people and murdered a large part of it. What else is there to say?” So wrote Norman Podhoretz in his scathing 1963 essay on Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Arendt, a German Jewish refugee and the world's foremost theorist of totalitarianism, had travelled to Israel to witness the historic trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. But rather than writing a fair-minded report on the Jewish people's first opportunity in millennia to try one of their oppressors, Arendt used the occasion to offer her own theory of Eichmann's character, Jews' complicity in their own slaughter, and what she called the “banality of evil.” Arendt's coverage of the trial sent shockwaves through the coterie of New York Jewish intellectuals of which she had been an admired member. Writing in Commentary magazine, Podhoretz showed himself to be among her harshest critics. His essay is a clarion call for moral clarity that seeks to expose how Arendt's brilliance distorts her ability to see Nazis for what they were and evil for what it is. In this podcast, Tikvah Distinguished Senior Fellow Ruth Wisse joins Eric Cohen to discuss Eichmann's trial, Arendt's theory of it, and Podhoretz's piercing critique. They discuss what motivated Arendt to write as she did and analyze why this moment proved to be so momentous in the intellectual evolution of many American Jewish thinkers. Wisse and Cohen show that while the Eichmann trial may be behind us, the perversity of brilliance against which Podhoretz inveighed is still very much alive today. Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble, as well as Ich Grolle Nicht, by Ron Meixsell and Wahneta Meixsell. This podcast was recorded in front of a live audience at the Tikvah Center in New York City.

Church & State By Jason Odell WilliamsOctober 21 - November 12 2017Good-natured and popular Republican Senator Charlie Whitmore is up for re-election in North Carolina. Just three days before voting, he lets slip to a blogger his new and not-so-popular thoughts on God and the second amendment. As his bible-thumping wife, Sara, works to retain religion in their marriage, Alex, his New York Jewish liberal staffer, fights to keep the campaign from spinning out of control. Hailed as "A powerful... highly contemporary piece" (Huffington Post), this new comedy looks at America's political system today. Directed by Michael Kissin. "The topics of this play - religion, guns and politics - seem heavy. But a heavy drama about heavy topics doesn’t interest me. What interests me is a play that gets to the heart of the people around these issues. And when you write about people, you can’t help but let them be funny and sad and honest, heartbreaking and uplifting all at the same time. Because isn’t that what being human is? I hope this play raises questions, sparks debate, makes people laugh and cry, and laugh while crying. And of course I hope it moves people in some way. Perhaps enough to take action with their voice and vote and bump the needle ever so slightly in the conversation about gun violence. But most of all, I hope this play speaks to your heart. Because, for me, that’s the only reason to write anything: to speak to each other’s hearts."-Jason Odell Williams, Playwrighthttp://mnjewishtheatre.orghttps://app.arts-people.com/index.php?show=73179

It's not easy starting out to make a living as a writer, and A.L. Kennedy began with one of the most challenging jobs ever: as a puppeteer and clown, chasing children around a field in Fife with a loud horn. Thankfully it didn't take long before she left the day job behind and established her reputation as one of our most original voices, the author of 17 books - novels, short story collections, non-fiction - and talks and plays for stage, radio and television. She's also, on and off, a stand-up comedian - so that early training as a clown wasn't wasted. In Private Passions she tells Michael Berkeley about growing up in Dundee, and discovering that she could escape on the overnight bus to Stratford and the theatre, which made everything in life more bearable, more alive. Glenn Gould is one of Kennedy's heroes, and we hear him playing Bach; but we also hear Gould's speaking voice in a radio documentary about the Canadian North. Other choices include the Venetian baroque composer Franceso Cavalli, and Josquin des Prez. We hear John Adams too, with a yearning love aria, and a commemoration of Auschwitz composed by the New York Jewish composer Osvaldo Golijov. There's Gaelic folk music to end, re-interpreted by a group of contemporary Scottish singers. So, a wonderfully eclectic list of choices, and - we clear up the mystery of her name, and find out why Alison Louise Kennedy became "A.L. Kennedy". Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

When Harry is talked down from throwing himself off a Bridge by old school friend Milt, who luckily happens to be passing, his life takes a different direction as he finds love in this 1963 comedy from Murray Schisgal. He's the prominent New York Jewish writer responsible for Tootsie, Dustin Hoffman’s cross-dressing film comedy hit. Here Charles Dorfman talks to Judi Herman about finding LUV and playing Harry; his co-stars Nick Barber and Elsie Bennett; his collaboration with director Gary Condes; and Dorfman’s Buckland Theatre Company, resident company at Park Theatre’s studio space, Park 90.

In this episode, Elisha and Kelly girlsplain hunting and Christmas with their New York Jewish friend Bethany and Bethany gabs about her favorite topic of late: Scientology and Leah Remini. Also, are guns and spears OK to give as a wedding gift? A LadyBrains investigation. The LadyBrains are: Elisha Krauss is a morning talk show […]Join the conversation and comment on this podcast episode: https://ricochet.com/podcast/ladybrains/guns-wedding-registry/.Now become a Ricochet member for only $5.00 a month! Join and see what you’ve been missing: https://ricochet.com/membership/.Subscribe to LadyBrains in Apple Podcasts (and leave a 5-star review, please!), or by RSS feed. For all our podcasts in one place, subscribe to the Ricochet Audio Network Superfeed in Apple Podcasts or by RSS feed.

00:00:01 JK’s HAPPY HOUR THEME SONG Artist: NOFX Album: They’ve Actually Gotten Worse Live! 2007 Fat Wreck Chords 00:00:28 INTRODUCTION – Darell and J.K. talk "Bat Trump", Darrell's first trip to SDCC,strange pantless customs at Heroes Con, our "New York Jewish mothers", c2e2 and the sleepless EOC party, & a self serving Behemoth spiel! Fortunately they soon head to the bar before it gets too ridiculous. 00:21:38 "AT THE BAR" WITH NIK VIRELLA – Nik’s origin story – Night of the Living Deadpool – 1872 – G.I.JOE – Hyperion – We go on a brief Gargoyles tangent(WE all love that animated series) – the working artist's schedule – Nik's experiences in art school – technique – con experiences – temporal confusion drinking game! 01:00:36 OUTRO MUSIC Artist: John Lennon Album: Sometime in New York City 1972 Apple Records RELATED LINKS NIK VIRELLA: http://www.nikvirella.com/ https://www.facebook.com/nik.virella https://twitter.com/niK_IT http://marvel.com/news/comics/24605/the_origin_of_nik_virella BEHEMOTH: https://www.comixology.com/Behemoth-Vol-1/digital-comic/339162?ref=Y29taWMvdmlldy9kZXNrdG9wL3NsaWRlckxpc3Qvc2VyaWVz TAYLOR NETWORK: http://taylornetworkofpodcasts.com/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/taylornetworkofpodcasts/ https://twitter.com/taylornetwork

00:00:01 JK’s HAPPY HOUR THEME SONG Artist: NOFX Album: They’ve Actually Gotten Worse Live! 2007 Fat Wreck Chords 00:00:28 INTRODUCTION – Darell and J.K. talk "Bat Trump", Darrell's first trip to SDCC,strange pantless customs at Heroes Con, our "New York Jewish mothers", c2e2 and the sleepless EOC party, & a self serving Behemoth spiel! Fortunately they soon head to the bar before it gets too ridiculous. 00:21:38 "AT THE BAR" WITH NIK VIRELLA – Nik’s origin story – Night of the Living Deadpool – 1872 – G.I.JOE – Hyperion – We go on a brief Gargoyles tangent(WE all love that animated series) – the working artist's schedule – Nik's experiences in art school – technique – con experiences – temporal confusion drinking game! 01:00:36 OUTRO MUSIC Artist: John Lennon Album: Sometime in New York City 1972 Apple Records RELATED LINKS NIK VIRELLA: http://www.nikvirella.com/ https://www.facebook.com/nik.virella https://twitter.com/niK_IT http://marvel.com/news/comics/24605/the_origin_of_nik_virella BEHEMOTH: https://www.comixology.com/Behemoth-Vol-1/digital-comic/339162?ref=Y29taWMvdmlldy9kZXNrdG9wL3NsaWRlckxpc3Qvc2VyaWVz TAYLOR NETWORK: http://taylornetworkofpodcasts.com/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/taylornetworkofpodcasts/ https://twitter.com/taylornetwork

In Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli (New York University Press, 2015), Ted Merwin, Associate Professor of Religion and Judaic Studies at Dickinson College, serves up the first full-length history of the New York Jewish deli. A social space and symbol, the deli demonstrated American Jews’ connection to their heritage and to their new surroundings. Merwin addresses the rise and fall of the Jewish delicatessen in America, how we remember it, and its contemporary resurgence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli (New York University Press, 2015), Ted Merwin, Associate Professor of Religion and Judaic Studies at Dickinson College, serves up the first full-length history of the New York Jewish deli. A social space and symbol, the deli demonstrated American Jews’ connection to their heritage and to their new surroundings. Merwin addresses the rise and fall of the Jewish delicatessen in America, how we remember it, and its contemporary resurgence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli (New York University Press, 2015), Ted Merwin, Associate Professor of Religion and Judaic Studies at Dickinson College, serves up the first full-length history of the New York Jewish deli. A social space and symbol, the deli demonstrated American Jews’ connection to their heritage and to their new surroundings. Merwin addresses the rise and fall of the Jewish delicatessen in America, how we remember it, and its contemporary resurgence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli (New York University Press, 2015), Ted Merwin, Associate Professor of Religion and Judaic Studies at Dickinson College, serves up the first full-length history of the New York Jewish deli. A social space and symbol, the deli demonstrated American Jews’ connection to their heritage and to their new surroundings. Merwin addresses the rise and fall of the Jewish delicatessen in America, how we remember it, and its contemporary resurgence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli (New York University Press, 2015), Ted Merwin, Associate Professor of Religion and Judaic Studies at Dickinson College, serves up the first full-length history of the New York Jewish deli. A social space and symbol, the deli demonstrated American Jews’ connection to their heritage and to their new surroundings. Merwin addresses the rise and fall of the Jewish delicatessen in America, how we remember it, and its contemporary resurgence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli (New York University Press, 2015), Ted Merwin, Associate Professor of Religion and Judaic Studies at Dickinson College, serves up the first full-length history of the New York Jewish deli. A social space and symbol, the deli demonstrated American Jews’ connection to their heritage and to their new surroundings. Merwin addresses the rise and fall of the Jewish delicatessen in America, how we remember it, and its contemporary resurgence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices