Podcasts

Reporters' Roundtable: Bibi Before Congress

In this week’s Forward Reporters’ Roundtable, our staffers unpack Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s May 24 speech before a joint session of Congress.Read More

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Yid Lit: Haley Tanner

By Allison Gaudet Yarrow

Haley Tanner’s debut novel, “Vaclav & Lena” (Dial Press), is about love without questions, hesitation or limits. This love flourishes between two Russian-Jewish immigrant children in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn: Vaclav dreams of becoming a magician, like Houdini, and casting the fragile Lena as his assistant. Tragedy temporarily unhinges this plan, and when the two children become teenagers, they are forced to reconcile their pasts and decide how they’ll embark on a future together. Tanner intimately knows the love and struggle that Vaclav and Lena share: She wrote this book while living with the man who would become her husband and, soon after, die of melanoma. Tanner says that the loveliness and lightness in the novel is his. She spoke recently with the Forward.Read More

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Reporters' Roundtable: Bibi's Speech; Meet the Ratners

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s forthcoming speech before the U.S. Congress, the growing spotlight on the Ratner real estate family in light of a recent indictment of a New York state senator, and a Brighton Beach, Brooklyn gathering of Jewish veterans who served in the Soviet armed forces during World War II are the topics of this week’s podcast.Read More

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Reporters' Roundtable: Justice for bin Laden; BDS on Campus

In this week’s podcast, the panel looks at whether or not Osama bin Laden should have been put on trial, like the Nazi lieutenant colonel Adolf Eichmann was, back in 1961. The second topic is the potency — or lack thereof — of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement on American college campuses.Read More

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Reporters' Roundtable: A Fatah-Hamas Government; Erasing Maine's Labor History

The future of an Israeli-Palestinian peace process and the U.S. role therein, in light of an announcement that Fatah and Hamas would form a unity government, and the decision by the Maine governor to remove a public mural depicting labor leaders are the topics of this week’s Reporters’ Roundtable.Read More

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Yid Lit: Meg Wolitzer

By Allison Gaudet Yarrow

Meg Wolitzer writes in spaces where women’s emotions run high: She has tackled wives overshadowed by their husbands, as well as career woman who became stay-at-home moms. In her new novel, “The Uncoupling” (Riverhead), she investigates sex by creating characters who stop having it altogether when a spell enchants their suburb. The magic begins — or ends, depending on how you see it — when a drama teacher produces the Aristophanes comedy “Lysistrata,” in which women withhold sex from men to protest war. The Forward’s Allison Gaudet Yarrow spoke to Wolitzer about describing mobile devices as sex objects, the loud, second-wave feminist Jewess and not writing chick lit.Read More

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Women's Roundtable: Passover, Fashion and Piety

In this edition of the Women’s Roundtable podcast, a co-production of the Forward’s Sisterhood blog and Lilith magazine, panelists weigh in on what fashion has to say about piety, and they take a look at how feminist Passover rituals have evolved. Lilith editor Susan Weidman Schneider, Lilith associate editor Sonia Isard and Sisterhood contributor Debra Nussbaum Cohen join Sisterhood editor Gabrielle Birkner for the discussion.Read More

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Reporters' Roundtable: JVP and BYU

In this edition of the Forward Reporters’ Roundtable, host Josh Nathan-Kazis speaks with Gal Beckerman, a staff writer, about Jewish Voice for Peace’s campaign for acceptance within the Jewish community and with Gabrielle Birkner, director of digital media, about the tradition of Passover Seders at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.Read More

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Reporters' Roundtable: Richard Goldstone's About Face; Ford Foundation Leaves Israel

In this week’s podcast, staffers weigh in on what motivated Richard Goldstone’s recent about-face, and discuss the Ford Foundation’s decision to pull funds out of Israel.Read More

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David Bezmozgis on Living in Limbo

Author David Bezmozgis recently visited the Forward’s podcast studio to discuss his new novel “Free World,” in which he tells the story of a Latvian Jewish family who spends the summer of 1978 in the Rome suburbs while awaiting visas to America.Read More

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