Evolve
Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations
About the show
Evolve: Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations features interviews with thought-provoking rabbis, leaders and creators about the urgent issues faced by Jewish people today. As a part of Reconstructing Judaism’s multimedia Evolve project, this podcast models respectful, sacred conversations about challenging topics.
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Episodes
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Episode 25: 'Adoption Isn’t a Bad Thing, It’s a Tricky Thing'
November 29th, 2021 | Season 1 | 40 mins 58 secs
adoption, evolve, jewish
The process of adoption is often thought of as children in need of a loving home being matched with couples who get to fulfill deferred dreams of becoming parents. It’s a win-win, right? Minna Scherlinder Morse, a writer and editor as well as an adoptive parent, says the reality and the history is far more nuanced.
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Episode 24: Liberation from Opioids: One Rabbi’s Journey
October 12th, 2021 | Season 1 | 1 hr 4 mins
opioid, recovery, sobriety, vicodin
Rabbi Michael Perice recently made a startling revelation to his congregation: For four years, he’d been addicted to opioids. Now, celebrating 10 years of liberation, Perice decided it was time to share his story with his community and the wider world.
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Episode 23: Hidden Jews in the 21st Century
August 17th, 2021 | Season 1 | 1 hr 2 mins
conversation, conversion, interview, jewish, judiasm
In the past few decades, descendants of Jews who had been forced to flee, convert, or hide Jewish practices during the Inquisition have been seeking to reconnect with Jewish communities. At times, they have been embraced, other times shunned, and, too often, encountered Jewish experiences that didn’t authentically reflect their Sephardic roots.
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Episode 22: Hope as an Ethical Imperative
July 22nd, 2021 | Season 1 | 52 mins 48 secs
breitman, evolve, hope, jewish, judaism, spiritual direction, staub, therapy
In Barbara Breitman’s telling, hope isn't "some fluffy thing." It's an essential Jewish practice. Hope enables leaders to imagine a different world and work to bring it out about no matter what obstacles stand in the way. Breitman, a spiritual director, therapist and scholar of religion, cites Moses, Noah and Mordechai as Biblical characters who embody this kind of hope. How can ordinary people emulate these examples?
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Episode 21: Fighting Antisemitism and Racism in Minneapolis
July 1st, 2021 | Season 1 | 48 mins 47 secs
“People are really still antisemitic? I thought you all were just regular white people now.” When social justice activist Carin Mrotz heard those words from a Black activist, Mrotz knew she had even more to do: Educating non-Jewish progressives about antisemitism, putting antisemitism on the progressive agenda, building alliances to tackle antisemitism, racism and all expressions of white supremacy. In this interview, Mrotz, executive director of Minneapolis-based Jewish Community Action, discusses how the murder of George Floyd and subsequent conviction of former police officer Derek Chauvin has impacted her work. Mrotz also talks about her working relationship with Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress. And, just to mix things up, we get into how the Miami punk rock scene of the 1980s shaped her worldview.
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Episode 20: America's First Bat Mitzvah
May 27th, 2021 | Season 1 | 33 mins 28 secs
The first American bat mitzvah took place on March 18, 1922. As its 100th anniversary nears, we’ve got something of a departure for our podcast. We’re running an episode of Adventures in Jewish Studies, a podcast of the Association for Jewish Studies. Evolve: Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations co-sponsored this episode. Guest scholars Rabbi Carole Balin, Melissa R. Klapper, and Rabbi Deborah Waxman consider the history of the bat mitzvah and its evolution over time. They also explore how the bat mitzvah helped pave the way for greater inclusion of women in public Jewish ritual and practice and helped shape American Jewish life.
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Episode 19: Environmental Justice and Race
April 28th, 2021 | Season 1 | 43 mins 28 secs
We talk with Rabbi Rebecca Richman of Philadelphia’s Germantown Jewish Centre about environmental justice and the legacy of environmental racism, particularly focusing on her adopted hometown of Philadelpha, whose refinery – which recently made national headlines with a massive conflagration – has harmed Black and brown residents' health for decades. She addresses how the Torah can help us conceive of environmental justice and identify environmental racism. And in an emotional segment, we discuss parenthood in a world that seems spinning out of control. “As a parent...if I don’t take care of this place today, then there is no life for my children. And, if I don’t teach my children to take care of this place, then there will be no capacity for them to have children.”
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Episode 18: Liberating Your Passover Seder
March 23rd, 2021 | Season 1 | 56 mins 56 secs
At 87, Rabbi Arthur Waskow still proudly calls himself a radical. His most revolutionary act may have taken place 52 years ago, when he wrote, published and organized the original Freedom Seder. Celebrated, debated and criticized, the Freedom Seder upended the contemporary seder by incorporating contemporary, non-Jewish liberation struggles. We talk about the origins of the Freedom Seder and what it means today. We explore Waskow’s life of activism, including his personal interactions with Rev. Martin Luther King Junior. And Waskow shares what keeps him turning out books and, at increasing risk to himself, taking to the streets and facing arrest. He also offers some practical advice on how to make a Zoom seder more compelling and how to take first steps as an activist. And we ask the burning question (no pun intended): is civilization as we know it headed for collapse?
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Episode 17: Human Composting: Good for the Environment, But Is It Kosher?
February 16th, 2021 | Season 1 | 1 hr 6 mins
In this live episode, recorded as part of the 2021 Big Bold Jewish Climate Festival, we speak with Rabbi Seth Goldstein and Rabbi Adina Lewittes, two religious leaders who’ve thought deeply about human composting, the green burial movement, and what each means for Jewish communities.
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Episode 16: Silver and Gold: Reparations and Judaism
January 14th, 2021 | Season 1 | 43 mins 55 secs
Since Ta-Nehisi Coates published his influential Atlantic essay “The Case for Reparations” in 2014, a number of thinkers have made explicitly Jewish arguments for (and against) reparations for American slavery. Educator and activist Rabbi Aryeh Bernstein argues in an article on Evolve that the case for reparations is presented clearly in the Torah itself. In this episode, Bernstein explores this claim, and what he thinks it means for present-day policies and politics.
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Episode 15: Jews and Money: A Frank Conversation
December 15th, 2020 | Season 1 | 45 mins 52 secs
Endowments and donor-advised funds: They may sound like boring financial terms, but they're actually part of a fascinating history of philanthropy in the Jewish community. They reflect the ways in which individuals and organizations use financial resources to impact the Jewish community and democratic society writ large. For half a decade, Lila Corwin Berman has been raising eyebrows, and sparking conversation, with her writings about wealth and charitable giving, Jewish communities, and democracy. In this interview with Berman, we explore the origins of both endowments and donor-advised funds, and examine how they have shaped communal decision-making.
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Episode 14: Fixing Broken Policing: What Does Judaism Say?
November 19th, 2020 | Season 1 | 48 mins 41 secs
Does the Talmud offer a perspective on police reform, and whether it makes sense to, as the slogan says, defund the police? Rabbi Aryeh Cohen, a Talmudic scholar and an advocate for redirecting police funding, explains what ancient Judaism does and doesn’t have to say about policing. After a quick post-election debrief, Cohen lays out the case for a new approach to policing, one in which far fewer officers would carry arms. He addresses questions about armed guards protecting Jewish institutions during a time of rising antisemitism and touches on how his experience as a soldier in the first Lebanon War shaped his anti-violence worldview.
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Episode 13: COVID-19 and Jewish Ethics
October 22nd, 2020 | Season 1 | 39 mins 49 secs
How can Jewish ethics shape how people make decisions about daily life during a pandemic? Rabbi Mira Wasserman, who directs the Center for Jewish Ethics, explains how ethical considerations have shaped her own decisions — such as whether to drive her child to school or send him on the school bus — and how they should operate on a communal level. She also addresses the narrowness of questions of medical ethics such as best use of limited hospital resources, arguing that a true ethical response to crisis goes beyond the mechanics of triage to address the structural inequities in our health care system that lead to scarcity in good times as well as crises. She and Bryan also cover how Hollywood action movies' model of heroism reflect a warped model of heroic individualism that neglects less flashy, but vital and sustaining contributions. Is it time to rethink the actions and behaviors celebrated by American society?
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Episode 12: Dreams: Judaism's Forgotten Practice
September 8th, 2020 | Season 1 | 45 mins 12 secs
Rabbi Haviva Ner-David, an Orthodox feminist turned “post-denominational, interspiritual rabbi”, says that dreams have long been neglected in mainstream Jewish practice. In this interview, she discusses how dreams offer each of us a tool to better understand ourselves and our world – if only we know how to use it.
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Episode 11: The Jewish Studio Project
August 10th, 2020 | Season 1 | 35 mins 36 secs
Making art is either for children or acclaimed artists, right? Not if Rabbi Adina Allen has anything to say about it. Allen is the co-founder of the Jewish Studio Project and daughter of a pioneering therapist. In this episode, Allen makes the case that engaging in a creative process is something that adults not only can do, but should do. Art-making, she explains, can be a tool for emotional regulation. It’s also a tool for spiritual exploration, engaging Jewish texts and community, and getting in touch with the place inside oneself that leads an individual to make a better world.
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Episode 10: Disability Justice
July 14th, 2020 | Season 1 | 49 mins 45 secs
In our conversation with Rabbi Elliot Kukla, we discuss his essay for Evolve: Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations about the profound and unexpected ways in which trauma can affect a person's health and overall spiritual wellbeing. In the piece and this interview, he shares some of what he's learned about life by being chronically ill. We discuss his heightened appreciation for the interdependence of people, and what that means for the responsibilities of societies and communities to care for their members, even the most vulnerable. We also talk with Rabbi Kukla about his recent New York Times piece, "My Life Is More 'Disposable' During This Pandemic", and about the COVID-19 pandemic more generally; about the newly resurgent racial justice movement; and about the challenge parents face in maintaining hope for our children and the world they're inheriting in this deeply unsettling time.