Unorthodox

Everything you ever wanted to know about Jewish last names, with name change stories from our hosts and listeners. Plus, Noah Levinson investigates the story behind immigrant name changes at Ellis Island. Want to share your family's story? Email us at Unorthodox@tabletmag.com or leave a message at our listener line: 914-570-4869. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, and join our Facebook group to chat with the hosts and see what happens behind-the-scenes! Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get new episodes, photos, and more. Get your Unorthodox T-shirts, sweatshirts, and baby onesies at bit.ly/unorthoshirt. This episode is sponsored by Unorthodox Wine, offering beautiful kosher wines from South Africa. Get free shipping on any order when you visit bitly.com/unorthowine. This episode is also brought to you by KOL Foods, delivering great tasting, healthy, sustainable, and ethically raised meat. This Passover, go to KOLFoods.com and use the code UNORTHODOX to receive a 10-percent discount on your next order. Ad

This week on Unorthodox, it's Adar Madness! Make your picks for Liel's middle name here. We've got two Jewish guests this week. The first is psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb, who writes the “Dear Therapist” column for The Atlantic. Her latest book, Maybe You Should Talk To Someone, is about her life as a therapist, and about starting to see a therapist herself after an unexpected and traumatic breakup. Our second guest is Clevelander Harley Cohen, who was assigned the seat next to Mark on the flight to Cleveland for our November live show at the Mandel JCC. Harley is a Jewish Deadhead (a Grateful Dead megafan), and he told Mark about his embrace of Jewish practice later in life and his love of the iconic jam band, and the ways in which the two are intertwined. We love to hear from you! Send comments and questions for Unorthodox to Unorthodox@tabletmag.com or leave a message at our listener line: 914-570-4869. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, and join our Facebook group to chat with the hosts and see what happ

This week on Unorthodox, you'll never look at an Einstein Bros. bagel the same way again. Our Jewish guests are David Rossmer and Steve Rosen, co-writers and co-stars in the Off-Broadway play The Other Josh Cohen. They tell us about meeting at the performing arts summer camp French Woods and working together ever since, most recently collaborating on this rollicking musical tale of mistaken identity (apparently there are a lot of Josh Cohens out there!). Our gentile of the week is Drew Magary, a columnist for GQ and Deadspin, and the author of the memoir Someone Could Get Hurt: A Memoir of Twenty-First-Century Parenthood. He tells us about his highly controversial recent columns about bagels, and asks us if he's in for a year of shlepping his now 12-year-old daughter to bar mitzvahs in the Maryland area. We love to hear from you! Send comments and questions for Unorthodox to Unorthodox@tabletmag.com or leave a message at our listener line: 914-570-4869. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, and join our Faceboo

This week on Unorthodox, we're celebrating the publication of The 100 Most Jewish Foods: A Highly Debatable List with an episode dedicated to Jewish food. Throughout the episode you’ll hear from contributors to the book—including Jill Kargman, Gil Hovav, Gail Simmons, Shalom Auslander, Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs of Food52, and many more—who will be reading their entries. We talk to Tablet editor-in-chief Alana Newhouse, who edited the collection, as well as Gabriella Gershenson, who edited the recipes in the book. We also sit down with Dr. Beth Ricanati, the author of Braided: A Journey of a Thousand Challahs, who tells us about the healing power of baking bread. Naama Shefi and Amanda Dell tell us about their work at the Jewish Food Society and their Schmaltzy storytelling events. Plus, Brette Warshaw explains the difference between corned beef and pastrami, listener Sonia Marie Leikam tell us about brewing kosher beer in Portland, and the story of a special pie delivery to Pittsburgh's Jewish communit

This week on Unorthodox, an update from Belgium, and Lin-Manuel Miranda's bar mitzvah-dancing past. This week's interviews were recorded live at the Marlene Meyerson Manhattan JCC during our Valentine's Day show. Our Jewish guest is dating app ghostwriter Meredith Golden, whose job is to make your dating profile better and to get you dates! She tells us about the mistakes most men and women are making on their profiles, and polls the audience about with dating apps they prefer. Our next guests are Jess Salomon and Eman El-Husseini, married comedians from Canada. Jess is Jewish and Eman is Palestinian, and they tell us about how they met, what their parents think, and the comedy they've found in the tensions of their particular union. This episode is brought to you by Unorthodox Wine, offering beautiful kosher wines from South Africa. Get free shipping on any order when you visit bitly.com/unorthowine. This episode is brought to you KOL Foods, delivering the best tasting, healthiest, most sustainable, and most

This week on Unorthodox: two Jews, many opinions! Returning to the show is writer and illustrator Christopher Noxon. He tells us about his new book, “Good Trouble: Lessons from the Civil Rights Playbook,” an illustrated history of the civil rights movement. Our second guest is French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, the author of more than 30 books, including The Genius of Judaism. He joins us to discuss his most recent book, The Empire and the Five Kings: America's Abdication and the Fate of the World. We love to hear from you! Send comments and questions for Unorthodox to Unorthodox@tabletmag.com or leave a message at our listener line: 914-570-4869. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, and join our Facebook group to chat with the hosts and see what happens behind-the-scenes! Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get new episodes, photos, and more. Get your Unorthodox T-shirts, sweatshirts, and baby onesies at bit.ly/unorthoshirt. This episode is also sponsored by Harry's, offering a great shave at a great pri

This week on Unorthodox, we've got a special episode dedicated to circumcision and the Jewish mitzvah known as the brit, or bris, that signifies entry into the tribe for eight-day-old Jewish males. We talk to Dr. Emily Blake, the mohel who performed Mark's son's bris, about why this biblical practice has remained so central to the Jewish experience, even among the non-observant.  The folks at BimBam explain Lech Lecha, the parsha in which Abraham and God enter into the covenant that defines the Jewish people. Hayim Leiter, a rabbi and mohel in Jerusalem, tells us about Safer Habrit, his organization that provides circumcision education and advocates against the controversial practice known as metzitzah b'peh. Sara Fredman Aeder tells us about approaching Jewish circumcision from a scholarly perspective and, later, a personal one, and Lizzie Skurnick shares her experience weighing circumcision as a single mother by choice. Producer Noah Levinson talks with Australian medical historian Dr. Robert Darby, (www.hi

 This week on Unorthodox, we'd like to thank the Academy... and our three Jewish guests! First we get glammed up with shoe designer Stuart Weitzman, who tells us about getting his big break when Aretha Franklin wore his shoes to the 1983 American Music Awards, and how he made red carpet history when he designed $1 million shoes for Mulholland Drive actress Laura Harring to wear to the 2002 Oscars. Since then, the 'shoe cam' has become a standard feature of award shoe red carpets. Then film critic Jordan Hoffman returns to the show to tell us what to expect at Sunday's Academy Awards, at which only a few Jews are nominated and some non-Jews are up for Jewish roles. Finally, a special Oscars treat: Liel calls up actor Kurt Fuller, who talks about being 'that guy' in hundreds of films, including Ghostbusters II, Wayne's World, Anger Management, and just about every movie you've ever seen. We love to hear from you: Send comments and questions for Unorthodox to Unorthodox@tabletmag.com or leave a message at our li

This week, we're live and wide awake from Seattle. Our Jewish guest is Rabbi Will Berkovitz, CEO of Jewish Family Service Seattle. He tells us why helping resettle refugees is about more than simply "Jewish values," describes the surprising pushback he's received from some Jews over his social activism, and explains how he was inspired to become a rabbi after attending a Catholic college. Our gentile of the week is Dan Savage, the Seattle-based sex-advice columnist and host of Savage Lovecast. He returns to the show to answer love and relationship questions from Unorthodox listeners just in time for Valentine's Day (or as we call it, secular Tu B'Av). (For the uninitiated, Dan is very open and uncensored in his discussion of sex and relationships, so we really mean the obscenity warning this week.) We love to hear from you: Send comments and questions for Unorthodox to Unorthodox@tabletmag.com or leave a message at our listener line: 914-570-4869. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, and join our Facebook grou

This week's episode was recorded live at Adat Shalom in Los Angeles. Our first Jewish guest is Rachel Sumekh, who founded Swipe Out Hunger, the leading nonprofit in addressing hunger on college campuses. She tells us why Swipe Out Hunger is a fundamentally Jewish project, inspired in part by her family's dependence on food assistance after her parents immigrated to the U.S. from Iran, and how, as a Persian Jewish woman in the technology and social entrepreneurship world, she's hoping to be more of a norm than an exception. Our second Jewish guest is actor, screenwriter, and director Lauren Miller Rogen, whose most recent film, Like Father, stars Kristen Bell and Kelsey Grammer and is streaming on Netflix. After her mother was diagnosed, at age 55, with early onset Alzheimer's, Lauren created Hilarity for Charity, which has raised more than $10 million for Alzheimer's awareness and research through star-studded variety shows fundraisers. Lauren tells us about moving from Long Island to Lakeland, Fl and becomin

This week on Unorthodox, one young man's journey out of white nationalism. Our Jewish guest is Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter Eli Saslow, whose latest book is Rising out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist, which tells the story of Derek Black, the son of Stormfront founder Don Black and heir apparent to the White Nationalist movement. After enrolling in a diverse college and befriending a wide range of people—including Jewish students who invited him to weekly Shabbat dinners after he was outed as a white supremacist—Derek began to challenge his ingrained assumptions, ultimately denouncing the movement he was raised to lead and his family's involvement in it. We also talk to Derek himself, who tells producer Shira Telushkin about life after white nationalism, explains the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories at the root of the movement (plus the whole thing about lizard people), and shares the remorse and guilt he feels that the ideas he once publicly espoused and proliferated

This episode was recorded at Washington Hebrew Congregation in Washington, D.C., in partnership with the Association of Reform Jewish Educators. Thanks to our friends at ARJE for making this show happen. Our Jewish guest is food historian Michael Twitty, author of the James Beard Award-winning book The Cooking Gene, who returns to the show to tell us about his years as a Hebrew School teacher, when he was often the first black person his students interacted with, and his next book project, Kosher Soul, which focuses on his Jewish identity. He also explains what ptcha is, and why it's one of Tablet's 100 Most Jewish Foods. Our gentile of the week is Congresswoman Katie Porter, the newly-elected Representative of California’s 45th District and the first Democrat to hold the seat since it was created in 1953. She tells us about dining at Yale's kosher kitchen with our own Mark Oppenheimer back in college, how she's trying to help furloughed government workers during the shutdown, and her life as a single mother

This week on Unorthodox, we're setting it up. Our Jewish guest this week is longtime matchmaker Tova Weinberg, who founded the Jewish dating website Saw You at Sinai. In an interview recorded at our Hanukkah live show in Pittsburgh, she tells the hosts about ditching dentistry to become a matchmaker (she estimates she's made 350 matches over the past 40 years), and her opinion on what it is that men and women really want. She also helps out a listener with some first date tips. Our Gentile of the Week is producer Scott Ellis, whose long list of theater and television credits includes The Good Wife, Weeds, She Loves Me, and more. He sits down with Stephanie to talk about getting his start on TV with the sitcom Frasier, putting himself up for an Emmy nomination, (and actually getting the nomination!) for an episode of 30 Rock, and being entrusted by The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel creators Amy Sherman-Palladino and Dan Palladino to direct a few episodes of the award-winning Amazon series. (Scott even got Stephanie an

This week on Unorthodox: early elections in Israeli, bat mitzvah recaps, and a taste of Liel's listener meetup in Tel Aviv. We have three Jewish guests: Jesse Eisenberg, who in addition to playing everyone from Lex Luthor to Mark Zuckerberg on screen, executive produced the new documentary 'The World Before Your Feet,'  which follows Matt Green as he walks every block of of New York City, and was directed by Jeremy Workman. The three of them sat down with Stephanie Butnick to discuss Matt's unusual journey, the 'churchagogues' he discovered along the way, and what you learn when you slow down and look around. Our Gentile of the week is journalist Rukmini Callimachi, who covers terrorism and the Islamic State for the New York Times. She’s the host of Caliphate, a serialized podcast that follows a former ISIS member and tracks the international rise of the terrorist group. She tells us about digging through ISIS trash in Syria, and the strangest (and scariest) things that have happened to her along the way. Her

Back in 2013, Tablet contributor Daniel Estrin spoke to Amos Oz for Tablet's Vox Tablet podcast. Oz died today, December 28, 2018, and we wanted to bring you this episode from the back catalog.  

We're closing out 2018 with two interviews with people who stand up—quite literally—for what they believe in.  First, we sit down with formerly Hasidic comedian Leah Forster, who has traveled the world performing for religious Jewish audiences, but whose recent gigs were cancelled after religious authorities found out she was gay and threatened to pull the kosher certifications of venues who hosted her. You can follow along with Leah on Instagram. Then, Mark talks to Presbyterian minister Jeff Hutchinson, who shares the harrowing tale of what happened when he dared to confront white supremacists at a nearby church in Black Mountain, North Carolina—a story that doesn't end until Hutchinson finds a new church 1,000 miles away.  We're hitting the road in 2019! Come see us January 15 at Washington Hebrew Congregation in Washington, D.C. It's free—register here. We'll be at the Stroum JCC in the Seattle area February 2 for a special live show with Dan Savage of the Savage Lovecast. Tickets here. We love to hear f

Tis the season—for Chinese food and a movie! Our first Jewish guest is Bill Adler, the Def Jam alum who helped Run DMC create their iconic 1987 song "Christmas in Hollis". He tells us how he went from being a music journalist to the second full-time employee at Def Jam in the 1980s; how "Christmas in Hollis," ended up on the soundtrack of films like Die Hard, and how his distaste for cliche holiday music led him to make an annual Christmas playlist for friends and family, and now, you! Listen to Adler's 2018 Christmas Jollies mix here. We also talk to Steven de Souza, the Hollywood screenwriter responsible for films like Commando, Judge Dredd, and, of course, Die Hard. He tells us how Bruce Willis's character was actually originated by Frank Sinatra, the origin of the movie's epic "yippee ki yay" catchphrase, and why Die Hard is even more of a Christmas movie than White Christmas. We're hitting the road in 2019! Come see us January 15 at Washington Hebrew Congregation in Washington, D.C. It's free—register he

This week on Unorthodox, we're getting over our latke hangovers. Our first Jewish guest is New York Times writer Taffy Brodesser-Akner, who has written profiles of celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow, Bradley Cooper, and Melissa McCarthy. She joined us at our recent live show at the Manhattan JCC to talk about how she tries to be a journalist and a mensch, which biblical figure she'd love to profile, and why she enjoys being on Twitter. We also sit down with Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, the former Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth. He tells us about getting to know the royal family (and giving the Queen a menorah), speaking out against British anti-Semitism, and the time he had to meet with Prince Harry after the 20-year-old wore a Nazi uniform on Halloween. But before all that, Liel talks to his friend Scott Harris about the amazing Be A Jewish Star music competition for Jewish youth! shabbat shalom and thanks again. scott S C O T T   H A R R I S We love to hear from you: Send com

From warding off the evil eye to rules about whistling, Jews are serious about their superstitions. This week on Unorthodox, we hear from listeners about their family customs, talk to Tablet's editor-in-chief Alana Newhouse about the enduring nature of shtetl superstitions, and take a visit to a very lucky spot in Northern Israel. Ptui ptui! We love to hear from you: Send comments and questions for Unorthodox to Unorthodox@tabletmag.com or leave a message at our listener line: 914-570-4869. This episode is sponsored by: Belvedere Vodka, certified kosher by the Orthodox Union, and produced in accordance with the legal requirements of Polish Vodka. Learn more here. Jewish National Fund, making an impact on Israel with a vision that encompasses planting trees, building water reservoirs, helping those with special needs, preserving heritage sites, and transforming the North and South with new housing, job creation, and infrastructure development. As you plan your year-end giving, go to JNF.org/tablet to take pa

Today's episode comes out a day early, so you can gobble it up before Thanksgiving. First, comedian Travon Free, a producer on Lena Dunham's HBO show Camping, speaks with producer Josh Kross about anti-Semitic old tweets of his that resurfaced last week. Liel sits down with Jewish guest Frederick Wiseman, the legendary filmmaker, to discuss his latest documentary, Monrovia, Indiana. Our gentile of the week, live from Cleveland, is former Rock and Roll Hall of Fame president and CEO Terry Stewart. to talk about what he calls the greatest job in the world, the much-speculated upon Hall of Fame nomination process, and how 'rock and roll' the Hall of Fame's CEO can actually be. We love to hear from you: Send comments and questions for Unorthodox to Unorthodox@tabletmag.com or leave a message at our listener line: 914-570-4869. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, and join our Facebook group to chat with the hosts and see what happens behind-the-scenes! Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get new episodes, photos,