[Live on Zoom] Bad Rabbi – Live Podcast Recording

Tuesday May 19, 2020 4:00pm
Live Podcast Recording

Cosponsored by LABA: A Laboratory for Jewish Culture, The 14th Street Y


Admission: Free

Registration is required.

Watch the video

Join us for a live-recording of Charlie Buckholtz’s Bad Rabbi Podcast in which Buckholtz will be joined by YIVO’s Eddy Portnoy for a discussion of Portnoy’s book, Bad Rabbi and Other Strange but True Stories from the Yiddish Press. An underground history of downwardly mobile Jews, Portnoy’s Bad Rabbi mines the Yiddish press to expose the seamy underbelly of pre-WWII New York and Warsaw, the two major centers of Yiddish culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One part Isaac Bashevis Singer, one part Jerry Springer, this irreverent, unvarnished, and frequently hilarious compendium of stories provides a window into an unknown Yiddish world that was.

Purchase the book.

About Bad Rabbi – The Podcast

What does it mean to be a spiritual leader at this critical and chaotic moment in human history? Join Rabbi Charlie Buckholtz as he conducts intimate long-form interviews with other artists, change-agents, culture-leaders and spiritual activists...in the process sketching the contours of some compelling new possibilities for personal authenticity and communal identity. On topics ranging from spiritual resistance to disorganized religion to religious feminism to Israel/Palestine to creativity to the possibility of individual and collective change, their lively journeys and conversations offer insight, humor, rare perspective and at times rank absurdity for its own sake—in the process sketching the contours of some compelling new possibilities. More information is available here.


About the Speakers

As an ordained Rabbi Charlie Buckoltz explores disorganized religion. Co-author of several books on topics from pop-culture history to religious feminism, Bucholtz is also a writer of personal essays for the Washington Post, Tablet, and The Jewish Week. An observer of the spiritual dimension of politics, culture, and current events with particular focus on the infuriating, inspiring, and absurd, Bucholtz is also a standup comic, a hip-hop artist, and the producer of the Bad Rabbi Podcast.

Eddy Portnoy is the Academic Advisor and Director of Exhibitions at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. He is the author of Bad Rabbi and Other Strange but True Stories from the Yiddish Press (Stanford University Press 2017).