Judaism Unbound · Institute for the Next Jewish Future

Episode 495: Israel-Palestine - Conversations Across Generations - Amy Eilberg, Penina Eilberg-Schwartz

·52 min·4 clips

Penina questions why her Jewish school focused only on the Holocaust while ignoring genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia.

A mother and daughter write across distance. Amy Eilberg and Penina Eilberg-Schwartz come to Judaism Unbound through published letters about Israel-Palestine and the strain of talking across generations. Dan and Lex do not overdress the setup. They say this is the podcast's first chance to talk about the Jewish history of Israel and Palestine, and that gives the episode a careful, almost held-breath quality. The fight is over language, though fight may be too clean a word for it. Penina talks about watching genocide become, in some Jewish spaces, a word treated as more dangerous than bombs falling on Gaza. That reversal shakes her. She also says she has sometimes used mass death and destruction when she needed the conversation to keep going. It is not tidy moderation. It is a tactical, uncomfortable choice in rooms where one word can shut people down before the moral work even starts. The softer phrase still has a problem. Penina pushes back when her mother can accept mass death and destruction, because the phrase can make the harm sound actorless. Grammar does moral work here. Without an agent, violence starts to sound like weather, or like the act of an unkind God. The episode stays in that uncomfortable place. Both mother and daughter want conversation to remain possible, but neither can pretend that possible is the same as honest. The family argument becomes a Jewish communal argument, with love, fear, moral clarity, and inherited attachment all crowding the room. No slogan gets out clean. The episode asks whether a conversation can stay open and still say what is happening, especially when tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed and the words are part of the struggle.

As heard by us

A serious Jewish conversation across generations about Israel-Palestine, responsibility, and the work of choosing words.

Amy Eilberg and Penina Eilberg-Schwartz anchor a Jewish conversation about Israel-Palestine that moves across generations and keeps coming back to the letters written after October 7.

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Why you'd press play

A mother-daughter exchange about Israel-Palestine where one phrase can change what stays discussable.

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