The Chochmat Nashim Podcast: Women Talk Judaism · Jewish Coffee House

From Simone Biles to Liri Albag: Heroes and the Twisted Twisties (Season 8 Episode 5)

·22 min·1 clip

The returned hostages came back holding hands, fists in the air, and Hamas did not get the response it wanted.

Anne Gordon begins by saying the news cycle is moving too quickly to settle into anything neat. She sets the conversation inside a ceasefire and hostage-release moment, but makes clear the episode will not try to track every political turn. That choice gives the rest of the discussion room to breathe. She then opens with a story about an athlete who caught their attention. The comparison is not about sports trivia. It is about what happens when someone expected to perform at the highest level has to face disorientation, fear, and the limits of control. From there, Anne and Shoshana Keats-Jeskel turn toward the Israeli women who were held captive. They focus especially on the Tazpitaniyot, the young women who were on the border doing the ordinary, specific work of watching screens and reporting movement. The conversation is direct about the fact that they were ignored, abducted, and badly hurt. It does not soften the brutality of what happened to them. It also does not try to invent certainty about their inner lives after release. That restraint keeps the discussion grounded. The speakers spend time on how the women seemed to look out for one another. Liri becomes a central example. She is described as using her voice to advocate for fellow captives, including making sure Agam did not have to cook on Shabbat. The episode treats that as leadership. It is not a grand speech or a public title. It is the habit of noticing what someone else needs and doing something about it. The same attention goes to the way the women leaned on one another and used their different strengths. Religious observance comes up here too. Anne notes that the women, at least the Tazpitaniyot, fasted on Yom Kippur. The point is not ritual as display. The point is ritual as memory, connection, and continuity even in captivity. That idea widens the episode beyond a single news event and into a meditation on identity under pressure. The speakers keep returning to the smallest things: shared discipline, mutual protection, and the will to keep hold of one another. The conversation also resists easy sentimentality. It acknowledges anger, devastation, and the real wreckage that people may carry after this kind of experience. At the same time, it insists that the first visible act mattered. The young women gathered themselves, appeared together, and did the strong thing in public. That image becomes part of the argument about what courage looks like. The episode closes on a practical lesson: sometimes the smallest acts are the ones that build the best versions of ourselves, day after day, when everything else has been stripped down.

As heard by us

A serious Jewish conversation about captivity, mutual care, and the small acts that helped women hold each other up.

Anne Gordon and Shoshana Keats-Jeskel keep the focus on the women who were held captive and the small ways they looked out for one another. The details are plain and concrete: reporting back from the border, fasting on Yom Kippur, and using voice and strength to speak for each…

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Why you'd press play

When you want a conversation about captivity, mutual care, and Jewish memory in one listen.

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