Translations

Kara & Eli

• Project Shema

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0:00 | 26:48

In this episode, Kara and Eli explore how our inability to translate our language, and ourselves, undermines meaningful dialogue. How can we challenge complex norms and ideas if we remain more committed to binary frameworks than to understanding one another’s lived experiences? The antidote, they argue, is storytelling. By illuminating how our experiences shape our perspectives, storytelling has the power to depolarize conversation. It’s an approach at the heart of Project Shema’s work.

Chapter Breakdown:

  • 0:00: The role of translating
  • 2:51: The idea of “binary rage”
  • 3:58: How we change complex social norms
  • 4:58: How do we start to translate from a place of stories? 
  • 8:11: How Kara translates herself in her experiences as a Black Jewish woman
  • 9:51: How Eli translates himself as a white member of a Black Jewish family
  • 12:00: The impact of ideological insularity
  • 13:00: Project Shema’s mission to translate and “wrestle”
  • 19:34: The notion of harmful speech
  • 21:50: Going beyond translating just antisemitism
  • 24:01: Previewing future episodes

Resources:

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Visit our website: www.projectshema.org.

Translations is a new initiative from Project Shema exploring how we can approach complex issues with nuance and empathy. Every six months, we dive into a different topic shaping our world and our work. Through conversations with leading academics, practitioners, and community voices, this podcast invites listeners to learn alongside us as we translate big questions into deeper understanding. http://projectshema.org/translations

SPEAKER_02

Okay, so I have been trying to get us to start this podcast forever because we obviously have the best team of people around at Project Shema.

SPEAKER_01

We do have the best team.

SPEAKER_02

The best team. And we have these incredible conversations all the time that we don't get to share with other people, and it's not fair. So I think that we need to, like, I think we need to do this. Um, and just thinking about one that we had recently with our staff, with Dr. Matt Boxer from Brandeis University, who did some recent research on different attitudes towards Zionism and anti-Zionism amongst different Jewish people. And he had this one answer that like really stood out to me about apartheid.

SPEAKER_01

Hold up. What does apartheid mean?

SPEAKER_02

We can't even define it yet. I mean, I think like that's part of what we're getting at here, but apartheid is an Afrikaans word that means separateness, and is, you know, was described used to describe the regime in South Africa that was a regime of separation between white people and people of color and black people in different ways and different sort of legal restrictions. And we sort of use this word a lot now, obviously, right? We have to translate it all the time. And part of what stood out to me about Dr. Boxer when he talked to us was this story that he told about a total lack of translation. And I think it's a good intro for us because what he was saying was he asked people, as part of his research, whether they thought the situation on the ground in Israel and Palestine was apartheid, and he got two answers from two different people that were completely opposite, right? So one person said, Yes, this is apartheid. And when they were asked the follow-up question of why, they gave word for word the exact same response, right? It's obvious, no explanation needed. So it's this story of like, we're not doing the translating. We think we know exactly what these words mean, this uh apartheid meaning separateness, and we know sort of what it meant in South Africa, and we see what's happening in Israel and Palestine, and it must be the same, or it must not be the same, and it's just obvious. And we spend zero time thinking about what that word might mean to other people or how other people might understand the same things that we're saying.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I remember that, and I remember thinking, you know, if if I think about some of our frameworks and what does it mean to have a dialogue across difference, or what does it mean to want to have a dialogue across difference? I was thinking, like, what would a conversation look, sound like, be like between those two respondents?

SPEAKER_02

How would they even start?

SPEAKER_01

How would they even start? Yeah, yeah. How would they even start?

SPEAKER_02

Because the tendency is to avoid, right? Like it's just to say we are so different that we're not even gonna talk to each other.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. And you know what I actually recently read there was an opinion piece that was about binaries and and why are binaries um necessary and how have we gotten deeper into binaries. And I learned an interesting term, the idea of binary rage, where you start to feel so strongly about your side that you're getting like real anger and rage against someone who could who could think right the opposite. And it and it was so interesting because some of the examples I know people might mentally think of as binaries, but it was this professor who was like, Well, are you for dogs or cats? You know, which is not really a binary.

SPEAKER_02

It is though.

SPEAKER_01

But it but it is, yes. Uh and I'm realizing now that you are a cat person and I am a dog person.

SPEAKER_02

Cats are for introverts and dogs are for extroverts, just to binary the binary. It's a double binary.

SPEAKER_01

Uh surrounded by my two dogs. Um, and it was just like interesting about how it can impact our attitude towards even wanting to enter that conversation. Like I perceive a difference, and how do we go in defensive in that moment? And what does it actually take to get over a feeling like that to enter into it willingly and wanting to learn?

SPEAKER_02

Yes. And actually, that story reminds me of something that we have been talking about at Project Shama for a long time, also, which is an example from the book Change by Damon Santola, which is a book that we have all sort of read and studied together and think about a lot, which is a book about how we change complex social norms and how sort of complex ideas and complex opinions change. And one thing that he says in the book is that if you are interacting with someone who you feel like is on the other side of a binary from you, not only will you not convince them of your, you know, of your norm change or the importance of your point or whatever, you will actually push them farther away from you because their perception is going to be we are so different about everything that we are different about this too. And I'm on my team over here, and they're on their team over there. And so even as I'm trying to convince you of the importance of this thing that's really important to me, it's apartheid or it's not apartheid or whatever it is, it actually becomes even that much harder.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, yeah. All the assumptions that we can carry with us into it, yeah, that's a really good point. Well, I think that's why, you know, how do we start from a place of stories? How can we start to translate from a place of stories almost as a way to depolarize it? Like, how can I actually remind myself that this is another human being?

SPEAKER_02

When you say stories, do you mean individual stories?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I think individual stories, yeah. Just hearing you talk about that, I think that's why storytelling can be so powerful because if you're stuck in that and you're continuing to almost dehumanize the other person, like I'm just identifying you completely with this ideology or perspective, whatever it is, and you keep pushing it, pushing it, pushing it.

SPEAKER_02

No, like that it's an opportunity to create shared values, right? And shared, a shared understanding of what we're talking about. When I think about a conversation like the apartheid conversation, it's a you know, it's a conversation about why did my values and why did my background and how have my lived experiences led me to a place where this is so obvious? Because just saying to you it's obvious isn't going to convince you. But at least by helping you understand why I approach things the way I do and the values that inform that perspective, we can start to have a conversation or at least start to build a conversation. And I used to hear this in conversations, I mean, I still do, but I it was very it's been very common for me to hear this in conversation with Jewish people in our community and with Jewish people who we've done our work with. And they would say things like, you know, I was having this conversation about anti-Semitism, or I was having this conversation about Israel and Palestine or whatever it is. And I got to the point where I said, you know, this thing that I thought was this devastating takedown. And I was sure the conversation would be over, and this person just totally like didn't hear it. And I'm like, because you didn't do any of the work of building the shared values and building the shared experience and the shared space that you're trying to inhabit. So this person is perceiving you as coming from, you know, a combative place.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Or they're perceiving you as coming from, you know, a place of that's rooted in disagreement or misalignment or whatever it is because you haven't aligned.

SPEAKER_01

Or wanting to convince them, right? Wanting to convince them of whatever your point is. And we're we're naturally as human beings gonna sense that and flare. And yeah, so I think like, what does it mean when we think about our trainings to just get curious, not with the intention to want to change someone's mind, but to so for those two people, right? If we go back to our two people, like, do you actually want to know how someone can have the same reasoning that you do to come to the opposite conclusion? And I'm I would be interested to know that.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, I would love to get those two people on here and have that conversation. Like that is the work that we are doing in so many ways, and it's a work of translation. It's not about just translating words like apartheid, it's about translating experiences, it's about translating identities, it's about translating histories. I think it's something that goes beyond interpretation. It's not just I have a different interpretation of what the word apartheid means or what the facts on the ground in Israel and Palestine lead me to a different conclusion, and that's a matter of interpretation. I think it really is a matter of how do you see and understand the world? What choices are you making with your language? And what can we, you know, what can we tell from the choices that you're making? How do we understand that and dive into that in a curious way, like you're saying?

SPEAKER_01

I like that and the layers to it, that it's not just language, it's personal experience. It's what does that mean to you on such a deeper level and how that word has been used throughout your life, throughout your family, right? And all the ways that we need to do that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

How do you feel like you translate yourself and your experiences, either in Project Shema context or just in general?

SPEAKER_01

Um, so I think for me, I certainly understand the responsibility I have when I'm out in the world facilitating, certainly, of translating a black Jewish experience, black Jewish woman experience. And, you know, I it makes me think of a story when I was a kid. So when I was in fourth grade, my parents decided as I was entering fourth grade, um, my parents decided that they wanted to move us to a small private school. My brother, who's older than me, was just having some issues, and they decided to transplant us into an entirely white private school. So all of a sudden, we got dropped into this entirely white environment for many of the students, or at least most of the students who came in and wanted to have conversations with me. It was very clear that I was the first black person they had ever interacted with in their life. And this is at an age, right, where there's no filter of questions. You know, I remember a girl holding my hand kind of back and forth and like, well, did you used to be white and that's why you sound like that? Like, is that what's going on here? Like, how do we actually arrive at a black person? And it was just really intense. And I felt all of this pressure to represent something more than myself. But I'm also thankful for not going through that in entirely alone and having my brother with me, who I still talk to every day, and like we still kind of mention sometimes that it was such a wild experience. But it's a lot, it's hard.

SPEAKER_02

I can see where that would be formative for you, I guess is the word I will use.

SPEAKER_01

Foundational.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, foundational. Yes. It's so interesting. I tend to think of it in terms of my life now in translation that I do also as a white member of a black Jewish family, and just the conversations that we have internally in our family. But what you're talking about makes me think of my experience as a kid too. And I'm reminded of I grew up in Minnesota, not around a lot of Jews, and in a big public school system where I was one of the only Jewish students, and explaining Judaism to people and explaining, you know, why I was missing holidays and stuff like that was a big part of my Jewish holidays, was a big part of my experience. And I was just thinking, as you were talking, about a professor of mine who had said, who had grown up, I think in Tennessee, and said a similar exper and had sort of a similar experience, how that drew us to education. And I've always thought of myself as an educator, and that's been sort of like a primary professional definition for me for a long time. Um, and I think a lot of that goes back to the extent to which I was translating and teaching and explaining for people, even as a young age, what it meant to be Jewish and different in this place where that was not very common and how that has sort of continued to be. I I still just you, as you know very well, I'm just explaining stuff. Like that's just what I do all the time.

SPEAKER_01

That's so interesting. Wow, isolated other to educator pipeline. Like what that's yeah, you're you're you're right though. I I think that's what always I always felt from a very young age that, although now I'm realizing maybe around the same age that I wanted to teach or educate in some way. And yeah, some of it is like you you're just you have so many conversations about like, oh man, you don't know this piece of me personally, but then actually I want you to know all these other pieces about my people and all the many definitions of of my people. And like, how do I, how can I just chip away at people's perceptions, misperceptions, all the assumptions they make about for me, my blackness. I I was hit with, oh wow, black that means something totally different to some of these people. And I and how do I even begin to process that, reflect that back? Like, how do I like what can I do? That's interesting. That's interesting.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, well, it's a reflex that gets built into you, but it's not a reflex that everyone has, I think, especially for folks who grew up in more, I don't know if insular is the right word, but homogeneous, right? Um, more uniform communities, places where either they weren't minoritized or that lacked a certain kind of diversity that fostered that sense of curiosity. But that's what we, you know, and I think that's I think that's ideological now. I think that's part of what we're talking about. And when we come back to, you know, the apartheid topic, it's I mean, I'm ideologically insular, and that's why this is so obvious to me, one way or the other, because the people who I'm around are, you know, are only thinking the way that I'm thinking or are thinking close enough to the way that I'm thinking that things are obvious. And things shouldn't be obvious when we're interacting with people who think differently than us. It shouldn't be that person thinks differently than us, and therefore, you know, my thing is even more obvious. It should be, you know, that person thinks something different from me, and therefore I have to reconsider how I understand the world and things around me in in deep ways in some cases.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. Well, and how much do we have to seek that discomfort though?

SPEAKER_02

So much.

SPEAKER_01

I'm used to people understanding, right? And it's it's a it's a muscle. It's definitely a muscle.

SPEAKER_02

But that's what we're here to do, right? And that's how we're, I think that's part of how we are here to help with this, is to talk about translation, is to be able to share the diverse community that is Project Shema and the diverse lived experiences that the members of our team have and the perspectives that they bring to different issues, and how we model that, and how we ask questions and we, you know, do what's called clarify and verify to depolarize, like you said, how we listen carefully to depolarize, um, and how we make sure that we are having these conversations with respect and empathy and nuance in all of the, you know, all of the ways that allow us to move forward productively and learn from each other about how we translate and how we translate, not just internally at Project Shema, but for the world.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. Well, I think about the immense diversity of our team in both ways that are obvious and not obvious. And we get so much practice of wanting to explore differences. And yeah, so how can we bring that to all of you?

SPEAKER_02

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Because it's not just about these words, you know, like we said, there's experiences that we're translating, there's language that we're translating. We talked about apartheid. We translate words that are, you know, unique words that come partly from other languages, like intifada in different slogans, like, you know, to shake off in Arabic, but I think means something very different, or at least is interpreted as something very different amongst many people who are not Arabic speakers, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Words like genocide, you know, there's all of these words that I think we we just sort of assume that people know what they mean, or we assume that people are using these words or defining these words in the same in the same ways that we are, but often that's not the case.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

We want to help translate from academic conversations into practical conversations, and we want to help access sort of the ivory tower aspect of some of these pieces too. Yeah. Or the 10,000-foot view of how some of these conversations are happening, and then what that actually means for how we have these coalitional conversations and how we have these practical conversations about building diverse coalitions and building diverse groups of people that can move forward together in the fight against anti-Semitism and other forms of discrimination, whatever it is. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

And people doing that work on the ground. What does that look like? What are those experiences? And as you listen, like how do you see yourself in some of those? How do you see the differences? And how do we struggle and and wrest wrestle, not struggle? How do we wrestle with all of that?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. The people of Israel, right?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I knew you were gonna say Israel.

SPEAKER_02

Of course. Israel, the Hebrew Israel Israel, comes from to wrestle, and it comes from this story of Jacob, one of the forefathers or the ancestors of the Jewish people in the Torah, in the biblical story, wrestling with an angel and being renamed Israel, the he who wrestles with God. And that's not what we're doing here, but we are arguing and wrestling and talking and all of the things. Arguing probably not so much.

SPEAKER_01

I think that's a good point to make because I do think I think what's been frustrating about what's been happening certainly post-10-7 and within the Jewish community and our inability to sort of talk across some differences, is it just feels like such a Jewish value to me that we're able to do that and and process that in a way that's healthy and that is good. Like we are seeking that wrestling. And so I've been really frustrated just by the resistance to that and sort of retreating to ideological sides if we think of things about Zionism, anti-Zionism, non-Zionism, like how much we don't talk across difference when it just feels like something that's so deeply Jewish to me.

SPEAKER_02

And in our case, progressive too. I was reading recently The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt. I think his last name is pronounced Hate. I'm not really sure. It might be Haight. But one of the things that he talks about in the book is the ways that people who identify themselves as liberal and conservative have different levels of openness to new experience. And one of the things that defines liberals is a broader openness to new experience, which isn't to say that current conservatives aren't open to new experiences, but it tends to be more common amongst liberals and amongst progressives, um, which is part of why like cities are so liberal, for example, or urban areas, because you're encountering different stuff all the time and you have to be more comfortable with that in order to live there. But I think that's, you know, that's our political home individually. That's our political home organizationally, in as much as we have one. We don't we're not a political organization, but in as much as we, you know, fit ourselves into a political perspective, it's on the left side of things and on sides that are, you know, in a place. I don't I don't like how this is sounding at all.

SPEAKER_01

Um It's our focus, right? We are I think we focus ourselves around the fact of how can we, because so many of us identify as progressive Jews, progressive Jews politically in the big P politics, of supporting progressive causes, and what does it mean to want to make the movement better? What does that mean? And to that point of this being a Jewish value, I think about machloket, machlokat lecemine, an argument for the sake of heaven. An argument for the sake of heaven. And if we look back and and we think about the debates between Beit Hillel, Beit Shamay, like people who did live on opposite sides of a debate many times, but still lived in that debate. And that was okay, and that was expected.

SPEAKER_02

And preserving the record of the debate, right?

SPEAKER_01

Yes.

SPEAKER_02

Not saying the debate is over and this, you know, this is the winning perspective, and therefore we're all doing this, and shame on you should you think anything different, which seems to be sort of much more characteristic of the discourse today. But actually, there's incredible value in preserving that other perspective and preserving the minority report or whatever it is. It seems to me though that all of this kind of gets lost both inside and outside the Jewish community when we're talking about anti-Semitism, we're talking about racism you know, anti-black racism or Islamophobia or anti-agram immigration policies or whatever it is that end up in this insular place, and we lose this ability to have the machlokatlashem Shemaim or the, you know, sort of the higher, more principled debate and conversation. We lose the ability to translate for each other, we lose the ability to move past the binaries, to operate with empathy. Those are the sorts of things that I, you know, it's not about what is the conversation we're having. Ultimately, you know, I'm I'm less concerned about whether someone thinks the situation in Israel and Palestine is apartheid or not apartheid. I'm much more concerned with how we have that conversation um and what are the impacts of the what are the impacts of our process um on the outcome and our ability to be in community.

SPEAKER_01

Right, because they're because we're painfully aware that there can be real impacts. There, there is a way that rhetoric can get used to cause harm, both psychological, physical. And so being aware of that line is important. And I'm thinking about how we started to even introduce into our language the concepts of anti-Jewish harm. Like, how do we not, how do we no longer or move away from a concept of defining something as anti-Semitic or not to when we might flare a lot of defensiveness of if we make that call? I mean, the same thing happens with anti-black racism, like, oh, what are you calling me a racist?

SPEAKER_02

Fragility response.

SPEAKER_01

Well, yes, yes. Um, and how do we actually make it more about a story where someone you know, someone you're in relationship with, experienced harm?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. I got a question recently for a panel that I'm doing in a couple of weeks. So I feel comfortable saying this here because it won't be published until after the panel, anyways. But the question was about, you know, it's about free speech and hate speech, and when is the line crossed from free speech to hate speech? And for me, it's like that's really not that's not it. Like, that's not the question. You know, the question is when is speech harmful? Yeah. When can speech lead to violence? When can speech undermine people's safety? It's not a legal concept, it's a concept for how we want to live with other people around us and just what it means to be respectfully in community and in dialogue with each other.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

You can say something to me that, you know, it's oh, it's free speech, so it's okay to say, but it still might be a harmful thing to say. It still might hurt. And if you don't care about the fact that I'm hurt because you're standing on free speech grounds, I'm not impressed with you. Yeah. I don't want to be your I don't want to be your friend. You know, I want I want to be around people who care when I say I'm harmed, and I want to care when they say they're harmed, and I want that to be the basis, not is this hate speech or not. I think that I think it just completely, you know, those kinds of frameworks just completely miss the mark for me.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, it it you're definitely, it's like, how are we removing the human element in that? Because anytime you're standing on a legal, like, well, it's not, it's not, it wasn't illegal what I did. It's like, okay, could still be unethical, could still be immoral, and You're still an asshole. You're still an asshole.

SPEAKER_02

I'm thinking of the movie Philadelphia now, and the whole trial about, you know, whether Tom Hanks's character was fired because he had AIDS and was gay.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

And it was like, yes, it's a wonderful legal victory for him in the movie and in the story. And even if he hadn't won, those people still would have been awful people for what they did.

SPEAKER_01

Still would have been awful people. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

So we have this, you know, and I think this it comes up all the time when we talk about anti Semitism, obviously. It's become it, which is just everywhere and it feels like ubiquitous. Now that we're having conversations about anti-Semitism, even in places we would never expect them. But this idea of translation and this idea of how Project Shema understands the role of translation, I don't think about being restricted to anti-Semitism at all. As we've already talked about, we're talking about Jewish identity, we're talking about Jewish history and lived experiences. We're not just talking about Jewish stuff. We're talking about the idea of inclusion generally, of diversity work, equity work, inclusion work generally. How do Jews fit into or, you know, how are Jews how do inclusion frameworks relate to Jews or not? Um, and what are other things that we just think about and are important and are happening in the world? And how do we take a minute to step back and translate those things so we're not just giving these kind of hot takes that cause more, you know, cause more tension, that raise the tension, that don't allow this space for reflection and for asking these kinds of important questions.

SPEAKER_01

And I think a lot of our work, even in workshops, is about talking through a process, commitment to a process, commitment to frameworks. And I think that's a lot of what this podcast is going to be about. As you're saying, like, let's talk about inclusion, but let's let's learn about and and think about and explore people on our team who have a lot of expertise on that, experts out in the field who just can give us so much knowledge about a different way of thinking about something or a more expansive way. How can we get more expansive in our definitions? When I think of translations, it's making something more complicated instead of simplistic. If I think about the long entries sometimes in a dictionary, you have so much choice. And I feel like I've heard you say, right, like translation is a choice. And before we make a decision, can we be curious about all of the different ways that those things can be interpreted? Can I think about all of the different ways that I can think about what it means to be Jewish? What is it, what does it mean to be part of a peoplehood that's multiracial, multi-ethnic, with diaspora communities all over the world, and not think that there is one story that can paint the picture and translate every Jewish experience.

SPEAKER_02

I love that. So this is gonna be broken down as we go forward into kind of three ways that we are recording these. One is gonna be we're gonna have scheduled guests, we're gonna have experts, we're gonna have academics, scholars, practitioners, people who are doing this work, who are building the world with empathy that we want to see and figuring out, you know, hosting conversations with them and figuring out what we can learn together and what we can learn from them, which is really cool. We're also gonna have a part of this called Shema sessions that are conversations between Project Shema staff members.

SPEAKER_01

What does Shema mean?

SPEAKER_02

What does Shema mean? Shema comes from the Hebrew word to listen, Lishmoa, the verb to listen, that's our name. But more importantly, in this case, Shema means people who work at Project Shema are amazing folks and talk about relevant issues. I really want to get Jill and Michael on here to talk about some issues that they raised with conversations that we have about intersectionality and Judaism that don't include Black Jewish perspectives. Like I want to have that kind of conversation. Um, and then we'll also be doing some kinds of rapid response things, not as often, but as things come up in the world that are really highly relevant to Project Shema and the way we think about things, we'll do our best to get some perspective or conversation out there in a reasonable amount of time.

SPEAKER_01

And when we think about rapid response, what we want to be able to bring to you all is how are we thinking about what just happened? This is not a policy analysis, this is not anything like that. What we want to bring is how are we thinking about it? How do you actually talk about these things in your day-to-day networks and those who you're in relationship with? What are the things to think about? What are the like potholes on the road that you might want to avoid? And that's what we're looking to bring when we think about rapid response and hearing from our team members, different experts. Again, tapping into what is our framework, what is our approach, and how do we do some of this stuff a little bit better. Thank you for listening. Translations is a production of Project Shema. Executive producers include myself, Kara A. Wilson, Eli Cohn Postel, and Orin Jacobson. Translations is engineered and edited by Nathan J. Vaughn of NJV Media.

SPEAKER_02

If you're interested in learning more about Dr. Boxer's research, check the show notes for links. And please be sure to like, listen, and subscribe anywhere you get your podcasts. And if you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to share it with a friend.

SPEAKER_01

We'll be releasing new episodes regularly, between now and the end of 2025. And we want to hear from you. So share your questions on our website. You can use the link in the show notes.

SPEAKER_02

If you're interested in signing up for a training with Project Shema, check out our website. You can find a link, you guessed it, in the show notes. Thanks again for joining us. We'll see you soon.

SPEAKER_01

See you soon.