Chutzpod!

🎶No graduation day for you 🎶
As Hebrew Schools around the country supply their students with lulavs and etrogs for the upcoming Sukkot holiday, Rabbi Shira and Hanna talk about all things religious education. What’s the goal? Is it working? Is Hebrew School just a B’Mitzvah Factory? (and is there anything wrong with that?). Rabbi Rebecca Rosenthal, the Senior Director of Youth and Family Education at Central Synagogue in New York, helps answer these questions and more.
Read more on Jewish obligations to teaching children
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Even if you can’t make it to Aspen you can hear Rabbi Shira’s sermon for Yom Kippur this year. Drawing on her own experience visiting the Langa Township in Cape Town, South Africa, the Yom Kippur Haftarah reading and some Ursula LeGuin, Shira urges us all to “shrink the frame” to a human-sized small town of responsibility, practice Teshuvah and reject willful blindness.
Watch this sermon
Read The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
Read the Yom Kippur Haftarah reading
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Chutzpod is back to usher everyone into the New Year! And as we approach 5787, a listener wonders how to show up authentically, even if that means bringing the mood down. Rabbi Shira and Hanna wonder why we feel pressure to have a “happy” new year and encourage everyone not to bring the Jewish equivalent of a sanitized Christmas letter to their high holiday celebrations. 
Read This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared
Read about the Unetanah Tokef
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Listen to this special bonus episode recorded live at Aspen Jewish Congregation on August 12, 2026. 
As America approaches 250 years, this conversation looks at the enduring relationship between Jewish life and the American experiment. Through historical reflection and contemporary insight, speakers will explore how Jewish tradition and democratic ideals have shaped one another—and what that long story asks of us now.
This conversation features Rabbi Sharon Brous, Founder and Senior Rabbi of IKAR, Eric Cohen, President and CEO of Tikvah, and moderator Jeffrey Goldberg, Editor-in-Chief, The Atlantic.
Chutzpod will be back with new episodes September 9th! Need advice from Hanna and Shira? Submit your questions to chutzpod@gmail.com. And make sure you're subscribed.
Listen to Rabbi Brous on Chutzpod!
More AJC conversations
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Chutzpod is coming back with new episodes and new real-life questions September 9th!
Rabbi Shira and Hanna will talk about when to see a rabbi over a therapist, how to navigate a mixed-observance marriage and is believing in aliens Jewish?? 
Subscribe to automatically get all new episodes. And submit your own questions to be featured on an episode!
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