A year of comfort

It’s been just about exactly 20 years since the podcast as we know it — not the technology, that’s older, but the nascent art form — was created.

I think that it is life-altering. Combine dog-walking and ever-changing, variously lit, marvelously complex cityscapes with podcasts and you have enough entertainment, education, and food for all sorts of thought to last you for far longer than you need it.

There are now many enormously skilled, smart, thoughtful, articulate, witty podcasters who can analyze art and politics and culture and fashion and food and true crime and pour it into your ears on demand and at whim.

My friends have learned not to get me started on the Bulwark, a website with writers and podcasters who are so smart that it’s impossible not to learn from them, no matter how much you think you know. I urge anyone who is at all interested in politics to consider it.

Now, though, I want to focus on Unholy: Two Jews on the News.

It’s a weekly podcast hosted by, yes, two big-time Jews who examine news — Yonit Levi, the anchor of Israel’s Channel 12 news, and Jonathan Freedland, of the Guardian, in London. They’re smart, clear-eyed, direct; they’re both deeply Jewish, deeply Jewishly educated and rooted, and deeply Zionist, but their show is the opposite of polemical.

Sometimes they talk about subjects other than politics, although since October 7 that’s become rarer. Twice, they’ve hosted Sir Nicholas Hytner, the film and theater director, who, to my shock and surprise (but what do I know?) is Jewish. To hear them talk about “Guys and Dolls” is to experience joy. (The way Sir Nicholas was able to defang the now inherent discomfort in the song “Havana,” when Sky Masterson gives Sarah Brown a dulce de leche to make her drunk, was to change the way she said “Bacardi? It’s very nice.” Before, she didn’t know what Bacardi was. Now she knows. It’s even funnier this way.)

But last week’s Unholy was even stronger and sadder than most of its episodes have been since October 7. That show included an interview with Rachel Goldberg and Jon Polin, the parents of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, one of the six Israeli hostages whom Hamas held in horrendous conditions in a tunnel under Gaza and then brutally executed 11 months later.

Rachel and Jon were asked how they were doing; “We are terrible,” Jon said evenly. This time of year is hard, he added. He can’t bring himself to say the greeting shanah tovah; instead, he replies with “shanah shel nechama.” Let this be a year of comfort.

The interview was extraordinary because the Goldberg-Polins are so honest. They are able to talk about terrible things without cracking.

They talked about how their mission had been to work for the release of their son and the other hostages, and that required that they suppress their emotions. “We packed all of it in many suitcases,” Rachel said. “We shoved the emotions in bags, and they’re waiting to be opened and unpacked.”

Now, she continued, “I am trapped in the extreme present.” She tries to get through each day; sometimes she has to break it down into getting through an hour at a time. Sometimes it has to be just a minute.

They both talked about hope. They had hope — perhaps they had too much. Maybe things would have been different had the assumption that what they needed was patience, that eventually things would work out and the hostages would be back home, got in the way of the urgency they really needed.

Or maybe it was the politicians and other leaders who got in the way. Very politely, very gently, both Rachel and Jon said that they did not talk to the unnamed but easily identifiable leaders who called them after Hersh’s death but had not called when he was alive. The other parents of the hostages murdered along with Hersh — the beautiful six, they called them — Carmel Gat, Eden Yerushalmi, Alexander Lobanov, Almog Sarusi, Ori Danino, and Hersh Goldberg-Polin — have been experiencing not only the same grief but the same change in status, from parent to symbol.

Rachel talked about their loss of anonymity. Because grief hasn’t made her an entirely different person, she still could be funny. She looks like every Rachel Goldberg anyone has ever met, she said, and Rachel Goldberg is the Jane Doe of the Jewish world. But now everyone knows her, and it is exhausting to carry the entire Jewish world’s grief, when her own is so overwhelming.

But both Rachel and Jon still are working to free the other hostages. They desperately hope that they will be released, and say, with some apparent and well-earned bitterness, that now that they no longer can be considered hysterical parents, it is possible that they will be taken more seriously.

The podcast is moving, powerful, and important. It’s available all over, and it’s worth a listen.

As these holidays draw to an end, we take inspiration from Rachel Goldberg and Jon Polin in wishing our readers a shanah shel nechama.

—JP