Agunah Revisited: How To Avoid High Conflict Divorce
18Forty Podcast
18Forty
4.7 • 704 Ratings
🗓️ 19 May 2026
⏱️ 85 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We’re also joined by Keshet Starr, CEO of Shalom Task Force. In this episode we discuss:
- How do potentially amicable divorces escalate to being high-conflict?
- Why does adversarial divorce seem to be increasingly common in the Jewish community?
- What do experts in the area of agunot think of the related social-media movements?
Interview begins at 15:16.
Keshet Starr joins at 53:20.
Sarah M. Nissel is the founding Executive Director of the Jewish Divorce Assistance Center and a visiting professor of law and religion at Pepperdine Caruso school of law, where she leads the Faith & Family Mediation Clinic. A Yale and NYU Law graduate, she previously worked in white-collar and complex litigation, served at the Innocence Project, and now lives in Los Angeles with her husband and four children.
Yona Elishis is a family law mediator and Adjunct Clinical Professor at Pepperdine Caruso School of Law, where she teaches in the Faith & Family Mediation Clinic in partnership with the Jewish Divorce Assistance Center of Los Angeles (JDAC). Trained at Osgoode Hall Law School, Columbia Law School, and New York University School of Law, she previously practiced family and corporate law in Toronto and New York and now lives in Los Angeles with her husband and five children.
Keshet Starr is the CEO of Shalom Task Force, which works to combat and prevent domestic abuse in the Jewish community. Previously, she led the Organization for the Resolution of Agunot. She lives in Hillside, New Jersey, with her family.
References:
Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden
See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Violence by Jess Hill
Marriage Story (2019)
Gett (2014)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi friends, a quick word from our sponsors, the incredible organization, Mugin David Adom. |
| 0:07.2 | There's a symbol most of us have seen our entire lives, yet rarely stopped to think about. |
| 0:12.3 | The Red Star of David on the side of an ambulance or emergency motorcycle. |
| 0:16.9 | Mugin David Adom was founded in 1930, 18 years before the state of Israel even existed. |
| 0:23.5 | There was no Israeli flag yet, no army, no government, just Jews in pre-state Israel who understood |
| 0:29.9 | that when someone needs emergency care, someone must show up. |
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| 0:46.6 | National Emergency Medical Service. Their mission, protecting, saving, and giving life. MDA is responsible |
| 0:53.6 | for Israel's national blood supply, collecting and storing it safely in the |
| 0:58.0 | world's first underground blood bank. |
| 1:01.0 | They partner with the Israel Defense Forces, the IDF, as well as Israel's police and fire services, |
| 1:07.0 | responding to every kind of emergency across the country. And here is something remarkable. |
| 1:12.9 | 90% of MDA's first responders are volunteers. They are yeshiva students, teenagers, soldiers |
| 1:19.1 | between shifts, ordinary people who made an extraordinary decision that when the siren goes off, |
| 1:25.3 | they run toward it. Not because they have to, because they choose to. |
| 1:30.3 | On October 7th, MDA medics were in Kibbutzbe'eri. |
| 1:33.8 | They were at the Nova Music Festival. |
| 1:35.8 | They treated the wounded, identified the fallen, and kept working even under fire. |
| 1:41.3 | There is a Hebrew word that captures this spirit. |
| 1:44.0 | Achraud, responsibility. Not the kind that captures this spirit. Achraayut, responsibility. |
| 1:46.2 | Not the kind that weighs on you, the kind that defines you. The kind that says, I am the person |
... |
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