How a Jewish Rabbi Flips Judgement into Curiosity (with Rabbi Dr. Shmuly Yanklowitz)

All Out in the Open

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5 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 30 October 2025

⏱️ 45 minutes

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Summary

In this week’s ALL Together episode, Liz Macdonald and Michael Soto sit down with Rabbi Dr. Shmuly Yanklowitz. Growing up in an interfaith home, he felt called to Judaism and a life of activism. Rabbi Yanklowitz has founded organizations that serve foster children, immigrants, unsheltered individuals, and animals. Through his leadership and faith, he has also been a steadfast ally to the LGBTQ+ community. Rabbi Yanklowitz invites listeners to reinterpret exclusive teachings, live joyfully as ...

Transcript

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0:00.0	Good morning, Rabbi. Thank you so much for being here with us.
0:12.0	It's such a delight. Thank you for the honor to invite me.
0:15.1	Oh, my gosh. We're so excited. We've been talking about interviewing you since we started this.
0:19.6	I mean, I have known you from my work in the
0:22.3	LGBTQ community and the ways that the LGBTQ community and the Jewish community work together,
0:28.6	often around safety issues. And so I'm so excited to talk with you about your experience as a faith
0:34.8	leader, about how, you know, you are, you lead all over the
0:39.4	country, all over the world, really. Every time I see you on social media, it's far beyond Arizona.
0:44.6	So I'm excited for us to get to hear about your work as a rabbi, as a Jewish faith leader,
0:49.8	and as someone who's very called social justice. We were wondering if you would introduce yourself to our audience.
0:57.1	Yeah, well, thank you.
0:58.9	It's really a delight to be in this kind of conversation with you,
1:03.0	my respect for you and your work,
1:05.0	and the chance to share some ideas together is really something I've been looking forward to.
1:10.2	And so I was born in Canada and
1:12.3	lived in New Jersey and Chicago and moved a lot between L.A. and Texas and I've been Arizona now
1:18.8	in my 13th year. And I grew up in an interfaith home. I grew up in an interfaith home that was
1:25.3	kind of equally exposed to different faiths.
1:29.3	And at age nine or ten, I made the choice to pursue the Jewish path.
1:34.6	And that continued to evolve.
1:37.0	In some cases, I was in the ultra-Orthodox world, you know, black hat world.
1:42.4	In some cases, I was in the settler world. I was a
	...

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