Ladies Lunch at the Holocaust-Themed Restaurant: Yael Bar-tur and ChayaLeah Sufrin of the Ask A Jew Podcast

The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum

Society & Culture

4.7 • 855 Ratings

🗓️ 11 April 2022

⏱️ 116 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week, Meghan talks with Yael Bar-tur and ChayaLeah Sufrin, co-hosts of the podcast Ask A Jew. ChayaLeah was born and raised in an Orthodox Hasidic community in Southern California and remains happily part of that community today. Yael is a secular Israeli Jew now living in New York City. The two became friends through an online community and began a dialogue about (among other things) Judaism, much of which consisted of Yael asking ChayaLeah questions about the Orthodox world that she would have been afraid or embarrassed to ask most people. The conversations were so interesting that they started recording them — and from there emerged Ask A Jew.

In this conversation, Yael, ChayaLeah and Meghan (who is not Jewish despite having been a guest on Ask a Jew) cover a range of topics; anti-semitism, arranged marriage, policing, what happened to Jon Stewart, why the heterodox space is so male dominated and why the superstar podcaster and journalist Bari Weiss (who's not a man) is so polarizing as to make people deranged. They also talk about their recent lunch together at a Kosher restaurant in Los Angeles that was founded by Steven Spielberg's late mother.

Guest Bios:

ChayaLeah Sufrin was raised in an Orthodox Jewish home in Long Beach, CA. After attending university in New York, ChayaLeah moved back to Southern California and spent fifteen years teaching High school Jewish history and as the Education Director at Shul by the Shore. ChayaLeah served as the Senior Jewish Educator at Long Beach Hillel for three years and is now the Executive Director. ChayaLeah, together with her husband Boruch, has four teenage sons.

Yael Bar-tur is a crisis communications and social media consultant who previously served as the director of social media and digital strategy for the New York City Police Department where she developed and implemented the social media and digital communications strategy.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The three of us went to a kosher restaurant.
0:05.7	Oh, yes.
0:06.5	This is my favorite story.
0:09.1	Do you want to take it?
0:11.0	Okay.
0:11.7	I will tell it.
0:12.5	So we, we, I was visiting Los Angeles and we want to take Megan out to lunch.
0:18.4	And we're like, you know, we have to go to a kosher place because Haile ate kosher.
0:21.7	But it was really important for us to pick like a nice place that wouldn't intimidate Megan too much.
0:26.3	Because, you know, if we would take her to some like crazy Israeli place, she would like run for the hills.
0:31.9	So we went to Steven Spielberg's mother's restaurant.
0:36.9	And when I got there, Megan got there first, and she was like very frightened.
0:42.8	And I don't know why you say that.
0:45.0	Like, like, frightened it was on my face.
0:47.9	Well, I had a mask on probably.
0:49.9	Was it the like Schindler's List poster that you walked into?
0:53.2	Yeah, well, there's a huge...
0:54.3	It's a Holocaust-themed restaurant, actually.
0:57.0	Yeah. That's all potatoes, soups.
0:58.6	That's not known for the food.
1:00.5	But there was a great moment where, um, where Megan asked, I asked me, she said,
1:05.6	I can't tell what here is like Jewish and what here is COVID-related.
	...

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