Join Rabbi Yoshi Zweiback as he talks with an eclectic variety of thinkers, artists, and change-makers about their experiences (Jewish or otherwise) and their own search for meaning and purpose in their lives.
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Episodes
Search for Meaning With Rabbi Yoshi Zweiback and Author Zack Bodner
In the latest edition of his Search for Meaning podcast, Stephen Wise Temple Senior Rabbi Yoshi Zweiback hosts Zack Bodner, CEO of the Oshman Family Jewish Community Center and author of "Why Do Jewish? A Manifesto for 21st Century Jewish Peoplehood." The founder of the Z3 Project, which fosters renewed conversation on world Jewry and Israel relations, Bodner has spent his career serving the Jewish community. Before taking over OFJCC, he spent 14 years as the Pacific Northwest Regional Director of AIPAC. During his time heading the OFJCC, he oversaw the launch of the Taube Center for Jewish Peoplehood, and helped create the Center for Social Impact, which is committed to tikkun olam initiatives that address poverty, disaster relief, racial justice, and more. His new book discusses what it means to live a meaningful, relevant, and joyful Jewish life. Bodner touches on the role of [...]
Search for Meaning With Rabbi Yoshi Zweiback and Veronica Zweiback
WARNING: This episode of Search for Meaning with Rabbi Yoshi contains some explicit language. In the latest edition of his Search for Meaning podcast, Stephen Wise Temple Senior Rabbi Yoshi Zweiback hosts singer-songwriter Veronica Zweiback, who talks about her journey in music, as well as her journey of self-discovery in terms of gender identity. Rabbi Yoshi's niece comes from a musical family. Her father plays the guitar, bass, and drums. Her mother Kimberly Marshall is a world-renowned organist and a professor of music at Arizona State, so fittingly, Veronica played piano (along with the violin, cello, classical guitar) growing up. She first began songwriting as an 8-year-old, and still remembers looking down at her handwriting as she wrote her artist name. At the time, she thought, it was just what young songwriters did—write out one's band name in cool fonts—but there may have been something [...]
Search for Meaning With Rabbi Yoshi Zweiback and “Four Winters” Director Julia Mintz
In the latest edition of his Search for Meaning podcast, Stephen Wise Temple Senior Rabbi Yoshi Zweiback hosts Julia Mintz, the director of acclaimed Holocaust documentary "Four Winters," a story of Jewish resistance against the Nazis now playing at the Lumiere Cinema in Beverly Hills for a limited engagement. You can purchase TICKETS HERE, and watch the trailer HERE. Awarded the "Human Rights Award" at Hamptons Doc Fest, "Best Documentary" at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival, and an official contender for "Best Documentary Feature" at the 95th Academy Awards, "Four Winters" is a particularly salient film in light of the recent rise in antisemitism. Marjorie Ingall of Tablet called it "a must-see Holocaust movie (no, really)." The film—written, directed, and produced by Mintz—tells story of just some of the over 25,000 Jewish partisans who fought back against the Nazis and their collaborators from deep within the [...]
Search for Meaning With Rabbi Yoshi Zweiback and Rabbi Ken Chasen
In the latest edition of his Search for Meaning podcast, Stephen Wise Temple Senior Rabbi Yoshi Zweiback hosts his friend of 40 years, Rabbi Ken Chasen. The Ordination Seminar instructor at HUC-JIR's Skirball Campus, Rabbi Chasen is also the Senior Rabbi at Leo Baeck Temple, which partners with Wise's Center for Youth Engagement and currently hosts our Aaron Milken Center Parenting Center during construction of our transformational new facility. Before he became a rabbi, Rabbi Chasen wrote music and edited scores for film and television. His love of music—he started playing the guitar at age 10—is intimately entwined with his love of Judaism. As a scrawny 11-year-old at Goldman Union Camp Institute in Indiana, he was first exposed to the blend of Israeli and American folk-style music that would eventually come to define the Reform Movement of the 1980s and 1990s. "I came to camp not [...]