When I lived in New York, I had the joy of being part of the Beyond the Pale crew, joining Esther Kaplan and Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark as a contributing host from time to time. Beyond the Pale has an interesting history. The show began when the station, WBAI, recognized that they needed to do more in confronting anti-semitism within WBAI, and as a testament to the large community cultural reality of Jewish life in New York City. WBAI came to JFREJ to ask for their support and advice in creating a new show, and thus began Beyond the Pale.

Beyond the Pale recently launched their own website, where you can join them Sundays by listening live online (although this Sunday their off the air because of a fundraising drive), or listen throughout the week to different segments from their show.

Their latest conversations include interviewing Udi Aloni about his film, Forgiveness, which “tells the story of David Adler, a 20-year old American-Israeli who decides to move back to Israel, only to find himself committed to a mental institution that sits on the ruins of a Palestinian village called Deir Yassin.” The film takes on a very different film aesthetic than most would expect of the subject matter, in which Aloni creates a psychological thriller, mixing fantasy and reality, and the possibilities and impossibilities of the human psyche, to tell the difficult stories of the Middle East. Undoubtedly controversial, the film explores what the director believes is needed to heal the psychological wounds — that the Nakba is part of the wounds Jews must heal from in order to move forward. The film opened for the first time in the U.S. after winning the audience favorite award from the Woodstock International Film Festival in 2006. Folks in New York can check it out at the Cinema Village. Listen to the interview here.

They also interview Nathaniel Popper, who first broke the story of abusive worker conditions in the Agriprocessors’ Postville Iowa plant in The Forward in 2006. They talk with Popper about how the story has continued to unfold, and about accusations of misconduct in plants in New York. Listen here.