Next Year in Palo Alto: Recent Episodes
Rebecca
This podcast follows a group of French friends living in the Silicon Valley - their traditions and attempts to transmit them to the next generation in 2020.
Catherine Lewi comes from a community that has all but disappeared = the Jewish minority in French villages, from Alsace to Normandy. In this episode, Rebecca tries to understand how Catherine led her quest to keep her family's heritage and legacy alive. Along the journey, Catherine meets Yves, whose parents directly experienced the impact of the war in Russia and Poland, and who shares Catherine's responsibility in transmitting Jewish values and traditions. Together, they go on an exploration to find the right place to pass on the spark.
In this episode, Rebecca interviews Judith Vacchino, who spent her childhood in Venezuela and Argentina amidst the backdrop of a military coup, in a family with strong humanistic values and political involvement. Moving from country to country in search of a place to fit in, Judith came to California where she encountered the French tribe. She shares how her mindset evolved at the contact of this group of friends.
In this episode, Rebecca interviews Antonia and Fred Benque, who grew up with very different backgrounds but share a joint desire to transmit strong values to their children. Antonia grew up in a Catholic family from Portugal and converted to Judaism when her first child was born. Fred grew up in a non-traditional family environment but built his Jewish identity over time, strongly influenced by his North African family, and developed a strong attachment to the Sephardic tradition through his French friends in California.
In this episode, Rebecca interviews Meital Amzallag and Ben Slomka, two siblings whose grandparents were pioneers in a kibbutz in Israel, and whose parents made a striking choice to leave the kibbutz to move to France - thus defining what it means to build a family. Their love of cooking for others, their entrepreneurial spirit and their laughs are what makes it so fun to be around them.
In this episode, Rebecca reverses the roles. Instead of interviewer, she becomes the interviewee of Nurith Aizenman, who in her day job is NPR’s correspondent for Global Health and Development, but is also a great friend to the French group. Rebecca remembers what it was like growing up in Paris with her parents who each rejected their respective traditions and urged her to make her own choices. She reflects on the seeming irony of her attachment to the French sephardic traditions given her background.
In the midst of the Covid winter, Rebecca interviews Cassy who brings a different perspective to the identity of the French Friends group. A descendant of catholic immigrants from Northern Europe and raised in the US by a mother who converted to Jehova's Witnesses, Cassy chose her own path at every fork in the road - and is now is an integral part of the group of French Friends - both through her husband's incredible history and through her own research on micro-histories.
In this episode, Rebecca interviews Sophie and Itai Dadon who recently kicked off a zoom study group on Friday evenings during the pandemic, in an attempt to create a transmission link across generations. In her quest to understand their attachment to transmission, Rebecca finds out an amazing journey of survival for the Greek and Turkish Jews of Thessaloniki.
In this episode, Rebecca meets Judith and Marc Rapoport on the eve of Yom Kippur, to get an Askhenazi perspective on what makes the French Friend community so unique. Judith and Marc both carry the weight of their families' tragic destinies during the Shoah. Yet they found their way to North America and discovered a new lively, vibrant family in California. And they are now the DJ and soul of every party.
In this episode, Rebecca is planning for Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, which is a difficult task due to the Covid Pandemic and the California Forest Fires. She remembers that her friends Eric and Aurelia Setton, who now live in Israel, are the keepers of the Egyptian tradition for Rosh Hashana for the French group of friends living in Silicon Valley. She reaches them by phone in their Tel Aviv apartment to ask about the secrets of Egyptian dishes and symbols of this holiday.
In this first episode, Rebecca decides to follow a group of French Friends living in the Silicon Valley for one year during the covid pandemic - their unique traditions, their attachment to the Sephardic Jewish tradition and their attempts to transmit their culture to the next generation. Meet Marilyn, a Tunisian Jew and her husband Alan, an American Ashkenazi Jew as they celebrate their son Zachary's Bar Mitzvah, surrounded by the French Friends group.