Episode #7: What if the border itself began to talk?: Yanara Friedland
Return the Key: Jewish Questions for Everyone · Julie Carr with Yanara Friedland
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Show Notes
Julie and Yanara talk about Yanara's childhood in a Jewish-American and German family in Germany, the question of Jewish identity when there is no real practice, walking as a writing practice, the value and problem of silence in the face of rupture, fractured and buried archives, Midrash as methodology, and Walter Benjamin's messianism. We ask whether borders are always a violence, why we cry when walls come down, and who witnesses the monster we are when we do not sleep.
Texts and authors discussed:
Walter Benjamin: On the Concept of History
Yanara Friedland is a writer born in Berlin. She is the author of Uncountry: A Mythology (2016) and Groundswell (2021). Both books have appeared in German translation with Matthes und Seitz Berlin. Her current writing on sleeplessness investigates the relationship between political violence and nocturnal imagination, the aftermath of traumatic events as wakeful presence permeating language. She teaches at Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies.