Ira and Aaron welcome Ira’s friend and collaborator Seth Zurer, longtime Chicagoan recently transplanted to Southern California. The starting point is a piece of family history that Seth recounted in the 2007 performance about utopias through which he and Ira first met. It is the little-known story of Clarion, a short-lived early-20th century Jewish agrarian settlement in Utah where his grandmother was born.

From there, the conversation drifts to Seth’s own westward move to Riverside, CA, where he has discovered The Cheech, Cheech Marin’s museum of Chicano art, and started navigating California’s cottage industry laws to sell his home-baked bread and fruit preserves. An oral history that Seth shared, which his mother, Diana, gave to the Yiddish Book Center about her lifelong relationship to Yiddish culture, provides a point of reference throughout.

Underlying the conversation is the ever-charged topic of when, how, and where Jews gather together identifiably as Jews, particularly in the American context where doing so has largely become a choice. Examples range as widely as the Catskills vacation colony founded by descendents of residents of Clarion to ecstatic dancing and singing with Israeli Hasids at a Rainbow Gathering in the Wyoming wilderness. In the end, Aaron just wants to know how a nice Jewish boy ends up starting Chicago’s largest festival celebrating cured pork?

NOTE: This episode has been in the hopper a long time before being released. It was recorded in August 2023, two months before the October 7th 2023 Hamas attack in Israel and the subsequent and ongoing Israeli war in Gaza. There is some discussion of American Labor Zionism in the mid-20th Century in the episode, but not much reference to present-day Israel-Palestine. However, if it seems strange that the post-Oct. 7th world is not acknowledged, that is why.

Diana Woll Zurer's Oral History @ Yiddish Book Center

Zurer Bread in Riverside, CA

Music:
“Open Up Your Heart” by Roger Miller (a song which features the show’s namesake lyric). arranged and recorded especially for JIALIO by 80 Foots, Chicago’s only End Times Vocal Trio.

“Open Up Your Heart” by Buddy Killen + Roger Miller
Arranged and recorded by: 80 Foots (https://www.facebook.com/80FPM)