Chutzpah

and that was too much they could not stand for that so so they have to begin attacking people on a personal level now many of these these people are are in the same organizations that have been attacking people like dhh people like me people like so many others within The tech and open source world who happen to not be on the extreme left and calling us things like Nazis and fascists and all manner of names would usually apply better to them than anyone else.

There is a word that I love called chutzpah.

Chutzpah is a Yiddish word which has a myriad of definitions, but a great way to explain it to someone is when you go up to say your little brother and you grab his fist, like you grab his arm, and you forcefully force him to keep hitting himself in the face with his own fist, right? But you're swinging his arm back and forth, hitting his fist, hitting his face with his own fist, and yelling, why you keep hitting yourself? Why you keep hitting yourself? Why do you keep hitting yourself? That's chutzpah.

That is almost exactly what Miguel de Ecaza and so many others are doing here.

Miguel de Ecaza is practicing regularly extreme racism, extreme ignorance, extreme intellectual laziness and dishonesty, hatred, supportive violence, and then turning around and pointing at anyone who says, Hey, I don't like hate.

Because you're given literally a small amount of pages to do a story.

Like I just had to write my short for Chutzpah volume two, which is a Jewish anthology I show run.

And I only had seven pages.

So I had to figure out how to compress my story to that seven pages and make sure I don't go over.

I'll go ahead and pause right there.

So you were saying that, yeah, funding is going well?

Yeah, we just finished our campaign a few weeks ago for Chutzpah number two, which is our Jewish comic book anthology, which I mentioned earlier in the podcast um the jewish comics anthology it's our second issue and our first issue we had let's take a six thousand dollar goal we mean like seven thousand or so we had eight thousand gold dollar goal this time and between making the goal and late pledges is actually my most successful

campaign ever

There's a few organizations that we're definitely standing on the very strong shoulders of.

Back in the 70s, I believe there was a group called Chutzpah.

Chutzpah is a – it's not super well known.

I think it had pockets in Perth and Sydney and Melbourne.

So they had a – if you look back through Jewish newspapers back into the 70s and 80s, you'll see advertisements for like a – I think they called it back then a homosexual support group, whatever it was.

Well, I would feel self-conscious calling anybody comrade, and I don't make anywhere near the same amount of money that Oscar Eustace does.

Chutzpah, as the great William Shakespeare once wrote.

[upbeat music] That's it for this week's Reduced Shakespeare Company podcast, except for one more thing, which I'll share with you in about 60 seconds, so stick around.

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Balagan means a mess.

Chutzpah means nerve or audacity, and it's in English dictionaries and English speech, so the model is being asked a question that isn't a fact about the string.

Is chutzpah an English word now or a Hebrew one?

And there's no right answer because it depends on the speaker.

The story of the kibbutz doesn't begin in Israel, but in Warsaw, Poland, with a man who would come to symbolize all the things that Israelis value.

Chutzpah, an insistence on Jewish dignity, community, continuity.

And though that man did not live to see the kibbutz named in his honor, he set the example for the kibbutz's defenders in both 1948 and 2023.

The story of Yad Mordechai is a story in three parts, a multi-chapter epic about resilience and grief, a tale that starts in the Warsaw Ghetto, picks up over six days in 1948, and unexpectedly over one horrific day in 2023.

One of those days on the plane, we were talking about, "What is your dream in politics?" And she said, "I wanna be Speaker of the House."

You had to have some chutzpah at that point in her career to say, "I wanna be speaker," right?

Chutzpah doesn't begin [laughs] to describe it.

It was impossible.

The Speaker is a production of KQED in San Francisco and distributed by NPR.