When I talk about podcasting, it’s usually about FIR or one of the other CAPOW podcasts. Not today. Today the light is shining on my beautiful wife, Michele (that’s her with me in the picture to the left), whose podcast Your Jewish Neighborhood was given star treatment in a write-up in Forward magazine.

Michele has been producing the podcast for nearly two years—episode #92 of the weekly show went up last Thursday. The official podcast of our synagogue, Temple Isaiah of Lafayette, California, the show runs around 10-20 minutes and features mainly interviews with clergy, staff, educators, and interesting volunteers. She sometimes deviates and does soundseeing shows (she attended a pro-Israel rally in San Francisco and snagged a comment from San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom) along with interviews with non-Temple personalities, such as the executive director of the National Holocaust Museum and the editor of Lilith magazine.

The Forward, a daily Jewish newspaper that originally began publishing in Yiddish in 1893, is a nice venue for this story, which does a credible job of explaining podcasting and its role in religion. Michele notes that the podcast isn’t listened to mainly by Temple Isaiah congregants. ???About 70% of our audience doesn???t live in the state of California. And about 30% of [the non-California listeners] don???t live in the United States,??? she said. ???But that???s the beauty of podcasting; it goes everywhere.??? In fact, Michele has heard from listeners in places like Africa, Israel, the U.K., Australia and Canada. One such listener noted that, with virtually no other Reform Jews where he lives, “Your Jewish Neighborhood” is his only regular connection to his faith.

Way to go, honey!