I’ve been around since Chapo was on Reddit and I’ve only ever listened to the episodes with Connor O’Malley because I’m a huge Joe Pera fan. Are there any particular episodes of those podcast that I should check out? I’ve heard a lot about Citations Needed, but have only seen clips. They seem more up my wheelhouse than Chapo because I like my political podcasts on the drier side. Like if there are any episodes featuring the true nuclear dunks or just top tier comedy, I’m still down, but generally look for just super informative shit. Trying to get back into podcasts

The only podcast I ever listened to religiously was Marx Madness, a podcast that’s essentially just synthesis of dense and/or hard to read academic works. Went over a lot of difficult pieces I read when I was doing high school debate and helped fill in my gaps of understanding. First season is Kapital. They add their own commentary and add modern context to show how certain ideas still hold up, but for the most part they’re presenting the texts as they are. The most I remember them going off path with Kapital was addressing the discussion of anti-Semitic language in Marx’s work. I stopped listening to them because time, but I listened to everything up to the history of W.E.B. DuBois and it’s great. Strongly recommend to anybody who wants to get into literature that’s too dense to read.

Also to say what they said about Marx and anti-Semitism. They don’t handwave everything and dismiss it because some of the word choices are awful with modern context, but they also point out that anti-Semitism was so baked into culture over the past thousand years that many of the anti-semitic words were common colloquialism. Like a chef that calls their conical strainer a china cap or chinois (Chinese in French). Yes, it is a racist term, they may even understand that it’s racist and still use it. If they call it a conical strainer on the recipe instead of a china cap, nobody is going to know what they’re talking about. Marx’s casual anti-semitic phrasing is more a reflection of thinkers of the era, how anti-Semitism had been so prevalent that it was barely even an idea yet, almost like air.

The Marx work most well known for this issue is “On The Jewish Question”, an essay written in response to another Hegelian, Bruno Bauer. Bauer argues that the only way for Jewish emancipation to be achieved is for Jews to give up their religion because a secular state demands secularism. Marx was explicitly defending jewish religious freedom, using material analysis to say that liberalism likely wouldn’t bring Jewish emancipation.