Familiar Touch and the Feminist Politics of Aging

In this episode, editor-in-chief Arielle Angel speaks with filmmaker Sarah Friedland and feminist scholar and activist Lynne Segal about aging through a feminist lens, on the occasion of the digital release of Friedland’s award-winning film Familiar Touch. The film follows cookbook author Ruth Goldman (Kathleen Chalfant) as she transitions to a memory care unit in an assisted living facility and struggles with a shifting sense of self and a different relationship to dependence and care.

Friedland was inspired to tell this story by watching the fiercely independent women in her grandmother’s Jewish Communist milieu as they aged, as well as by Segal’s book Out of Time: The Pleasures and Perils of Ageing—particularly its description of how aging renders the elder at once “all ages and no age,” and capable of experiencing time in less linear ways. Angel, Friedland, and Segal discuss what it would mean to embrace, rather than fear, the experience of aging; to center a politics of care and interdependence over a neoliberal idea of self-sufficiency; and to allow for elder desire.

Thanks to Jesse Brenneman for producing and to Nathan Salsburg for the use of his song “VIII (All That Were Calculated Have Passed).”

Media Mentioned and Further Reading

Out of Time: The Pleasures and Perils of Ageing by Lynne Segal

Lean on Me: A Politics of Radical Care by Lynne Segal

The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence by The Care Collective

“How the 'One Big Beautiful Bill' Impacts Older Adults,” AARP

The Moosewood Cookbook by Mollie Katzen

Sarah Friedland’s speech about Gaza at the Venice Film Festival

“Why We, 18 Elder Jewish Women, Chained Ourselves to the White House,” Jewish Voice for Peace

“Exodus From Now,” Arielle Angel, Jewish Currents

Transcript forthcoming.