Chemistry cannot be manufactured or faked, says Joel Waldman. And that’s exactly what he has with his mom, Karmela.
“You can’t imitate chemistry,” he insists. “And we have a really genuine special chemistry that no one, not even [popular podcaster] Joe Rogan, can emulate.”
Waldman, who lives in Florida, is referring to “Surviving the Survivor,” an irreverent 60-minute weekly podcast he produces and co-hosts with Karmela, an 82-year-old Holocaust survivor.
The concept for “Surviving the Survivor” came to Waldman at the height of the pandemic.
“I had left Fox News Channel, where I was a national correspondent, for a variety of reasons, one of which is I have three little kids and was traveling too much,” he says. “Then the world came to a screeching halt, and all you saw was death and dying and suffering. And it reminded me of something my mother used to say: ‘We’re just trying to survive in a rough world.’
“It really resonated at that moment, and we decided, ‘You know what? People are miserable right now. They’re at home. Let’s do something.’ And we decided to launch the podcast.”
Waldman says the title of the podcast is “a little tongue-in-cheek. We’re surviving in a rough world, and my mom’s story of survival threads through each episode.”
On the podcast, the Waldmans talk about contemporary issues in a relatable and frequently humorous manner.
“What Karmela and I excel at is taking really heavy subjects like the war in Ukraine and we can make it comfortable,” Waldman says. “I don’t want to say light, but we can discuss it without a really heavy shroud over us.”
In an early broadcast, Karmela Waldman spoke about her life story. Born in a village in what was then Yugoslavia, she and her mother escaped the Nazis through a hole in the fence in their backyard.
Karmela was hidden in a Catholic boys school for about five months, while her mother and grandmother hid in Budapest. Eventually, a non-Jewish friend retrieved Karmela, who was reunited with her mother in the Hungarian capital.
As an adult, Karmela became a social worker and marriage therapist. She had two children with her husband, now 88, a retired psychiatrist from Brooklyn, N.Y. The couple raised their children in New Jersey, but now they and Joel and his family live in Miami.
“I’m curious about everything — everything,” she says. “I am also a social worker and I’m not sexist. I am not racist. I am not homophobic. I am all the right things. But the thing that moves me strongly is my Zionist views.”
Each broadcast of “Surviving the Survivor” opens with the rousing notes of “Hava Nagila.” Waldman calls his mother “Karmela” or “Karm” instead of “Mom.” They often talk over each other, with Waldman frequently lecturing his mother about turning off her cell phone and speaking into the microphone.
Waldman portrays himself as a stereotypical neurotic Jew. He regularly complains about his stress level, sleepless nights, trying to earn a living and having a mother who “gives me 17 things to do every day.”
Karmela — whose thick Eastern European accent is reminiscent of sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer — makes fun of her son’s myriad neuroses. “Move over Woody Allen,” she says in one episode.
Their dialogue is characteristically rife with Jewish schtick, and each broadcast has a prescribed structure.
“Our main segment is called, ‘The Main Schmooze,’” says Waldman. “’The Main Schmooze’ is our guest, and then we do a thing called, ‘The News Schmooze.’ We go over relevant current events and get Karmela’s take on it. And then we do something called, ‘Three Questions for Grandma,’ which is in the vein of the old show, ‘Kids Say the Darndest Things.’”
Waldman’s years of working in the media industry give him access to high-profile guests. They run the gamut, from low-brow pop culture figures such as Carole Baskin of “Tiger King” fame to literary stars such as novelist Dara Horn to Harvard University astrophysicist Avi Loeb, who contends that aliens have visited Earth.
“Probably the most fun guest we’ve had is a guy named MC Serch, and he is a hip-hop legend,” says Waldman. “He was part of a group called 3rd Bass, and they were very popular in the early ’90s. And now he produces for Nas, who is one of the world’s biggest rappers. He ended up rapping about Karmela, just freestyle rapping. He recited his bar mitzvah portion, stuff he would never do on any other podcast.”
When it comes down to it, “Surviving the Survivor” is a podcast for challenging times.
“We just went through this pandemic,” says Waldman. “Now there’s a war raging in Europe that’s very reminiscent of what happened with Adolf Hitler. … I still work locally a few days a week for the CBS station here, and I cover these rallies now. My mother is taking care of my aging father. I’m taking care of my three young kids.
“Life’s always challenging and we’re all just trying to survive,” he says. “And no matter how chaotic life gets, our message is, let’s try to enjoy it — the good, the bad and the ugly.”
For information, visit survivingthesurvivor.com.
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