A Brutally Honest Conversation about Life (& Death) with My Mom: A Holocaust Survivor, Therapist & My Podcast Co-Host

Holocaust survivor and licensed therapist Karmela Waldman shares brutally honest advice about life and death—often deploying brutally sharp wit—with her son and podcast co-host, Joel Waldman.

Karmela Waldman is an eighty-something psychotherapist and Holocaust survivor. Her son, Joel Waldman, is a successful broadcast journalist. After a discontented Joel chooses to leave his network-news job, he gets a crazy idea for the next step in his career: What if he and his elderly mom did a podcast together?

The two embark on creating a show together and name it Surviving the Survivor. Things get off to a bumpy start as the lovingly dysfunctional mother-son duo struggle to figure out the art of podcasting on the fly—sometimes feuding, sometimes laughing, and finally mastering the format and watching Surviving the Survivor break out as a wildly popular true-crime hit.

Along the way, the two discover things about each other that they never knew. Joel is stunned to learn that Karmela survived World War II by hiding in a boys’ Catholic school. Karmela also sheds light on the emotional struggles she endured when Joel’s older brother, Rami, died of an incurable illness. She’s also struggling with the inevitable loss of her husband of sixty-three years, which she describes as the most difficult experience of her life.

Mastering podcasting is one thing; figuring out the meaning of life is a challenge of an entirely different order. In real time and “on air,” mother and son engage frankly and movingly with each other for the first time as adults, discussing child-rearing, aging, illness, death, and the secrets to enjoying life no matter how complicated it gets.

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