IRA GLASS & ETGAR KERET

Co-presented with City Arts & Lectures

“This show really began on a bus heading out of Tel Aviv last summer. Etgar told me a story that went off like a dense little bomb of feeling – really one of the most remarkable things I’d ever heard – and I thought ‘I have no idea how this can be a show but we have to make it into a show.’” – Ira Glass

Ira Glass is the host and creator of This American Life, heard each week by over 5 million listeners on public radio stations and podcasts. Glass began his career as an intern at National Public Radio’s network headquarters in Washington, DC in 1978, when he was 19 years old. He put This American Life on the air in 1995. He also served as an editor for the podcasts Serial, S-Town and Nice White Parents. Under Glass’s editorial direction, This American Life has won seven Peabody awards and the first Pulitzer Prize ever awarded for audio journalism. In 2021, the episode ‘The Giant Pool of Money’ became the first podcast ever to be inducted into the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry.

Etgar Keret is a leading voice –especially among the younger generation –in Israeli literature and cinema. He is celebrated for his surreal, often darkly humorous short stories collected in books such as The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God & Other Stories, The Nimrod Flipout, and Fly Already. His film and television credits include co-directing Jellyfish (2007) and co-writing the series Deep Skin. Many of his short stories have been adapted for the screen. His writing has been published in The New York Times, Le Monde, The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Paris Review and Zoetrope.