Episode notes
I met Jeffrey Weiss earlier this year at his office on the Tel Aviv waterfront, in one of the old, ramshackle buildings at Kikar Atarim that look out over the marina. I’d been drawn to the memorial stickers that have changed public space in Israel over the last three years. They’re tributes to people who've fall on and since October 7th, usually no bigger than a bumper sticker, on lamp posts, benches and whole walls of train stations. Each has a face and a name.. Almost always, there’s also a motto written on the sticker, something the person lived by.Jeff made aliyah a few months before October 7th. In the rmonths that followed, he started stopping to read the stickers. He has since photographed more than four hundred, reached out to the families one by one, and built an organization called Stickers of Meaning. It’s an archive that is now being deposited with the National Library of Israel.What surprised me was how little of our conversation was about death. Jeff ran his first 10K at 48 and has since done ultramarathons and two Ironmans. He reads these stickers the way he reads the signs along a race course, as instructions for how to keep going. This is one of the more hopeful conversations I’ve recorded. I think Jeff would say that’s the point.
Host-only episode
Full transcripts are on the way.
