True crime podcast by a Holocaust survivor and her son catapults them to unlikely fame

Karmela Waldman and her son Joel attract millions each month with their unique series ‘Surviving the Survivor.’ Now Joel has penned a book about their lives with the same name

By ROBERT SARNER, The Times of Israel – August 21, 2024

TORONTO — This summer, the Toronto Holocaust Museum hosted an event featuring Holocaust survivor Karmela Waldman and her son, former TV journalist Joel Waldman, both Miami residents. Much to the intrigue of the audience, composed largely of children of Holocaust survivors, the saucy, often argumentative interplay between the two speakers contrasted with the museum’s usual solemn fare.

At once acerbic and humorous, the mother-son duo’s repartee figured prominently during the Q&A conducted by the museum’s chief curator Rachel Libman, and in Joel’s recently published book, “Surviving the Survivor, A Brutally Honest Conversation about Life (& Death) with My Mom: A Holocaust Survivor, Therapist & My Podcast Co-Host.”

“Some people think the interaction between my mother and me, whether in our public appearances, on our podcast or in the book, is just us partaking in shtick,” Joel, 54, told The Times of Israel during the Waldmans’ visit to Toronto, which also included an event at a local bookstore. “It’s not shtick whatsoever. This really goes on between us when we’re not in public. It’s actually much worse when the mic is off.”

Joel and his mother arrived in Toronto via New York, where they had a public discussion at the Museum of Jewish Heritage with CBS journalist Jim Axelrod, who interviewed them about their collaborative efforts and Karmela’s compelling life journey. The pair just wrapped up a North American tour promoting the book in Los Angeles on August 15.

A retired licensed marriage therapist, Karmela, 84, speaks six languages — cursing freely in all of them. On occasion, she’ll recall a word in Hebrew more readily than in English, despite not having lived in Israel for more than a half-century. Some people compare her accent to that of the late well-known sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer, also a Holocaust survivor who made a new life in the United States.

Born in 1939, Karmela was only two when the Nazis marched into her hometown of Subotica, in the former Yugoslavia (now Serbia). In June 1944, Nazi SS officers came to her family’s home and abducted her father. She escaped through the back garden with her mother, owing her survival to several non-Jews, including a nun who hid her in a Catholic boys’ school. Recounted poignantly in the book, the Holocaust took a heavy toll on Karmela and her family. Her father and grandfather perished at Auschwitz, and an aunt, uncle, nephews, nieces and cousins also died at the hands of the Nazis.

 

Karmela later graduated from the University of Geneva in Switzerland, where she met her future husband, Roy Waldman, a medical student. Before marrying in 1961 in Long Beach, New York, he agreed to Karmela’s request that they eventually move to Israel.

“I felt given all that had happened during the Holocaust, Israel was where I belonged,” said Karmela. “It was always my life plan to live there. After my father was gassed in Auschwitz, I made this promise to myself.”

The couple, along with their two young children, moved to Israel in 1971 but returned to the US three years later at Roy’s insistence due to his frustration trying to make a living there as a doctor.

“It was very emotional for me,” said Karmela, who has eight grandchildren, two of whom live in Israel, and one great-grandchild. “I felt by leaving Israel, I was betraying my vow to live there.”

Unlike his mother, Joel was spared a harrowing childhood. Born and raised in New Jersey, he earned a degree in English literature from Brandeis University and a master’s degree in education from Bank Street College in New York. He then spent 27 years as an Emmy Award-winning cable news correspondent covering national politics based in Washington, DC, and as a reporter in New York, Miami and Tucson. In 2020, while living in Los Angeles, he dabbled in stand-up comedy, taking classes, after which he performed at the Hollywood Improv.

 

“It was kind of a transient period in my career as I was switching from broadcast news and trying to figure out the next step,” said Joel, who shares an appreciation for humor with his mother, evident throughout the book and in their banter. “What I admire about comedy and stand-up is the economy of words.”

Humor has served Karmela well.

“My mom’s biggest thing was using humor to get through dark times,” said Joel. “She only survived because of her humor.”

Not just another coronavirus podcast

In 2021, at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, Joel and Karmela launched their podcast, also titled “Surviving the Survivor.” It started attracting a large audience when it pivoted to focus on true crime. People were fascinated that it featured one of the oldest podcast co-hosts in the US, a Holocaust survivor no less, brimming with character.

Today, the podcast has 110,000 YouTube subscribers, up to 2.5 million views a month, and a substantial following on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Audible. Central to its appeal, in addition to the guests they interview about dramatic, often high profile, crimes, is the caustic, spirited crosstalk between Joel and Karmela, not typically associated with mother-son relationships.

The podcast’s first incarnation featured guests that Joel calls “thought leaders,” including Dara Horn, author of “People Love Dead Jews”; Ben Ferencz, who at the time was the last surviving prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals; and Harvard astrophysicist Dr. Avi Loeb. Since transitioning to a true-crime focus, guests are top criminal defense attorneys, law enforcement officers, former CIA and FBI forensic psychologists and other related specialists.

The change in coverage occurred after a podcast team member, Steve Cohen, a former colleague of Joel’s at Fox News, became fixated on a case in south Florida. It involved the murder of Dan Markel, a prominent Jewish, Canadian, Harvard-educated legal scholar teaching at Florida State University. He was fatally shot in Tallahassee in 2014 and last year his ex-mother-in-law and ex-brother-in-law were arrested and charged with his murder.

Audience numbers surged with that segment, prompting Joel and Karmela to make true crime the sole focus of “Surviving the Survivor.” They found their niche, developed a community they affectionately refer to as STS Nation and increased their frequency to every day except Saturdays.

 

Karmela, who co-hosts once a week, is nothing if not direct in her communication, especially in the book. Despite her boundless love and admiration for her son, she isn’t shy in disparaging him, sometimes referring to him as a “moron,” “idiot,” “hollow head,” “schmuck” and “a self-indulgent loser.” For good measure, she’s also said he suffers “from envy and greed.”

“When I said things like that, I meant it in the moment,” said Karmela, seated next to Joel at their hotel in Toronto where their verbal jousting was on full display. “If I called him something unbecoming, it was totally sincere in that situation. He deserved it.”

Joel takes it in stride.

“Our relationship is beautiful and ugly and complicated all at once,” he said. “It’s also unequivocally real and very deep. There’s no bullshit between us. We lay it on the line for each other.”

Love, and other four-letter words

Doing justice to his mother’s life story in the book represents the most important and toughest assignment in Joel’s career. While Karmela dominates the content — including addressing the excruciating loss of her first son to illness when he was only 3 — her husband, who was ailing and eventually died during the writing of the book, and her daughter, Joel’s sister, are far less present.

Early in the book, Joel writes: “The conversations you’re about to hear between my mom and me are intimate, real, raw, disturbing, sometimes expletive-riddled, explosive and emotional but always filled with love.”

Indeed, for all their feistiness, arguing and speaking over one another, they are close.

 

“If there’s someone who loves you more than I love you, I don’t know who it is,” Karmela tells Joel late in the book. “Americans like to say, ‘I’d stand in front of a bullet for you.’ I’d do that for you without thinking.”

Along with her put-downs of Joel, she has a predilection for foul language.

“I don’t even really hear my mother’s cursing anymore because I’ve become so immune to it over the years,” said Joel. “It would be like asking a transplant surgeon if blood makes them squeamish.”

Karmela is a self-described “news junkie,” especially when it comes to Israel, given her boundless love for the country.

“My mother is the most ardent Zionist I know,” said Joel. “I haven’t seen her cry about the Holocaust, nor about her son she lost or about my late father. But I’ve seen her cry multiple times about Israel since October 7.”

Karmela is philosophical about the current explosion in anti-Jewish hate.

“Antisemitism is very much in my experience and worldview,” she said. “It was always there. It’s not shocking to me. It’s part of the world. But I’ve also been exposed to Righteous Gentiles throughout my life, including those who saved my life, so I don’t think all people are evil, even though there’s so much antisemitism. It’s a relief that it can’t have the same effect as it did when Jews were in a position of helplessness. Yet we’re not that strong and people we think we can count on sometimes walk away from us.”