A man with a beard admits he's the stereotypical Jewish mother…a woman who's always been afraid of teenagers explains why an 18-year-old from Somalia is calling her mom…and a veteran stage actor waxes philosophical about all the mother roles she has played—though she's not a mother herself. In this Mother’s Day episode, we celebrate the many forms motherhood can take, and look at what it means to wholeheartedly step into the role.

“Every cuisine tells a story,” writes Claudia Roden in the Book of Jewish Food. “Jewish food tells the story of an uprooted, migrating people and their vanished worlds.” Claudia’s childhood world vanished when the Jewish community was forced out of Egypt in the 1950s. Her quest to collect family recipes led to a celebrated career as a cookbook author. But Claudia writes more than recipes—she traces the DNA of cuisine. In this Passover edition, Claudia Roden talks about Passover cooking, her childhood in Egypt, and what makes Jewish food Jewish.

45 years ago a group of women in the Boston area collectively published Our Bodies Ourselves—a groundbreaking book that put forward the radical notion that women should get to know their own bodies and take charge of their health and sexuality. Since its first publication, the book has sold more than four million copies and been adapted into 30 languages.

Our pilot episode is about… pilots! Elynor Rudnick and Zahara Levitov grew up on different continents: one in America, one in British-ruled Palestine. In the 1940s, they were both young Jewish women with pilot's licenses. During some of the most turbulent years in modern Jewish history, their stories were woven together—not by fate, but by flight. Plus, Deb Dreyfus, a modern day Jewish woman pilot, takes our host Nahanni Rous for a spin in her four-seater Cessna.