Two friends, one podcast – the duo putting the joy back into being Jewish  

The best podcasts tend to work because of the chemistry between the hosts and the sense that we are eavesdropping on conversation between genuine friends. That is certainly true of the magnificently titled Nisht For Me, hosted by lifelong pals Abigail Radnor and Arron Ferster.

The pair met at the age of ten at the Bat Chayil of a mutual family friend and quickly became close. They moved to the capital from Manchester at a similar time in their twenties, Ferster embarking on a career in television and Radnor in journalism, the latter explaining: “We Mancs tend to stick together in London.”

Arron is a writer and producer, a former Manchester Grammar School pupil who read history at Oxford, now works on television series including Never Mind the Buzzcocks, QI and Through the Keyhole.

Withington Girls’ alumni Abigail, who read English Literature and American Studies at the University of Birmingham, has worked for various fashion magazines and is now lifestyle editor for The Guardian’s Saturday magazine.

These days they are back in Manchester with their young families and live round the corner from one another, in an idyllic Coronation Street-style existence. A couple of years ago, they tended to see each other daily at the bus stop and, Ferster says, the podcast was born out of the conversations they had when that blissful existence seemed to have been shattered in the aftermath of October 7.

“Abi and I got into this probably unhealthy habit of unloading on each other about everything we’d seen or read. As with many Jews, it had taken a toll on us in various ways… I had this idea of doing something that would get us back to the joy of being Jewish and the stuff we used to talk about before.”

The result is a podcast that celebrates the minutiae of British Jewish life in a way rarely explored in any medium since Simon Amstell’s Grandma’s House. Guests have included Jonathan Freedman, Hadley Freeman and Emma Barnett and regular features include heimishe flexes (Jewish Top Trumps) and, of course, the titular Nisht For Me, where the guest is asked to nominate something generally popular that is, well, nisht for them. In the interests of full transparency, on my episode I went with having an Auschwitz survivor grandparent for the former and the wearing of shorts for the latter. Those answers should give a sense of quite how varied the tone of the show can be with its joyous blend of light and shade in evidence throughout every episode.

There is a kind of inadvertent public service aspect to the podcast too. While Radnor accepts the primary audience is Jews, she is pleased to “put something out there about Jewish people that is beyond the headlines”. There is something humanising about the whole endeavour, in her words: “We are real people with real lives and they’re not too dissimilar to yours. It rounds us out a bit.” They both feel a sense of pride that America tends to dominate when it comes to thinking about the diaspora and yet their podcast focuses on Jews in this country, a tiny minority of the population that would almost fit into three Wembley Stadiums. She explains: “That British Jewish experience is homely and unaffected.”

The podcast launched in August 2025 and has brought the pair back to what they always loved and felt proud of about Judaism. They wanted Jewish listeners to “feel seen” and the act of doing it has had a similar effect on the hosts, with Radnor describing it as a “load lightener”. That mood changed in the wake of the Heaton Park synagogue attack on Yom Kippur and given the most fundamental aspects of their personalities are Mancunian and Jewish, the duo felt it was not an event they could ignore. Radnor goes as far as to call those aspects of her character “two of my favourite things about myself”.

That particular episode, recorded in the immediate aftermath of the event, is an extraordinary listen and could prove an invaluable primary source in years to come for anyone seeking to understand the impact of the attack on ordinary Jews. Ferster’s phone was off over the fast and the pair had not actually had an opportunity to process things as they ordinarily would until recording began and thus the chat feels genuinely unfiltered with not a hint of artifice on the part of either host. They wisely opted not to make a decision on whether to put the episode out until they had listened back, allowing the conversation to feel as natural as it would without the presence of microphones. Radnor believes the episode resonated because “it was very authentic and very raw because it was less than 24 hours later”.

That authenticity is at the heart of every episode of the podcast and probably explains why it has gained an audience relatively quickly. The Spotify statistics they received at the end of the year suggested plenty of Mancunian Jews listening in exile from predictable locations like Israel, Australia and America but there were some surprises like a listener in Italy, a treat for the hosts who never believed the show would be heard by anyone beyond close friends and family. Ultimately though, Ferster says, “we’ll continue doing it as long as we’re enjoying it”.