Moshe Kasher on Deaf Parents, Hasidic Summers & SubcultureAt sixteen, freshly sober, Moshe Kasher sold ecstasy at raves — greeting customers he recognised from his Tuesday night recovery meeting. On this episode of Identified with Nabil Ayers, the comedian and author of Subculture Vulture unpacks a childhood that explains it: two deaf parents who met at the World Games for the Deaf, a mother who took the boys to Oakland "on vacation" and never went back, and a father whose calendar — found after his death — counted the days to their return in X's that simply stop.
It's a conversation about building a self from borrowed worlds: raised broke in Oakland's hippie disability-rights scene, then shipped to Brooklyn's Satmar community six weeks a year to live as a Hasidic boy — too white for Oakland, too gentile-seeming for Brooklyn, at home in neither; the rabbi who humiliated his own son to teach Moshe that "everybody's stupid" in somebody's language; the bad kids who became his first family, rehab at fifteen, sobriety at sixteen, and the question that followed — now what?; the six subcultures that answered it; shiva as the most perfectly designed system of grief he knows; and the day — one year after his father's death, long-haired and unrecognisable — he stopped trying to stuff himself into his bar mitzvah hat, let his hair down, and walked to temple as himself. "That's when I became a man."
His answer to what family means now, with a daughter of his own: pouring the coins he collected along every one of those paths into her — and letting her choose.
Identified is a series of conversations with artists about the roots of who they are — family, place, and identity — hosted by Nabil Ayers.
00:00 The sober ecstasy dealer
03:42 Two deaf parents & the Thunderbolt
06:15 The calendar full of X's
10:30 Hasidic summers, six weeks a year
14:51 "Everybody's stupid": the rabbi's lesson
16:24 Too white for Oakland, too gentile for Brooklyn
17:15 Sober at 16: now what?
19:51 Subculture Vulture: six universes
22:12 His father's final weeks
24:42 Shiva: a perfect system of grief
28:04 Taking the hat off
31:57 What family means now
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Identified is a podcast series that explores identity, race, culture, and family through personal conversations. Hosted by author and music executive Nabil Ayers, each episode dives into lived experiences that reveal how our backgrounds shape who we are—and how we find belonging.
Nabil is the author of My Life in the Sunshine (Viking, 2022), and has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, and GQ on themes of race, music, and personal history. He’s also the President of Beggars Group US, co-founder of Sonic Boom Records, and founder of the record label The Control Group / Valley of Search.
Identified brings together notable voices for reflective, vulnerable conversations about where we come from—and where we’re going.
Read more about Nabil:
➡️https://www.nabilayers.com/
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