Ilana Landsberg-Lewis - Happily Getting Older | S6 E02
With “thousands of grandmothers' voices and stories” in her head, Ilana Landsberg-Lewis, a Canadian labor and human rights lawyer and passionate women’s rights advocate, started the “Grandmothers on the Move” podcast over two years ago.
Fifty-three engaging episodes later, she’s already succeeded in her goal to “kick old stereotypes to the curb” through conversations with astonishing older women.
Ilana worked at the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) for many years before joining with her father in 2003 to co-found the groundbreaking Stephen Lewis Foundation to partner directly with community-based groups confronting the HIV-AIDS pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa.
She is an ardent mother who sees motherhood as “an emotional reality and a political identity.” (Yes!) And at 55, Ilana is “happily getting older.” Don’t you want to know why?
Check out Ilana's Grandmothers On The Move podcast at: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/grandmothers-on-the-move/id1356003135
+ TRANSCRIPT
Joanne and Idelisse: Welcome to Two Old Bitches. I'm Idelisse Malave and I'm Joanne Sandler. And we're Two Old Bitches. We're interviewing our women friends and women who could be our friends. Listen, as they share stories about how they reinvent themselves.
Ilana: Personally, what I find myself gravitating to is older women. They're the ones who are keeping my hope alive for humanity in this moment. This is the real truth of how I feel and what I see. So they're the ones I turn to. Are we going to make it, is there ever going to be equality? Can white women ever get it together and be useful in any way and not keep screwing up and hurting people in the name of femininity? Is there a way forward here?
Joanne and Idelisse: Idelisse, today we are interviewing Ilana Landsberg Lewis and we're all podcasters together. And we're members of a very exclusive podcasting club, podcasters who interview older women. That's right. And Ilana's podcast called Grandmother's on the Move, which we hope our listeners will listen to.
We'll provide a link. We will. (She) interviews activist grandmothers from all over the world. And it is a joy. It is. And she's expanded, she said to beyond just grandmothers, right to, older women. Right? So Ilana is someone who I met 25 years ago, working in the UN, she is Canadian. And as you pointed out, Ide,Two Old Bitches has now gone south to Mexico to interview Lucero.
Now north to Canada. We have interviewed both of our neighbors here on Turtle Island, as they call the Northern hemisphere as Europeans called the indigenous lands. So Ilana is, as you discovered in the podcast, just an extraordinary social justice activist who eats, drinks, breeds and lives, social justice.
Well, I had, I hadn't met Ilana, um, before we did the interview and she truly is a force, the, the kind of the intensity, um, clearly someone who has an idea and she makes it happen.It's that she is a doer. You know? She thinks and she does it and she turns it into reality. And thinks about it probably night and day in order to get it done.
She, she is, as I've told you, and she knows this, she is a workaholic supreme. Um, she was the founder and executive director, but this workaholic is also one of the most strongly identified mothers. I mean, talk about identity and we're going to hear that. I just wanted to make sure to say that she's the founder and executive director, was the founder and executive director.
She recently stepped down of the Stephen Lewis Foundation. She's going to tell us a little bit more about that, but yeah, just generally this was a foundation that tackled the HIV pandemic early in the early days. And then she created Grandmothers on the Move. Her podcast. There was a grandmother's campaign that was also part of the foundation.
Exactly. So we started our interview, our discussion, our conversation with Ilana like we do. We do asking that question, right? We love to ask the question, who are you? And she really recognized that question for all the possible depth, um, that it can allow the answer.
Ilana: I identify, um, I just turned 55, just, just, I mean a week ago. Um, and, uh, and, and uh, being a mother is, has become a pretty central part of my understanding of the world around me politically, not just as a, not just as an emotional reality, which is lovely, but very personal. Um, but more as a political identity too, it reframed some of the understandings that I thought I had, uh, and deepened them.
So I think that's an important thing. Um, I also think a lot these days about um, what it means to be, what does it mean to be middle aged older in relationship to everyone around me and the rest of the world?
You know, I was just on a call the other day because I live in Canada,and I'm Canadian. Uh, we started off with a question if you don't introduce yourself and everybody on the call was extremely mindful of the introduction as being a settler or being a colonizer on Turtle Island, which is what we call the area where we live.
And there was a, there was an increase, and it wasn't just politically correct recitation. You know, it there's a mindfulness now that we're living in the middle of yet another iteration of a, of a liberation movement and necessary one. Um, not just Black Lives Matter and racialized anti-black racism, but also in Canada, there's a lot of conversation about the intersection with indigenous culture. And so, you know, that's, that feels like a tremendously important part of answering the question of who are you? Is not just being accountable for all of the harms that we carry with us in our ancestry and in our contemporary exercising of those privileges, uh, knowing and unknowing, but also thinking about, well that's what you carry in yourself. So what else can you carry to mitigate as a human, as a woman, as a feminist, as a Jew, as a lesbian, as a mother, as somebody who's worked internationally, as someone who carries an extraordinary amount of privilege, skin, white skin privilege, and all sorts of other class privilege as a democratic socialist, how do you live your life with an extraordinary level of, responsibility accountability? But also the ability to look backward and see how that learning, uh, has got to be living in vigorous and contemporary, because at each stage I can look back and see the trail behind me of years, not just moments, but years of unconsciousness around all of those things.
That's who I am right now. A deeply reflective person who hopes to come out of it, doing more good, less harm in the world than ever before.
I do feel like in the last year, in particular of deep, deep reflection and paying attention to the political, external environment in the internal, and a lot of changes in my life, I feel like I've put my baby. My not my baby. My big toe will go a little further. My big toe is on the path to, you know, righteous liberation within the mind, as a, as a woman, who's getting older and quite happily getting older believably, getting older.
Growing up in a, in a feminist egalitarian and very political household, uh, involved in both the pure sort of electoral politics side of it too. Just a political lens on freaking everything.
Although my politics were falling, not even one inch, uh, but one millimeter from the tree. Um, my self-expression was not in line with what my parents were hoping would be this new liberation of young women. Um, and so when I finally came out as a lesbian, they were very relieved.
Idelisse: So with a background in an incredibly political and egalitarian family, still, and perhaps because of that, Ilana, decided to travel to New York. And that's where you met her, Joanne.
Joanne: I met her around 1995, I think. I was working at UNIFEM the UN development Fund for Women and Ilana came, a young activist, and became the senior advisor on women's human rights.
And, you know, as we were saying before, Ilana is someone who starts things and grows them and builds them. And she did that. She did that at UNIFEM. She developed an amazing program.
Idelisse: It's interesting because what I took away from our conversation with her was how important it was for her at this point in her life to have the opportunity to meet and work with women activists from the global south who taught her so much and who she saw as so incredibly capable.
Joanne: She's an amazing learner. And she's pursuing, she's always pursuing a question and I think one of the questions she came with was about what are more egalitarian, democratic ways of organizing and, you know, what does the United Nations have to offer me?
Joanne and Idelisse: And in fact, while she was there, she discovered that the politics of the UN were as problematic, if not more problematic, than the politics that she'd left behind in Canada, when at the same time she decides to become a single parent.
Joanne: She has her first child Zev, uh, who I had the great privilege of meeting right after he was born.
And now she also has her second child, Yoav. Um, but anyway, being a single mom in New York, right after 9/11 was not necessarily where she wanted to stay. Then her dad, Steven Lewis, who is one of the preeminent advocates and activists around HIV and AIDS. At that time... decided to start, they collectively decided to start the Stephen Lewis foundation and Ilana is going to tell us about that now.
Ilana: I started that foundation to work on HIV and AIDS in Africa to fund, uh, directly put resources into the hands of community-based organizations overwhelmingly run by women, uh, by and for women, but to try and see, to see if it was possible to do it in a different way. Was it actually possible to raise funds and transmit them directly to community-based organizations?
And let them drive the agenda almost entirely and let, set up the foundation to be a buffer with the donors and all of the metrics and all of the impositions that the, that the north wants for us, for it to be our job, to satisfy those needs of the donors and people with money and power and let the community-based organizations, therefore, operate as unfettered as possible to do the work that they thought was the priority and the way that they thought it should unfold. And get out of their way, basically give them the money, get out of their way. And, uh, and I spent 17 years doing that, 16 years doing that, and building a foundation and the process, which was really just meant to be me, my 10 months old, baby, my father and his name, which I frankly, I'm the one who insisted he lend his name to it.
We sent over 130 million dollars to 1800 plus initiatives with over 320, uh, grassroots community-based organizations in the 15 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa,hardest hit by HIV and AIDS in the, in the, in the course of that work, it emerged, the grandmothers and older women in these countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, I think across the continent, we're overwhelmingly stepping in to raise millions of children, orphaned by AIDS.
Uh, we paid special attention to that work, uh, and did a lot of work. And then, um, to be perfectly honest, uh, and I'm in a moment of it's slightly painful reflection, but necessary. I came yet again to the epiphany and not without the, not without the, uh, urgings of people around me and my colleagues, uh, I came to the epiphany yet, again, that even setting up a paradigm shift in the way that we were, we were flowing funds to community-based activists and organizations and women, uh, in these 15 countries, that yet, and still I was replicating within the philanthropic culture and within the culture of the foundation beloved to me as it was, which I had helped to create with my colleagues, uh, that I was in my own person perpetuating the kind of, uh, now I'm getting really serious, forgive me, but the kind of white feminist leadership, which I was raised on and thought was also right, uh, that I was perpetuating that in my very way of being.
Well, it's a bird of the paradigm some of the way. I am the person of who I am managed to perpetuate the part of the paradigm I couldn't...because I'm part of it. So that's an interesting thing in a painful thing to realize, because actually, if you have a principle of socialism, feminism, lesbian feminism, do no harm-ism. Uh, that's a hard truth to come to terms with.
In this moment of revolutionary paradigm shifting revolutionary love and revolutionary accounting. Um, I actually find, I don't know how other people feel. I find that it's, um, it's a very serious and very important and in some way, liberating, this is strange to say moment to, to actually learn how to step aside for real.
I've spent my whole life trying to get out of the way of the women that I thought were really the ones, whatever that means, just as a short form for this conversation. But, uh, now recognizing the ways in which I did that necessarily put me in the way in some ways, and then even allowed me to exercise some of the privilege that I most find most egregious to exercise it, unthinkingly. That's an amazingly, terrible, and the enormity of that realization also comes with a release to realize actually the answer may be to fully get out of the way.
Frees your mind a little bit to imagine yourself out of the picture, how astonishing is that when your whole life as a feminist or as an activist or as lesbian or whatever, whatever, however you identify. The story that our foremothers, in my case, Jewish Ashkenazi mothers that are foremothers told us was how to write ourselves back into the story...into the picture.
So what an astonishing moment, and I recognize the astonishing moment that I'm in is one of deep privilege because I'm not the one in agony over what's happening to my children on the streets. I'm not the one in agony around my people being murdered for no good reason except, uh, hate and the color of their skin.
So it is also still a privilege to be able to come to this, uh, epiphany. But it's an amazing epiphany to think as a feminist, that part of the journey now is, and I don't mean being invisible or silent, none of those horrible things that we wore buttons to say things about. Uh, but rather to, uh, to think about what it means to ...yourself uh, out of the way, in a way that isn't action and not a passive protective stance.
The ugly allure of power under the guise of what in America you call liberalism what I call progressive, uh, uh,a liberal cloak, a liberal shawl, liberal cape, you know, where, and I'm not being, I'm not being mean-spirited about it. I really mean it in a deep way. I mean, as someone who comes from three generations of deep, uh, engagement in and leadership around this, not my generation, the three before, um, around, uh, democratic socialism and egalitarianism, I'm thinking very, very deeply about what it means to own the power that my generation has had and, and how, how much we don't like having that power, how much we try to issue it in pretend ways. I think a lot of the time we've thought we meant it. It just turned out, I think, to be rather inauthentic and how important it was to us to be putting to the, for all of those things that were, they good fight that we were fighting for and who we were in it and not to be able to own the name, figure out what to do about, uh, the ugly underbelly of power and what it did for us.
Idelisse: After 17 years at the foundation doing, I have to say very amazing work and working with so many, so many older women in Africa, as well as outside of Africa, uh, Ilana really had a chance, Joanne, to, to pursue, right, this lifelong fascination that she had both personally with her mother, her grandmother, in her personal life with older women, but also politically about the role that older women do play and can play in the world.
Ilana: Grandmother's on the Move, well, I'm thinking that too deeply too, because here's one of the things I'm realizing, um, it's not just grandmothers, it's older women, of course, and old woman and all of the words that older women use. So some women like older women, some women like crones, and there's so many ways to identify and there should be as many ways as there are women.
Let's face it and, and age, and, and I've had people, lots of grandmothers had older women challenged me to say, why are, why are we making age part of the equation? I had another grandmother say to me I don't like the name of your podcast and I'm not going to be interviewed by you because, uh, grandmotherhood is my personal life.
I'm a grandmother's my personal life. It's my identity as one woman who has grandchildren, but I'm just a woman and I'm a fashionista and I'm a, this, and I'm a that. And I said to her, oh, please, please come on and say that. I actually want you to come on and say that because this podcast is supposed to explore these issues.
And so, uh, far from not coming on and saying something negative, please come, let's, let's have this discussion because part of what, part of where it started was, uh, looking at women, older women who had chosen to identify themselves as grandmothers in the pork they were doing. So in the United States, you have lots of examples of grandmothers against gun violence, grandmothers for reproductive rights, angry tias and abuelas, you know, there's, there, there are many groups, there's a thousand...bay grandmothers, uh, in San Francisco.
So you have, uh, or the wonderful, um, what's going to escape me, but, yeah, what makes the bad-ass grannies who are magnificent. And there's the fierce, there's the fierce, there's many, many of them and the graffiti grannies I love, I love the pasta grannies. I love the, I love the, ...in the Philippines, uh, the Omas in an Austria who are fighting fascism as omas.
So that was very interesting to me. All the women who are using their grandmotherhood and their identity as grandmothers to position themselves, that's where their activism is coming from. They're naming it intentionally because as one they want people to understand grandmotherhood is powerful. Uh, it's not Norman Rockwell.
Thank you very much. Let's shove him in the corner with his nitty grandmother and the rocking chair, a lovely painting, but not the reality of the grandmothers I'm speaking to. They may even love knitting. They may even like sitting in rocking chairs. I do too, but that's not what grandmotherhood means...and for them in the work that they're doing, so that inspired me. Now most of all, what inspired me of course, was the Grandmothers to Grandmothers campaign, which was part of the Stephen Lewis Foundation, which was a solidarity campaign between, uh, over the years, 10,000 grandmothers in Canada, Australia, and a group of the UK who came together in solidarity to support african grandmothers raising millions of children orphan new by AIDS.
There are many older women around the world who are making vital contributions in their families, their communities, the societies, their countries. It is a real force to be reckoned with. You can look at Ruth Bader Ginsburg and you could look at Nancy Pelosi. You could look at women, you like women, you don't like, I don't care.
It's not so much right now about the politics of it. It's the question of, well, why don't we see older women as a force to be reckoned with? We sort of canonize or admire these individuals, but that's not the reality of what's going on.
It seems more important than ever to hear from older women in my framing of it, older men too, in some contexts, but I'm really focusing obviously on older women, it seems really important to me who are these women? These are women who have lived through revolutions in other countries. These are women who've started revolutions in other countries.
These are women, uh, like, like the woman I interviewed in Nicaragua who started off as a Sandinista. Uh, we all know her, she works with(inaudible), uh, but she, you know, she started off as a Sandinista and now she's working with the students as part of a pacifist movement. I mean, these are women who have, um, not just lived through unbelievable moments in human history and have learned from it, they've also been the creators of new movements, new approaches. We need them in the mix in my mind, humanity depends on them (inaudible).
So I have to say, when I think about living through a pandemic of this proportion, or living through a revolution, racial justice revolution, I'm very glad that there are young people everywhere on the front lines, in the media, everywhere they can be they ought to be. Personally, what I find myself gravitating to is older.
They're the ones who are keeping my hope alive for humanity in this moment. This is the real truth of how I feel and what I see. So they're the ones I turn to. Are we going to make it, is there ever going to be equality? Can white women ever get it together and be useful in any way and not keep screwing up and hurting people in the name of feminism? Is there a way forward here?
The very first interview I ever did was with my mother. And at one point I said something to her. It was before COVID, was before all of the uprisings of a, for everything. And still we were talking, we were talking in pretty bleak terms about the state of the earth. I think it was at that point, it was climate change that was on our minds.
And I said to you to, what do you take hope from? And she looked at me and she said, honey, there's optimism in survival. Right? And I looked at her, I thought, right. That's why I go to older women. Right. I mean, I'm lucky, I'm blessed with a mother who just has, you know, pearls of wisdom and one-liners, that are awfully good.
She's a writer by profession, but you know, I can honestly say my entire life, I have benefited from how older women, what the lenses that they bring to it, in all its diversity and complexity. It's not uniform by any stretch of the imagination. So that's why I did Grandmothers, that's really why I kept going with Grandmothers on the Move.
Part of the joy of the podcast for me is finding a way to earn the trust of the women that I'm speaking to. Why on earth should they share with me their deepest anything?
So my question is, you know, how do you create a moment, an atmosphere and a moment of comfort? Um, Uh, the, the ability to share as much as you can across differences, uh, in all of those differences, because for every conversation there's many of them. And, uh, and how do you create this, uh, this space which allows the women to come forward in whatever way they want to and, and feel good about it afterwards so they feel quite great? And I've had women, I can't tell you how many women I've interviewed, but at the end they say to me, okay, okay, that was all right.
I usually, I'm really exhausted at the end of them, uh, because I've been thinking, so like, I been listening so hard because just like you, I don't have... an agenda. I don't go in with a set of questions. I never send questions ahead of time. I don't even know what we're going to talk about. Uh, yeah, because that's not these aren't, they're not scripted and that's not what this is.
And I find at the end, I'm usually I have this...it must be how it, how it feels when you're really vigorous, uh, athlete is what I think that kind of this release of endorphins or whatever it is that you get. Cause it's not like, I feel like I've run a marathon. It's not quite like that. It's that, um, the intensity of the listening so that you can really honor what this woman is saying to you and have a real meaningful conversation or response to what she's saying, coupled with this kind of euphoria at the end of it. Because every shared story feels like, you know, one more drop in the, in, in the fighting the good fight cup, or one more drop in the doing right by somebody's story cup.
One of the things that has been really, it's not surprising to me, I fully expected it, it's just been much more of a, of a joy than I anticipated actually, is finding, um, finding older women and grandmothers who are doing one of two things. Working in groups, who've actually put groups together, um, and are doing activists as older women together.
Those are amazing stories. I mean, they're just breathtaking stories and there's really inspiring. I actually find that more, um, more edifying in a way and more interesting radio. If you will, then the women who are professionals at this, not that they don't have important things to say too, but I actually find the women who are kind of, they're surprised themselves at what they've done and what they've been able to do.
I really, I love that. And the other thing that I've found very amazing as that is women, um, who are, uh, who are doing this, who were never activists before.
Joanne: Right, who just got inspired.
Ilana: Right. They got inspired. They got pissed off. They got really, really worried, you know, and they, and part of it for sure in America is, you know, the advent of Trump and then the outrage.
And yet people getting galvanized who had not been galvanized before, but not entirely. Right. Like a lot of these women hit this point when they be, when they got older and they realized, because so many of them have said to me over the last year and a half, couple of years of doing this, uh, I never thought I'd be doing this.
You know, I got, I got to the age where I don't care. What am I good at? What are they going to do? Fire me? I don't have a job right now. Or even if I am working, I don't care if they fire me and I no longer care what my kid's teacher thinks of me. And I'm not, I'm worried about embarrassing my son, he's 40.
Joanne: Ilana loves learning and she loves podcasting because she learns so much from the women that she interviews. And she told us about one of her early interviews, where she was talking with a doctor who specializes in gerontology from Columbia, who told her something absolutely inspiring, a reframe really of what it means to be older.
Ilana: She said grandmothers are the most forward-looking people, uh, in our, in our society because they're the ones who are really thinking about what kind of planet their grandchildren will inherit. And they're really done with looking backward and they're not captured in the presence with all of the extraordinary concerns of, you know, raising your children to be good people and, uh, investing in your career, or just keeping your family going and healthy and safe, et cetera, et cetera.
They're in a moment where they can look forward and have vision for what the world will look like and what they want it to look like and then invest in that in very few other demographics, populations can.
Older women in my life, and I don't, they don't have to be all of them 80 at any given point women who are even five years, 10 years older than I am older women all my life have been my guiding posts. They've been the place where I get hope. They've been the place where I figure out how to push through a despair.
They've been the ones who give me a framework for how to interpret the world or understand it. And that's no way to diss my father of who I'm very fond and who I think was quite a smart person, but in terms of how I identify in the, and I'm going to be essentialist in a way that is a little in for dig, but in terms of the deep, in terms of the connection between the political intelligence and the emotional intelligence uh, of history and looking backward and looking forward, it has actually been the older women in my life, in how they see the world in all, and I'm talking about women from all over the world in many, many different walks of life. And so for me that when, uh, when the professor said this to me, uh, it was like, it was like one of those moments when you're in a theater and it's dark and they turn the floodlight on and you know exactly where your eyes should go.
And in that moment, you surrender completely to the experience you're about to have, because someone's just turned a light on and said, this is where you will now be looking. And this is how you will be feeling about this moment where you're looking over here and you really have to render in that moment.
Joanne and Idelisse: So thank you for joining Two Old Bitches for another extraordinary conversation, please visit us on iTunes, Apple podcasts, Stitcher, wherever you get your podcasts. We'd love for you to give us a review. And we're going to take you out with, well, actually, we also want you to listen to Grandmothers on the Move, right.
Um, but to get you in the mood, right, we want to end with I, what I think of is a tribute to Ilana's grandmother who wanted to keep her Jewish granddaughter safe in Toronto and thought it would really matter that she have excellent posture and perfect elocution. So she would have Ilana recite what you're going to hear her recite right now.
Ilana: My beloved grandmother was very, very proper and, uh, was very afraid that she would be, that someone would know that she came from Russia and send her back so her whole life, because they had immigrated, she was a baby under a hay cart when they escaped through Germany. Then they went to England. So her whole life, she made me walk across the room with books on my head and I would have to recite to my grandmother.
Um, I would have to say Mary got married. And she had a parrot who liked carrots and she married a man called Harry. And unfortunately, Harry was very hairy..
