Brandeis Magazine

By Susan Piland
Photography By Alie Skowronski

“He’s a provocateur, you know,” says Karmela Waldman, 85.

She’s talking about her 55-year-old son, Joel Waldman ’91, her verbal sparring partner for the past half century or so. In 2021, their bickering went public with the launch of a podcast Joel developed, which today livestreams on YouTube five times a week.

Joel listens impatiently as his mother describes him. A few minutes later, he lives up to his billing. As Karm praises his even-keeled older sister, he interjects, just audibly and with dry comedic timing, “She’s very boring.”

Karm sets the record straight, firmly: “She takes after my husband, who was in no way boring, and she is in no way boring.”

The podcast is called “Surviving the Survivor,” a phrase that reflects Joel’s view of his life with his no-nonsense mother, who earned the “survivor” moniker as a child, when she barely escaped capture by the Nazis in the former Yugoslavia, now Serbia. Karm’s 32-year-old father was not as lucky; he was murdered at Auschwitz in 1944.

Joel had the idea for a podcast after he and his wife and kids moved to Miami during the pandemic to be near his mother and father. Tapping Karm as a co-host made sense. Mother and son are “two peas in a pod,” according to Karm. Both are funny; both are quick on the uptake. And both enjoy getting to the bottom of people’s motivations. Joel used to do that as a TV news reporter, and Karm was once a therapist. In the podcast’s early episodes, they interviewed a variety of guests — Carole Baskin, of “Tiger King” fame, for example (Karm kept calling the show “Lion King”).

Then they did a few episodes on a high-profile South Florida crime — the apparent murder-forhire of law professor Dan Markel. Members of Markel’s ex-wife’s family were under suspicion. (Markel’s former brother-in-law, Charlie Adelson, has since been convicted of first-degree murder and is serving a life sentence. Donna Adelson, the former mother-in-law, is behind bars, awaiting trial.) Audience numbers spiked, and Joel pivoted “Surviving the Survivor” to an exclusively true-crime focus.

The wisdom of that move is reflected in the podcast’s current metrics. “Surviving the Survivor” boasts 136,000 subscribers, and between 2 million to 3 million downloads and views every month.

A book editor, impressed by the podcast’s success, convinced Joel to write a memoir. Also titled “Surviving the Survivor,” it was published by Post Hill Press last year. It’s a poignant account of Karm’s life, and an inside look at Joel and Karm’s lovingly fractious relationship. It’s also very funny.

Joel calls it “the only laugh-out-loud Holocaust book ever written,” and he’s probably right.

A door in the fence

The story of Karm’s Holocaust childhood is both depressingly familiar and as individual as a fingerprint. In June 1944, Hungarian SS agents showed up before dawn at her family’s house in the Jewish ghetto in Subotica, Yugoslavia. The family — 4-year-old Karm and her mother and father — were told to pack up, now, for transport by train.

Although Karm’s parents had doubted any escape attempt could be successful, her mother was desperate to do something, anything. She took her daughter’s hand and ran through a small door in their back-garden fence. Karm’s father stayed behind. Within months, he had perished in an Auschwitz gas chamber.

HOMECOMING: Joel and Karm Waldman in Budapest’s Great Synagogue, during their 2023 trip to visit sites from Karm’s childhood.
Photo Courtesy Joel Waldman

But Karm and her mother were able to get away. They went to a Catholic boys’ school in town, where the nuns agreed to hide the little Jewish girl.

At the end of 1944, Karm’s mother and grandmother, who were now in Budapest, sent someone to fetch her. In Nazi-controlled Budapest, the trio managed to evade capture (in public settings, Karm would loudly recite the Catholic prayers she had learned, as cover). They survived the Russian assault on the city. And when the war was over, they went back home to Subotica.

Karm met her future husband, Roy, at the University of Geneva, in Switzerland. She was studying politics. He was a medical student. They moved to the U.S.; got married; and raised Joel and his sister in Highland Park, New Jersey, not far from Rutgers University, where Karm earned a Master of Social Work. Roy was a psychiatrist. Karm was a licensed marriage therapist. Family life was comfortably suburban. Education was a priority.

If you ask Karm what her rules for living are, she’ll probably tell you this: Act, don’t ruminate. Remember that things usually work out.

Most important, enjoy your life every day, because you never know when it will end.

True crime’s Larry King

Both Karm and Joel agree she expected a lot from her son, who was plagued by anxiety and indecision, traits he attributes to his family’s generational trauma, not to mention the fact that both his parents were therapists.

Yet Joel’s creativity and intelligence were undeniable. Karm was thrilled when he got into Brandeis, believing the close attention he’d get from faculty would help him flourish. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in English, Joel made his way up the broadcast-news career ladder, working at Fox5 in New York City and as a Fox News correspondent in Washington, D.C.

By the time he’d hit the 23-year mark in TV news, he’d had enough of an industry that was relentlessly cutthroat and far from a meritocracy. He left to start his own communications consulting business.

Increasingly, podcasts like “Surviving the Survivor” are helping to “democratize” news coverage, Joel says, allowing people to choose what they watch and eroding the once-dominant position of the major networks. Case in point: One morning last February, Joel did a livestream that covered an appearance by Donna Adelson in court. Around 8,000 YouTube viewers tuned in to watch it live. Over time, the video will likely draw 80,000-100,000 views.

“On certain stories, our numbers are competitive with massive media companies’ numbers,” he says.

“Surviving the Survivor” airs as a 90-minute livestream on YouTube every weeknight. Joel leads a revolving panel of guests — criminal defense attorneys, forensic psychologists, security experts — in a discussion of a particular criminal case, making him “the de facto Larry King of true crime,” he says. Audio from the livestream is available on the major podcast platforms. Karm makes an appearance whenever a topic really interests her.

In addition to the Adelsons, the podcast has covered such accused wrongdoers as Bryan Kohberger and Lori Vallow Daybell. Eighty-two percent of the podcast’s viewers/listeners are women. Joel and Karm believe Karm’s presence appeals to them. “If Joel had done this solo, it would have gotten less traction,” Karm says.

Building on the podcast’s popularity, Joel recently launched a YouTube network called True Crime Talk, which he hopes will eventually present content that runs 12 hours a day.

The NSFW media star

The editor who asked Joel to write a memoir gave him just six months to produce a complete manuscript. Joel was so anxious about writing a book that he barely reread a chapter once it was done, never rewrote a word and has never once read the entire book straight through.

Each chapter opens with the transcript of an actual voicemail left by Karm (an amuse-bouche for anyone who’s watched an elderly relative grapple with newish technology), then covers a specific topic — Karm’s childhood, for instance, or her thoughts on marriage, money or children.

To capture their repartee, Joel taped his and Karm’s conversations about the topics. The resulting text has an entertainingly brisk, stream-of-consciousness flow, placing the reader in a ringside seat as mother and son defend their conflicting takes. It also explains why the “Surviving the Survivor” logo puts a parental-advisory label over Karm’s mouth: She’s a world-class curser (the book includes a brief postscript in which she promises to work on this).

A sad event brackets the book as a whole. In its early pages, Joel’s dad is in a nursing facility in declining health. By the book’s end, Roy has died, at age 89, a painful blow for his family, especially Karm. Joel is writing a new book, “Surviving the Psychiatrist,” as a tribute to his father, again working with Karm’s help.

In the meantime, everyone is clamoring for more Karm. Joel and his mom have talked with Fox News, ABC News and CBS News; the book has been featured on PBS’ “Between the Covers”; and Karm’s been interviewed by the National World War II Museum, in New Orleans. Joel and Karm make public appearances together and appear on other people’s podcasts.

Two summers ago, the woman Joel calls his superhero took an emotional journey back to Subotica and Budapest. Joel; his wife, Ileana; and their kids, Vida, 11, Zizi, 9, and Judah Mac, 6, went along, too. Together, the family saw the house Karm grew up in and the Catholic school that hid her, and found her father’s gravestone.

As the years tick by, Holocaust survivors are a rarer and rarer breed. Karm is still moving forward, determined to enjoy her life with warmth and humor, and a few F-bombs.

One day, a group of Jewish ladies sitting around the pool at her condo building asked her to bless them. She couldn’t believe it, she says, because “I have the biggest mouth and I’m the biggest sinner.” Nevertheless, since then, “I have been blessing people left and right.”

She smiles as she explains the reason for her exalted status: “Holocaust envy.”