Chicago therapist turns podcaster after October 7

Manya Marcus (right), host of What Came After and founder of WCA Media, pictured in Israel with Oz Bar-Liss, co-host of WCA’s forthcoming podcast, Can You Hear Me Now? (Photo credit: Shanie Roth Photography)

Manya Marcus described herself as a “shell” in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Israel on October 7. 

“I was shocked. I felt like I wasn’t present as a therapist, as a parent, or as a partner,” said Marcus, a Chicago social worker and mother of three young daughters. 

Six thousand miles away from friends facing the horror in their homeland, she found comfort in Wartime Diaries, a miniseries from the podcast Israel Story. The 15-minute Diaries episodes shared interviews about how people were doing as the war in Gaza raged. 

“Hearing those a couple times a week really was soothing to me. I found that I was able to function better on the days that I heard one,” Marcus said. 

But then the stories of Wartime Diaries ended and Marcus again found herself struggling. 

Recognizing that she talks to people all day in her role as a therapist, her husband suggested she record her own interviews. 

“We talked about it on a Wednesday, and on Sunday, all these Amazon boxes were at the door, and I had a podcast studio set up in our bedroom,” she said. 

Her husband is an American military veteran who knows how to take action under pressure. He had ordered the equipment she needed, giving birth to What Came After, a podcast about life after October 7. 

Marcus conducted three interviews via Zoom, but quickly realized she preferred in-person conversations. She got portable equipment, and took off on a worldwide adventure. 

Since the spring of 2024, she’s recorded 110 interviews across Israel, and in Chicago, New York, Washington D.C., Seattle, Princeton, N.J., Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Rome, and Warsaw. 

She’s released six seasons of the podcast What Came After. She’s also aired the miniseries Between Sirens, featuring interviews she recorded in bomb shelters during the war with Iran. 

Along the way, she’s interviewed people with a broad range of perspectives including Jews, non-Jews, Zionists, anti-Zionists, rabbis, academics, and artists. 

With a particular interest in European Jewry, she focused the third season on how that population is handling current events. She heard varying opinions, including an Israeli journalist who said that the Jewish community has no future in Europe, and a Dutch rabbi who predicted that the future of Judaism in Amsterdam is Israelis. 

Marcus also interviewed Oz Bar-Liss, an Israeli urban planner and an October 7 survivor, who turned from guest to co-host when he suggested a new series. Can You Hear Me Now? uses Israeli music to understand what it feels like to be Jewish in Israel and the diaspora. It’s set for release in January. 

Now, three years after the attacks, Marcus has put most of her therapeutic work with clients on hold to run her media company, WCA Media, that she is self-funding with hopes of finding additional community support. 

It’s become more than a full-time job, which she says has brought new meaning to her life. 

“I just feel so connected to the past. I feel such duty to the future,” she said. 

All of this is quite a shift for a woman who grew up in an interfaith household in Lincoln Park with little religion. “My mother is Jewish. My father was raised by evangelical Christians. The religious thread in my life, until I was about 17 or 18, was Easter and Christmas,” she explained. Through her own exploration, she found her way to Judaism while a religious studies student at Northwestern University. 

At age 44, she recognizes the challenge of encouraging today’s young people to embrace Judaism and Israel, and she hopes her work can make a difference. “I want my listeners to know that if they want their kids and their grandkids to just be engaged with it at all—which is not to say they love it—they’re going to have to be willing to tell them smaller stories, and to engage them in new ways.” she said. 

Julie Mangurten Weinberg is a Chicago-based freelance journalist with 25+ years of experience in broadcast, print, and digital media.