Vox Tablet

So Long, Farewell

Fri, 24 Jun 2016 04:30:00 GMT

Since 2005, the Vox Tablet team—producer Julie Subrin and host Sara Ivry—have done our best to create a Jewish podcast with conversations, stories, and reports from across the Jewish cultural world. But good things—even pioneering, award-winning podcasts—come to an end, and their makers move on to new adventures elsewhere. In our final episode, we take a brief walk down memory lane to some of our favorite moments from the past decade. Among highlights we feature are our visits with actor Fyvush Finkel; illustrator and author Roz Chast; Silver Jews’ frontman David Berman; tourists en route to the Statue of Liberty; South African justice Albie Sachs; attendees at an annual deli luncheon in a small Mississippi town; Israeli musician Noam Inbar; and West Side Story aficionado Alisa Solomon.

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Louis Brandeis: The Jewish Boy From Kentucky Who Became a Supreme Court Legend

Wed, 15 Jun 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Exactly a century ago, President Woodrow Wilson nominated Louis Brandeis to the Supreme Court. After a contentious confirmation process, he became the first Jewish justice, serving on the bench for 23 years. His rulings on privacy, workers’ rights, and free speech feel as relevant today as they did when he issued them, and his foresight, wisdom, and clear-spokenness cemented his reputation as nothing short of a visionary.In Louis D. Brandeis: American Prophet, writer Jeffrey Rosen explores Brandeis’s personal and professional life. He joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to discuss the influence Thomas Jefferson had on Brandeis—known as the "Jewish Jefferson," the justice’s ruling in Whitney v. California—a landmark free speech case, and why Brandeis is uniquely relevant in the fractious political climate of our day.

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Tanya's Story

Wed, 08 Jun 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Tanya Zajdel grew up in a Hasidic family in Montreal and was excited to embark on her life as a wife and mother after marrying a charismatic rabbinical student when she was 19. It didn’t take long, though, for Tanya to realize that her marriage was not going to be as she’d expected. No matter how hard she tried to live up to the ideal of the perfect Jewish wife—supportive, modest, an upholder of shalom bayit, or “peace in the home”—her husband responded with increasingly volatile and sometimes violent behavior.It took Tanya a long time to figure out how to do the right thing for herself and her family. This is her story, brought to us by producers Shea Shackelford andTori Marlan. A warning to sensitive listeners: This piece includes descriptions of violence.

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A New Kind of Prayerbook

Wed, 11 May 2016 04:01:00 GMT

Earlier this year, the Rabbinical Assembly of the Conservative movement put out a new prayer book, or siddur. Siddur Lev Shalem, which means ‘full heart,’ is full of innovations. There are new translations of traditional prayers. Poems are included. There are commentaries on different parts of the Sabbath and holiday services. There are straightforward explanations of simple rites and gestures, like when and why to bow during the Amidah. The last time the Conservative movement published a new siddur was 15 years ago—not so very long. What compelled rabbis to put together a new siddur so soon? How does it differ from what preceded it?Rabbi Edward Feld, who oversaw the creation of Siddur Lev Shalem, joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to talk about the whats, whys, and hows behind this new prayer book.

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Hey Mister DJ, Put a (Diaspora-Blending, Genre-Bending) Record On

Mon, 25 Apr 2016 04:01:00 GMT

Rob Weisberg, the host of the world music radio program Transpacific Sound Paradise, joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to talk about a trio of new genre-bending projects: A-Wa, Sandaraa, and Schizophonia. A-Wa are Israeli sisters of Yemeni ancestry who invoke the music of legendary singer Ofra Haza. Sandaraa joins Pashtun songs from Pakistani singer Zeb Bangash with the Eastern European klezmer clarinet of Michael Winograd. And Schizophonia, a project of guitarist Yoshie Fruchter, reconceives cantorial songs by setting them in a rock and roll context.Weisberg shares a bit of background about each project and we listen in for ourselves to these energetic and riveting sounds.

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From Kooky Waif to A-List Beauty: The Story of Barbra StreisandUntitled Episode

Wed, 13 Apr 2016 04:01:00 GMT

Barbra Streisand turns 75 next year. In her 50-plus year career, she has made her mark on the silver screen, on Broadway, in nightclubs, and on the record charts. Her beginnings were humble—she grew up poor and scrappy in Brooklyn with a mother and stepfather who were far from encouraging, and knew early on that she wanted to be a star regardless of her unconventional looks and comportment. How did she do it? What was the source of her broad appeal? And why does she stand out as a unique cultural figure in the landscape of so-called ethnic performers?Writer Neal Gabler tackles these and other questions in Barbra Streisand: Redefining Beauty, Femininity, and Power, a new title in Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives Series. Gabler joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to discuss Streisand as an ersatz Christ figure, how she has functioned as a metaphor for American Jewishness, and the deep debt she's owed by Melissa McCarthy and Adele.

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What's Free Will Got To Do With It?

Wed, 30 Mar 2016 04:01:00 GMT

Especially in election season, we love talking about the moral fiber (or lack thereof) of our candidates. But when it comes to ethics, no man—or woman—is an island. Host Sara Ivry talks to Professor of Religious Studies Heidi Ravven about the myth of "free will," and how neuroscience along with philosophical traditions from Aristotle to Maimonides to Spinoza may offer more useful ways for us to think about how to foster ethical behavior and moral societies.

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Builders of a New Jerusalem

Fri, 18 Mar 2016 04:01:00 GMT

Host Sara Ivry talks to writer Adina Hoffman about her new book, Till We Have Built Jerusalem, which brings to life three architects who transformed the city in the days of the British Mandate.

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Bathe in the Waters

Wed, 02 Mar 2016 05:01:00 GMT

Traditionally, Orthodox Jews submerge themselves in mikvehs—ritual baths—to purify themselves. Producer Hannah Reich has always been drawn to water—to rivers, oceans, pools—and was fascinated by the idea that ritual submersion sanctifies the sexual relationship between a man and a woman. At the same time, though, she was conflicted over how such an act can be reconciled with feminism and acceptance of the body as is. Through mikveh visits and in conversations with the ‘Mikvah Lady’ of Melbourne, the first female rabbi in the Southern Hemisphere, and other Jewish women, she explores these questions in “Immersion.” This documentary first aired on the program Earshot from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

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Beyond Drake

Tue, 16 Feb 2016 05:00:11 GMT

February is Black History month. To celebrate, Tablet contributor and JN Magazine editor MaNishtana is writing a series of blog posts introducing readers to Jews of Color whose religious affiliation you might not have known.

Think: less Drake, more Lani Gunier.

MaNishtana joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to discuss the whats and hows of this project, his own Jewish roots, and why questions about the different parts of his identity makes no sense.

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The Saddlemaker, the Schindler, and the Miller of Wlodowa

Wed, 03 Feb 2016 05:00:40 GMT

A short-story collection that revolves around the Holocaust is a tough sell. Make it colorful, or optimistic, and it’s pure fairytale. Dwell on the ugliness, the death and depravity, and it becomes perverse–or simply unbearable. Besides, what is there left to say?

Then along comes In the Land of Armadillos, by Helen Maryles Shankman, a New Jersey-based writer and painter. The eight stories in the collection are interwoven, and all but one take place in or around the remote Polish town of Wlodawa. Shankman shows us a world in which German officers, Poles, and Jews regularly cross paths. It’s a...

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The Man Behind the Mustache

Wed, 20 Jan 2016 05:00:19 GMT

When we think of Groucho Marx, we think of a giant of comedy. From his cigar to his wisecracks, Groucho, along with his brothers, established the fundamentals of American comedy. Indeed, it was he who first said he’d want no part of a club that would have him as a member—a notion made famous by a Brooklyn-bred heir named Woody Allen.

As critic Lee Siegel argues in Groucho Marx: The Comedy of Existence, Marx’s humor was predicated on disdain toward others—he was hardly a cuddly character, or a champion of the downtrodden, as critics and fans alike have painted him. Groucho and his brothers were all about disrupting social norms and...

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A Year of Firsts

Wed, 06 Jan 2016 05:00:10 GMT

In 2008, at the age of 23, Luzer Twersky left his wife, his children, and the Hasidic community in Borough Park, Brooklyn, to try to make a new life for himself. He was tired of pretending to feel and believe things he no longer felt or believed. Since then, Twersky has gone on to become an actor; he now lives in Los Angeles, and has a leading part in Felix and Meira, Canada’s submission for the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, as well as a small part in the second season of the Amazon TV series

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For the Love of Suzie Louise: A Christmas Story

Tue, 22 Dec 2015 05:00:55 GMT

As Christmas 1963 approaches, a statue of the baby Jesus goes missing from the town manger in Skokie, Illinois. Its theft causes great distress to nearly everyone, including 9-year-old, flaxen-haired Suzie Louise Anderson. In the hopes of becoming her hero and solidifying their love, Suzie Louise’s young boyfriend, a Jew, cobbles together a posse to try to recover the stolen figure, and to restore joy and peace to the girl’s life.

Read by Ken Marks, ‘For the Love of Suzie Louise’ is adapted from the novel My Surburban Shtetl, by Robert Rand. Sound design is by Jonathan Groubert.

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The Most Haunted Leading Man

Wed, 09 Dec 2015 05:00:08 GMT

The antithesis of nearly every Holocaust movie ever made, the Hungarian film Son of Saul is slim on happy endings. Directed by László Nemes, it tells the story of a member of the Sonderkommando, the Jews who ushered their co-religionists off the trains into the showers and who, after the gassings, cleared those showers out to ready them for the next batch of victims. Saul, portrayed by Géza Röhrig, is shaken out of his numbness and despair by the body of a child who survives the gassing and suddenly, amid the true-life rebellion of the Sonderkommando in October 1944, engages in his own form of resistance.

With a camera that rarely takes...

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Girlhood, Interrupted

Mon, 23 Nov 2015 05:00:53 GMT

The steady stream of people currently fleeing Syria for Europe is a sobering sight, but it’s not a new one. The plight of refugees all over the world is age-old. Cynthia Kaplan Shamash was a child refugee in 1972, when her family—among Iraq’s last Jews—tried to flee their homeland. Their first attempt was thwarted, and the family landed in jail. A second attempt was a success; Cynthia is now a dentist in the United States, but the family’s itinerancy came with great personal losses.

In The Strangers We Became: Lessons in Exile From One of Iraq’s Last Jews, Shamash details her family’s exile from Iraq to Israel to the Netherlands. She joins Vox...

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Let ‘Freedom’ Ring: A Flutist Gives Life to Musical Celebrations of Liberations

Mon, 09 Nov 2015 05:00:03 GMT

Mimi Stillman is a world-renowned flutist heralded by the New York Times as “a consummate and charismatic performer.” Stillman is the founder and artistic director of the Dolce Suono Ensemble, a Philadelphia-based chamber group. Also a historian, she brings both interests—history and music—to bear on her latest release, an album called Freedom.

Freedom features compositions by Richard Danielpour, David Finko, and the late

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Sweet Madeleine

Mon, 26 Oct 2015 04:00:58 GMT

Best known for his seven-volume masterpiece A La Recherche du Temps Perdu (In Search of Lost Time), French writer Marcel Proust is considered to be one of the finest novelists of the 20th century. Though born into upper-class society—his Catholic father was a doctor and his Jewish mother came from a well-known Jewish family—Proust did not show much ambition or aptitude as a young man. Indeed, he was a dilettante and man about town who spent his time having love affairs and squandering an inheritance.

As biographer Benjamin Taylor makes clear in Proust: The Search, all...

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Puzzle Master

Tue, 13 Oct 2015 04:00:26 GMT

A genizah is an area in a synagogue or Jewish cemetery where sacred texts that are in disuse are stored. Traditionally, a text is considered sacred if it’s got the name of God written on it, whether in a liturgical form or simply in a greeting like “Praise Be to the Almighty” written at the top of a letter. The most famous genizah was in Cairo at the Ben Ezra synagogue. It held documents dating to the 9th century; those documents helped scholars piece together what life was like for Jews in the middle ages. Until fairly recently, people who studied genizah fragments mostly looked at the Hebrew or Aramaic, piecing together documents to figure...

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The Original Gallery Girl

Wed, 30 Sep 2015 04:00:49 GMT

The name Guggenheim is synonymous with modern art. That's thanks to Solomon Guggenheim and his famous museum on Fifth Avenue in New York City. Credit also goes to his niece Peggy, who championed icons like Jackson Pollock and Wassily Kandinsky and established influential galleries in New York, London, and Venice, where she eventually settled. Guggenheim also lived a unique personal life; she was twice married—once to the painter Max Ernst—and claimed in her memoirs to have had a thousand lovers, including Samuel Beckett.

How did she become a key figure in the modern art landscape? What personal demons did fight along the way? What is her legacy? These are questions writer Francine Prose tackles in...

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My Grandfather, the Secret Policeman

Wed, 16 Sep 2015 04:00:49 GMT

Poet and writer Rita Gabis grew up surrounded by grandparents with accents—Russian, Yiddish, Lithuanian. That makes it sound like a familiar Jewish immigrant tale, but it was far from that. While Gabis’s father came from a family of Russian Jews who immigrated to the United States well before WWII, her mother was born in Lithuania. She and her family emigrated in the 1950s. And they were Catholic.

As a child, Gabis was vaguely aware that these two different family backgrounds were at odds with each other. It was as an adult, however, that she came to understand that the divide went much deeper, and that her mother’s father, her beloved Senelis as she called him...

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Beyond the Pulpit

Mon, 31 Aug 2015 04:00:50 GMT

For the past nine years, at this time of year, Andy Bachman, a favorite Vox Tablet guest, would be gathering his thoughts in order to lead High Holiday services at Brooklyn’s Congregation Beth Elohim. Bachman was the head rabbi there. It’s a synagogue with a reputation for community engagement and social activism, and claims among its congregants a host of outspoken and influential personalities (Sen. Charles Schumer and Jonathan Safran Foer are among them).

This year is different. Bachman stepped down from the pulpit earlier this summer and...

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André Aciman, Sarah Wildman, and Others Build a Summer Reading List

Fri, 14 Aug 2015 04:00:42 GMT

There are roughly three weeks until the summer clock unofficially runs down. How will you spend these last lazy days? Maybe you’ll be under an umbrella by the sea or in a hammock next to a green meadow or flopped on a big, soft couch in your very own living room. Wherever you are, you’ll want a good book by your side.

To help you figure out exactly what that good book will be, Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry asked some experts what they’ve enjoyed reading this summer and what they’re still yearning to dive into.

Music for this week’s podcast comes from Podington Bear.

***

Book Recommendations:

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And Now for Something Completely Different

Mon, 03 Aug 2015 04:00:28 GMT

First there was Vox Tablet. Then there was Israel Story. Now, we are excited to present Unorthodox, Tablet’s newest podcast and part of Slate’s Panoply network.

Hosted by Tablet Editor-at-Large Mark Oppenheimer and featuring Deputy Editor Stephanie Butnick and Senior Writer Liel Leibovitz, the weekly show includes fresh, fun, and “disturbingly honest” (says Oppenheimer) discussion of the latest Jewish news and culture, plus interviews with two guests—one Jewish, the other not.

In the first episode, which you can listen to below or by subscribing to Unorthodox on iTunes, after a weighty disquisition on the place of Adam Sandler and Andy Samberg in contemporary Jewish culture, the panelists chat with...

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How One Zealous Looter Changed Jewish History in the Name of Its Preservation

Wed, 22 Jul 2015 04:00:31 GMT

In 1961, a librarian in a municipal archive in Strasbourg caught a visitor tearing pages out of a manuscript and stuffing them into his briefcase. The visitor, it turned out, was a widely respected historian who had done ground-breaking scholarship on the history of Jews in France.

It soon became apparent that this was not the first time Zosa Szajkowski had procured documents by questionable means. He’d been doing so for years, before, during and especially after the Holocaust, and the thousands of pages he’d collected had in turn been sold to important archives throughout the United States and Israel. Why did he...

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Einstein: Patent Clerk, Rebel, Equivocal Zionist

Wed, 08 Jul 2015 04:00:18 GMT

For many Jews, the fact that Albert Einstein was Jewish is a point of pride. But what do we know about his Jewish self-identification? And how many folks out there could claim to have a basic understanding of his General Theory of Relativity? In Einstein: His Space and Time, biographer Steven Gimbel tackles these and other fundamental aspects of Einstein’s life and work. Gimbel is chairman of the philosophy department at Gettysburg College. He spoke with Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about Einstein’s religious period (it came to an abrupt end when he discovered geometry at age 10), his clashes with all forms of authority, and his love of Israel, which fit uneasily with his profound distrust of nationalism. Gimbel also lays out the basic tenets of Einstein’s achievements in physics in terms that will make even science-phobes comfortable.

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Recovering From a Brain Injury, One Measuring Spoon at a Time

Wed, 24 Jun 2015 04:00:18 GMT

Photo: Jessica Fechtor

Jessica Fechtor was just 28 years old when a blood vessel in her brain burst while she was exercising on a treadmill. Newly married, she was pursuing a Ph.D. in Jewish literature at Harvard, and she and her husband had just started thinking about having a baby. Now, suddenly, she was facing a long and difficult recovery–one that got even harder when complications arose after an initial surgery.

Before she was even out of the hospital, Jessica started making lists. Not to-do lists, but grocery lists. She’d always loved cooking, and suddenly, the act of mixing ingredients to produce something delicious for herself and for the people around her felt more important than ever.

She describes what happened in a new book that’s two parts memoir and one part cookbook. It’s...

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A Lullaby for Auschwitz

Wed, 13 May 2015 04:00:05 GMT

More than a decade ago, an Italian-born Jerusalem-based singer named Shulamit learned of a collection of songs composed in concentration camps during WWII. Written by a handful of women most of whom perished in the war, the songs nearly possessed her. Shulamit began performing them, and in 2013 started working with trumpet player Frank London, of the Klezmatics, and the Israeli pianist Shai Bachar, to make arrangements and adaptations for an album.

That album, called For You the Sun Will Shine: Songs of Women in the Shoa, is now out.

From her apartment in Jerusalem, Shulamit tells Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about the individual...

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I Was a Teenage Stowaway

Wed, 29 Apr 2015 04:00:27 GMT

These days it'd be pretty hard to walk without a ticket onto a boarding airplane bound for an international locale. Between the TSA and sniffer dogs, any would-be stowaway would likely see the inside of a jail cell pretty fast. But before September 11, in fact, before 1970, it wasn't quite as challenging.

When Victor Rodack, now a psychiatrist in his 60s, was a young teenager he had but one dream: to get to Israel. He tells Vox Tablet producer Julie Subrin exactly how he made that dream come true.

Bonus track: Listen to Victor’s press conference at JFK Airport, just after he landed back in the United States. (Thanks to Victor Rodack and Paul Ruest for making this archival interview...

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Abraham Lincoln’s Other Minority

Wed, 15 Apr 2015 04:00:25 GMT

The 16th president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, was known for many things, among them his humble origins, his commitment to ending slavery, his assassination exactly 150 years ago at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C. Less well-parsed were his relationships with Jews. And there were many such ties. Lincoln and the Jews, by Jonathan Sarna and Benjamin Shapell, examines scores of documents and archival materials to show that Lincoln befriended many Jews and also worked to include them in various strata of government.

Sarna, a historian at Brandeis University, joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to...

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We’ll Be Here All Night

Sun, 29 Mar 2015 02:00:20 GMT

What do we talk about at Passover? Slavery, plagues, food, and of course all the unforgettable stories from Seders past. In this Passover special, produced by Vox Tablet for public radio stations (and you), we’ve got all that and more—hosted by Sara Ivry and Jonathan Goldstein, with stories from Etgar Keret, Sally Herships, Debbie Nathan, Michael Twitty, and Jonathan Groubert.

We’ll Be Here All Night, Part 1: Plagues
Co-host Jonathan Goldstein speaks with writer and filmmaker Etgar Keret about the narrative strengths and weaknesses of the Passover story, ending with an animated discussion of the 10 plagues. Next, reporter Sally Herships takes us into the home of Abigail Rosenfeld...

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The Life and Painting of Mark Rothko

Wed, 18 Mar 2015 05:00:28 GMT

Marcus Rothkowitz was born in 1903 in Dvinsk, a town in the Pale of Settlement. As a child, he moved with his family to the United States. It was a journey that changed his life—and that of the world of modern art. Rothkowitz grew up to become the painter Mark Rothko. He’s the focus of Mark Rothko: Toward the Light in the Chapel, a new biography by Annie Cohen-Solal.

She joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to discuss Rothko's revolutionary approach to painting, his ideas about the role of the artist in society, and what made him a Jewish artist.

Plus, get ready for a Vox Tablet Passover extravaganza. We've got a...

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Heroics Aside, the Story of Purim Is the Bible’s Greatest Farce

Wed, 04 Mar 2015 05:00:34 GMT

The Book of Esther is among the Bible’s shortest stories. It tells the tale of a young Jewish woman who saves her people from a genocidal plot conceived of by Haman, an adviser to King Ahasuerus. It’s a story Jews around the world celebrate on Purim with costumes and revelry.

Robert Alter, a professor of comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley, has been working for years on new translations of all the books of the Bible. Included in the most recent edition of project, Strong as Death Is Love, is Alter’s take on the Book of Esther. In...

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Convince This Man You’re a Jew, and He’ll Move You to Israel

Thu, 19 Feb 2015 05:00:44 GMT

Tablet Magazine’s Matthew Fishbane likes to find Jews far from home. He's reported from Venezuela, the Solomon Islands, and Uganda. His latest assignment took him to Manipur, India, where people from disparate hill tribes who identify themselves as Jewish—and who are known as the Bnei Menashe—prepared to make aliyah. Fishbane was there shadowing Michael Freund, an Orthodox Jew who is something of a savior to these people and who has spent 17 years working to bring hidden Jews and...

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What’s Love Got To Do With It?

Wed, 11 Feb 2015 05:00:26 GMT

Valentine’s Day is not native to Israel, but the country does not lack for tales of love and romance (or pursuit thereof). In this, our sixth and final episode of Israel Story’s first season, we bring you some of those.

Writer, director, and actor Ghazi Albuliwi looks back at the twists and turns of his arranged marriage in Tulkarm. A husband and wife in their sixties look back at their 37 years together. Mishy Harman eavesdrops on the matchmaking quest of his downstairs neighbor. And an Israeli and a Palestinian confront the barriers to love. Listen to the full episode here, or download from

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An Abridged Biography of Your Great-Grandfather (Probably)

Fri, 06 Feb 2015 05:00:15 GMT

“Pack peddlers,” known in other parts of the world as smous, ambulantes, kloppers, weekly men, and a host of other names, are a staple of Jewish family lore everyplace that Jews headed when they left Europe starting in the 19th century.

But the specifics of that job, and the impact it had on Jews’ success or failure in their new homelands, have not been much considered until now. In Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way, New York University historian Hasia Diner examines what the lives of Jewish peddlers were really like day to day.

Where did they sleep every...

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Roger Cohen Heads to South Africa To Examine His Family’s Itinerancy and Mental Illness

Wed, 21 Jan 2015 05:00:45 GMT

When journalist Roger Cohen was just 3 years old, in 1958, his mother underwent electroshock treatment. Raised in South Africa, June Cohen, who was later diagnosed with manic depression, had moved with Roger’s father to England just a couple of years earlier. Immigrants in England, they’d chosen to uproot themselves from Johannesburg and the warm embrace they’d known there. Their own families were themselves immigrants to South Africa—they’d skirted the Holocaust, leaving Lithuania before the Nazi reign of terror but in a period when Europe was increasingly hostile to Jews.

Along with a genetic predisposition, Cohen believes all this dislocation may have contributed to his mother’s condition. What...

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Holy Cow! Three Tales of Bovine Worship

Mon, 05 Jan 2015 05:00:25 GMT

The fate of Israel has long been seen by religious people of various stripes as intimately tied to cows. In the beginning, there was Moses’ battle over the Golden Calf, in which he struggled to bring his people around to monotheism. Then came the folks who believe, based on a passage in the Book of Numbers, that an essential step for hastening the coming of the Messiah is the sacrifice of a red heifer.

In this episode of Israel Story, we bring together stories of these and other instances of bovine worship. Yochai Maital traces the origins of

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Roz Chast Drags Us Kicking, Screaming, and Laughing, Into the Land of the Infirm

Fri, 26 Dec 2014 05:00:30 GMT

[Podcast audio below.] Roz Chast is best known for her New Yorker comics—colorful and witty depictions of everyday humiliations and grievances. Often those come at the hands of the people closest to her: family members. In Chast’s recent book, a graphic memoir called Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? that has rightfully earned a place on many annual lists of the year’s best new non-fiction, she tells the story of her parents. In particular, she looks back at how, as an only child, she dealt with their steep decline at the end of their lives—with love and sadness, but also with frustration and guilt. It’s a poignant and often unexpectedly hilarious account and one that...

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Hanukkah Alegre!

Fri, 19 Dec 2014 05:00:41 GMT

It all started back in 2001, when Sarajevo-born folk singer Flory Jagoda invited roughly a dozen other Sephardim in the Washington area to join her for conversation over burekas and bumuelos (fritters, or doughnuts). More specifically, she invited them for conversation in Judeo-Spanish, also known as Ladino, the language spoken by Jews in medieval Spain and later in the far-flung lands to which they fled after the expulsion in 1492.

Today, the language is all but forgotten, except by those like Jagoda who spoke it growing up. The group has grown to include more than 20 participants. At their monthly meetings—which...

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Forget Spelling It: Most of Us Have No Idea What This Holiday Is Even About

Mon, 15 Dec 2014 05:00:00 GMT

When some of the Tablet staff started talking about Hanukkah, it became apparent how little we could assert about the holiday’s particulars. Some knew it involved violence. Others that there was eight days’ worth of oil to light a menorah. Still others that the word “Hanukkah” means dedication. But how did those elements fit together in an origin story?

To find out, we asked Tablet readers and friends to send in their take of the Hanukkah story. Many people obliged us—you can find a terrific mash-up of their answers here:

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Being Ben-Gurion

Mon, 08 Dec 2014 05:00:06 GMT

David Ben-Gurion looms so large in Israel’s mythology, it's like he's George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln all rolled into one—the country’s Founding Father and the architect of many of its earliest and most crucial achievements. But maybe the comparison with America’s greatest presidents is flawed, for while we love nothing more than to discover the humanity of our historical leaders—Washington chopping down that cherry tree, Jefferson and his indiscretions, Lincoln’s melancholia—Ben-Gurion does not lend himself to such intimacy. He appears to be as inscrutable as he is inevitable, there in every major juncture in Israeli history yet never really familiar.

That is, until...

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The Life and Good Times of Norman Lear

Tue, 02 Dec 2014 05:00:16 GMT

Archie Bunker, George Jefferson, Mary Hartman, Maude Findlay are just a handful of the iconic characters Norman Lear created for television. In his storied career, Lear tackled abortion, cancer, racism, rape, abuse, interracial relationships, single motherhood, alcoholism, and poverty—subjects many shows today won’t even consider as viable fodder for entertainment. Now 92 years old, Lear got his start writing bits for showmen like Danny Thomas and Jerry Lewis before moving into television and film and then embarking on a second career as an activist (he co-founded People for the American Way).

Now Lear has moved into a new medium—print. He has written

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Don’t Mess With a Missionary Man

Mon, 24 Nov 2014 05:00:22 GMT

Visitors to Israel—or at least Jerusalem, or, OK, the Old City in Jerusalem—can reasonably expect to bump into a missionary or two. Chances are, though, those missionaries hail from elsewhere. In this, our fourth episode of Israel Story, called “A Man on a Mission,” we introduce three Israelis who are not religious but have pursued unusual hobbies with missionary zeal. One is a hitman-for-hire, another collects a highly specific classification of autographs, and the third is a professional whistler. This has earned them, variously, animus, accolades, and celebrity in far-flung places (here's the
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Radical Writer Tillie Olsen Gave Her Grandson Text Fragments. He Made Music From Them.

Mon, 03 Nov 2014 04:00:38 GMT

Writer Tillie Olsen died in 2007, at age 94. During her life, she worked at many jobs—as a union organizer, waitress, hotel maid, and factory worker, among others—and, with her husband, raised four daughters. That didn’t leave a lot of time to write. But once Olsen got to it, publishing her first story at the age of 43—she made a name for herself, writing elliptical, realist short stories and often angry essays taking on the plight of working people, social injustice, and the many ways that creativity is stifled.
Several years before she died, Olsen recruited her grandson Jesse Olsen Bay to help her move out of her San...
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From Etgar Keret to a Lovelorn Student in Dimona, Tales of the Book-Obsessed

Mon, 27 Oct 2014 04:00:18 GMT

Are Jews still “the people of the book”? Are Israelis? What does that even mean today? In the third episode of Israel Story, we’ve got three stories that all revolve around people who rescue books, chase after books, or otherwise allow books to determine their destiny—from a Yiddish book collector based in the Tel Aviv central bus station to a lonely college student to bibliophiles in search of the lost fragments of the Aleppo Codex. And we chat with Israeli writer Etgar Keret, who has some original thoughts on where the “people of the book” tagline came from. (Listen to the full episode
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A Grandfather’s Hidden Love Letters From Nazi Germany Reveal a Buried Past

Mon, 20 Oct 2014 04:00:53 GMT

In 2007, journalist Sarah Wildman discovered a hidden cache of letters in her grandfather’s home office. By that time, her grandfather Karl was no longer living, but he had been a strong presence for most of her life—a worldly bon vivant and successful doctor whose smooth escape from Vienna in 1938 was part of the family lore. The letters, written mostly in German, came from people he’d left behind—people Wildman had never heard of before and, in particular, one young Jewish woman named Valy, whose letters made clear that she and Karl had been much more than friends. The letters—sent between 1939 and 1941—overflowed with love and yearning, but also conveyed that her...
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Royal Contradictions: The Flawed, Paradoxical Heroism of King David

Mon, 13 Oct 2014 04:00:16 GMT

In the annals of biblical kings, David stands out. A humble shepherd, he slew Goliath, wrote poetry, dethroned his predecessor, and reigned in Israel for 40 years. His heroics inspired artists throughout history from Michelangelo to Shakespeare to Leonard Cohen. But David’s achievements in helping unite the Jews did not come without costs—he had innocent people killed, looked away at violence among his children, bedded married women.
In David: The Divided Heart, out from Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives Series, Rabbi David Wolpe takes a look at this Jewish hero—warts and all. Wolpe joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry...
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Basya Schechter Mixes Prayer Songs With Brass, Oud, and Radiohead

Mon, 29 Sep 2014 04:00:12 GMT

Growing up in a Hasidic community, Basya Schechter heard music all around her—not rock music or even folk—but religious nigguns, or tunes. There were the zmirot–songs sung after Sabbath meals; the communal singing at Hanukkah; the prayers recited in unison in holiday liturgies. In her late teens, Schechter abandoned that world and its music. After college, she traveled extensively through the Middle East and North Africa and learned to play instruments from the region like the darbuka and oud. In 1998, Schechter formed the band Pharaoh’s Daughter, which ventured into all sorts of musical genres.
Now with Pharaoh’s Daughter Schechter...
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Love Syndrome: Israel Story, Episode 2

Mon, 22 Sep 2014 04:00:23 GMT

This month’s episode of Israel Story is devoted entirely to Chaya’s story. Chaya Ben Baruch grew up as Enid, in a Conservadox family in Far Rockaway, N.Y. Midway through college, she left that world behind to study sea otters in Fairbanks, Alaska.
Fast-forward a decade: Enid is now married to a nice Catholic salmon fisher named Stan. She’s just given birth to her sixth child, and discovers he has Down syndrome. Many parents in her position would be devastated. Some might place their baby in an institution, or put him up for adoption. For Enid, the birth of Angkor started her and her family on an incredible journey—to Tzfat, Israel, and...
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Leonard Bernstein: A New Look at His Rise, His Foibles, and His Impact on Music History

Mon, 15 Sep 2014 04:00:13 GMT

This is a sponsored podcast on behalf of Yale University Press and their Jewish Lives series.
When the composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein died nearly 25 years ago he left a broad legacy. He wrote music for Broadway. He devoted himself to education through the Young People's Concerts. He conducted the world’s finest orchestras. He wrote poetry. And he wrote classical pieces. While some critics cheered the range of his engagements, others argued that in spreading himself thin he squandered his compositional talents.
In
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How a Reporter Dispelled Myths About Ultra-Orthodox Jews Gaming the System

Mon, 08 Sep 2014 04:00:08 GMT

Around the country, kids are settling into their classrooms for a new school year, unaware of the wars over curriculum, teacher evaluations, school funding, and other hot-button education topics. Just north of New York City, in the district of East Ramapo in Rockland County, one such battle has been brewing for nearly a decade, churning up racial and ethnic tensions as it goes. In 2005, the school board in East Ramapo underwent a change when Hasidic Jews living in the area voted enough Orthodox Jews into office to make them a majority. Yet by and large the children in the public schools the board oversees come from African American, Caribbean, and Latin American households, while the children of the area’s...
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Elvis Was Our Shabbos Goy

Mon, 25 Aug 2014 04:00:44 GMT

We’ve all got our go-to story about brushes with fame, but Harold Fruchter’s is truly a conversation stopper. Fruchter, a singer and guitarist in a Jewish wedding band, and the son of a rabbi, was born in 1952. When he was a baby, and up to the age of 2, his family lived in the upstairs apartment of a two-story flat in Memphis. Their downstairs neighbors were the Presleys. The two families formed a friendship, and the future King of Rock, just a teenager then, learned to pick up the cues when the Fruchters needed someone to turn on a light or unlock a door on Shabbos. The Fruchters, for their part, helped Elvis out materially (if not...
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Faking It: Israel Story, Episode 1

Mon, 18 Aug 2014 04:00:04 GMT

In our very first episode, the Israel Story team delves into the realm of fakes, forgeries, and mimicry. Three stories, from different periods and places, of people pretending to to be something they are not. (You can find Sipur Israeli, the original, Hebrew version of Israel Story, here.) [Listen to full episode here, or download from iTunes.]
Prologue: The Israeli This American Life?!...
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The Israeli ‘This American Life’ Will Surprise Even Those Who Think They Know the Land Well

Mon, 11 Aug 2014 04:00:09 GMT

Several years ago, a group of four young Israelis—friends since childhood—got to work making a Hebrew-language radio show inspired by This American Life, the public-radio show two of them had grown to love while living in the United States. On the airwaves in Israel all that was available was talk radio and music, and the guys wanted something to listen to that was akin to the Ira Glass-hosted program with which they’d become obsessed. So, though they had never before made a radio story, they rolled up their sleeves to create what eventually became Sipur Israeli.
This year, the men—Ro’ee Gilron, Mishy...
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A Hasidic Girl Band Gears Up for Its Debut at a Storied Rock Venue

Mon, 04 Aug 2014 04:00:57 GMT

In 2011, adventure-seeking rock drummer-turned-Hasidic mother of four Dalia Shusterman became a widow. At about the same time, Perl Wolfe, born and raised in the Lubavitch sect of Hasidism, married and divorced, was living with her parents and beginning to write her own music. A few months later, the two women would meet in Crown Heights, Brooklyn and soon after that begin recording their first EP, titled “Down to the Top.”
Their band name, Bulletproof Stockings—a somewhat derogatory term used to refer to the opaque stockings worn by some Orthodox women—hints at their insider status as Hasidic women and also at a kind of freedom or...
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How a British Museum Curator Discovered Noah’s Ark Would Have Been Round

Mon, 28 Jul 2014 04:00:08 GMT

In 2009, a visitor to the British Museum presented curator Irving Finkel with a fascinating artifact—a 4,000-year-old Babylonian cuneiform tablet that told of a flood, and an ark, but with mysterious details unfamiliar from previously discovered tablets of that period. Finkel’s official title is Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian script, languages, and cultures; a discovery like this was right up his alley. He spent the next several years turning the tablet over and over (literally and figuratively), trying to decode its message, and to forge a path between that text and the story that would appear in the Book of Genesis some 1,000 years later.
His new book, The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the...
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After the Holocaust, the Dutch Tried To Collect Past Due Taxes From Survivors

Mon, 21 Jul 2014 04:00:27 GMT

It was all over the Dutch press this past spring—the revelation that in the years immediately following the Nazi occupation, Amsterdam authorities came after the small trickle of returning Dutch Jews who owned property and told them they owed outstanding leasehold fees from the time they were away – indeed, the authorities demanded that they not only pay those fees, but also fines for late payment.
The person who first discovered this mind-bogglingly absurd requirement was Charlotte van den Berg, a then 21-year-old mild-mannered intern working at the Amsterdam City Archives....
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Centuries Ago, Jews Were Farmers Like Everybody Else. Why Did They Leave the Fields?

Mon, 14 Jul 2014 04:00:57 GMT

Passover, Sukkot, and Shavuot are harvest festivals that hearken back to a time when Jews were farmers just like everyone around them. But Jews as professional farmers did not endure in fact or as a stereotype. Instead, Jews moved into more highly skilled fields—as moneylenders, traders, doctors, lawyers. What happened centuries ago that caused most of the world’s Jewry to move from tilling fields to work that required them to be able to read and write? That’s the question that a pair of economists—Maristella Botticini of Bocconi University in Milan, and Zvi Eckstein of the School of Economics at ICD Herzliya in Israel, set out to answer in their recent book,
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Rethinking the Controversial Figure Who Helped Establish the State of Israel

Mon, 07 Jul 2014 04:00:46 GMT

This is a sponsored podcast on behalf of Yale University Press and their Jewish Lives series.
Students of Jewish history—and the history of Mandate Palestine—are familiar with the name Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky. Born in Odessa, Jabotinsky was a journalist and an ardent Zionist committed to the establishment of the state of Israel. He was also a talented novelist, poet and screenwriter. In Jabotinsky: A Life, writer Hillel Halkin examines the full extent of Jabotinsky’s influence. He joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to discuss the liberal Jewish...
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The Musicians of Zvuloon Dub System Marry Ethiopian Soul with Roots Reggae

Mon, 30 Jun 2014 04:00:55 GMT

When Gili Yalo was 4 years old, he discovered that he loved to sing. It was in 1984, during a two-month trek through the desert on the first leg of a long journey from Ethiopia to Israel, where his parents believed life would be better for them.
Thirty years later, Yalo is still singing, now with Zvuloon Dub System and in a musical style that encompasses the different aspects of his life—immigrant, Israeli, Jew. Based in Tel Aviv, Zvuloon Dub System plays an irresistible blend of roots reggae and classical Ethiopian pop. They are now touring the United States to celebrate the release of their new album,
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Taking on Tamarind, a Staple of Syrian Jewish Cooking, With Aleppo’s Culinary Ambassador

Mon, 23 Jun 2014 04:00:57 GMT

Poopa Dweck is the poster woman for Syrian Jewish cooking. Her cookbook, Aromas of Aleppo, won a National Jewish Book Award. She gives lectures, does cooking demonstrations on television, and travels the world talking about the food of her ancestors. Dweck even has her own line of condiments, featuring specialties such as quince orange-blossom confit.
But if you really want to see Dweck in her element, you score an invitation to visit her at her home kitchen in a seaside town in New Jersey when she’s got her sleeves up and is elbow deep, once or twice a year, in soaking tamarind. That’s what producer Emma Morgenstern did...
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Sigmund Freud Tried Thwarting Biographers. That Didn’t Stop Adam Phillips.

Mon, 16 Jun 2014 04:00:46 GMT

This is a sponsored podcast on behalf of Yale University Press and their Jewish Lives series.
Sigmund Freud nearly boasted of the fact that he was ignorant of “everything that concerned Judaism.” He also held a deep mistrust of biography—so much so that the father of psychoanalysis burned his papers in order to try to thwart would-be future biographers. So you can see why Adam Phillips may have been daunted by the suggestion that he write a biography of Freud for Yale University Press's Jewish Lives series. Nevertheless, he decided to have a go at it.
A psychoanalyst, the editor of the Penguin Modern Classic translations of Freud published in...
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Criminal Attachments: Immigration, Family, and Fraud in Soviet Brooklyn

Mon, 09 Jun 2014 04:00:45 GMT

Slava Gelman, a twentysomething aspiring writer, is trying to claw his way out of the post-Soviet Brooklyn neighborhood of his family. But his grandfather is determined to pull him back in. He wants to enlist Slava to invent life stories for Soviet émigrés in the hopes of getting money from the claims conference for Holocaust survivors, despite the fact that technically these émigrés are not survivors.
It’s a preposterous—and sometimes hilarious—scenario but one that raises serious questions about truth, fiction, and suffering. Those matters are at the heart of A Replacement Life, the debut novel from émigré writer Boris...
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Is It All Doom and Gloom for Jews in Europe? Student Leaders Say No.

Fri, 30 May 2014 04:00:32 GMT

Last weekend brought bad news from Europe: Far right parties in France, Denmark, Austria and elsewhere won big in the European Parliamentary elections. And in Brussels, four people died after a shooting at the city’s Jewish Museum. The attack came in a spring punctuated by anti-Semitic violence in France, the U.K., and elsewhere. All of these incidents have elicited the question: Is it time for Jews to leave Europe?
To find out if things are as hostile for Jews in Europe as they seem from the vantage point of U.S. shores, Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry speaks with two young European Jewish leaders. Andi Gergely grew up in Hungary and is the chairperson of the World Union of Jewish Students. Though now based in...
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Joshua Ferris Takes on All Kinds of Decay in His Ambitious New Novel

Mon, 19 May 2014 04:00:04 GMT

The novelist Joshua Ferris made a splash in 2007 with his debut Then We Came to the End. The critically acclaimed book was a hilarious, biting satire about employees in a collapsing ad agency in Chicago at the end of the dot-com era. Ferris followed it up in 2010 with The Unnamed, a somewhat darker novel about a Manhattan lawyer who just wants to be walking; it’s an urge he cannot resist, and it undoes his life.
Now Ferris is out with a new novel, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour. With the help of a somewhat petulant, loner dentist the book takes on existential dread, what it means to be a Jew, and Red Sox fandom in a mix of the absurd, the droll, and the profound. Ferris joins...
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Is It OK To Dance After the Holocaust? Absolutely, Says the Band Golem

Mon, 12 May 2014 04:00:21 GMT

Known for frenzied takes on Yiddish and Eastern European music, the members of Golem bring the party with them wherever the band plays and no matter what they’re singing about. Their new album, Tanz, which means dance in Yiddish, covers religious rites, anti-Semitism in the former Soviet Union, dark children’s poems, and more, in a mix of rollicking interpretations of classic songs and original numbers.
Golem’s founder and accordionist, Annette Ezekiel Kogan, and its violinist, Jeremy Brown, join Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to talk about the band’s surprising Mexican fan-base, how painful it is to sing the song “Odessa” now that Ukraine is in the throes of Russian occupation, and their ambivalence (now...
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Neither Anatevka Nor Auschwitz: One Man’s Revelatory Roots Trip to Poland

Tue, 29 Apr 2014 04:00:33 GMT

Ashkenazi Jews whose grandparents or great-grandparents hail from the Pale of Settlement tend to hold certain received notions about Poland (“bad for the Jews”) and its people (“hated the Jews”). On the basis of such notions, many Ashkenazim see little or no reason to visit the place. Jonathan Groubert felt similarly. Nevertheless, in 1994 he tacked Poland on to the itinerary of a backpacking trip through Europe. The visit was intended to do little more than confirm what he already knew. Instead it left him confused and determined to dig deeper into his family’s past and into Konin, the town they left behind. Here he shares his story. Groubert is a radio host and producer based in the Netherlands. A version of this story first aired on his podcast, “
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How an Alabama Doctor Became a Rabbi to His Patients at a Groundbreaking AIDS Clinic

Thu, 17 Apr 2014 04:00:55 GMT

Back in the early 1980s, two populations found their lives upended by the AIDS epidemic in America. There were, of course, those infected by the virus, along with everyone who cared for them. And then there were the medical professionals—researchers, doctors—desperately scrambling to figure out where the virus came from and how to interrupt its terrible progression. In 1981, Dr. Michael Saag unexpectedly found himself at the center of the latter group. At the time, Saag was just beginning a residency in internal medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. By the following year, he had helped open the 1917 Clinic, a comprehensive AIDS treatment and research center at UAB.
In a new...
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Leonard Cohen’s Long, Strange, Sometimes Tortured Road to Mastering His Own Sound

Mon, 07 Apr 2014 04:00:23 GMT

How do you write a Leonard Cohen song? That’s a difficult question, even for Leonard Cohen. The lyrics aren’t the problem; Cohen was a poet long before he wrote his first song. Nor has it been a question of finding the right melody. The challenge in writing a Leonard Cohen song came later, in the studio, when it was time to figure out how the whole thing should sound.
So says Liel Leibovitz, anyway. Leibovitz is a senior writer at Tablet Magazine and the author of a new book on Cohen, A Broken Hallelujah: Rock and Roll, Redemption, and the Life of Leonard Cohen. It comes out this week, after four years of Leonard Cohen immersion, which led...
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‘Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah’: Inside 19th-Century Yiddish Letter-Writing Manuals

Mon, 31 Mar 2014 04:00:18 GMT

“A trustworthy person, one of our friends, has told us that you have been seen going around late at night with young men. You are also seen very frequently at dances, masquerades, and picnics.” So starts a letter to a young Jewish woman from her worried father who warns her of the peril that awaits if she continues her misbehavior. The letter is one of many having to do with social mores and business concerns. It is also a fiction. That is, it is a sample letter dating from 1905. Sample letters were written in the late 19th and early 20th century to help teach people not just how to read and write, but also how to conduct themselves in all aspects of a modernizing world. These letters were written in different languages and targeted at different...
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When a Daughter of the Holocaust Meets a Daughter of the Third Reich

Mon, 24 Mar 2014 04:00:27 GMT

Growing up, Lynn Jordan never knew that her father was a Holocaust survivor. She only knew, subconsciously, that he seemed fragile and that he needed her to live life for the two of them, because he had somehow missed out on most of life’s pleasures. There were other problems, too—her mother’s self-destructive habits, her parents’ frequent fights. It wasn’t until Lynn had been begging her parents for years to get help that she discovered her father’s past. At that point, she was faced with a painful question: Given what he’d been through, should she go on living for him? Or could she make a break and start living for herself? It would take an encounter with a stranger whose parents were survivors...
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Reassessing Menachem Begin: Terrorist? Humanist? Man of the People?

Wed, 12 Mar 2014 04:00:56 GMT

Although he won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1978, Menachem Begin had a reputation for violence that chased him his whole life. During the Holocaust he fled Europe (where he had been a leader in the radical Zionist group Betar) for Palestine, where he became a leader in the Jewish underground militia known as Etzel and was implicated in deadly events in the fight to help establish the state of Israel. Begin was reviled by the country’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, but did not let the contempt he endured from Labor Party rivals run him out of politics. Instead he embraced his role as an opposition...
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From Baghdad to Tel Aviv and Back: An Israeli Star Digs Into His Grandfather’s Music

Tue, 11 Mar 2014 05:00:52 GMT

Dudu Tassa is a major figure in the Israeli rock scene. The singer-songwriter and guitarist released his first album when he was just 13, produces music for television and film, and has collaborated with international heavy weights like Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead. Since he was a kid, Tassa has had a vague idea that his late grandfather was an important musician in his native Iraq, but it was only recently that he came to understand just how important: Tassa’s grandfather and great-uncle, Daoud and Saleh Al Kuwaiti, are considered by some critics to be the founders of modern Iraqi music. Their legacy was nearly forgotten when Tassa dug up old recordings of his grandfather’s music and set them to a modern groove. The result, the album
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Fyvush Finkel: A Charming Conversation With a Longtime Serious Mensch

Mon, 03 Mar 2014 05:00:35 GMT

Fyvush Finkel, 91 years old and still cracking wise, will take to the stage this month in a pair of Purim cabaret performances. Vox Tablet caught up with the legendary actor a few years ago, on the occasion of a different show. To celebrate his impressive vigor, good humor, and all-around affability, we revisit that conversation.
Finkel made his stage debut more than eight decades ago, when he was 9 years old, singing “O Promise Me” at a theater in Brooklyn. Soon after, he crossed the East River to take roles in the famous Yiddish theaters of Second Ave. From there, he made his way onto Broadway and then into films by the likes of Sidney Lumet, Oliver Stone, and the
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Pin the Crime on the Jew: Blood Libel and the Case of Mendel Beilis

Mon, 24 Feb 2014 05:00:38 GMT

The myth that Jews murder Christian children and use their blood to make matzo, a legend known as the blood libel, used to rear its ugly head with frightening frequency. Arguably the most famous instance of this accusation took place in 1913, with the trial of Mendel Beilis.
Beilis, a barely observant Jew, worked in a brick factory in the slums of Kiev. In 1911, he was accused of murdering Andrei Yushchinsky, a poor, 13-year-old boy. From the outset, “ritual murder” served as an excuse to accuse a Jew, despite ample...
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As If You Needed It, Yet Another Reason To Be in Miami: The Delis

Tue, 18 Feb 2014 05:00:57 GMT

As this endless winter drags on, making life miserable for those unfortunates living in the Midwest and Northeast, the wise among us have made the well-worn pilgrimage to South Florida. The tradition dates back to just after WWII, when Jews from cities like Baltimore, Philadelphia, and especially New York began flocking to Miami Beach for the winter. And in Miami Beach, they wanted delis just like the ones they ate in back home. In fact, the postwar years were a golden age for the Jewish deli in Miami Beach, from Raphil’s to Wolfie Cohen’s Rascal House and Pumperniks.
Times change, though...
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Talmud for Boys, Challah-Making for Girls—Gender Rules in Orthodox Day Schools

Mon, 10 Feb 2014 05:00:19 GMT

In the past several decades, it has become increasingly common to find religious women who are doctors, professors, scientists, and rabbis. Yet while they’ve gained acceptance as professionals in their community, their children often get very different messages in Jewish day schools about acceptable and unacceptable gender roles. There, rigorous training in Jewish thought, or math and science, for that matter, may be offered to boys only, while girls may find that more attention is paid to the length of their sleeves, and skirts, than to their questions about Rashi.
Differential treatment of boys and girls is not unique to Jewish day schools. But for those invested in...
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How the Concept of Shtetl Moved From Small-Town Reality to Mythic Jewish Idyll

Mon, 03 Feb 2014 05:00:34 GMT

Until roughly the end of the 19th century, a shtetl was just a shtetl—that is, a town as designated in Yiddish, and nobody paid them any particular attention. Then interest in shtetls as places where Eastern Europe Jews lived picked up. Assimilated Western European Jews embarked on heritage tours to survey their exotic brethren in the east, academic interest in folk-life grew, and representations of shtetl life began appearing with more frequency in literature. After that came the Holocaust, which dealt life in the shtetl a final blow. Yet in a sense the shtetl did not die at that point. In fact, it—or the idea of it—has thrived in the decades since the end of WWII as artists, filmmakers, and writers have depicted shtetls—and what they imagine them to...
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The Sounds of Your Favorite Films—Including ‘Cabaret’ and ‘The Producers’—Remastered

Tue, 28 Jan 2014 05:00:26 GMT

David Krakauer is best-known and loved for his rocking klezmer clarinet, though he has long worked in other genres too, including jazz, classical, and funk. With his newest project, called The Big Picture, he even crosses media. In The Big Picture Krakauer takes memorable songs from films with some Jewish connection—like “Tradition” from Fiddler on the Roof, “Body and Soul” from Radio Days—and, with the help of five other talented musicians, makes them his own. The project has an additional element: A visual-effects team called Light of Day has made a series of short films to accompany Krakauer’s invigorating...
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Living the Middle-Class Dream—Beyond the Green Line, in a West Bank Settlement

Fri, 17 Jan 2014 05:00:56 GMT

Many people outside Israel think that settlers in the Palestinian territories are a small but powerful group of religious zealots—back-to-the-land types who form hilltop encampments and chase Palestinians from their olive groves. Though that kind of scenario exists, it is not what anthropologist Callie Maidhof found, for the most part, when she embarked on her field research in the West Bank. Maidhof wanted to find out who lives in settlements and why they go there, so she moved to a settlement of 8,000 people—she likens it to an American bedroom community—for nearly a year. The answers she found challenged the perception that religious Zionism has motivated nearly one in 10 Israeli Jews to put down roots in the West Bank and raised the new question of why that perception...
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Germans Want To Put the Holocaust Behind Them. One Citizen Says, ‘Not So Fast.’

Thu, 09 Jan 2014 05:00:17 GMT

Yascha Mounk grew up in Germany in the 1980s and ’90s. As a distinct minority, he gradually came to understand that his presence brought out a mixture of anti-Semitism, philo-Semitism, and profound discomfort in his fellow Germans. All Mounk wanted was a conversation without the fact of his Jewish background casting any special shadow. That such a conversation seemed impossible, he argues, has to do with Germany’s failure to reckon thoroughly with its own history—and it led Mounk to settle, for now, in the United States.
In Stranger in My Own Country: A Jewish Family in Modern Germany, the 31-year-old Mounk looks at how Germans have dealt with the...
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Stop Texting. Make a Resolution To Reconnect the Old Fashioned Way.

Tue, 31 Dec 2013 05:00:39 GMT

If you’re a parent living in the 21st century, chances are you have occasionally used digital technology for back-up when your patience is wearing thin, either to escape into your own work or social network, or to distract the kids with virtual entertainment. (If you haven’t, well, the rest of us bow down to you in awe and admiration.) But what is the impact when parents and their kids turn to texting or video games or other electronic distractions, rather than turning to each other? According to Catherine Steiner-Adair, these habits pose a serious threat to families, friendships, and even childhood as we know it. Steiner-Adair is a clinical psychologist and school consultant, and she draws on conversations with more than...
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The Truth About Santa, as Revealed to a Jewish Girl Circa 1980

Tue, 24 Dec 2013 05:00:09 GMT

For those who are prone to Christmas envy—particularly but not exclusively the elementary-school set—this has been a challenging year. Hanukkah ended weeks ago, and ever since, we’ve just had to grin and bear it in the face of the annual onslaught of red and green and jingle and sparkle.
Ophira Eisenberg, comedian, writer, and host of the weekly NPR trivia show “Ask Me Another,” is no stranger to this Christmas envy. Eisenberg grew up a religious minority in Calgary, Alberta, at a time when schools saw no need to take an inclusive approach to religious and cultural traditions. Here’s her tale of Christmases past, which was brought to our...
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Remembrance of Things Past: Moroccans Talk About the Jews Who Once Lived Among Them

Mon, 16 Dec 2013 04:00:50 GMT

In the early 20th century, nearly a quarter of a million Jews lived among Muslims in Morocco's towns and villages, making common cause in commerce and culture. Over the course of the past century, nearly all of them have left. Now there are an estimated 4,000 Jews in Morocco. So few that most younger Moroccans have never met one.

Aomar Boum, an anthropologist at the University...
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Five Years Later, Madoff Scandal Echoes Through the Jewish Community, and Beyond

Fri, 06 Dec 2013 04:00:35 GMT

Five years after Bernard Madoff admitted to his sons, and then to federal investigators, that he had been running the largest Ponzi scheme in history, the saga of his monumental ripoff continues to unspool. Lawsuits, settlements, and criminal trials are still ongoing, and Madoff himself, now 75, is just at the start of serving his prison sentence, with a fantastical projected release date in November 2139. Like a Mafia capo, he went down professing his own guilt but offered little in the way of help or information about the complicity of others.
Some of those others—from the wealthy money managers who like Madoff had the trust of their clients to Madoff’s office staff charged with helping conduct the fraud—have clung to their claims of victimization at the hands of a man whose career as one of the world’s most sophisticated investors was, as he infamously put it, “one big lie.”
In Manhattan, the trial of five key Madoff employees—who are charged with fabricating and mailing client...
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Four-Letter Words: Why Jews Have Led the Making and Defense of Obscenity in America

Mon, 02 Dec 2013 04:00:18 GMT

A warning to listeners: This episode of Vox Tablet contains explicit language and content you wouldn't normally hear on our podcast. To censor such language, offensive as it may be, felt contrary to the spirit of Lambert's argument, which posits a connection between “obscenity” and Jewish culture and continuity.
Jews are oversexed. That’s a long-held stereotype. And, like most stereotypes, it’s baloney. What is true, however, is that Jews in America have been fighters on the front lines in producing, distributing, and defending sexually explicit materials for more than a century.
Josh Lambert, a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts and a Tablet contributing editor, addresses why that has...
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Sephardic Singer Flory Jagoda Keeps the Music of Her Prewar Bosnian Childhood Alive

Mon, 25 Nov 2013 04:00:30 GMT

The Hanukkah song “Ocho Kandelikas” (Eight Little Candles) is often referred to as a “traditional Sephardic song.” In fact, it was written in 1983 by Flory Jagoda, an 88-year-old Sephardic folk singer who still performs today.
“Ocho Kandelikas” is one of dozens of songs Jagoda has written and recorded, drawing from a rich musical tradition and sung in Ladino, or Judeo-Spanish, the language she grew up with as a child in Bosnia. She carried that language and musical tradition with her to the United States, after WWII destroyed most of her family and the way of life she’d known.
Here, Jagoda offers her memories of making music with her mother, grandmother, aunts, and uncles as a child, and of her...
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How Thanksgiving Became Holy for One Iranian Jewish Woman and Her Family

Tue, 19 Nov 2013 04:00:54 GMT

Esther Amini’s mother—or Bibi (“grandma” in Farsi), as the family calls her—grew up in Mashhad, a holy Islamic city in Iran. To escape persecution, Bibi and other Jews kept their religious observance well-hidden. She immigrated in 1948 to the United States, where Esther was born. In the years that followed, the holiday of Thanksgiving—celebrating, among other things, the gift of religious freedom—came to hold a privileged place for her and her family, alongside Rosh Hashanah and Passover.
Amini’s account of this family tradition is one of eight narratives in Saffron and Rosewater: Songs and Stories From Persian Women, a theatrical production of the
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Femmes Fatales: How German Women Used Femininity for Evil During World War II

Mon, 04 Nov 2013 04:00:41 GMT

We know from witness testimony, and the work of historians, that though there were a handful of women among the most notoriously violent Nazi camp guards and bureaucrats, for the most part, German women were absent from Nazi positions of power. That might lead us to conclude that they were not active participants in the genocide that took place.
In Hitler’s Furies, historian Wendy Lower tells us such a conclusion is wrong. She argues that many young women seeking opportunity during the war headed to the eastern territories where the vast majority of the killing took place. There they took on essential roles as teachers, nurses, secretaries, and wives and lovers. In those capacities, they were not only aiding in the Final Solution but also witnessing it, and in some cases committing acts of violence...
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On the Making of ‘Aftermath,’ the Controversial Polish Film Now Opening in the U.S.

Mon, 28 Oct 2013 04:00:08 GMT

Last year, a film was released in Poland that was so controversial it was banned in some towns. Opening in New York on Friday and Los Angeles later this month, Pokłosie—or, Aftermath—is a thriller that tells the story of a rural farmer on a mission. At night, Józek Kalina digs up Jewish grave markers that were looted from a local cemetery and used by fellow villagers in their roads and gardens. Józek is trying to give the village’s Jewish dead a proper burial, but there’s a high cost to his activity. His wife has left him and taken the children, and his neighbors are reacting with growing menace.
The film is brutal and haunting, invoking the horrors of the...
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The Show That Made the World Fall in Love With the Jews and Grow Nostalgic for Tevye

Mon, 21 Oct 2013 04:00:12 GMT

It’s fairly common nowadays to hear renditions of “Sunrise, Sunset,” for instance, or “The Sabbath Prayer,” memorable melodies from the Fiddler on the Roof, at bar mitzvahs or weddings. Songs from that musical—whose story is inspired by the work of Sholem Aleichem—have become an indelible part of our popular cultural lexicon not just in the United States, but worldwide. Directed by Jerome Robbins and starring Zero Mostel, Fiddler debuted on Broadway in 1964 and quickly became a smash, resonating with Jewish audiences comfortable enough in their assimilated lives in America to be able to look fondly back at the shtetl their parents left behind. How the play got made and what its significance has been for peoples of all ethnicities and backgrounds is the subject of a new book by Columbia University professor Alisa Solomon.
Solomon joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to discuss
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Painting a Portrait of a Political, Literary and Journalistic Powerhouse

Mon, 14 Oct 2013 04:00:09 GMT

For most of its first 50-plus years, the Yiddish language Jewish Daily Forward (now 116 years old) was edited by its founder, Abraham Cahan. Cahan was a Lithuanian immigrant and socialist who came to this country alone at the age of 22, in 1882. Within five years, he’d established himself as a leader of the Jewish immigrant community and as an industrious reporter with friends like the muckraker journalist Lincoln Steffins and the literary critic William Dean Howells.
How Cahan climbed the political, journalistic, and literary (he wrote the critically acclaimed novel The Rise of David Levinsky) ranks of 20th century America is the topic of The Rise of Abraham Cahan, a new biography by Seth Lipsky. In 1990, Lipsky founded the English-language Forward. He joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to discuss how Cahan managed to wear the seemingly conflicting hats...
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From Teen Chronicler of Yiddish Curses to Global Fame: Sholem Aleichem’s Multitudes

Mon, 07 Oct 2013 04:00:25 GMT

When people hear the name Sholem Aleichem, they very often think of Tevye the Dairyman and his Broadway showstoppers. It’s true, Sholem Aleichem wrote the stories on which Fiddler on the Roof is based, but his body of work is much broader than that. In dozens of stories, novels, newspaper articles, plays, and even poems, Sholem Aleichem, who was born Sholem Rabinovich, depicted the humor and despair that characterized shtetl life at a moment when it faced threats from within and without. He was also a great advocate of Yiddish, and of the Jewish people. Readers and critics considered him the “Jewish Mark Twain” and when he died from tuberculosis in 1916 at the age of 57, he left behind tens of thousands of fans in Europe and the United States.
His life was relatively short but it made a lasting mark. Sholem Aleichem is now the subject of a new biography by Jeremy Dauber, a professor of Yiddish at Columbia University. The book is...
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Seeing the Strengths and Pitfalls of a Whole Country in the Lives of Seven Paratroopers

Tue, 01 Oct 2013 04:00:20 GMT

In June of 1967, the world watched with disbelief as the young Israeli army turned a perilous threat—enemy troops gathering at its borders—into a tremendous military victory. The symbol of that victory, for many, was a photograph of soldiers standing before the Western Wall soon after the sacred site was reclaimed by Israel in the fighting.
Those soldiers were members of the 55th Paratroopers Reserve Brigade. Most of them were in their early 20s. They included socialist kibbutzniks and religious Zionists. A surprising number of them would go on to be leaders in the movements those two groups spawned—the peace movement on the Left, and the settlement movement on the Right.
In his new book, Like Dreamers, veteran journalist Yossi Klein Halevi examines the lives of seven of these...
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Amos Oz, 74 Years Old and a National Treasure, Still Dreams of Life on the Kibbutz

Mon, 23 Sep 2013 04:00:59 GMT
There’s no other living Israeli author who is as well known around the world as Amos Oz. Inside Israel, he’s one of the country’s most respected cultural figures. Oz has lived a tumultuous life. When he was 10 years old, he witnessed the founding of the Jewish state. When he was 12 years old, his mother committed suicide. When he was 15, he joined a kibbutz and changed his last name to Oz, Hebrew for “strength.” He eventually left the kibbutz for the desert because of his son’s asthma, but as he tells Vox Tablet contributor Daniel Estrin, he still dreams of kibbutz life at least once a week. In his newest short story collection, Between Friends, he revisits the early years of the kibbutz, when the collective farms were still a wild Israeli ideological experiment. Estrin sat with Amos Oz in his home in Tel Aviv for a far-ranging discussion about...
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Alan Berliner’s Newest Cinematic Poem Reflects on a Relative With Alzheimer’s

Mon, 16 Sep 2013 04:00:46 GMT

For nearly 30 years, the filmmaker Alan Berliner has made uniquely personal documentaries that mine his life and the lives of his relatives, chipping away at seemingly routine stories to find a more precise, poetic, and nuanced narrative. His films display a relentless curiosity about the people closest to him—territory fraught with pitfalls.
Berliner’s 1996 film Nobody’s Business examined his father, a lonely, divorced, retired salesman. Throughout the documentary, we hear the senior Berliner barking his objections with “my life is nothing!” and “you’re boring the shit out of me!” But as details of his past are revealed, Berliner’s father becomes a complex, lively figure in history, while, at every turn, the audience is compelled to adjust their perception of him.
In Berliner’s newest film, First Cousin Once Removed, the filmmaker again focuses on family: in this case
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Helène Aylon’s Journey From Rebbetzin to Internationally Acclaimed Feminist Artist

Mon, 09 Sep 2013 04:00:52 GMT

Helène Aylon grew up in Borough Park, Brooklyn, in a tight-knit world of Orthodox families. From early on, she was a bit of a rebel, but that didn’t stop her from following the path prescribed for her. At 18, she married a rabbi, and they had two children. Then, when she was just 25, her husband fell ill; she was a widow by 30.
This was in 1960. The assumption then was that a woman in her position would marry her husband’s brother. Instead, Aylon became an artist. Her work, as she explains in a memoir published last year and titled Whatever Is Contained Must Be Released: My Jewish Orthodox Girlhood, My Life as a Feminist Artist, engaged with the liberation movements of her time—women from patriarchy, the colonized from colonizer, the earth from nuclear devastation—until she tackled the ultimate liberation: that of God from man. Now, at 82, Aylon...
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Ancient Roman Jews Meet Wartime Partisans on a Raucous and Lush Avant-rock Album

Tue, 03 Sep 2013 04:00:54 GMT

When guitarist and composer Dan Kaufman headed to Rome in 2009 to study the liturgical melodies of the city’s ancient Jewish community, he stumbled upon the site of a famous partisan attack against the Nazis. Bullet-marked, the building where the action took place remained as a testament to resistance. That story joined together in his imagination with that of the city’s inhabitants from millennia before, inspiring him to create the new album Bella Ciao. Like previous projects Kaufman has undertaken with his band Barbez—he joined the podcast in 2007 to discuss his album inspired by the work of Paul Celan—Bella Ciao draws on poetry and uses theramin, vibraphone, and more traditional instruments to produce an invigorating mix of sound and ideas.
He joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to talk about how he...
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A New Era of Anti-Semitism Is Here. Daniel Goldhagen Blames Globalization.

Thu, 29 Aug 2013 04:00:11 GMT

In 1996, Daniel Goldhagen unleashed a fury of controversy when he published the book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, in which he argued that the Holocaust took place not because Germans were especially obedient to authority, or because a few bad apples came into power, but because an eliminationist prejudice against Jews was woven into the very fabric of German culture. Germans “considered the slaughter to be just,” Goldhagen wrote. His book hit a nerve—critics called Goldhagen out for using overly broad generalizations to indict an entire country—but that criticism didn’t hurt the book’s reception; it was a phenomenal success in Germany and around the world.
Nearly 20 years later, Goldhagen has broadened his scope in a new work. The Devil That Never Dies: The Rise and Threat of Global Antisemitism offers an in-depth look at anti-Semitism around the world. He argues...
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Strippers, Jewish Guilt, and Loneliness Collide in Jill Soloway’s New Feature Film

Mon, 19 Aug 2013 04:00:40 GMT

Rachel (Kathryn Hahn) is a highly educated stay-at-home mom living in an airy modern home in the affluent L.A. neighborhood of Silver Lake. She volunteers for fundraisers at the JCC. She goes to wine-and-chats with the ladies. She works out and sees her therapist regularly. But she’s bored, she can’t get it up for her husband, and she’s starting to freak out. Enter McKenna (Juno Temple), a stripper who gives her a lap dance and whom Rachel then decides to “save,” by inviting her to move into her home.
This is the premise of Jill Soloway’s debut feature film Afternoon Delight, which is partly a comedy but also an affecting look at what...
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Drinking in Jerusalem: A Love Story. No, a Tragedy. No, an Adventure.

Mon, 12 Aug 2013 04:00:16 GMT

The dog days of August are upon us and with them, a marked slowdown in productivity. Nobody answers our calls, hardly anyone responds to emails, and those of us in the office find ourselves fantasizing about drinking icy beverages in faraway locales. Which got us wondering: What are people in Jerusalem drinking these days? Has the Holy City picked up on the craft cocktail movement currently holding sway throughout the Diaspora? And what drink best captures the life and spirit of the city?
We sent Daniel Estrin to investigate. Happy to oblige, he criss-crossed the city, making stops at three bars—HaSadna in Talpiot, the American Colony in East...
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A Hasidic Alt-Rock Girl Band Gets Its Groove On—In Crown Heights

Mon, 05 Aug 2013 04:00:00 GMT

In 2011, adventure-seeking rock drummer-turned-Hasidic mother of four Dalia Shusterman became a widow. At about the same time, Perl Wolfe, born and raised in the Lubavitch sect of Hasidism, married and divorced, was living with her parents and beginning to write her own music. A few months later, the two women would meet in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and soon after that, begin recording their first EP, titled “Down to the Top.”
Their band name, Bulletproof Stockings—a somewhat derogatory term used to refer to the opaque stockings worn by some Orthodox women—hints at their insider status as Hasidic women, and also at a kind of freedom or irreverence they bring to their enterprise.
Bulletproof Stockings, which also includes cellist Elisheva Maistser, performs for women only, in keeping with kol isha, the prohibition on men hearing women sing that is adhered to among Orthodox Jews. They also dress modestly, as...
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In ‘The Store,’ the Arrival of a Second-Hand Shop Unhinges an Israeli Village

Mon, 29 Jul 2013 04:00:22 GMT

David Ehrlich is best known as the founder of Tmol Shilshom, a bookstore café in the heart of Jerusalem that has long been a popular gathering place for writers and artists. It’s named after the novel by S. Y. Agnon and has hosted readings by the leading lights of Israeli literature, from Yehuda Amichai to David Grossman, as well as renowned writers from abroad.
Ehrlich is himself a writer, primarily of essays and short stories. Now Syracuse University Press has published Who Will Die Last: Stories of Life in Israel, the first collection of his stories to be translated into English. In today’s podcast, we invited Brooklyn novelist and performer John Haskell to read Ehrlich’s “The...
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The Children of Refuseniks Report From the Frontlines of Putin’s Russia

Fri, 19 Jul 2013 04:00:55 GMT

Yesterday’s sentencing of Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, was just the latest in a steady stream of blows to the democracy that President Vladimir Putin has ruled with near-dictatorial authority for more than a decade. Navalny, an anticorruption activist, was given a 5-year prison sentence for what most observers say are trumped up charges of embezzlement.
If you know anything about Navalny, or about Pussy Riot, or about new laws in Russia that erode freedom of speech, punish gays and lesbians, and intimidate nongovernmental organizations, there’s a good chance you’ve read the work of Masha Gessen, Miriam Elder, or
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The Dreyfus Affair Holds a Sacred Place in French History. Is There Room for Debate?

Thu, 11 Jul 2013 04:00:39 GMT

Nearly 120 years after the Dreyfus Affair shook the world, you would think we know all there is to know about the seminal case involving a French Jewish officer falsely accused of treason. Alfred Dreyfus was found guilty and deported to prison on a small, remote island, and it was only after his family, joined by leading intellectuals of the time, rallied in protest that he was acquitted, his case becoming a cornerstone of the democratic French republic.
A flood of books on the topic followed, from Emile Zola’s J’Accuse onward. Yet French historians showed remarkably little interest when, a few years ago, the French army made available parts of its archive that include the notorious secret dossier that had been used to indict the Jewish captain. The file sheds light not only on the case itself but also on the complex web of personalities, institutions, and societal attitudes that surrounded it.
All these details might have remained in the shadows were it not for the dogged work...
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What Spinoza Knew and Neuroscience Is Discovering: ‘Free Will’ Doesn’t Exist

Mon, 01 Jul 2013 04:00:04 GMT

Questions of character shape public discourse. From Paula Deen to Edward Snowden—the choices people make and actions people take raise questions about free will, personal responsibility, and morality. And yet, researchers in sociology, psychology, and neuroscience are increasingly asserting that the independent self that we are all so attached to doesn’t really exist. What’s more, there are philosophical traditions dating back to Aristotle, Maimonides, and Spinoza that may offer more useful ways of thinking about how to foster ethical behavior and moral societies.
In The Self Beyond Itself: An Alternative History of Ethics, the New Brain Sciences, and the Myth of Free Will, Heidi Ravven, a professor of religious studies at Hamilton College, examines these questions. She joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry on the podcast to discuss how the myth of free will took hold, what Spinoza had to say...
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In an Ex-Pat’s Literary Crime Novel, Norwegian and Jewish-American Sensibilities Collide

Mon, 24 Jun 2013 04:00:31 GMT

Sheldon Horowitz is a retired watch repairman and wise-cracker from New York City and a Korean War veteran relocated to Oslo, where he lives with his granddaughter and her Norwegian husband. In mourning over the recent death of his wife, Sheldon is in near constant anguish too over the loss years before of his only son—killed in Vietnam. That loss causes him to question continually the virtue of the patriotism and sense of civic responsibility that defined him and that he imparted to his child. When his Serbian immigrant neighbor is killed, Sheldon is forced to confront what is going on around him in the present and takes it upon himself to ferry his neighbor’s young child to safety. But what safety is and how to get there is unclear.
Derek B. Miller’s debut novel Norwegian by Night is a literary thriller that explores grief, memory, aging, and identity as it follows Horowitz and the boy from Oslo to the countryside. Though heady, the novel is also funny, laced with sardonic wit. Based...
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Jewish Comedy Has Earned Big Praise, But Is It Time to Stop the Joke-Telling?

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 04:00:47 GMT

What are the three words a woman never wants to hear when she’s making love? Honey, I’m home. Whether their circumstances are happy or fraught, Jews have been pointing out the humor in their predicaments since the biblical era, when Sarah the matriarch saw the fact that she’d bear a child at her advanced age as a cruel joke. But it was only since the Enlightenment that, as a people, the Jews became known as a witty lot—reveling in word play, contradiction, and self-deprecation. Yiddish scholar Ruth Wisse loves a good punchline (and, with her grandmotherly comportment, has perfected the straight-man delivery) but rejects the idea that Jewish humor is a uniform thing and, furthermore, that it’s something of which to be proud.
In No Joke: Making Jewish Humor, Wisse considers the variations of humor from Heinrich Heine to YouTube. She joins Vox Tablet host Sara...
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A New Novel Brings Ghosts, Geeks, and Golems to Sleepover Camp

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 04:00:22 GMT

In his debut novel, The Path of Names, Vancouver-based writer Ari Goelman conjures Dahlia, an intrepid 13-year-old who we meet as she begrudgingly attends her first summer at Camp Arava, the Jewish overnight camp where her brother is a beloved counselor. Ever interested in figuring out sleights of hand, she’d rather spend her time learning magic. Then strange things start to happen. Dahlia spots two apparitions—little girls dressed for the 1940s who beckon to her in her bunk. Suddenly she has memories and dreams of yeshiva life and understands Hebrew words she has never before known. Unruffled by the increasingly intense fantastical phenomena around her, Dahlia forges on, keen to figure out what’s happening to her and to the sweet ghosts who keep reappearing.
Ari Goelman talks with Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about the fantasy novels that accompanied his childhood, how he came up with the idea for Dahlia and her story, and why he set the action at a...
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Examining Life After a Crash

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 04:00:01 GMT

Joshua Prager is a reporter best known for tracking down elusive characters whose lives were altered in an instant—people like Tehran-based photographer Jahangir Razmi, the only anonymous winner of a Pulitzer Prize, and Albert Clark, who was unexpectedly bequeathed the royalties of the wildly popular children’s books Goodnight, Moon, Runaway Bunny, and other titles by Margaret Wise Brown. Now Prager has written Half-Life, the story of how his own life changed in an instant. When he was 19 and spending the year studying at a yeshiva in Israel, he was a passenger on a minibus headed to Jerusalem that was struck by a speeding truck. Prager’s neck was broken, and he nearly died.
Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry talks with Prager about how the accident altered the course he’d...
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When Berlin Meant Business

Mon, 20 May 2013 04:00:24 GMT

Berlin has long had an anti-capitalist bent, part of its countercultural charm. But before the war, it was a more enterprising and bustling place, due in no small part to the nearly 50,000 Jewish-owned businesses located there. What happened to those businesses under Hitler is at the core of meticulous research by Humboldt University historian Christoph Kreutzmüller. While most of us are familiar with images of Nazi boycotts and smashed storefront windows, Kreutzmüller and his research team have assembled less familiar details about the escalating campaign of violence and administrative harassment that led to the demise of Jewish enterprises and, ultimately, the demise of the idea of Berlin as a center of industry and commerce.
Kreutzmüller’s findings were on display earlier this month in an exhibit at the Berlin Chamber of Commerce as part of the city’s yearlong reckoning with the 80th anniversary of Hitler’s rise to power. They can also be found (in German) in his new book,
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In Praise of Dairy Restaurants

Tue, 14 May 2013 04:00:52 GMT

B&H Restaurant in Manhattan's East Village was once part of a neighborhood that vibrated with Jewishness. Yiddish theaters peppered the area. Ratner’s was down the street, and the 2nd Avenue Deli was just across the way. Opened in 1942, the dairy-only B&H has outlasted most of these joints—sure, the 2nd Avenue Deli remains but in a new location and not even on 2nd Avenue—with its blintz and pierogi offerings gobbled up by hungry customers in a classic, narrow diner space brightened by lime green walls.
Little has changed on B&H’s menu. So says Eve Jochnowitz, a lifelong Greenwich Village resident, Yiddish scholar, and Jewish culinary ethnographer, who has just finished translating and editing a 1930 Yiddish cookbook by Vilna restaurateur Fania Lewando. In anticipation of Shavuot, for which many of us indulge in cheesecake and other dairy delights, Jochnowitz joined...
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Curse of the Survivor

Thu, 02 May 2013 04:00:17 GMT

In 1930s Warsaw, a young beauty named Vera Gran made a name for herself as a seductive and charming cabaret singer with a voice fans likened to Edith Piaf’s and Marlene Dietrich’s. Gran (born Grynberg) was, along with her mother and sisters and thousands of other Jews, forced to live inside the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II. During her time in the ghetto, she continued performing until she managed, with the help of her Polish husband, to escape its confines and go into hiding in 1942. Her family perished.
As devastating as that loss was, Gran’s nightmare took a harrowing new turn after the war, when she was suddenly accused by other survivors—including her accompanist, the pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman—of having collaborated with the Gestapo. Her story captivated the Polish writer Agata Tuszyńska, who was born after the war but whose own mother and grandmother struggled to survive in the Warsaw Ghetto and who feels still the...
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Taken for a Ride in Jerusalem

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 04:00:39 GMT

Last week, the Society of Professional Journalists named Tablet contributor Daniel Estrin a Sigma Delta Chi Award honoree for his 2012 Vox Tablet report about a new light-rail system in Jerusalem, a city hardly known for its high-functioning infrastructure. With a rapidly growing population squeezed between sacred sites, and as ground zero for an intractable territorial conflict, Jerusalem is more or less an urban planner’s worst nightmare. When the light-rail system was first proposed, it was meant to ease congestion and unify the city. In addition to facing a host of logistical obstacles on its way to completion, the project prompted considerable opposition because...
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Inside the Ringelblum Archive

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 04:00:31 GMT

To read more Tablet in Warsaw coverage, click here.
This week, Tablet is reporting from Warsaw, which is commemorating the 70th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. The new Museum of the History of Polish Jews, opening today after formal ceremonies, is a spectacular glass-and-concrete structure—still empty, for the most part—that has been 20 years in the making, at a cost of more than 100 million dollars.
Proponents of the museum believe it represents a huge step forward in healing Polish-Jewish relations. Critics say it’s too Jewish, or not Jewish enough. The one thing that everyone seems to agree on is that, like it or not, this museum—which will rely on multimedia exhibits to tell its story—is not, and will never be, a home to artifacts. Yet about a mile away, on a slightly run-down side street, sits an...
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Why Do We Want Revenge?

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 04:00:45 GMT
In the wake of horrific crimes, there is a mantra from politicians, lawyers, and victims: They don’t want revenge, they say; they just want justice. Thane Rosenbaum, a novelist, essayist, and professor at Fordham Law School, says a distinction between the two is both disingenuous and misguided. In his new book, Payback: The Case for Revenge, Rosenbaum argues that the modern American judicial system in fact needs an injection of Old-Testament-style vengeance. From the killing of Osama Bin Laden to popular films like Munich and Braveheart, Rosenbaum highlights the contradiction between our desire for vengeance and our public disavowal of that desire. In a conversation with Tablet Magazine’s Bari Weiss, he made his case. [Running time: 23:42.]
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The Search for an Ancient Blue

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 04:00:49 GMT

In the Book of Numbers, it is written that God said to Moses: “Speak to the sons of Israel, and tell them that they shall make for themselves tassels on the corners of their garments throughout their generations, and that they shall put on the tassel of each corner a cord of blue.” Yet it is comparatively rare to see Jews wearing prayer shawls with blue thread added to the fringes. Why this intransigence?
The short answer is that it's an extraordinarily difficult commandment to fulfill, and one over which people have puzzled for centuries. Religious Jews believe that the blue used on tzitzit must be the same blue as was used in ancient times, and the source of that blue, referred to in the Bible as tekhelet, has been shrouded in mystery for over a thousand years.
Now, thanks to the efforts of a motley crew of rabbis, chemists, marine biologists, and archaeologists from around the world, it appears the mystery has been solved. Vox Tablet sent reporter Zak Rosen to...
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Close Encounters With Talmud

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 04:00:04 GMT

As an author and literary critic (including for Tablet), Adam Kirsch has written about Lionel Trilling, Benjamin Disraeli, Emily Dickinson, and Isaac Bashevis Singer, among many others. This past August, he moved into less familiar territory when he joined the tens of thousands of Jews participating in Daf Yomi, studying a page of Talmud a day. The study cycle will take seven and a half years to complete. Since he began, Kirsch has been writing a weekly column to share his reflections on these essential Jewish texts, and on the Daf Yomi process itself.
On today’s Vox Tablet, Kirsch shares some of those reflections with...
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Obsessed With Hollywood

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 04:00:07 GMT

Rachel Shukert is well known to Tablet followers as our pop culture expert, writing her Tattler column about everything from reality TV to the British royal family. She even wrote and performed an Oscar-night medley. Shukert is also the author of two memoirs: Have You No Shame? and Everything Is Going to Be Great.
In her new young-adult novel Starstruck, the first of a three-part series, Shukert focuses on pop culture, but from a historical perspective. Set in the 1930s, the Golden Age of Hollywood, the book follows three young women trying to break into the movie industry. The most shocking things in Starstruck...
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Our Jesus

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 04:00:31 GMT

Twenty years ago, while studying Hebrew and Latin in high school, London writer Naomi Alderman found herself fascinated by the conflicting and overlapping Jewish and Christian accounts she was reading of the first century AD. She remembers telling her Hebrew teacher, “Someone should write a novel about Jesus, but from the Jewish perspective.” Her teacher thought it was a terrible, if not outright dangerous, idea.
Now Alderman herself has written that novel. The Liars’ Gospel tells the story of the life and death of Jesus from four perspectives: that of his mother Miryam (Mary); his disciple and later betrayer Iehuda from Qeriot (Judas Iscariot); the High Priest Caiaphas; and Bar-Avo (Barabbas), the murderer and rebel whom Pontius Pilate releases instead of Jesus. Each of the four characters is drawn from the New Testament, but in Alderman’s telling, they are fully Jews, like Jesus himself, and are steeped in the rituals and beliefs of their...
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An Unwed Woman of Valor

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 05:00:21 GMT

When Mereleh Luft arrived in New York as a teenager in 1914, she had big plans: to meet a man and start a Jewish family, and to earn enough money to bring the rest of her family over from Latvia. By the 1930s, however, she had little to show for her years in America; she’d been slaving away in garment factories, living in rented rooms, and clinging to a manipulative playboy who refused to marry her. Meanwhile, her family remained stuck in Latvia, even as Hitler’s armies marched east and made their escape a matter of life and death.
In a new biography, Luft’s daughter Lillian Faderman recounts her mother’s travails. Faderman is an award-winning historian best known for her books on lesbian history and for her first memoir,
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The Nine Lives of ‘Hava Nagila’

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 05:00:29 GMT

“Hava Nagila” is perhaps the best-known Jewish song in the United States. Jewish and non-Jewish wedding and bar/bat mitzvah attendees alike know that its first few notes are our cue to link arms on the dance floor and drag or be dragged through a never-ending and increasingly chaotic hora.
But how many people know that the song originated not in Israel (Hebrew lyrics not withstanding) but in Ukraine, and that its greatest ambassador was not Jewish at all? In Hava Nagila (The Movie), a documentary that opens in a limited theatrical release this month, director Roberta Grossman traces the song’s history from a Hasidic enclave in the Pale of Settlement to Palestine and then the United States. She also looks at how affection for the song has waxed and waned, in some ways reflecting American Jews’ (and others’) relationship to Jewishness, through interviews with actor Leonard Nimoy, singers and musicians
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A Very Modern Purimspiel

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 05:00:28 GMT
A central component of Purim observance is, of course, the raucous, collective reading of the Book of Esther. That tradition has evolved into a virtual industry of theatrical storytelling events, or Purimspiels. This year, Vox Tablet decided to jump on the bandwagon. We commissioned four young comedians and/or comedy writers—Josh Gondelman (of recent Modern Seinfeld fame), Emily Heller, Rob Kutner, and Judy Batalion—to share personal stories related to one of several Purim-related themes. With guest host Rebecca Soffer as emcee, here are their stories, which take us on ill-advised cross-country road trips, deposit us in awkward dinner conversations, and remind us of the many ways one can hide one’s identity...
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How (Not) To Stop a Bully

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 05:00:13 GMT

When a bullying incident makes the news, a flurry of collective hand-wringing generally follows. We call for schools to be stricter, punishment to be harsher, kids to be kinder. But what have we actually learned about the dynamic of bullying and, more important, the most effective ways to prevent it? Slate writer and editor Emily Bazelon tackles these questions in a new book, Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy. Bazelon has reported on bullying since 2009. In the book, she profiles three teens—two victims of bullying, and one who was accused of bullying—and then goes beyond to define what bullying is, and is not; what works, and what doesn’t, to interrupt a cycle of bullying; and what needs to be done to prevent a culture of bullying from taking hold in schools and online.
Bazelon speaks with Tablet Magazine’s Liel Leibovitz about
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A Jerusalem Love Story

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 12:00:03 GMT

It is rare for an Israeli and a Palestinian to fall in love. There are physical barriers— Israelis can’t enter Palestinian areas, and Palestinians can’t enter Israeli areas, without special permits. There are also cultural barriers—Israelis and Palestinians are enmeshed in a bitter conflict. But sometimes love can be found. A year ago, two 29-year-olds met on an online dating site. One is from Jerusalem, the other from a West Bank village. Reporter Daniel Estrin brings us their story, courtesy of the radio production house Bending Borders. It is the latest installment in our Hidden Jerusalem series.
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The Afterlife of a Russian Bard

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 12:00:18 GMT

Vladimir Vysotsky, Russia’s beloved balladeer, would have turned 75 this week. Though he died more than three decades ago, at the age of 42, he is still revered as a singer and poet who captured the mood, and the soul, of a dejected generation. But while Vysotsky’s music and persona clearly spoke to a particular time and place (the USSR in the post-Stalinist “Thaw” era), his songs have been adopted by social movements all over the world, including, most recently, Israel’s tent protesters during the summer of 2011.
Today, on Vox Tablet, Liel Leibovitz looks at the too-short life, and enduring afterlife, of this remarkable man and considers what it is that makes his ballads so resonant for so many. [Running time: 10:11.]
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The Settlers’ Spiritual Fathers

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 12:00:09 GMT

Israeli voters go to the polls today to elect the next Knesset. Regardless of the outcome, undoubtedly the biggest story of the campaign season has been the rise of Naftali Bennett, a rookie politician who, against the odds, helped religious Zionism grow from a strong but discombobulated movement into an electoral powerhouse. This ideology, increasingly embraced by mainstream, secular Israelis, has its roots in the thinking of two influential rabbis: Abraham Isaac Kook and his son, Zvi Yehuda.
Tablet Magazine’s Liel Leibovitz speaks to Rabbi Shai Held, co-founder and dean of Mechon Hadar, an egalitarian yeshiva in New York, about the Kooks, the history of the religious Zionist movement, and why it is such a force in Israeli politics and culture today. [Running time:39:20.]
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Pantsless in Jerusalem

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 15:00:30 GMT

When reporter Daniel Estrin first heard through the grapevine that Jerusalemites were planning on participating in the international 12th annual No Pants Subway Ride, he thought: This cannot go well.
For those who aren’t familiar, the No Pants Subway Ride invites participants to ride together without acknowledging one another or the fact that they are significantly underdressed. (Nudity is not allowed; participants must sport some form of underwear.) Since its inception, it has grown exponentially. Four thousand New Yorkers participated this past Sunday, along with thousands more across the United States and in 17 countries around the world.
But Jerusalem? A town where, in some quarters, visitors may be assaulted for “immodest dress” even when they are fully clothed? Estrin decided to tag along to see how the pantsless commuters fared. His...
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The Search for a Black Zion

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 12:00:23 GMT

About a decade ago, novelist Emily Raboteau went to Jerusalem to visit a childhood friend who'd made aliyah. The trip provoked yearnings in Raboteau, the biracial daughter of an African-American father and white mother, for a place where she could feel at home, a Zion of her own. Six years later, that yearning led her to embark on a long journey to learn more about those who leave everything behind in search of a better life in a place they feel they belong. Following in the footsteps of others in the African diaspora, she traveled back to Israel to talk to Ethiopian Jews and African Hebrew Israelites; to Jamaica and Ethiopia to meet with Rastafarians; and to Ghana, home to expats from the United States and elsewhere who wanted to return to the place from which their ancestors were forcibly deported as slaves.
As she chronicles in her new book, Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora, Raboteau learned how difficult...
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Rock ’n’ Remembrance

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 12:00:29 GMT
Lily Brett didn’t care much for rock ’n’ roll, but her job was with a rock magazine, so, reluctantly, she hung out with Mick Jagger. And Jimi Hendrix. And the Who and Cat Stevens and Jim Morrison and just about any great rock star you can think of. It was the ’60s, before musicians had publicists and armies of assistants, so Brett could ask them just about anything she wanted. She did, which often meant she would ask the rock stars about their parents or tell them about hers, two Holocaust survivors who had given birth to their only daughter in a German DP camp. The result was powerful journalism that helped cement Brett’s reputation as one of her profession’s brightest stars. She’s also an acclaimed novelist: Earlier this year, her latest work of fiction, Lola Bensky, was released in her native Australia. It’s about a young woman, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, who becomes a rock journalist and travels to England and America and meets some of rock ’n’ roll’s most legendary performers and...
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Hidden Jerusalem: Sex Guide

Mon, 24 Dec 2012 12:00:07 GMT

Ultra-Orthodox Jews have sex through a hole in the sheet—right? Actually, that’s one of many misconceptions outsiders have about sexual relations within the Haredi community. That said, it is true that the high value strictly religious Jews place on modesty can prevent essential information about sex and sexuality from reaching people who need it: soon-to-be newlyweds; those who are sexually inexperienced, yet questioning their sexuality; couples who are struggling with sexual dysfunction or incompatibility. That’s where David Ribner comes in. Ribner is an Orthodox sex therapist in Jerusalem and co-author, with Jennie Rosenfeld, of
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Joel Meyerowitz Looks Back

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 12:00:32 GMT

Joel Meyerowitz has had many careers as a photographer over the past 50 years. He first made a name for himself at 24 as a New York City street photographer in the tradition of Robert Frank. A few years later he switched to color photography at a time when most art critics and gallerists dismissed it as too “commercial.” Later, Meyerowitz delved into landscape photography and portraits. Then, in the months after Sept. 11, 2001, he became the self-designated archivist of Ground Zero, persuading city authorities to grant him complete access to the site despite the fact that it had been designated a crime scene.
This month, Meyerowitz’s half-century of work is being honored with a two-part retrospective at the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York City and with the publication of a deluxe, two-volume limited-edition monograph of that work titled...
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The Jews Write Christmas Again

Tue, 11 Dec 2012 12:00:46 GMT
That Jews wrote many of the most beloved Christmas songs in the holiday songbook is no secret. “White Christmas,” by Irving Berlin, is perhaps the best-known example, but there are countless others, including “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” (Johnny Marks), and “Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow” (lyricist Sammy Cahn and composer Jule Styne). At age 27, Benj Pasek is now in a position to add his name to that illustrious lineage. Pasek is one half of the songwriting team Pasek & Paul. The two met as undergraduates at the University of Michigan, where they wrote their first production, a song cycle about twenty-something confusion called Edges. Several co-productions later, they were brought on to write the music and lyrics to A Christmas Story, adapted from the 1983...
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Old McYankel Had a Farm

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 12:00:13 GMT
Last summer, 18people paid anywhere between $2,000 and $4,000 to plant cucumbers, scrub potatoes, and build a chicken coop on 200 acres in Goshen, N.Y., all while speaking in a language few of them know. They were enrolled in the first full session of Yiddish Farm, the brainchild of 26-year-old Naftali Ejdelman. Ejdelman comes by his Yiddish honestly; he is the grandson of the late Yiddish professor Mordkhe Schaechter and grew up speaking the language at home. His farming experience, however, is less extensive (as he’s the first to admit). That didn’t stop him from procuring land, recruiting a partner, Yisroel Bass, and launching the first and only Yiddish-language-based shomer-shabbos working organic farm. In September, Vox Tablet sent reporter Nina Porzucki to find out how the farm, and its farmers, were faring. [Running time: 10:40.]
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Soccer as a Wartime Prism

Thu, 22 Nov 2012 12:00:14 GMT

Growing up in the Netherlands, Simon Kuper was raised on soccer and on stories of the Dutch resistance during World War II. It was only as an adult that Kuper, a columnist for the Financial Times, began to understand the level of complicity on the part of the Dutch: more than 75 percent of the Jews in the country were killed during the war. And yet ordinary life—including soccer playing and viewing—continued with little disruption.
In his book Ajax, the Dutch, the War: The Strange Tale of Soccer During Europe’s Darkest Hour (just out in the United States), Kuper looks at soccer culture during the war and offers fresh insight into the treatment of Dutch Jews. In particular, he digs into the archives and institutional memory of Ajax Amsterdam, the country’s premier club and one that has long been associated with the city’s Jews.
Kuper, who has written three other books about soccer, spoke from Paris with Vox Tablet’s Sara Ivry about what he uncovered in his research and...
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Cello Genius on the Move

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 12:00:43 GMT

It is hard to overstate 30-year-old cellist Alisa Weilerstein’s musical achievements. In 2011, she was named a MacArthur fellow, aka “genius,” for her accomplishments as a musician and as an “advocate for contemporary music.” She is constantly in demand, performing, giving master classes, rehearsing, and recording with the world’s best orchestras. And she’s just released an album on Decca Classics—the first time the label has signed on a cellist in over 30 years. The CD, Elgar, Carter: Cello Concertos, features concertos by Edward Elgar and Elliott Carter along with Max Bruch’s Kol Nidrei and is conducted by Daniel Barenboim and performed with the Berlin Staatskapelle.
The last few weeks have been particularly tumultuous for her, with the last-minute cancellation of her Carnegie Hall concert because of the danger posed by a crane dangling above the concert...
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My Hip-Hop Nation

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 12:00:34 GMT

Some people say the way to measure the health of a society is by the status of its women. Others look to the GDP, or to voter turnout. For Tablet’s Liel Liebovitz, it’s a question of beats, rhymes, and samples. When he was 13, Leibovitz had something of a crisis of faith in his home, as well as his homeland, after his father landed in jail with a 20-year sentence. He could no longer stomach the saccharine tunes that made up the mainstream of 1980s Israeli music. That was when he discovered American hip-hop.
It would take a few years before Israel got a hip-hop scene of its own, and its output, quality, and popularity have waxed and waned in the intervening decades. (We have an essay on some of the best new talent here.) Leibovitz, now living and raising a family in New York, finds that his feelings toward his homeland have followed a parallel course. [Running time: 8:41.]
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Enough Already With Koufax

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 11:00:40 GMT
At first glance, the appeal of an essay collection titled Jewish Jocks might seem limited to a small, if fervent, readership. In fact, the anthology, edited by former Tablet writer Marc Tracy and New Republic editor Franklin Foer, is lively and full of surprises, even for readers with no horse in this race. In essays by writers as varied as Simon Schama, David Bezmozgis, Emily Bazelon, and David Brooks, there are entries on the usual suspects, such as Barney Ross and Sandy Koufax. But the collection also includes profiles of lesser-known talents like Soviet weightlifter Grigory Novak, Brooklyn-born matador Sidney Frumpkin, as well as downright mediocre (but beloved to some) players like Mets right-fielder Art Shamsky. Finally, there are those included in the collection for the ways they elevated sport...
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Holocaust Memoir Scandal Redux

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 11:00:38 GMT

In the mid-1990s, East German novelist Benjamin Stein crossed paths with then-celebrated Holocaust memoirist Binjamin Wilkomirski at a literary conference, in a pleasant enough encounter. Soon after, Wilkomirski was exposed as a fraud who had invented his identity as a child Holocaust survivor; in fact he was Christian, born and raised in Switzerland.
In The Canvas, a novel just translated from German into English, Stein takes that encounter and builds from it a riveting story, told in two parts, about two fictional men who become intimately involved in the rapid rise and subsequent fall of a Wilkomirski-like character named Minsky. One protagonist is Amnon Zichroni, who is sent away from his ultra Orthodox Jerusalem community after he’s discovered reading secular literature. Zichroni remains religious but also pursues training as a psychotherapist and later aids Minsky in delving into his traumatic past. The other protagonist is Jan Wechsler, the writer who exposes Minsky only, it...
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How Streisand Got Her Start

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 11:00:43 GMT

This week, Barbra Streisand returns to Brooklyn for her first public performances in her native borough since moving away more than 50 years ago. News of her homecoming shows was announced in May—with tickets to performances tonight and Saturday selling out months before the $1 billion Barclays Center, where she'll appear, even opened.
How did this happen? In 1960, Streisand was a 17-year-old kid from Flatbush trying to make it big in Manhattan. Four years later, she was the country’s top-selling female recording artist and was starring on Broadway as Fanny Brice in Funny Girl. How she and her loyal associates transformed her into a beloved and critically acclaimed star is the subject of Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand, a new biography by William Mann. (Mann’s previous subjects include Elizabeth Taylor and Katharine Hepburn.) Mann joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to talk about how Streisand exaggerated her “kooky”...
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Harold Kushner Reads Job

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 11:00:36 GMT

Harold Kushner first brought comfort and insight to many in 1981 with his best-selling self-help book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Since then, he’s continued to offer life- and faith-affirming messages, with such titles as When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough, and Living a Life That Matters. Now he returns to his original theme of suffering with The Book of Job: When Bad Things Happened to a Good Person. In Job’s anguish and anger toward God, Kushner finds lessons on how one might remain faithful to a God who does not protect us from suffering.
Kushner talks with Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about the very personal roots of this exploration, dating back to the 1970s, when his son Aaron was diagnosed with a rare and incurable disease (Aaron died in 1977, at age 14); about the depth and complexity of the Job verses; and about why he believes we must choose between an all-loving God and an...
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Is Israel a Modern Sparta?

Mon, 24 Sep 2012 11:00:24 GMT
Ever since the founding of the state of Israel, the country’s leaders have favored overwhelming military might over diplomatic finesse in confronting conflicts with their neighbors. Such is the argument made by veteran journalist Patrick Tyler in his new book, Fortress Israel: The Inside Story of the Military Elite Who Run the Country—and Why They Can’t Make Peace. Tyler has spent a combined 26 years reporting for the New York Times and the Washington Post, covering the U.S. State Department, the Pentagon, the intelligence community, and the Middle East. In his book, Tyler focuses on the latter, offering a fascinating account of the Israeli military establishment—its victories, defeats, mistakes, and cover-ups. Beginning with David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan in the 1950s and continuing almost up to the...
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Meyer Levin’s Anne Frank

Fri, 14 Sep 2012 11:00:25 GMT

In 1952, Meyer Levin had every reason to believe he would bring Anne Frank’s diary to the stage. Levin, an American who served as a war correspondent in Europe during World War II, first came across Frank’s diary in a Paris bookshop in 1951. He immediately contacted Frank’s father, Otto, and was instrumental in getting the book published in the United States, and then in attracting the interest of readers, thanks to a glowing review he wrote for the New York Times.
Otto Frank granted Levin the rights to adapt the diary for stage, but Levin would never see that dream realized. The production only got as far as a preliminary radio play. It’s hard to pin down why. Some say the Anne Frank that Levin was so moved by—indeed revered—was too Jewish a character for early 1950s American audiences. Others say Levin’s difficult personality and lack of writing ability scuttled the project. Either way, Levin eventually relinquished the stage rights, shunned by Frank and his cohort. The failure left...
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Jewish Guys on the Side

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 11:00:27 GMT

Hanna Rosin’s new book The End of Men argues that changes in the U.S. economy—specifically the vast reduction of manufacturing jobs combined with growth in health, human resources, education, and other traditionally female-dominated professions—are leaving men in the dust in corporate culture, at universities, in families, and in popular culture. To what extent are these trends reflected in Jewish American communal life and leadership?
Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry is joined by Andy Bachman, rabbi of Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn (and U.S. history and politics buff), and Shifra Bronznick, founding president of Advancing Women Professionals and the Jewish Community, to discuss Rosin’s thesis, and how it might resonate in a Jewish context. They speak as Jewish leaders, as people who are privy to the private concerns of Jewish men and women who are struggling with these changes, and as parents of sons and daughters who will have to navigate...
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New Songs for Old Prayers

Tue, 04 Sep 2012 11:00:08 GMT

Zach Fredman is a musician, composer, and rabbi-in-training now in his fifth year at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Over the past several years, he has worked to combine his spiritual and musical passions by composing devotional songs that draw on his favorite musical traditions. Those include Indian raga, North African rhythms and forms of chanting, as well as the Grateful Dead and Aretha Franklin.
For lyrics, he turned to Torah and other religious texts. For collaborators, he turned to musicians whose work, like his, isn’t easily categorized. Perhaps most surprising is his singer Alsarah, a Muslim woman who grew up in Sudan and Yemen, went to Wesleyan University, and now leads the band Alsarah and the Nubatones from her base in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Together, the 10-person band, which is called the Epichorus, is releasing their first album, One Bead, available here at the end of this...
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Member of the Tribe

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 11:00:07 GMT

When Theodore Ross moved with his newly divorced mother and brother to the Gulf Coast of Mississippi at age 9, the family pretended not to be Jewish. This deceit was his mother’s idea, and years later it led Ted to question whether he should consider himself a Jew at all, having been discouraged from embracing any religious identification as a young person. In recent years, the desire to answer that question led him to seek out other Jews who are outliers in some way, from crypto-Jews in the Southwest, to the “lost tribe” Ethiopian Jews now resettled in Israel, to ultra-Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn who welcome him into their homes for Shabbat.
Ross writes about these journeys in Am I a Jew? Lost Tribes, Lapsed Jews, and One Man’s Search for Himself. He joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to talk about why his mother demanded that he hide his religious identity, what it was like pretending not to be entirely himself, and why he chose to...
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The New Sound of Central Asia

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 11:00:23 GMT

Originally from Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, and now based in and around Tel Aviv, the Alaev Family includes three generations of musicians. They’re led by Allo Alaev, the family patriarch, who’s now 80 and who spent 50 years as a percussionist with the Folk Opera of Dushanbe. These days he leads the seven-person family ensemble, which includes his sons and grandchildren. Together, they update traditional Jewish and Central Asian folk songs to create a propulsive and almost ecstatic new sound.
This month, the Alaevs concluded a world tour with a gig at Lincoln Center’s Out of Doors Festival. They also have a new CD, produced with Tamir Muskat, the drummer of the high-energy dance band Balkan Beat Box. And, come fall, they’ll be hitting the road once again, bringing their singular sound to...
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David Rakoff Reads Bambi

Fri, 10 Aug 2012 15:35:48 GMT

David Rakoff, a contributor to our site, died Aug. 9, 2012, after a battle with cancer. He was 47.
Some years ago, Rakoff wrote an essay on the life and work of Viennese writer Felix Salten. The creator of Bambi, Salten was a European Jew who wrote soft porn and a prominent critic in early 20th-century Austria. In concert with this essay, Rakoff joined Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry for a podcast conversation about the brutality in Bambi, about Salten’s place in literary society, and about the dark side of fairy tales—and life.
We re-run this piece now to celebrate David Rakoff, whose wit, warmth, and grace come across in every utterance, and whose reading of a particularly wrenching scene from Bambi gives a sense both of the work's violence and of Rakoff’s own captivating voice....
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Florida’s Airport Ambassador

Mon, 06 Aug 2012 11:00:52 GMT

Most of us would just as soon avoid airports, with their long lines and testy patrons. But Betty Sussman thrives there. She is one of approximately 90 volunteers who work a four-hour shift each week at the Palm Beach International Airport, greeting visitors as “airport ambassadors.” Sussman (who turns 81 this month) is not your typical South Floridian. She is still employed; four days a week she works as an office manager for an ophthalmologist. For her, being an airport ambassador eases some of the loneliness she experiences during the weekend—time she used to spend with her husband before he died six years ago. Plus there are perks: She makes good use of the meal voucher she earns each shift, redeemable at any of the airport’s concessions.
Miami-based radio producer Trina Sargalski trailed Betty on one of her Sunday-morning shifts and sent us this dispatch. This...
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Reporter Digs Up Converso Past

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 11:00:14 GMT

Doreen Carvajal was raised Catholic and had no occasion to question her religious or cultural heritage growing up. Even when she became a journalist (she’s currently a European correspondent for the New York Times and International Herald Tribune) and readers, seeing her byline, wrote to tell her that her last name was a common Sephardic Jewish name, she remained incurious. It took moving to Arcos de la Frontera, an ancient town in Andalusia, Spain, for her to finally confront the likelihood that her ancestors were conversos—that is, Spanish Jews who 600 years ago converted to Christianity rather than face death or exile during the Inquisition.
In a new memoir, The Forgetting River, Carvajal describes her search for definitive answers to questions about her identity. That search took her to Costa Rica, university archives and genetic specialists, frontier towns in Spain, and her own cache of forgotten memories and keepsakes....
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What Went Wrong in Munich

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 11:00:40 GMT

With the start of the Summer Olympics just days away, the International Olympic Committee remains firm in its insistence that there will be no commemoration marking the tragedy that took place 40 years ago, at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, Germany. It was there that 11 Israeli athletes and coaches were taken hostage and then murdered by a Palestinian terrorist group known as Black September. A German police officer and five of the hostage-takers also died in the standoff.
The United States, Germany, Australia, and Israel have called for a public remembrance at this summer’s games in London. Their efforts have been for naught. The IOC says it does not want to “politicize” the event with a memorial service even while international pressure—including from President Obama—to hold such a commemoration mounts.
David Clay Large is a historian of modern Germany who has written about the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Munich under Nazi rule, and, most recently,...
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Modern Muslim Girls

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 11:00:11 GMT

Many people think of Islam, or religion generally, as disempowering for girls and women. The Light in Her Eyes, a documentary by Laura Nix and Julia Meltzer, challenges that notion. It follows Houda al-Habash, a conservative Muslim, wife, mother, preacher, and founder of a girls’ religious school in Damascus. In observing al-Habash, her children, students, and colleagues at school, at home, in shopping malls, and at outdoor cafés, the film explores how modernity and Muslim faith co-exist, challenging many Western assumptions that such co-existence is a fallacy.
Meltzer and Nix join Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to talk about the difficulties they had filming as American women—one Jewish, one Christian—in Syria and about their audiences' reactions to the seemingly contradictory values and aspirations expressed by al-Habash and her students.
The Light in Her Eyes airs on the PBS series “POV” on July 19, 2012, and...
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Israel’s African Problem

Mon, 02 Jul 2012 11:00:49 GMT

Over the past few years, Israel has seen a dramatic increase in immigration—not of Jews, but of migrants from African nations like Eritrea, Sudan, and Ivory Coast. According to some estimates, there are now approximately 60,000 African migrants living in Israel, and their presence has given rise to tensions, particularly in the poor Tel Aviv neighborhoods where many of them have settled.
Now the government has embarked on a crackdown—not the first but certainly the toughest so far—deporting hundreds of migrants from South Sudan, which it says is safe enough for them to return to. Migrants from Ivory Coast are up next: This past Thursday, the...
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A Novel’s Unlikely Friends

Mon, 25 Jun 2012 11:00:04 GMT

According to the Torah, homosexuality is forbidden. That injunction is what makes Rabbi Zuckerman, a frail old man, recoil when he learns that a new friend, a twentysomething named Benji Steiner, is gay. These characters and their relationship anchor a new novel, Sweet Like Sugar, by Wayne Hoffman. It’s a story that takes on identity, personal secrets, and the search for connection. The novel is something of a departure for Hoffman, whose debut, Hard, took a much more explicit look at gay life, describing the personal and political engagement of a group of gay men in the late 1990s in Greenwich Village.
Hoffman, the managing editor of Tablet Magazine, will accept the prestigious Stonewall Book Award/Barbara Gittings Literature Award at the annual American Library Association conference today....
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Blonde and Botoxed in Miami

Thu, 14 Jun 2012 11:00:24 GMT
In the 1970s, Aline Kominsky-Crumb pioneered a let-it-all-hang-out style of autobiographical comics. Her influence continues to this day, in the work of graphic novelists like Allison Bechdel or, perhaps more aptly, filmmaker Lena Dunham, creator and star of the much-discussed HBO series Girls. Kominsky-Crumb’s other claim to fame is her husband, R. Crumb, the macher of underground comics. The Crumbs have been living in a village in France for the past two decades, collaborating and pursuing their own independent projects. Now Kominsky-Crumb has a show opening at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art in New York. The exhibit documents, with drawings and video, a trip she and fellow artist Dominique Sapel took to Miami—not as tourists, but as participant-observers of the local culture. More specifically...
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A Chinese Shul’s Love Story

Mon, 11 Jun 2012 11:00:20 GMT

The former Ohel Moshe Synagogue in the northern Hongkou District of Shanghai was once the spiritual home of European Jews taking refuge during World War II. Most of those 20,000 refugees moved on after the war and the establishment of Communist China. These days, the synagogue forms part of the Jewish Refugees Museum; it’s sparsely furnished and usually quiet. (An exhibit on the community opens later this month in New York City.)
For a few weeks this past spring that changed, as the synagogue’s prayer hall was transformed into a wartime café, in which was set a historical drama called North Bank Suzhou Creek. (The play has since had a three-night run in New York City, and there are plans in the works for additional performances.) The production, a love story full of musical numbers, is by Chinese playwright William Sun and was...
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Moroccan Grooves, Blogged

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 11:00:37 GMT

By day, Chris Silver works for a Jewish task force trying to raise awareness about civic inequalities facing Israel's Arab citizens. But he dedicates his free time to Jews in an Arab land, with his blog, Jewish Morocco. Silver created the blog in 2008, while traveling in Morocco, as a way of sharing the stories, photographs, and other artifacts he was collecting to document what Jewish life there had been like in its heyday. Along the way, he developed a particular interest in the country’s Jewish musicians and singers—characters who were beloved by Moroccans of all backgrounds, and to whom he gives ample space on his blog.
Silver joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to talk about some of the unique voices he’s discovered, what happened to Jewish Moroccan singers once they left the country in the 1950s and '60s, and where he gets his missionary zeal (hint: It has to do with Bob Dylan; Mama Cass; Bill Cosby; and Chris’s dad, Roy)....
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An Atheist for Religion

Tue, 29 May 2012 11:00:26 GMT
Essayist and philosopher-for-the-masses Alain de Botton is best known for How Proust Can Change Your Life, in which he plumbs Remembrance of Things Past for lessons on how to live a more fulfilling life. De Botton has also written books on love, travel, and architecture. In his newest book, Religion for Atheists, de Botton tackles religion. Here he argues that, in rejecting religion wholesale, atheists are unnecessarily depriving themselves of world religions’ prodigious cultural, spiritual, and ethical offerings. His “pick and choose” approach to religion–rejecting central tenets like, say, a belief in God, while borrowing concepts like Judaism’s Day of Atonement–will surely rub some believers the wrong way. But de Botton is addressing a different audience, including many self-identified “cultural Jews” whose ignorance of Judaism he laments. London-based reporter Hugh Levinson...
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Voices Raised for Jerusalem

Fri, 18 May 2012 11:00:27 GMT

Matthew Lazar grew up singing—at home, at summer camp, everywhere. A trained musician and conductor, he found that singing in a chorus offered him a way to foster community and express joy in being Jewish. That joy reached greater heights when Lazar took over the reins of the Zamir Choral Foundation, an organization dedicated to giving teenagers and adults an opportunity to sing together throughout the United States and Israel, 40 years ago.
This Sunday, the voices of the Zamir Chorale will fill the halls of Jazz at Lincoln Center, when they perform with Yehoram Gaon, Alberto Mizrahi, and other special guests in a concert celebrating Yom Yerushalayim, or Jerusalem Day, the holiday that marks the reunification of Jerusalem after 1967’s Six Day War.
Matthew Lazar joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to talk about what makes choral music Jewish, about his own musical background, and about what will surely be some...
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Old Jews Telling More Jokes

Mon, 14 May 2012 11:00:14 GMT

In the beginning, there were just old Jews telling jokes—you know, Uncle Buddy down in Boca or grandpa’s bawdy second wife Hettie. Then, in 2008, filmmaker Sam Hoffman had the idea of filming some of his favorite old Jews telling jokes. He created a website and posted a series of “Old Jews Telling Jokes” videos that soon attracted a devoted following. The most popular jokes (such as this one, about giving directions) have been viewed well over a million times.
Now, at the initiative of Daniel Okrent—the first public editor for the New York Times—and writer and editor Peter Gethers, Old Jews Telling Jokes has been re-purposed as a theatrical production, complete with a narrative through-line and cabaret-style musical numbers. Currently in previews, it opens May 20 at the Westside Theater in...
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The Most Perfect Hebrew Bible

Mon, 07 May 2012 11:00:40 GMT

The Aleppo Codex, which dates back to the 10th century, is considered by many Bible scholars to be the most perfect copy of the Hebrew Bible that has ever existed. Yet most Jews have never heard of it. Four years ago, Jerusalem-based reporter Matti Friedman set out to change that fact, researching the codex's mysterious history: how it changed hands from the Jews of Aleppo, Syria, where it had been safeguarded for centuries, to tightly held institutional control in the state of Israel—where it became decidedly more imperiled, and where large portions of the codex went missing.
Friedman explores this journey in The Aleppo Codex: A True Story of Obsession, Faith, and the Pursuit of an Ancient Bible. He joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to discuss the codex’s clandestine journey to Israel in the late 1950s, what might have happened to sections of the codex that have gone missing, and the struggle of the Jews of Aleppo to regain control of their community’s most prized religious...
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Madeleine Albright’s War Years

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 11:00:00 GMT

In 1996, just as the Honorable Madeleine Korbelova Albright was confirmed as secretary of State—the country’s first woman to hold that post—revelations came to light that her Czech parents, neither of whom were living by then, had been born Jews.
Josef and Anna (née Spieglová) Korbel converted to Catholicism in 1941, when Josef was working for the exiled Czech government in London. The information, which Albright learned of just a few months before it was made public, raised many questions: Why had her parents converted, and why had they never told her? Why had she never figured it out? And what happened to the relatives who remained in Czechoslovakia during World War II and after? It was only when her term as secretary of State ended that Albright was able to pursue answers to these questions in earnest. In her new book, Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, she chronicles her search and the answers she found. She joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to talk about...
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Taken for a Ride in Jerusalem

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 11:00:29 GMT
Jerusalem is not known for its high-functioning infrastructure. With a rapidly growing population squeezed between sacred sites, and as ground zero for an intractable territorial conflict, it’s pretty much an urban planner’s worst nightmare. To wit: Jerusalem's plan to build a light-rail system to ease congestion and unify the city. In addition to facing a host of logistical obstacles, the proposal prompted considerable opposition because the trains would cross borders that many people have fought hard to define and defend, separating East Jerusalem from West, Arab from Jew. After nearly a decade of construction, at a cost of over a billion dollars, the system finally opened several months ago. But if there’s one thing that unites these commuting Jerusalemites, it’s their frustration with the train’s deficiencies. Daniel Estrin filed this report. [Running time: 15:02.]
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Aging Survivors Can’t Forget

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 11:00:53 GMT
Many of the estimated 200,000 living Holocaust survivors face a new trauma in their final years, as they are overwhelmed by terrible memories they’ve successfully contained for 70 years. In some cases, the return of these memories is the outcome of a natural instinct, as we age, to look back over our lives. For others, it’s the result of what has been termed late-onset post-traumatic stress disorder, which brings on flashbacks, bouts of paranoia, and other debilitating symptoms. Reporter Karen Brown introduces us to survivors and their family members (including Howard Reich, whose documentary film Prisoner of her Past chronicled his mother’s mental decline), as well as social workers and specialists working with them, to find out more about this painful last chapter in a survivor’s life, and about what can be done to help them. [Running time: 17:00.]...
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On the Cancer Gene Trail

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 11:00:00 GMT

In 1999, a young woman in Colorado named Shonnie Medina died of breast cancer. Tests revealed that she carried a gene mutation commonly associated with Jews—yet Medina was a Hispano, meaning that her ancestry was both Native American and Spanish, with no known Jewish background. Other family members similarly turned out to be carriers of this potentially deadly gene; some have died from or been diagnosed with breast or ovarian cancer.
How this clan of Roman Catholic Hispanos became carriers of this mutation is the subject of a new book by Jeff Wheelwright: The Wandering Gene and the Indian Princess: Race, Religion, and DNA tells Medina's tragic tale as well as the story of how one specific genetic marker could have made its way from Ancient Babylonia to the contemporary American southwest. Wheelwright joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to talk about the resilience of the breast-cancer gene, and how the Jewish Diaspora can be traced...
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Don’t Diss Passover Fruit Slices

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 11:00:29 GMT

Jerry Cohen’s father opened Economy Candy on Rivington Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side back in 1937, and it remains a paradise for anyone with an appreciation for brightly packaged and affordable confections. In it, one finds shelves overflowing with every candy you can imagine, from Bonomo’s Banana Turkish Taffy to Sifer’s Valomilk. The store also carries seasonal treats, which, at this time of year, means neon-yellow marshmallow Peeps within arm's reach of packaged Seder mints.
On this week’s podcast, Cohen takes unabashed sweet tooth Blake Eskin on a tour of his Passover candy selection. Along the way, they discuss the joys of a non-packaged fruit slice and the future of the candy business and make a brief detour into the forbidden land of chocolate bunnies. [Running time: 7:11.]
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Big Band Theory

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 11:00:23 GMT

Growing up in Tel Aviv, pianist Alon Yavnai was exposed to a range of musical traditions including Middle Eastern, jazz, and Latin (his mother is Argentine). Since then, the Grammy-winner has experimented with other influences, touring with a Cape Verdean dance band, for instance, and collaborating with accomplished musicians such as cellist Yo-Yo Ma and saxophonist Paquito D’Rivera. Yavnai’s last album featured his own jazz trio. Now he’s trying his hand with a much bigger ensemble. Working with the Hamburg-based NDR Bigband, Yavnai has put out Shir Ahava, a jazz album that sometimes veers into symphony territory, blurring the lines between genres and suggesting, furthermore, that such lines are immaterial—to those making the music, anyway.
Yavnai speaks with Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry at his home in Brooklyn about how he first took up the piano, his ventures into big band...
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General Frenemy

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 11:00:07 GMT

Best known as the general who won the Civil War for the Union, Ulysses S. Grant later became the 18th president of the United States. Now historian Jonathan Sarna weighs in on Grant’s hotly debated legacy from a little-known angle: In When General Grant Expelled the Jews, the latest title from Nextbook Press, Sarna examines the reasons for and impact of Grant's General Orders No. 11, issued during the war on Dec. 17, 1862, which expelled all Jews from areas then under Grant’s jurisdiction.
Although it was quickly rescinded, General Orders No. 11 raised fears among Jews that the centuries-old threat of persecution had reached American shores. Throughout the remainder of his life, Grant went out of his way to show contrition: During his presidency, he promoted Jews to prominent positions in his administration and spoke...
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Jews for Jesus

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 12:00:37 GMT

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach made a huge splash with his 1999 book, Kosher Sex. The book, along with works including Kosher Sutra and Kosher Adultery, flouts taboos against discussing physical intimacy, desire, and other basic elements of the human experience. Now he’s at it again, taking on perhaps the biggest taboo of all: Jesus. In Kosher Jesus, Boteach argues that Jesus, a faithful adherent and proponent of Judaism, never intended to create a new religion. That turn of events was a corruption of Jesus’ reputation by his followers, argues Boteach, and getting to a place where Jews and Christians alike recognize his Jewishness can only help achieve greater understanding between peoples of different faiths today.
Boteach joins Vox Tablet, hosted by Tablet’s Bari Weiss, to talk about his new book. With him on the podcast is Noah Feldman, a law professor at Harvard University and a longtime friend of Boteach’s, who has his own...
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Easy Access

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 12:00:57 GMT

Before Ilya Khodosh went off to graduate school, he spent a lot of time online, especially when he had insomnia or felt anxious. For Khodosh, moving to a new city was a new opportunity to go cold turkey and stop websurfing, which meant no Internet at home. As he explains in this story, which recently won first prize in a Jewish storytelling slam, that deprivation didn’t last long.
Ilya Khodosh is currently enrolled in a graduate theater program where he is studying criticism and playwriting. [Running time: 8:11.]
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Salonica Stories

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 12:00:30 GMT
In the 19th century, Sa’adi Besalel a-Levi was an esteemed (if controversial) journalist, publisher, singer, and composer in Salonica, a Mediterranean port city whose 2,000-year-old Jewish community was later decimated in the Holocaust. He also wrote the earliest known Ladino-language memoir, which was all but lost until Stanford University history professor Aron Rodrigue found a forgotten copy at Jerusalem’s Jewish National and University Library. Now the memoir is available to all, in an edition introduced and edited by Rodrigue and fellow historian Sarah Abrevaya Stein, and translated by Isaac Jerusalmi: A Jewish Voice From Ottoman Salonica has been published in English in tandem with a digital version of the original soletreo, or Ladino cursive. Rodrigue and Stein join Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to talk about Sa’adi’s life, his obsession...
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The Projectionist

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 12:00:31 GMT
Actor Antony Sher has won accolades for playing Shylock, Richard III, Cyrano de Bergerac, Macbeth, and Primo Levi. Knighted in 2000, he’s traveled a great distance from his quiet middle-class upbringing in Cape Town, South Africa, and even further from the world of his grandparents, who were Jewish immigrants from Lithuania. Now Sher is returning to his roots in Travelling Light, an acclaimed new play by Nicholas Wright being produced by England’s National Theatre. (Selected National Theatre productions are broadcast to movie theaters worldwide via its NT Live program. Additional U.S. screenings of Travelling Light are scheduled for cities including Brooklyn, N.Y., Los Angeles, Chicago, Phoenix, and Minneapolis.) He plays Jacob Bindel, a wealthy timber merchant turned movie producer in an Eastern European town in the early 1900s. Through Bindel, the play explores how so many Jews came...
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Cheap Eats

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 12:00:51 GMT

The Ukrainian city of Lviv, also known as L’vov or Lemberg, has a rich but complicated past. On the eve of World War II, the city was home to the third-biggest Jewish population in what was then Poland, behind Warsaw and Lodz. Then came a familiar story: Nazi occupation, pogroms, a ghetto, and concentration camps, and finally the Soviets took over and erased whatever traces of Jewish life remained. The past remains a painful subject in Lviv, and there have been few public efforts to deal with the city’s dark Jewish history. And so a young Ukrainian entrepreneur sensed an opportunity. He opened Under the Golden Rose, a theme restaurant that he says honors the city’s Jewish past. It’s a place where diners are...
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Grace Notes

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 12:00:45 GMT
Virtuosic mandolin and clarinet player Andy Statman recently released his first album in five years. It's called Old Brooklyn, and it includes collaborations with a number of top-notch musicians, including Béla Fleck and Paul Shaffer. Perhaps most unusual, though, is the track titled “The Lord Will Provide.” The song is an 18th-century hymn, and this beautifully spare version is a collaboration between Statman, an Orthodox Jew, and country music star Ricky Skaggs, an evangelical Christian. Independent radio producer Stephanie Coleman wondered how this collaboration came about. Here's the story, as told to Coleman by Statman and Skaggs. [Running time: 10:20.]
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Goodbye to All That

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 12:00:40 GMT
The Jewish community in Caracas has long been lively, prosperous, tight-knit, and devoted to the country that accepted so many of them as refugees during and after World War II. At its height, it numbered as many as 40,000 people. But in the years since President Hugo Chávez came into office, their sense of well-being has eroded significantly. Like other wealthy Venezuelans, they have seen their economic opportunities diminished. Unlike other wealthy Venezuelans, they’ve been singled out in a rhetoric of class warfare that is sometimes implicitly, other times explicitly, anti-Semitic. In a few cases, that rhetoric has led to violence, as in 2009, when vandals broke into the Mariperez Synagogue, defacing it with anti-Semitic graffiti and destroying property. With their future uncertain, younger Jews are leaving Venezuela in droves, in many cases with their parents and grandparents following in their footsteps. Tablet’s Matthew Fishbane traveled to Caracas to
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Who Shall Live

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 12:00:40 GMT

When Varian Fry, an American journalist, went to Europe in 1941 on behalf of the Emergency Rescue Committee, he went with a mission: to save a group of European artists and intellectuals from the Nazis. His endeavor succeeded. With the help of a small team, he rescued Hannah Arendt, Marc Chagall, and more than 2,200 others. But at a time when Oskar Schindler and Raul Wallenberg are familiar names, Fry has been largely forgotten.
Journalist Dara Horn was determined to tell his story. In a revelatory Kindle Single published today by Tablet Magazine, Horn reports on how Fry came to his rescue work and what became of him after the war. (You can read a preview on Tablet.) But how did this hero decide whom to save in the first place? Horn spoke to Vox Tablet host Sara Ivy about Fry's exploits, the arguably eugenics-like nature of his mission, the cultural heritage that was...
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Hope Less

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 12:00:16 GMT

What if the Holocaust’s most famous victim hadn’t died in Bergen-Belsen but had continued living in hiding, moving furtively from attic to attic, until she found herself a perch in a house in upstate New York? That’s the premise of Hope: A Tragedy, the new novel by Shalom Auslander. It follows Solomon Kugel, the owner of the house, who discovers an ancient, haggard Anne Frank upstairs struggling to finish a follow-up to her famous diary. Kugel is put-upon; his marriage is strained, he flails at work, and his mother, who lives with him, is obsessed with Jewish persecution and pretends that she herself was a victim of the Nazis. In addition, Kugel is in ongoing conversation with a guru who posits that nothing good ever comes of optimism.
The novel, Auslander’s first, is both entertaining and disconcerting and Auslander, a
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Settling Down

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 12:00:12 GMT

Chani Getter was married off by her ultra-Orthodox family when she was 17. By the time she was 24, she had three children. She was deeply religious and deeply unhappy. She knew she was gay and could not stay in her marriage, but she also knew that she wanted to stay within the ultra-Orthodox community and raise an observant family. She is one of seven women (including a male-to-female transsexual) profiled in DevOUT, a new documentary produced and directed by Diana Neille and Sana Gulzar. Each of the women in the film is attempting to follow the strictures of Orthodoxy while embracing a sexual identity that the religious tradition has labeled an abomination.
This film is not covering entirely new turf. In 2001, Sandi Dubowski’s Trembling Before G-d also profiled gay Orthodox men and women. But DevOUT’s subjects are are settling down, raising families, and forcing their communities to come to terms with their existence...
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Disney’s World

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 12:00:14 GMT

Walt Disney was not a controversial figure during his lifetime. But after his death in 1966, historians began putting forth a variety of disquieting revelations about him: The animator and studio chief had testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, it turned out, and he may have been an FBI informant. He was allegedly interested in cryogenics. And he was reportedly prone to making anti-Semitic remarks. But subsequent biographers disagreed, sparking a long battle over Disney’s legacy.
Eric Molinsky worked in the animation industry, and has long wondered not only if the claims of Disney’s anti-Semitism are true but also why they remain a point of fascination and ridicule among cartoonists and others nearly a half-century after his death. For this week’s Vox Tablet, Molinsky, now a radio producer, spoke to an animation historian, a Disney-obsessed playwright, and a fairy-tale scholar in an effort to understand if Disney the man, or Disney’s world view, was truly bad for the...
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Wonderstruck

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 12:00:42 GMT
Several years ago a fan of the multi-instrumentalist Basya Schechter approached her with a copy of a book of Yiddish poems. The verses were by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who arrived in the United States from Europe in 1940, when he was 33 years old. Heschel was born in Poland and gained renown for his theological works and for his role as a Civil Rights activist. He was far less known for his poetry, written when he was in his early 20s, about intimate relationships—both with God and with people. Schechter’s fan asked her to set Heschel’s poems to music. It took some time for Schechter, who was raised in the Orthodox Brooklyn neighborhood of Borough Park and who heads the band Pharaoh’s Daughter, to take up that...
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American Master

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 12:00:07 GMT

It was 1982, and Robert Weide was 22 years old, when he first approached Woody Allen about profiling the comic in a documentary. Weide, a fan of comedy legends since his childhood, had already made The Marx Brothers in a Nutshell, an acclaimed film about Groucho and his brothers, but Allen politely turned him down. Instead, the filmmaker turned his focus to Mort Sahl, about whom he made 1989’s Mort Sahl: The Loyal Opposition, and Lenny Bruce, subject of his Emmy- and Oscar-nominated 1998 film, Lenny Bruce: Swear to Tell the Truth. Then he helped Larry David create Curb Your Enthusiasm, for which he served as executive producer for five seasons. When he approached Allen again, in 2008, the answer was yes.
The result is Woody Allen: A...
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Survey Says

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 12:00:40 GMT

Is there a custom to place a cat, pieces of cake, or something else in the crib before one lays the child in it? Is biting off the protuberance at the end of an etrog considered a protection for a pregnant woman? If two zaddikim quarreled in this world, do they make peace in the next world?
These are questions from the Jewish Ethnographic Program, a vast questionnaire developed by ethnographer S. An-sky between 1912 and 1914 for dissemination throughout the Pale of Settlement, the part of Eastern Europe that was then home to 40 percent of the world’s Jews. An-sky, best known as the playwright of The Dybbuk, hoped the questionnaire would record waning folk beliefs and practices that he believed were at the core of Jewish life. But World War I interfered, and his ethnographic expedition was called off. An-sky died in 1920, and...
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Preoccupied

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 11:00:14 GMT

It’s been nearly two months since the Occupy Wall Street protesters unrolled their first tarps in Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park. What was once merely a blip on a few Twitter feeds is now a world-wide phenomenon, with occupations in more than a thousand cities and towns in 80-odd countries. But in the absence of any leadership or specific set of demands, it’s hard to say what this movement is, who it represents, and where it’s headed. Even those who agree with its basic message–that the income gap between the rich and the rest in this country is immoral and unsustainable–disagree about Occupy Wall Street’s potential to bring about meaningful change.
At their respective pulpits, physical and virtual, Andy Bachman, senior rabbi at Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and Marc Tracy, Tablet Magazine’s Scroll blogger, have had a lot to say about the movement since its inception. This week on Vox...
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Flesh and Blood

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 11:00:40 GMT

These days there is a lot to worry about: global warming, financial collapse, terrorism—you name it. For writer Max Brooks, the threat that trumps them all is zombies. He sounded a warning call about these walking dead in 2003 with The Zombie Survival Guide, followed three years later by World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, an immensely popular account of a massive zombie outbreak (the movie version, starring Brad Pitt, is due out in December 2012).
Brooks joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry on the podcast to discuss the perils of dressing up like a zombie on Halloween, the particular horrors that a zombie infestation represents to Jews, and the origins of his own zombie fears—traced to one fateful night circa 1985 when Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft opted not to hire a babysitter. [Running time: 14:40.]
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Father Figure

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 11:00:35 GMT

In 1900, a 14-year-old Jewish boy in Poland named David Gruen founded a Zionist youth group. He made his way to Palestine when he was 20, where he eventually changed his last name to Ben-Gurion. He went on to become a founding father of Israel and its first prime minister. One of Ben-Gurion’s key aides in founding the Jewish state was Shimon Peres, now the country’s president. Thirty-seven years younger than his hero, Peres similarly emigrated from Poland to Palestine and similarly served as Israel's prime minister. Peres won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994, along with Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, for his efforts in the talks that led to the Oslo Accords.
With the help of journalist David Landau, Peres has written a new biography of Ben-Gurion, his mentor: Ben-Gurion: A Political Life, available now from Nextbook Press. Landau, a former...
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Huddled Masses

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 11:00:36 GMT

Every day, people gather in lower Manhattan to pay tribute to an American icon. They are waiting, often for hours, for the ferry that will take them to the Statue of Liberty. While most visitors to the statue are familiar with the rousing poem displayed inside its base—“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” and so on—very few can name the poet who wrote it, Emma Lazarus. Even fewer know that Lazarus was a Sephardic Jew and a scholar, playwright, and novelist.
In 2006, Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry went to the Statue of Liberty ferry terminal to talk to visitors about Lazarus and solicit from them a group...
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Conservadox

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 11:00:58 GMT

Sukkot, which begins later this week, celebrates the end of the harvest season. People decorate their sukkahs with branches and fruits as a way of giving thanks for the season’s bounty. Yet Jews generally shy away from nature worship, with its echoes of idolatry and paganism. It is even argued that Judaism’s human-centered worldview—the belief that humans alone are made in God’s image—makes us particularly ill-suited to respond to warnings about shrinking glaciers and dying species.
How, then, does a religious Jew who is deeply concerned about threats to the environment galvanize her community? Evonne Marzouk, the founder and executive director of Canfei Nesharim, a Jewish environmental organization, addressed that question for Vox Tablet. She spoke to host Sara Ivry about rabbinical and Torah-based justifications for making environmental sustainability a priority, her own journey to...
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Unforgiven

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 11:00:07 GMT

Blasphemy and Other Serious Crimes, the latest album from the jazz-metal band Pitom, has a title that makes explicit reference to the vidui, or confession—one of Yom Kippur’s central prayers. The vidui is a recitation of the many ways in which we sin—by robbery, by lying, by blasphemy. But while the album may flirt with sin in its raucous approach, it comes from a place of devotion. Yoshie Fruchter, the leader of Pitom, is the son and grandson of cantors, and professes an abiding love for the traditional melodies sung on Yom Kippur. The songs on the album, which was released by John Zorn’s Tzadik label, are meant to invoke the intense emotions that accompany the holiday’s centuries-old prayers. The result is rich, loud, and cathartic.
For Vox Tablet, Fruchter and Jeremy Brown, Pitom’s violinist, played a stripped-down version of the track “Neilah,” and they explained to host Sara Ivry why a...
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Paper Chase

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 11:00:55 GMT

Like Isaac Bashevis Singer, his fellow Yiddish writer, Chaim Grade (his last name is pronounced GRAH-duh) fled the Russian Empire and settled in New York, where he established himself as a major figure in the literary world. But while Singer’s fame flourished in America, Grade’s reach grew more limited. After Grade died in 1982, scholars, translators, and publishers tried to acquire his unpublished works for posthumous publication but were stymied by Grade’s widow. Fiercely protective of her husband’s legacy, Inna Grade rebuffed nearly all who approached her. Meanwhile, the Grade apartment in the Bronx would become an impassable and grimy shrine to her husband’s papers and books.
Inna Grade died last year. In the ensuing months, Yiddishists have thrilled to the possibility that they will finally gain access to her husband’s...
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On the Ground

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 11:00:02 GMT
Nathan Thrall, a Middle East analyst for the International Crisis Group, is also a reporter, and since 2006 he's been filing stories from Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza for publications including the New York Review of Books (and Tablet Magazine). He recently spoke to Tablet Magazine contributing editor Adam Chandler about what he thinks will happen in the West Bank and Gaza following the Palestinian bid for statehood at the United Nations this week. His recent conversations with Palestinians in the region, he told Chandler, have revealed a population inured to false hopes and accordingly far less exercised about the planned Security Council move than their Israeli counterparts. [Running time: 18:30.]
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Mother’s Helper

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 11:00:58 GMT

In her best-selling memoir, The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit, journalist Lucette Lagnado brought to life the multiethnic metropolis of Cairo in the 1940s and 1950s. Lagnado’s father, Leon, a debonair man-about-town, thrived in that cosmopolitan world, and young Lucette basked in his glow. But Egypt’s 1952 revolution changed all that. The family held on for a time, finally immigrating to the United States in 1962, and Lagnado’s book—winner of the 2008 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature—arrestingly described her father’s steady decline.
Now she has written a second memoir, The Arrogant Years: One Girl’s Search for Her Lost Youth, that offers a loving and often devastating portrait of her mother and all that she sacrificed to keep her family...
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In the Picture

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 11:00:03 GMT

Bruce Jay Friedman has been writing across genres and media for more than half a century. Literary types remember Stern, his 1962 breakout book, referred to by one critic as “the first Freudian novel.” Movie buffs know him as the screenwriter of blockbusters like Splash and Stir Crazy. The film The Heartbreak Kid was based on his short story “A Change of Plan.” And then there were his several plays, including the popular 1970 Steambath.
Now Friedman has written
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Agent Provocateur

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 11:00:53 GMT

Serge Gainsbourg was, depending on whom you ask, a brilliant songwriter, a buffoon, an outrage, a Don Juan, or the definition of French cool. To French comic book artist Joann Sfar, growing up in a strait-laced observant family in the 1970s, Gainsbourg—born Lucien Ginsberg in 1928—was a hero. Sfar was enthralled by Gainsbourg’s outrageous antics on French television, his unabashed romps with knockouts like Brigitte Bardot and Jane Birkin, and his reckless smoking and drinking, not to mention his talent as a singer and songwriter. All this from a skinny Jewish guy with protruding ears and a big nose.
Gainsbourg was a mostly washed-up artist when he died at 62 of a heart attack, in 1991. But that’s not what Sfar wishes to remember in his first feature film, Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life, which opens next...
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After Shock

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 11:00:30 GMT

Ever since his service in the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Israeli Yuval Neria has been interested in the impact of extreme trauma on mental health. He became an expert on post-traumatic stress disorder and was recruited to Columbia University’s department of clinical psychology shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Since then, he has been working with and studying those most directly affected by the events in New York City: friends and family of those who were killed in the World Trade Center, and the first responders who worked in the wreckage.
On the eve of Tisha B’Av, the day of mourning that commemorates the destruction of the first and second Temples and other catastrophic events in Jewish history, Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry spoke to Neria about his own wartime experiences and what his research has taught him about treating trauma. Neria was awarded a Medal of Valor for his service, and in 1986 he published the novel Esh, Hebrew for “fire,” a fictionalized account of his time in...
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Unhealthy Obsession

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 11:00:47 GMT

In an old joke, a Frenchman, a German, and a Jew walk into a bar. “I’m tired and thirsty,” says the Frenchman. “I must have wine.” “I’m tired and thirsty,” says the German. “I must have some beer.” “I’m tired and thirsty,” says the Jew. “I must have diabetes.”
Hypochondria is a staple of Jewish humor, but the neurotic disorder is by no means the exclusive domain of Jews, nor is it necessarily funny. Those who suffer from it are consumed by anxiety over the imagined progression of illness in their bodies and obsessively take note of symptoms real or imagined. It disrupts work and family life. And it taxes the healthcare system, as hypochondriacs seek second, third, fourth, and fifth opinions and demand test after test.
This week Vox Tablet presents the radio documentary “Living With Hypochondria: The Real Costs of Imagined Illness,” written and produced by Karen Brown and first aired on WFCR in New England. It takes an in-depth look at...
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In Good Company

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 11:00:45 GMT

When performer and memoirist Janice Erlbaum was a young teenager, she had a crush on a boy from school. He invited her to his bar mitzvah, an event that was also to be attended by the gaggle of girls who had recently turned on Janice, publicly declaring her a misfit. Janice was thrilled to be there, but as the afternoon unfolded, her allegiance to the boy was to be pitted against her desire to gain re-entry to the in crowd. She tells the story of what happened on that fateful day.
Janice Erlbaum is the author of Girlbomb and Have You Found Her. You can find more of her stories here. [Running time:10:20.]
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Family Jewels

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 11:00:13 GMT
For most women, diamonds prompt reveries of fairytale engagements, or at least daydreams of Marilyn Monroe. For journalist Alicia Oltuski, they connote family. Her paternal grandfather was a diamond dealer; he once traded a single stone for condensed milk, marmalade, and honey when he was a displaced person in Germany just after World War II. Oltuski’s father also dealt in gems—buying and selling antique jewelry on West 47th Street, the heart of New York City’s diamond district. In her new book, Precious Objects: A Story of Diamonds, Family, and a Way of Life, Oltuski examines the jewelry trade and some of the characters who work in it. She joined Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to discuss Jewish predominance in the diamond business, her family's relationship with the industry, and how the gems now represent polar positions—romance and conflict—in popular culture. [Running time: 18:26.]
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Jerusalem Post

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 11:00:56 GMT

The inaugural class of fellows at the American Academy in Jerusalem was announced last month by the Foundation for Jewish Culture, which will host the four selected American artists while they develop new work in the dynamically, culturally rich city. The project is the brainchild of Elise Bernhardt, the foundation’s president, who modeled it on the American Academies in Rome and Berlin (each is a separate entity, with no formal ties). The American Academy in Jerusalem, a nine-week residency, also aims to strengthen ties between artists and cultural institutions in the United States and Israel.
Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry talked about the program with Bernhardt, discussing how the fellows were selected and whether Jerusalem can compete with European cities as a cultural capital. Ivry also spoke to the four fellows, who are headed to Jerusalem in October: urban planner David Karnovsky, visual artist
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Birth Right

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 11:00:35 GMT
Oxford doctoral candidate Rebecca Steinfeld argues in Tablet Magazine today that granting Yigal Amir, the assassin of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the right to conjugal visits and by extension the right to father a child is consistent with the state’s pro-natalist policies. Steinfeld is writing a dissertation on the topic, War of the Wombs: The History and Politics of Fertility Policies in Israel, 1948-2010. She spoke to Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about the evolution of these policies, from cash “birth prizes” awarded to mothers on the birth of their 10th child in the early days of the state to today's heavily subsidized fertility procedures for women who wish to conceive, and about accusations that these policies have favored Jewish citizens over others. [Running time: 17:29.]
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Block Party

Mon, 13 Jun 2011 11:00:27 GMT

Tablet Magazine recently moved its offices to a stretch of West 28th Street in Manhattan. The new digs are in an auspicious location—the block that was once Tin Pan Alley, the historic district where George Gershwin and Irving Berlin and many others went to play piano and peddle songs to music publishers.
As the 20th century reached its midpoint, tunesmiths moved elsewhere. (The Brill Building, famously home to later generations of songwriters, is just north of Times Square.) Old buildings came down while new ones went up, and our portion of West 28th is now a bustling commercial hodge-podge bookended by the flower district to the west and the perfume district to the east. To learn more about our new neighborhood—where Emma Goldman founded her anarchist magazine, too, and Zero Mostel had a painting studio—Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry spoke to
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All Night Long: Preparing for Shavuot’s Study Sessions

Mon, 06 Jun 2011 11:00:25 GMT
The holiday of Shavuot brings with it unique forms of observance. In addition to the consumption of dairy-rich delicacies, many people participate in a tikkun layl Shavuot, an all-night study session. During a tikkun, it’s traditional to peruse and discuss a portion from the Bible, the Talmud, or the Mishneh. To mark Shavuot this year, Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry asked novelist Nathan Englander, musician Alicia Jo Rabins, Rabbi Phil Lieberman, and theologian Avivah Zornberg what text they’d most like to think about in the early-morning hours, and what...
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Into the Fire

Mon, 23 May 2011 11:00:48 GMT

In the early 1900s, Puerto Barrios, in Guatemala, was on the cusp of becoming a thriving Caribbean port town. It was the bustling terminus for trains hauling produce for the United Fruit Company. From there, bananas were shipped north to the port of New Orleans and, thereafter, to destinations all over the United States.
By the late 1930s, things had changed dramatically. Puerto Barrios' indigenous charms had been all but eradicated, replaced by filth and destitution. It was inhabited mostly by Afro-Guatemalans and West Indians who worked on the docks for pitiful wages; those with means were advised to get out of town as fast as they could.
It is here that we meet Samuel Berkow, the well-to-do German Jewish bachelor at the center of The Price of Escape, a new novel by David Unger. Berkow arrives in Guatemala from Hamburg, where the Nazi noose had begun to tighten...
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Slugger

Mon, 16 May 2011 11:00:32 GMT

If you ask a kid to name a Jewish baseball hero it's likely she'll answer Kevin Youkilis if she’s thinking current day icons, or, if this theoretical kid is more historically oriented she’ll cite the great Dodger Sandy Koufax. But long before either of them put on a glove, there was Hank Greenberg.
Greenberg made his major league mark in the 1930s and '40s, playing primarily for the Detroit Tigers. He was a first-baseman and a phenomenal batter. In 1938, in a single season, he hit 58 home runs. He made the All Star team five times, was twice named American League MVP, was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1956, and still holds the American League record for runs batted in by a right-handed batter in a single season: 183 in 1937. Over this entire career, he had a whopping 1,276 RBIs.
Like...
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Walter and Edith

Mon, 09 May 2011 11:00:09 GMT
Death—always around us—seemed especially present in recent days. The killing of Osama Bin Laden revived memories of his 9/11 victims, while Yom HaShoah brought to mind those who perished in the Holocaust. Yet every day, private acts of mourning take place—people grieve over the loss of a loved one, a friend, a neighbor. In the short story “Walter and Edith,” Miami-based writer Jeremy Glazer offers a more intimate glimpse into the experience of personal loss. His story comes to Vox Tablet by way of Alicia Zuckerman, a senior producer of the radio show Under the Sun at WLRN in Miami. [Running time: 9:32.]
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Queen of Pop

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 11:00:20 GMT

In the late 1950s, Florence Greenberg was a housewife in Passaic, N.J., with an itch to get into the music business. A tip from her daughters led her to a quartet of young African-American singers. Under Greenberg’s tutelage, the women became the legendary Shirelles, the group behind such hits as “I Met Him on a Sunday” and “Dedicated to the One I Love.” Greenberg’s name in the business was made. She formed three record labels—Tiara, Scepter, and Wand—and had a hand in the successes of talents including Dionne Warwick and the Isley Brothers.
As the curtain rises on Baby It's You, a new musical celebrating Greenberg's life and work, Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry speaks with Slate Magazine music critic Jody Rosen about the obstacles Greenberg might have faced as a pioneering woman, about her ability to identify voices and styles that others didn’t think America was quite ready for, and about the real meaning of the song “Say a Little...
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