Vox Tablet

End of the World

Vox Tablet — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 11:00:57 +0000

This week, Vox Tablet invites listeners to consider some unconventional summer reading. Gary Shteyngart and Joshua Cohen have both come out with new novels that paint a very dark picture of the future. In Super Sad True Love Story, Shteyngart envisions a not-so-distant world in which the United States is a crumbling, militarized empire, public and private life are indistinguishable and projected for all to see through social networking technologies, and the reading of books is a lost art. In Cohen’s novel Witz, a mysterious plague has claimed the lives of all but one of the world’s Jews, and that last Jew, Benjamin Israelien, is subject to the passions of a public that is equal parts philo- and anti-Semitic.

The novelists take their dystopian visions in radically different directions—Shteyngart has written a fast-moving love story, while Cohen’s is more stream-of-Jewish-consciousness, dense with wordplay and religious and cultural references. Tablet Magazine Editor-in-Chief Alana Newhouse sat down with the two of them for a sometimes bookish, other times bawdy, conversation over drinks and smoked fish, on a sweltering summer day on the boardwalk of Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach.

The Players

Vox Tablet — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 11:00:46 +0000

Israel may be a small country, but when it comes to classical music, it’s a powerhouse. From his position on the board of New York’s Mannes School of Music, David P. Goldman has had the chance to witness Israeli prominence in the field firsthand. In an effort to get a better handle on the phenomenon, Goldman, a political commentator and music theorist, recently traveled to Israel to investigate the secret to Israel’s classical music success. He wrote an essay for Tablet Magazine based on his trip, and he also played some pieces for Tablet’s Gabriel Sanders while discussing how Russian immigrants have changed the study of music in Israel and how interpreting a piece of music is akin to the study of Talmud.

READ GOLDMAN’S ESSAY HERE.

Back to Babylon

Vox Tablet — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 11:00:58 +0000

The Bowls Project is an unusual sound and architectural installation now on display at the Yerba Buena Center for Arts in San Francisco. A combination of a song cycle, a double-vaulted masonry dome, strangers’ secrets, and inscriptions found in Babylonian Jewish amulets known as “demon bowls,” the Bowls Project is the creation of the composer and performer Jewlia Eisenberg, together with her band, Charming Hostess, and a gang of volunteer architects, masons, and engineers. Tablet Magazine contributor Hadara Graubart spoke to Eisenberg about the project shortly before its opening on July 6. It runs through August 22, and it includes an opportunity to shed some demons of your own. (If you’re abstaining from music during the Three Weeks that precede Tisha B’Av, you’ll want to wait until July 21 to listen.)

Ashkenaz Unbound

Vox Tablet — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 11:00:04 +0000

Two years ago, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, which is devoted to the study and preservation of Ashkenazic culture, published the trailblazing Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. A remarkable resource, it offers some 1,800 entries on everything from general topics like art to key figures like Ludwik Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto. Earlier this month, YIVO launched an online version, which not only offers free access to scholars and students the world over, but also provides supplemental material like audio and video recordings that the print edition couldn’t.

To discuss the project, and the new possibilities offered by its digital version, Tablet Magazine’s Gabriel Sanders had a chat with the encyclopedia’s editor in chief, McGill University historian Gershon Hundert.

Power Chords

Vox Tablet — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 11:00:23 +0000

The six-person band Yiddish Princess takes the sounds of ’80s rock—from the ethereal vocalizations of Kate Bush to the pounding drums and guitar riffs of Bon Jovi—and marries them with Yiddish songs. Some of the songs are Yiddish poems; some are original works by Sarah Gordon, the band’s lead singer. Gordon comes to the Yiddish repertoire honestly; her mother is Adrienne Cooper, who’s been described as “the premier female Yiddish vocalist and interpreter of Yiddish song.” Other band members are similarly fluent in Yiddish musical traditions. Michael Winograd, the band’s keyboard player, is well known as a clarinetist who has played with Frank London, the Klezmatics, and Socalled. Yoshie Fruchter, the band’s guitarist, also plays with Pitom, which has recorded an album on John Zorn’s Tzadik Records.

Vox Tablet’s Sara Ivry joins Gordon, Winograd, and Fruchter in Winograd’s bedroom-turned-studio to talk about their debut eponymous EP, out this week, and to play a little music on the fly.

Men of Mystery

Vox Tablet — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 11:00:59 +0000

Alan Furst’s bestselling spy novels depict the secret allegiances and betrayals that animated interwar and wartime Europe, but what distinguishes his work from others who’ve toiled in the genre is the attention he pays to the flavor of everyday life. Amid the forged documents and concealed identities, he still manages to conjure things like the meal a well-to-do couple traveling through the Belgian countryside might have eaten in1941: radishes, salted beef tongue, “some kind of white, waxy cheese,” dried winter apples, and a loaf of bread.

In Furst’s latest, Spies of the Balkans, he introduces us to Constantine “Costa” Zannis, a high-level Salonika detective who, somewhat inadvertently, becomes one link in a chain of operatives shepherding Jews out of Germany. Vox Tablet’s Sara Ivry speaks to Furst, in his home in Sag Harbor, Long Island, about how, in 1986, a Django Reinhardt cassette led him to the time and place he’s written about ever since; about his upbringing on Manhattan’s Upper West Side; and about his attraction to unattached, intellectual heroes.

Body Image

Vox Tablet — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 11:00:36 +0000

“Thou shalt not make graven images.” Thus reads the second commandment, which has been widely interpreted by Jews to mean that they are forbidden from depicting the human body. Yet, according to art historian Eliane Strosberg, during the 20th century Jewish artists in Europe and the United States defied that prohibition and almost exclusively painted and sculpted likenesses of themselves and of people they knew. They did so even while non-Jewish peers were jumping into Cubism, Expressionism, Fauvism, and other avant-garde genres. In a new book, The Human Figure and Jewish Culture, Strosberg explores the reasons why these Jewish artists set themselves apart.

Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry speaks with Strosberg about Chaim Soutine, Amedeo Modigliani, Lucien Freud, and others, about renderings of the body in ancient Jewish art, and about the mother as muse.

No Debate

Vox Tablet — Mon, 24 May 2010 11:00:36 +0000

In 2007, Ian Buruma profiled Tariq Ramadan, the high-profile European Muslim professor who’d been denied an entry visa to the United States the prior year, in The New York Times Magazine. Though some see Ramadan as a moderate voice in an increasingly radicalized European Islamic community, others see him as dangerous. Buruma offered a noncommittal assessment, and that seeming insouciance infuriated the writer Paul Berman, who has been examining the liberal response to terrorism and the growth of political Islam for the past decade. In his new book, The Flight of the Intellectuals, he takes Buruma and other writers to task for insufficiently challenging Ramadan and, by failing to do so, becoming apologists for Muslim fundamentalists. (The Flight of the Intellectuals is reviewed in Tablet Magazine today by Christopher Hitchens.)

Berman spoke to Vox Tablet’s Sara Ivry about Ramadan’s family ties (his grandfather founded the Muslim Brotherhood), about the link between Islamism and fascism, and about whether the camps for and against Ramadan parallel the camps that either embrace Israel, flaws notwithstanding, or take every opportunity to criticize it.

Light and Sweet

Vox Tablet — Tue, 18 May 2010 11:00:31 +0000

The holiday of Shavuot marks the giving of the law at Mount Sinai. To celebrate, people stay up all night studying. They also eat dairy foods—milk, blintzes, and cheesecake—although there seems to be little agreement as to why.

Fred Schuster opened S&S Cheesecake in 1960; he now has help from his son-in-law, Yair Ben-Zaken. Together, they supply steakhouses and gourmet shops around the country—Dean & Deluca, Morton’s, Smith & Wollensky. Reporter Blake Eskin decided to make a pilgrimage, by subway, to their windowless one-story brick bakery at 238th Street in the Bronx, home to what many consider to be the best cheesecake in the country. Here’s his audio postcard, from our archive.

Song Cycle

Vox Tablet — Mon, 10 May 2010 11:00:08 +0000

In May 1967, at the annual Israel Music Festival in Jerusalem, a song was born. Singing to a live and radio audience of millions, Shuli Natan debuted “Yerushalayim Shel Zahav,” or “Jerusalem of Gold.” With elegiac music and patriotic lyrics by Naomi Shemer (with a sentence or two borrowed from Yehuda Halevi), it immediately won the hearts of many in the audience; three weeks later, after the Six-Day War and the unification of Jerusalem under Israeli rule, the song gained the status of a near-national anthem. On Jerusalem Day, celebrated this year on May 12, it’s inescapable. But the song has its detractors, and it comes with some surprising historical baggage. Tablet Magazine’s Liel Leibovitz tells the story.

Showtime

Vox Tablet — Mon, 03 May 2010 11:00:05 +0000

Harlem’s Apollo Theater was once a whites-only burlesque house, until the city shut down the circuit in 1934. That’s when Frank Schiffman, a promoter specializing in what was then called “race music,” bought the place. He recruited young talents like Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, James Brown, and Billie Holiday—many of whom got their start at the Apollo’s famous “Amateur Night,” at which only those who received the audience’s approval were invited back to perform. Schiffman was a businessman, who reportedly refused to book Apollo performers who played competing venues. But he—and, later, his son, Bobby—provided African American musical acts a respectable venue from which to launch their careers. As the Apollo celebrates its 75th anniversary with an exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, reporter Eric Molinsky considers the theater’s founding father.

Arguable

Vox Tablet — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 11:00:50 +0000

Growing up, Mark Oppenheimer was always itching for a fight. He didn’t want the kind involving jabs and hooks—rhetorical skill and quick wit were his weapons—but, even so, neither his peers nor the hands-on-activity-loving teachers at his progressive elementary schools shared his inclinations. Salvation came in middle school, when he discovered the world of competitive debate. There, verbal agility was rewarded, as Oppenheimer, a Tablet Magazine contributing editor, recounts in his new memoir, Wisenheimer: A Childhood Subject to Debate. He discussed how debate skills do and don’t contribute to journalistic endeavors, and what this all has to do with being Jewish, and his third-grade nemesis—a teacher named Lisa—with Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry.

Survival Instinct

Vox Tablet — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 11:00:27 +0000

Eitan “Croc” Einoch is a thirtysomething, not terribly introspective Tel Aviv resident who suddenly finds himself lauded as a national hero after narrowly surviving three terrorist attacks within several days. Fahmi Sabih is a pensive twentysomething Palestinian in the West Bank who belongs to the terrorist cell responsible for the attacks. The two characters alternate as narrators in Assaf Gavron’s new darkly comic novel, Almost Dead, his first book translated into English. Writing with humor and empathy, Gavron examines the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the lens of these ordinary lives. He spoke with Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about the Israeli response to Almost Dead, anxious commutes during the Second Intifada, and the pleasures and pains of translating Philip Roth, J. D. Salinger, and his own work. Gavron will be participating in the PEN World Voices Festival, and in book readings across the country, this month and next.

Animal Planet

Vox Tablet — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 11:00:50 +0000

Yann Martel’s 2001 novel Life of Pi chronicled a young Indian man’s 227 days adrift at sea with a Bengal tiger. Part fable, part exploration of religion, ritual, and story-telling, it was a tremendous international success and earned Martel the prestigious Man Booker Prize. With his new novel, Beatrice and Virgil, Martel once again uses animals to tell his story. Ostensibly, the novel is about an acclaimed novelist who’s lost his calling and an aloof taxidermist who comes to him for literary advice. Within the novel is a play about a persecuted donkey, named Beatrice, and monkey, Virgil, whose circumstances come to look frighteningly similar to those of Europe’s Jews during the Holocaust. Both the novel and the play within the novel probe the difficulty of representing historical events that are all but unimaginable. Martel spoke by phone with Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry from a hotel in London, where he was on book tour, about the strengths and weaknesses of Holocaust literature as we know it, about the mixed messages of taxidermy, and about our over-identification with animals and under-identification with our own species.

Art Market

Vox Tablet — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 11:00:10 +0000

With his graphic-novel trilogy James Sturm’s America, comic-book artist James Sturm gained a devoted following for his skillful storytelling, sharp eye, and deft hand. The books examined 18th- and 19th-century America through the lens of religious revivalists, desperate gold miners, and a scrappy team of Jewish (and presumed to be Jewish) baseball players. Now, in Market Day, Sturm imagines Jewish life in industrializing Europe, following 24 hours in the life of Mendelman, a highly skilled rug maker who confronts economic changes that might destroy his livelihood—and with it, the pleasure he takes in seeing the world through his craft. Influenced by Art Spiegelman and R. Crumb, among others, Sturm is not only a cartoonist but also the director and co-founder of the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vermont. He spoke to Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about his introduction to shtetl life, his grim (or, he argues, not so grim) choice of subject matter, and his Center’s spiritual founder, Inky Solomon.

Ask, Don’t Tell

Vox Tablet — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 11:00:18 +0000

Tablet’s Gabriel Sanders decided it was time to teach his 21-month-old son the seder’s Four Questions, but, in looking back over the text, he found he has some questions of his own—about the seder’s structure, about similarities between the Mah Nishtanah and other children’s songs, and about just what it means to teach a child questions before he’s developed the power to ask.

Day of Rest

Vox Tablet — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 12:00:27 +0000

Judith Shulevitz grew up in a house divided; mom observed Shabbat, and dad did not. She’s not the only one. What for some is a meaningful respite from the daily grind is, for others, an antiquated and oppressive ordeal. Indeed, the Sabbath has always raised questions and posed challenges for those who observe it, Jews and Christians alike. In her new book, The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time, Shulevitz, a journalist and cultural critic who has been a columnist for the New York Times and Slate and is a contributing editor to Tablet Magazine, explores how the Sabbath has been understood over the course of millennia and how Sabbath observance affects social and familial relations, ethics, civic life, and individual well-being. Vox Tablet spoke with Shulevitz at her home in Manhattan about how the Sabbath has influenced her, her children, Jesus and his disciples, and Supreme Court justices, among others.

Hearts and Minds

Vox Tablet — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 12:00:24 +0000

The Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement is known for its outreach among non-Orthodox Jews, encouraging them to become more religious. Chabadniks are posted to about 75 countries, where their efforts are generally met with curiosity, indifference, or, at worst, irritation. But in Ramat Aviv, an upscale, liberal, and famously secular neighborhood of Tel Aviv, the sect’s arrival has prompted a much stronger reaction: fury. Chabad’s presence in Ramat Aviv is growing, and secular residents—who in the fall formed a residents association to oppose the Chabad incursion—are convinced that the Hasidim are trying to brainwash their children and take over the neighborhood. Now, every Friday, the two camps face off outside schools and in other public spaces, where Chabad representatives approach passersby, mostly kids, and invite them to wrap tefillin and pray. The battle has caught the attention of the Israeli press, even prompting an angry column, accusing the secular residents of anti-Semitism, from one of the country’s best-known columnists, Gideon Levy. Tablet contributor Daniel Estrin filed a report on the growing conflict in Ramat Aviv.

Man Out of Time

Vox Tablet — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 12:00:51 +0000

Illustration by Paul Rogers

Novelist Steve Stern wasn’t raised in a traditional Jewish home—indeed, he says, his childhood in Memphis was virtually devoid of “heritage.” But he has made up for that as an adult, delving deeply into Jewish history, fiction, liturgy, and mysticism in his work. All of that comes into play in The Frozen Rabbi, his ninth work of fiction, which Tablet Magazine begins serializing today. The story begins in the basement of one Bernie Karp, a pimply and spiritually bereft teen who, intent on pleasuring himself in the liver-aided manner of Alexander Portnoy, gets distracted when he discovers at the back of the meat freezer a 19th-century rabbi from the Pale of Settlement. From there, we are transported between the past and the present, along the way encountering shtetl kabbalists, Lodz peddlers, Lower East Side gangsters, New Age hucksters, and more. Stern spoke to Vox Tablet about Charles Dickens and Isaac Bashevis Singer, libel suits, and how he came to write this comic-tragic tale of modern European Jewry. The Frozen Rabbi will be published in May.

Fugging Around

Vox Tablet — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 12:00:33 +0000

In 1965, two beat poets on New York’s Lower East Side, Tuli Kupferberg and Ed Sanders, put together a band called the Fugs. (The name is a euphemism that means what it sounds like and was borrowed from Norman Mailer’s novel The Naked and the Dead.) The Fugs have been recording and performing irreverent rants about sex, drugs, and war since then, often with Kupferberg delivering deadpan lyrics in what the New York Times recently described as his “rabbinical monotone.” The group’s latest album, Be Free, comes out this week, though Kupferberg has been confined to his home since the fall, after two strokes left him virtually blind. He continues to make himself heard by way of daily dispatches, which he calls “perverbs,” posted on YouTube. He doesn’t consider himself religious, but his songs, poems, and missives are steeped in the Yiddish culture he grew up in. Reporter Jon Kalish profiled the performer—who, be warned, uses some explicit language.

Life of a Poet

Vox Tablet — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 12:00:43 +0000

Yehuda Halevi was, some say, the greatest Hebrew-language poet who ever lived. Also a physician and philosopher, he had the good fortune of living in a time and place—Andalusia, in southern Spain, in the 11th and 12th centuries—where the ability to write verse well was highly valued, and where there existed a culture of lively, if not always peaceful, exchange among Muslims, Jews, and Christians. In a new Nextbook Press biography, Hillel Halkin chronicles the life and work of Halevi, including his spiritual yearnings, which would ultimately lead him to make aliyah at a time when such a journey was all but unheard of. Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry spoke by phone to Halkin, who lives north of Tel Aviv, about Halevi’s ability to knock off a few lively verses in exchange for a jug of wine, about the tenuous nature of La Convivencia, “The Coexistence,” and about how he and Halevi found similar resolutions to midlife crises about what it means to be a Jew.

French Connections

Vox Tablet — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 12:00:43 +0000

The 19th arrondissement of Paris, on the city’s northern edge, is home to large populations of Sephardic Jews, Muslim immigrants from Africa, and a growing Lubavitch community. It has been known as a hub of anti-Semitic violence, but, surprisingly, it’s been calmer lately, even as anti-Semitic attacks have spiked in France, and throughout Western Europe, in the past year. Credit for the relative tranquility goes to clergy on all sides, who’ve worked with their communities to keep tensions from rising. Reporter Léa Khayata visited the area; her dispatch will appear on Tablet tomorrow. First, she spoke to Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about the recent efforts to build bridges in the 19th arrondissement.

Still Lives

Vox Tablet — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 12:00:41 +0000

In 1914, a Russian Jew writing under the name S. An-sky wrote a play called The Dybbuk. It concerns a young bride-to-be possessed by the spirit of her former lover, and it would go on to become one of the most popular plays in the Jewish- and Yiddish-theater repertoire. But An-sky’s pre-Dybbuk work might be his most valuable contribution to Jewish culture: from 1912 to 1914, the playwright led ethnographic expeditions throughout Russia’s Pale of Settlement, collecting Jewish folk tales, rituals, music, and other artifacts of daily and religious life. An-sky’s research has been an invaluable resource to students of Jewish history and culture. Now, a new body of material from those expeditions has come to light: approximately 350 photographs, comprising perhaps the most comprehensive visual record available of these small towns and the people who inhabited them. The photos are remarkable not only for the wealth of detail they offer about a way of life in transition, but also for the immediacy of the subjects themselves.

A collection of nearly 200 of these newly discovered photos is now available in a volume titled Photographing the Jewish Nation: Pictures from S. An-sky’s Ethnographic Expeditions. Vox Tablet spoke to two of the book’s editors, Eugene Avrutin and Harriet Murav, both professors at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, about the importance of this collection for anyone interested in shtetl life in the Russian Empire. A gallery of photos from the book appears below.

Beyond Goulash

Vox Tablet — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 12:00:05 +0000

Jews have lived in what today is Hungary since the 11th century, and despite the devastation of World War II and discrimination under Communism, Hungary is home to the largest Jewish community between Paris and Moscow. Today, roughly 80,000 Jews live in Budapest alone. Over the years, Jewish culture has woven itself deeply into Hungarian life, particularly in the kitchen, where many dishes that are typically thought of as Hungarian actually have Jewish origins. London-based reporter Hugh Levinson took a culinary tour of Budapest with Bob Cohen, an American ethnomusicologist who has lived there for more than 20 years. Cohen writes a foodie blog, plays fiddle in his band, “Di Naye Kapelye,” and is an expert on the tastes and tales of the local cuisine. Their first stop was Kádár, a tiny, legendary restaurant in the heart of the old Jewish district.

Talking Shop

Vox Tablet — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 12:00:57 +0000

Daniel Menaker is a good talker. He has to be; the former New Yorker fiction editor and Random House executive editor-in-chief has long been highly sought for schmoozing opportunities of all sorts. In a freewheeling new book, A Good Talk: The Story and Skill of Conversation, Menaker writes about both why he believes conversation matters and the elements that make for a good conversationalist. (Curiosity, humor, and impudence, he says, are key.) For Vox Tablet, we asked him to have a chat with Joshua Halberstam, a philosopher and the author of Schmoozing, about private conversations among American Jews. It was Menaker and Halberstam’s first meeting, but it turned out they had a lot to say to each other, on topics ranging from ultra-Orthodox demographics to logical positivism.

Free Thinkers

Vox Tablet — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 12:00:08 +0000

The French Revolution is not generally considered a key moment in Jewish history. But in his new book, Emancipation: How Liberating Europe’s Jews from the Ghetto Led to Revolution and Renaissance, Michael Goldfarb argues that the period that began with the Revolution and Jews’ consequent enfranchisement and ended nearly two centuries later with the Holocaust was marked by astonishing contributions by Jews to Western culture—in philosophy, industry, politics, literature, music, and the sciences. Newly liberated Jews were in a unique position to challenge received wisdom in all areas, after experiencing such radical changes in their own way of life. But their integration into European society also came at the expense of religious and cultural identity.

Goldfarb, former London bureau chief for National Public Radio and now an independent journalist living in London, speaks to Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about signifcant moments and personalities of that period, from philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, who left his Talmud studies in the Dessau ghetto to become what some referred to as “Germany’s Plato,” to the Rothschild dynasty and its antithesis, Karl Marx.

Family Singalong

Vox Tablet — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 12:00:45 +0000

Children’s music has become much more interesting in the past decade. Now there are world-music lullaby collections, educational albums put out by indie rockers, and classical music repurposed for kids. What about Jewish children’s music, has it kept up with the trend? Tablet Magazine parenting columnist Marjorie Ingall assesses releases from 2009, measuring success by how long the album would be tolerated on a family road trip.

Hanukkah Alegre!

Vox Tablet — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 12:00:29 +0000

In 2001, Sarajevo-born folk singer Flory Jagoda invited roughly a dozen other Sephardim in the Washington, D.C., 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 members call vijitas de al’had, or “Sunday visits,” after a centuries-old tradition from the Old Country— the men and women eat Sephardic treats, sing songs, and study a Judeo-Spanish reading exercise, complete with vocabulary lists. Vox Tablet’s Julie Subrin recorded their annual Hanukkah gathering last December. David Tarica took the photographs.

Eight Days of Hanukkah

Vox Tablet — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 00:00:36 +0000

A Hanukkah gift from us to you: “Eight days of Hanukkah,” with lyrics by Sen. Orrin Hatch and music by Madeline Stone, sung by Rasheeda Azar. Don’t miss the video here. Chag sameach!

Blessed Bluegrass

Vox Tablet — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 12:00:34 +0000

As a teenager, Jerry Wicentowski rebelled against his Orthodox upbringing, but only to a degree. He wouldn’t take the bus from his Brooklyn home to Washington Square Park to join his friends for bluegrass jam sessions but instead he stayed at home, incessantly practicing guitar runs in his bedroom to the great frustration of his father. Now in his fifties, Wicentowski has stopped rebelling. He does not play instruments on Shabbat. But he’s a highly respected bluegrass musician who’s found a way to combine his passion for the music with his religious faith. His greatest limitation, it appears, is that he is unavailable for most weekend gigs. Reporter Jon Kalish profiles him in this week’s podcast.

Listen to two of Jerry Wicentowski’s recordings:

Shalom Aleichem, from the unreleased album A Shabbos in Nashville.

Little Maggie, from the solo album titled Lucky Break, available here.

Being Jewish

Vox Tablet — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Hadeish Yameinu by David Gelernter

David Gelernter, a prominent victim of the Unabomber, is a Yale computer science professor who is also fluent in the history and practice of Judaism. An observant Jew, Gelernter just published Judaism: A Way of Being (Yale University Press). Partly an exploration of the religion’s core themes and partly a defense of adherence to its commandments, the book is also an impassioned and provocative plea for Jews to recognize their religion’s unique relationship to God and to Western civilization. Gelernter spoke to Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about the importance of separation to Jewish life, about Jewish superiority, and about why Conservative and Reform Judaism appear doomed to failure.

The Negotiator

Vox Tablet — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 12:00:15 +0000

Psychologist Stephen P. Cohen has made his career as what he calls a “citizen diplomat.” He runs the Institute for Middle East Peace and Development, which he founded, and he’s been working for 40 years to try to help resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, participating in secret negotiations that have included Israel’s Shimon Peres and Moshe Dayan, Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, Jordan’s King Hussein, and senior leaders of the PLO and Hamas. In his new book, Beyond America’s Grasp: A Century of Failed Diplomacy in the Middle East, Cohen discusses the Arab world’s mistrust of the United States which began with Woodrow Wilson and which Barack Obama has endeavored, as witnessed by his speech in Cairo last June, to repair. He spoke with Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about that enormous challenge, about the role of the Jewish-American and Arab-American communities in the peace process, and about the need to reconceptualize the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as one in which there are no victors.

Home Away From Home

Vox Tablet — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 12:00:11 +0000

When New York Times reporter Andrew Jacobs heard that the Four Seasons Lodge, a Catskills bungalow colony he’d featured in a 2005 article, was slated to close after one more summer season, he was heartbroken. For more than a quarter-century, the colony had served as a gathering place for some 50 lodgers, virtually all of them Holocaust survivors now in their 80s and 90s. Together, they’d danced, caroused, played cards, prepared communal brunches, sunbathed, and shared memories good and bad. Jacobs decided the place, and its residents, needed to be documented before it was too late, and so he enlisted the help of cinematographer Albert Maysles and others to make a film.

Opening in New York City this week, the resulting documentary, Four Seasons Lodge, chronicles the day to day rhythms and occasional dramas that unfold over the course of a summer, and includes the reminiscinces of those who chose to share their wartime memories. Jacobs speaks with Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about the making of the film, a few of his favorite characters, and what got left on the cutting room floor.

In Training

Vox Tablet — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 12:00:10 +0000

Yuri Foreman is not afraid of challenges. After being bullied as a kid in Gomel, Belorus, he took up boxing, and was soon able to defeat the bullies. When he was nine years old, he moved with his family to Israel, where he became a national boxing champion. These days, he trains at Gleason’s Gym in Brooklyn and is preparing for a fight Saturday that could win him a world-championship title, the first for an Israeli. But even more daunting, he says, is the work he does each morning and between training sessions: he is studying the Shulchan Aruch, or Jewish code of law, in preparation to become an Orthodox rabbi. Matt Lieber reports the story.

Female Trouble

Vox Tablet — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 11:00:17 +0000

Alicia Jo Rabins has been around the block, musically speaking. She began as a toddler, with Suzuki violin lessons, then went on to play in punk rock bands, klezmer ensembles, and, in 2003, released a solo album of original and traditional Appalachian and shtetl-influenced songs on fiddle. She also performs with the gypsy-klezmer-rock band Golem.

Now, she’s formed a new band, Girls in Trouble, for a project by the same name. It’s a song cycle based on stories of women in the Bible. Rabins wrote the songs, and on a new album she sings, and plays electric and acoustic guitar, violin, and viola. She sees these works as a form of midrash, and bases them on extensive readings of commentary ranging from the popular to the obscure.

Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry speaks with Rabins in her Brooklyn apartment about betrayal, exile in the desert, loneliness, and seduction, as experienced by the likes of Bat Yiftach (Jephthah’s daughter), Miriam, and Tamar.

Woman of Mystery

Vox Tablet — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 11:00:06 +0000

Long before the late Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector became a beloved literary figure there, she was Chaya, the third and last daughter born to a poor family in a Ukrainian shtetl. Her journey from Eastern Europe to South America and from indigent refugee child to celebrated, eccentric author—with a stint along the way as a diplomat’s wife—is the focus of Benjamin Moser’s new book Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector. Moser, the New Books columnist for Harper’s Magazine, spoke to Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about Lispector’s enduring rage at God over her mother’s death, her fascination with mysticism, math, and Spinoza, and the various myths—that Lispector was a man, for one—that emerged about her and that the writer did little to dispel.

Related: Dizzy With Life [Tablet]

Benjamin Moser will be in conversation with Tablet Magazine’s Gabriel Sanders at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage on November 8.

Race Relations

Vox Tablet — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 04:01:38 +0000

In Moses and Monotheism, Freud advanced his theory of what makes Jews Jewish and how they managed to survive thousands of years of anti-Semitic persecution: he believed that certain events were so traumatic that their memories were inherited by successive generations. As Eliza Slavet argues in her new book, Racial Fever: Freud and the Jewish Question, this “racial theory of memory,” though bizarre, remains relevant to our understanding of the Jewish people. Slavet spoke to Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about the famous shrink, identity, and the continuity of Jewishness.

Her Body, Her Self

Vox Tablet — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 01:00:48 +0000

Joy Ladin is a poet and a professor of English at Yeshiva University’s Stern College for Women. For most of her life, though, she was a man named Jay, and her biological sex was a source of deep unhappiness. And so three years ago, Jay decided to start the process of becoming a woman. His marriage fell apart, and he worried about how the world would receive him after he became a woman. In this podcast from our archives, Joy Ladin spoke with Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about her decision to transition genders, her relationship to God, and the reaction from her Orthodox students.

Joy Ladin’s third book of poetry, Transmigration, was published last month by Sheep Meadow Press.

Facing the Music

Vox Tablet — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 11:00:06 +0000

It’s astonishing how many hits from the American songbook—the corpus of music written from the 1920s to the 1960s that includes Broadway hits, Tin Pan Alley tunes, and Hollywood musicals—were written by Jews. These Jewish composers and lyricists included heavy hitters like Irving Berlin, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and the Gershwins, plus perhaps lesser known figures like Harold Arlen and Dorothy Fields. Writer and poet David Lehman explores this connection in his new Nextbook Press book, A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs. Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry talks to him about the book, the songs, and the Jewish themes buried in some of the best-known classics.

A Fine Romance

Sub-Saharan Shabbat

Vox Tablet — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 11:00:37 +0000

In 1974, prompted by the vision of an itinerant preacher, Joseph Armah and several other members of the Sefwi tribe in western Ghana declared themselves the descendants of one of the lost tribes of Israel. This wasn’t as arbitrary as it sounds; for centuries, though unfamiliar with Judaism, the tribe had followed Jewish practices, performing circumcision a week after an infant’s birth, observing Shabbat, and excluding pork from their diet.

Their conversion raises interesting, if familiar, questions about who can legitimately call himself a Jew. But for Armah’s children, those questions don’t really matter. They are among the first generation of Ghanaians to be raised Jewish, and as such they must navigate for themselves what that means on a daily basis. Anna Boiko-Weyrauch spent a weekend with the Armah family, and sent us this dispatch.

A Frank Reader

Vox Tablet — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 11:00:50 +0000

In Reading Like a Writer, Francine Prose advised aspiring writers that the best way to hone their craft is to read works of great literature closely, word by word. In her new book, Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife, Prose applies that method to the famous young diarist’s work. By Prose’s measure, Frank’s diary has achieved its success not only because of what it documents but also because of her remarkable skill as a writer.

What Prose begins as a literary investigation expands to encompass the history of the diary and its author, as well as its many reincarnations as a musical, a film, a brand, and an inspiration for human rights organizations and classroom curricula. Prose spoke to Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about the diary and its impact.

Full Immersion

Vox Tablet — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 11:00:40 +0000

It’s not easy to convert to Judaism. Typically, the process involves up to a year of study with a rabbi, culminating in an appearance before a beit din, or rabbinic court, and, finally, immersion in the mikveh, or ritual bath.

The writer C.A. Blomquist has wanted to convert to Judaism for most of her life, but, as she wrote about on Tablet last week, it took some major mid-life changes for her to realize the step was possible. Finally, in her early fifties and after two years of study, she was ready to take the last step. Vox Tablet followed her to the mikveh. Here is her story.

This is the second in a three-part series by C.A. Blomquist on her conversion. The first installment was “Taking the Plunge.”

Let Justice Roll Down

Vox Tablet — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 11:00:04 +0000

Every new year, Jews are told to seek forgiveness for the “sins we have sinned.” It sounds fairly straight forward, but it’s not, especially for people who are prone to over-thinking. On what basis should we judge our behavior and those sins? The Bible? An internal moral compass? And how broad should our self-examination be? Are we looking only at how we treat our parents, or should we also consider our neighbors, our community, our fellow citizens, or perhaps all living beings?

Michael Sandel cannot answer those questions. He’s neither a rabbi nor a scholar of Jewish thought (at least, not by profession); he’s a professor of government at Harvard. He is, however, very good at explaining ways of thinking about right and wrong, as the many thousands of undergraduates who have taken his course on justice can attest. He spoke with Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about health care, Wall Street bonuses, and other collisions of politics and ethics.

Blow, Gabriel, Blow

Vox Tablet — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 11:00:46 +0000

Elul, the last month of the year on the Hebrew calendar, is often regarded as a time to prepare for the rigorous self-reflection that takes place on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Throughout the month, the shofar, or ram’s horn, is sounded to induce an appropriately wakeful frame of mind. And so, in order to get into the spirit of the High Holidays, Tablet Magazine’s Gabriel Sanders met up with an old family friend: lung specialist, Judaica collector, and expert shofar-blower Ira Rezak. The two discussed the shofar’s ritual significance, and then they settled in for a lesson in the difficult business of getting a shofar to sound the way it should.

Inside Player

Vox Tablet — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 10:59:55 +0000

Israeli-born musician Oran Etkin fell in love with jazz at age 10, when his parents gave him his first CD—a Louis Armstrong record. Later, he would fall in love with the clarinet, then with the polyrhythms of Malian music, and, later still, with the plaintive sounds of klezmer. In his new album Kelenia, a collaboration with three West African musicians, he combines all these elements to exhilarating effect. All Music Guide credits him with “set[ting] a new standard for world music.”

Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry interviews Etkin at the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music, where he teaches, about his unusual musical trajectory. For information on his upcoming performances, go here.

Holy Water

Vox Tablet — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 11:00:25 +0000

According to Jewish law, women are considered impure during their monthly period and are not allowed to have sexual relations or even casually touch their husbands until seven “clean” days have passed and they have immersed in the mikveh, or ritual bath. For Orthodox women, going to the mikveh is a fact of life from the time of their marriage until menopause. But as Varda Polak-Sahm discovered while researching her new book, The House of Secrets: The Hidden World of the Mikveh (translated from the Hebrew by Anne Hartstein Pace), in Israel, many secular women also choose to use the mikveh. Polak-Sahm spoke to Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry from her home in Jerusalem about the power of the mikveh for both the observant and the secular, the women-only rituals that take place within the mikveh’s walls, and her own vastly different immersion experiences before her first and second weddings.

End of an Era

Vox Tablet — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 11:00:21 +0000

In 1947, British-ruled Palestine faced mounting tensions: vast numbers of displaced European Jews hoped to immigrate, Arabs feared losing their land and majority status, and Jewish insurgent groups were fighting for the establishment of Israel. Britain reacted with often inept anti-terrorism squads. Historian David Cesarani combed through newly released archival materials from that period to uncover the role Roy Farran, a 26-year-old Special Air Service major, played in the abduction and death of a 16-year-old Jewish boy from Jerusalem, an event that further strengthened resolve for the establishment of Israel. Cesarani spoke to Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry from his home in London about Major Farran’s Hat: The Untold Story of the Struggle to Establish the Jewish State, his new history of the period.

Holy Rollers

Vox Tablet — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 11:00:46 +0000

You can count on one hand, if not one finger, the number of openly devout Jewish musicians who have attracted a sizeable secular following in the United States. There’s Matisyahu, and there’s … ? In Israel, though, the pop music landscape looks very different. Many of the most popular singers there today are deeply religious, and they explore their faith through music. In this week’s Vox Tablet podcast, Tablet Magazine’s Liel Leibovitz, a ninth-generation Israeli, explains that they’re popular neither because of their religiosity nor in spite of it. Here’s the playlist: 1. Shuli Rand, “Mohin Dektanot,” from the album Good Point 2. Shuli Rand, “Ma Hatachlit,” from the album Good Point 3. Eviatar Banai, “Av Harachman,” from the album Night Will Shine as Day 4. Berry Sakharof, “Shochney Batey Chomer,” from the album Adumey Hasfatot 5. Berry Sakharof, “Melitsati Bideagati Hadufa,” from the album Adumey Hasfatot

A Bronx Tale

Vox Tablet — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 11:00:37 +0000

The Grand Concourse, a major thoroughfare in the Bronx loosely modeled after the Champs Elysee, turns 100 this year. Back in the 1920s and 30s, the Concourse was considered among the best addresses to have, particularly if you were an upwardly mobile Jew. Several decades later, though, things changed radically; the Bronx became an emblem of urban decay and violence. In Boulevard of Dreams: Heady Times, Heartbreak, and Hope Along the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, out later this month from NYU Press, Constance Rosenblum traces the rise and fall and rise again of this historic artery. She speaks with Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about the art deco monuments that characterized the Grand Concourse, Jews’ affinity for apartment living, and the forces that contributed to its mid-century decline.

The exterior of Loew’s Paradise. Photo: Theatre Historical Society of America. The Lorelei fountain in the 1970s, covered in grafitti. Photo: New York Times.

The lobby of the Fish Building. Photo: Carl Rosenstein.

Mob Scene

Vox Tablet — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 11:00:16 +0000

Forty years ago, poor, crime-ridden Israeli neighborhoods were often ruled by a local mobster. It was a Godfather-style situation: the bosses were feared, but they were also respected as protectors for those who played by their rules. But today’s Israeli mafia is something quite different, younger, greedier, more ambitious, and far more reckless. In 2006, Tablet contributing editor Douglas Century visited Hatikva, a neighborhood in south Tel Aviv that spawned some of the more deadly modern mafiosi. Accompanied by Ilan Benshoshan, who grew up there, Century met gangsters, drug dealers, pimps, and a frightened populace trying to steer clear of the violence. Vox Tablet’s Sara Ivry spoke to the pair for a street-level view of today’s Israeli mob.