Vox Tablet
214 episodes - English - Latest episode: almost 8 years ago - ★★★★★ - 116 ratingsThis is Vox Tablet, the weekly podcast of Tablet Magazine, the online Jewish arts and culture magazine that used to be known as Nextbook.org. Our archive of podcasts is available on our site, tablet2015.wpengine.com. Vox Tablet, hosted by Sara Ivry, varies widely in subject matter and sound -- one week it's a conversation with novelist Michael Chabon, theater critic Alisa Solomon, or anthropologist Ruth Behar. Another week brings the listener to "the etrog man" hocking his wares at a fruit-juice stand in a Jersualem market. Or into the hotel room with poet and rock musician David Berman an hour before he and his band, Silver Jews, head over to their next gig. Recent guests include Alex Ross, Shalom Auslander, Aline K. Crumb, Howard Jacobson, and the late Norman Mailer.
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Episodes
So Long, Farewell
June 24, 2016 04:30 - 42 minutes - 24.4 MBSince 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 Fyvu...
Louis Brandeis: The Jewish Boy From Kentucky Who Became a Supreme Court Legend
June 15, 2016 04:00 - 31 minutes - 17.9 MBExactly 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 Br...
Tanya's Story
June 08, 2016 04:00 - 47 minutes - 43.9 MBTanya 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 sometime...
A New Kind of Prayerbook
May 11, 2016 04:01 - 22 minutes - 13.1 MBEarlier 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...
Hey Mister DJ, Put a (Diaspora-Blending, Genre-Bending) Record On
April 25, 2016 04:01 - 24 minutes - 27.8 MBRob 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 c...
From Kooky Waif to A-List Beauty: The Story of Barbra StreisandUntitled Episode
April 13, 2016 04:01 - 29 minutes - 17 MBBarbra 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 cult...
What's Free Will Got To Do With It?
March 30, 2016 04:01 - 24 minutes - 14.3 MBEspecially 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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/pr...
Builders of a New Jerusalem
March 18, 2016 04:01 - 43 minutes - 24.6 MBHost 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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Bathe in the Waters
March 02, 2016 05:01 - 28 minutes - 33 MBTraditionally, 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 Melbour...
Beyond Drake
February 16, 2016 05:00 - 22 minutes - 12.9 MBFebruary 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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy f...
The Saddlemaker, the Schindler, and the Miller of Wlodowa
February 03, 2016 05:00 - 19 minutes - 11 MBA 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 W...
The Man Behind the Mustache
January 20, 2016 05:00 - 20 minutes - 11.5 MBWhen 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 Year of Firsts
January 06, 2016 05:00 - 22 minutes - 13.1 MBIn 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...
For the Love of Suzie Louise: A Christmas Story
December 22, 2015 05:00 - 27 minutes - 16 MBAs 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...
The Most Haunted Leading Man
December 09, 2015 05:00 - 39 minutes - 22.5 MBThe 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 ...
Girlhood, Interrupted
November 23, 2015 05:00 - 21 minutes - 12.2 MBThe 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...
Let ‘Freedom’ Ring: A Flutist Gives Life to Musical Celebrations of Liberations
November 09, 2015 05:00 - 21 minutes - 24.9 MBMimi 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 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sweet Madeleine
October 26, 2015 04:00 - 23 minutes - 13.6 MBBest 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 in...
Puzzle Master
October 13, 2015 04:00 - 24 minutes - 14.1 MBA 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 Original Gallery Girl
September 30, 2015 04:00 - 23 minutes - 13.6 MBThe 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 lo...
My Grandfather, the Secret Policeman
September 16, 2015 04:00 - 26 minutes - 15.5 MBPoet 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...
Beyond the Pulpit
August 31, 2015 04:00 - 25 minutes - 14.4 MBFor 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. Bachma...
André Aciman, Sarah Wildman, and Others Build a Summer Reading List
August 14, 2015 04:00 - 16 minutes - 9.61 MBThere 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 yearn...
And Now for Something Completely Different
August 03, 2015 04:00 - 32 minutes - 18.7 MBFirst 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...
How One Zealous Looter Changed Jewish History in the Name of Its Preservation
July 22, 2015 04:00 - 32 minutes - 18.5 MBIn 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 tho...
Einstein: Patent Clerk, Rebel, Equivocal Zionist
July 08, 2015 04:00 - 29 minutes - 16.8 MBFor 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 Ein...
Recovering From a Brain Injury, One Measuring Spoon at a Time
June 24, 2015 04:00 - 25 minutes - 14.9 MBPhoto: 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. N...
Blum’s Day
May 27, 2015 04:00 - 1 minute - 16.6 MBDuring his political career, Léon Blum—who served three short terms as French prime minister between 1936 and 1947—was derided by his detractors as “a woman,” a “weak Jew,” and even a traitor. Meanwhile, he was worshiped by many French workers, grateful to him for introducing the 40-hour work week, vacation time, and other legislation from his Socialist agenda. According to sociologist Pierre Birnbaum, author of the new biography Léon Blum: Prime Minister, Socialist, Zionist, none of these ...
A Lullaby for Auschwitz
May 13, 2015 04:00 - 20 minutes - 23.5 MBMore 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 S...
I Was a Teenage Stowaway
April 29, 2015 04:00 - 22 minutes - 26.2 MBThese 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 c...
Abraham Lincoln’s Other Minority
April 15, 2015 04:00 - 25 minutes - 30.1 MBThe 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 th...
We’ll Be Here All Night
March 29, 2015 02:00 - 52 minutes - 60.6 MBWhat 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 a...
The Life and Painting of Mark Rothko
March 18, 2015 05:00 - 27 minutes - 15.9 MBMarcus 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 ...
Heroics Aside, the Story of Purim Is the Bible’s Greatest Farce
March 04, 2015 05:00 - 24 minutes - 28.2 MBThe 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 pro...
Convince This Man You’re a Jew, and He’ll Move You to Israel
February 19, 2015 05:00 - 25 minutes - 15.2 MBTablet 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... Hosted...
What’s Love Got To Do With It?
February 11, 2015 05:00 - 56 minutes - 65.2 MBValentine’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 I...
An Abridged Biography of Your Great-Grandfather (Probably)
February 06, 2015 05:00 - 32 minutes - 19.1 MB“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 Univ...
Roger Cohen Heads to South Africa To Examine His Family’s Itinerancy and Mental Illness
January 21, 2015 05:00 - 31 minutes - 18.3 MBWhen 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 t...
Holy Cow! Three Tales of Bovine Worship
January 05, 2015 05:00 - 1 hour - 71.6 MBThe 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 ...
Roz Chast Drags Us Kicking, Screaming, and Laughing, Into the Land of the Infirm
December 26, 2014 05:00 - 18 minutes - 10.8 MB[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, ...
Hanukkah Alegre!
December 19, 2014 05:00 - 7 minutes - 8.46 MBIt 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...
Forget Spelling It: Most of Us Have No Idea What This Holiday Is Even About
December 15, 2014 05:00 - 12 minutes - 14.7 MBWhen 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 terrif...
Being Ben-Gurion
December 08, 2014 05:00 - 28 minutes - 16.6 MBDavid 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 m...
The Life and Good Times of Norman Lear
December 02, 2014 05:00 - 23 minutes - 13.6 MBArchie 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 a...
Don’t Mess With a Missionary Man
November 24, 2014 05:00 - 55 minutes - 63.7 MBVisitors 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 w...
Have a Good Sex Life? Thank These People.
November 17, 2014 05:00 - 1 minute - 564 BytesA little more than 50 years ago, the idea that a woman could have intercourse for fun, and without worrying that nine months later she’d give birth, was a radical proposition. Then the birth control pill arrived. It was an innovation that changed how families expand, how women see themselves at home and at work, and how we as a species interact. Margaret Sanger, a reluctant wife and mother, made the creation of the pill her lifelong pursuit. But she didn’t work alone. She toiled alongside t...
When Repression, Regression, and Neurosis Seeped Into Viennese Music
November 07, 2014 05:00 - 1 minute - 564 BytesAt the turn of the 20th century, Viennese culture experienced a golden age, with the Art Nouveau movement, and the revolutionary music of composers like Mahler, Strauss, and Schoenberg. At the same time, Sigmund Freud‘s theories about dreams and desires were finding expression in art, literature, and music. This week a pair of recitals titled “Art Song on the Couch: Lieder in Freud’s Vienna” promises to transport audiences to the salons of that era. The program was conceived and curated by...
Radical Writer Tillie Olsen Gave Her Grandson Text Fragments. He Made Music From Them.
November 03, 2014 04:00 - 18 minutes - 21.9 MBWriter 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...
From Etgar Keret to a Lovelorn Student in Dimona, Tales of the Book-Obsessed
October 27, 2014 04:00 - 1 hour - 35.2 MBAre 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...
A Grandfather’s Hidden Love Letters From Nazi Germany Reveal a Buried Past
October 20, 2014 04:00 - 23 minutes - 13.7 MBIn 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 Val...