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
Meyer Levin’s Anne Frank
September 14, 2012 11:00 - 10 minutes - 6.25 MBIn 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 ...
Jewish Guys on the Side
September 10, 2012 11:00 - 23 minutes - 13.4 MBHanna 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, ra...
New Songs for Old Prayers
September 04, 2012 11:00 - 21 minutes - 25.2 MBZach 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 ...
Member of the Tribe
August 27, 2012 11:00 - 18 minutes - 10.9 MBWhen 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...
The New Sound of Central Asia
August 20, 2012 11:00 - 15 minutes - 17.9 MBOriginally 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 ...
David Rakoff Reads Bambi
August 10, 2012 15:35 - 19 minutes - 22.1 MBDavid 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 d...
Florida’s Airport Ambassador
August 06, 2012 11:00 - 7 minutes - 8.17 MBMost 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 som...
Reporter Digs Up Converso Past
July 30, 2012 11:00 - 17 minutes - 10.1 MBDoreen 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...
What Went Wrong in Munich
July 23, 2012 11:00 - 22 minutes - 12.7 MBWith 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 Sta...
Modern Muslim Girls
July 18, 2012 11:00 - 18 minutes - 10.7 MBMany 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, ch...
Shtetl-Born Strongman
July 09, 2012 11:00 - 1 minute - 162 BytesIn a fortnight, millions of TV viewers will tune in to watch world-class athletes perform acts of great strength and endurance. But a few generations back, at the turn of the last century, long before the Olympic Games became the outsized spectacle that they are today, audiences looking to be entertained by athletic prowess were more likely to find it at the fairgrounds, on a vaudeville stage, or along the boardwalk. That’s where strongmen could be found, pulling trucks with their hair or sp...
Israel’s African Problem
July 02, 2012 11:00 - 16 minutes - 9.69 MBOver 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...
A Novel’s Unlikely Friends
June 25, 2012 11:00 - 16 minutes - 9.72 MBAccording 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 li...
Blonde and Botoxed in Miami
June 14, 2012 11:00 - 8 minutes - 9.74 MBIn 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 ...
A Chinese Shul’s Love Story
June 11, 2012 11:00 - 7 minutes - 9.12 MBThe 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 synagog...
Moroccan Grooves, Blogged
June 04, 2012 11:00 - 25 minutes - 15 MBBy 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 ...
An Atheist for Religion
May 29, 2012 11:00 - 18 minutes - 10.9 MBEssayist 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, ...
Voices Raised for Jerusalem
May 18, 2012 11:00 - 15 minutes - 8.67 MBMatthew 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...
Old Jews Telling More Jokes
May 14, 2012 11:00 - 10 minutes - 6.13 MBIn 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 Dani...
The Most Perfect Hebrew Bible
May 07, 2012 11:00 - 18 minutes - 12.8 MBThe 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 ...
Madeleine Albright’s War Years
April 26, 2012 11:00 - 16 minutes - 9.35 MBIn 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:...
Taken for a Ride in Jerusalem
April 23, 2012 11:00 - 15 minutes - 10.4 MBJerusalem 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 ...
Aging Survivors Can’t Forget
April 16, 2012 11:00 - 17 minutes - 9.85 MBMany 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 Kare...
On the Cancer Gene Trail
April 09, 2012 11:00 - 17 minutes - 10 MBIn 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...
Don’t Diss Passover Fruit Slices
April 02, 2012 11:00 - 7 minutes - 8.33 MBJerry 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 t...
Big Band Theory
March 22, 2012 11:00 - 22 minutes - 25.8 MBGrowing 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...
General Frenemy
March 19, 2012 11:00 - 24 minutes - 13.9 MBBest 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. ...
Jews for Jesus
March 12, 2012 12:00 - 31 minutes - 18.1 MBRabbi 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 ...
Easy Access
March 05, 2012 12:00 - 8 minutes - 4.76 MBBefore 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...
Salonica Stories
February 27, 2012 12:00 - 24 minutes - 14.2 MBIn 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 ed...
The Projectionist
February 13, 2012 12:00 - 16 minutes - 9.56 MBActor 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 ...
Cheap Eats
February 06, 2012 12:00 - 16 minutes - 9.57 MBThe 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 wit...
Grace Notes
January 30, 2012 12:00 - 10 minutes - 11.9 MBVirtuosic 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. In...
Goodbye to All That
January 23, 2012 12:00 - 17 minutes - 10.4 MBThe 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...
Who Shall Live
January 17, 2012 12:00 - 22 minutes - 12.8 MBWhen 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 re...
Hope Less
January 09, 2012 12:00 - 20 minutes - 12 MBWhat 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...
Settling Down
December 19, 2011 12:00 - 18 minutes - 10.5 MBChani 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. Ea...
Disney’s World
December 12, 2011 12:00 - 10 minutes - 12 MBWalt 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 Dis...
Wonderstruck
November 29, 2011 12:00 - 24 minutes - 27.7 MBSeveral 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 ...
American Master
November 18, 2011 12:00 - 18 minutes - 10.9 MBIt 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 fil...
Survey Says
November 14, 2011 12:00 - 27 minutes - 16 MBIs 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 E...
Preoccupied
November 07, 2011 11:00 - 27 minutes - 15.6 MBIt’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 inc...
Flesh and Blood
October 28, 2011 11:00 - 14 minutes - 8.48 MBThese 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 S...
Father Figure
October 24, 2011 11:00 - 30 minutes - 17.3 MBIn 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...
Huddled Masses
October 17, 2011 11:00 - 4 minutes - 2.75 MBEvery 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 n...
Conservadox
October 10, 2011 11:00 - 19 minutes - 11.4 MBSukkot, 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, th...
Unforgiven
October 03, 2011 11:00 - 15 minutes - 17.5 MBBlasphemy 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 th...
Paper Chase
September 26, 2011 11:00 - 26 minutes - 15.3 MBLike 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...
On the Ground
September 22, 2011 11:00 - 18 minutes - 10.7 MBNathan 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 Palestinian...
Mother’s Helper
September 12, 2011 11:00 - 25 minutes - 14.6 MBIn 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—...