Last year, a film was released in Poland that was so controversial it was banned in some towns. Opening in New York on Friday and Los Angeles later this month, Pokłosie —or, Aftermath —is a thriller that tells the story of a rural farmer on a mission. At night, Józek Kalina digs up Jewish grave markers that were looted from a local cemetery and used by fellow villagers in their roads and gardens. Józek is trying to give the village’s Jewish dead a proper burial, but there’s a high cost to his ...
Oct 28, 2013•22 min
It’s fairly common nowadays to hear renditions of “Sunrise, Sunset,” for instance, or “The Sabbath Prayer,” memorable melodies from the Fiddler on the Roof , at bar mitzvahs or weddings. Songs from that musical—whose story is inspired by the work of Sholem Aleichem —have become an indelible part of our popular cultural lexicon not just in the United States, but worldwide. Directed by Jerome Robbins and starring Zero Mostel, Fiddler debuted on Broadway in 1964 and quickly became a smash, resonati...
Oct 21, 2013•30 min
For most of its first 50-plus years, the Yiddish language Jewish Daily Forward (now 116 years old) was edited by its founder, Abraham Cahan. Cahan was a Lithuanian immigrant and socialist who came to this country alone at the age of 22, in 1882. Within five years, he’d established himself as a leader of the Jewish immigrant community and as an industrious reporter with friends like the muckraker journalist Lincoln Steffins and the literary critic William Dean Howells. How Cahan climbed the polit...
Oct 14, 2013•26 min
When people hear the name Sholem Aleichem, they very often think of Tevye the Dairyman and his Broadway showstoppers. It’s true, Sholem Aleichem wrote the stories on which Fiddler on the Roof is based, but his body of work is much broader than that. In dozens of stories, novels, newspaper articles, plays, and even poems, Sholem Aleichem, who was born Sholem Rabinovich, depicted the humor and despair that characterized shtetl life at a moment when it faced threats from within and without. He was ...
Oct 07, 2013•22 min
In June of 1967, the world watched with disbelief as the young Israeli army turned a perilous threat—enemy troops gathering at its borders—into a tremendous military victory. The symbol of that victory, for many, was a photograph of soldiers standing before the Western Wall soon after the sacred site was reclaimed by Israel in the fighting. Those soldiers were members of the 55th Paratroopers Reserve Brigade. Most of them were in their early 20s. They included socialist kibbutzniks and religious...
Oct 01, 2013•33 min
There’s no other living Israeli author who is as well known around the world as Amos Oz. Inside Israel, he’s one of the country’s most respected cultural figures. Oz has lived a tumultuous life. When he was 10 years old, he witnessed the founding of the Jewish state. When he was 12 years old, his mother committed suicide. When he was 15, he joined a kibbutz and changed his last name to Oz, Hebrew for “strength.” He eventually left the kibbutz for the desert because of his son’s asthma, but as he...
Sep 23, 2013•28 min
For nearly 30 years, the filmmaker Alan Berliner has made uniquely personal documentaries that mine his life and the lives of his relatives, chipping away at seemingly routine stories to find a more precise, poetic, and nuanced narrative. His films display a relentless curiosity about the people closest to him—territory fraught with pitfalls. Berliner’s 1996 film Nobody’s Business examined his father, a lonely, divorced, retired salesman. Throughout the documentary, we hear the senior Berliner b...
Sep 16, 2013•27 min
Helène Aylon grew up in Borough Park, Brooklyn, in a tight-knit world of Orthodox families. From early on, she was a bit of a rebel, but that didn’t stop her from following the path prescribed for her. At 18, she married a rabbi, and they had two children. Then, when she was just 25, her husband fell ill; she was a widow by 30. This was in 1960. The assumption then was that a woman in her position would marry her husband’s brother. Instead, Aylon became an artist. Her work, as she explains in a ...
Sep 09, 2013•20 min
When guitarist and composer Dan Kaufman headed to Rome in 2009 to study the liturgical melodies of the city’s ancient Jewish community, he stumbled upon the site of a famous partisan attack against the Nazis. Bullet-marked, the building where the action took place remained as a testament to resistance. That story joined together in his imagination with that of the city’s inhabitants from millennia before, inspiring him to create the new album Bella Ciao . Like previous projects Kaufman has under...
Sep 03, 2013•20 min
In 1996, Daniel Goldhagen unleashed a fury of controversy when he published the book Hitler’s Willing Executioners , in which he argued that the Holocaust took place not because Germans were especially obedient to authority, or because a few bad apples came into power, but because an eliminationist prejudice against Jews was woven into the very fabric of German culture. Germans “considered the slaughter to be just,” Goldhagen wrote. His book hit a nerve— critics called Goldhagen out for using ov...
Aug 29, 2013•30 min
Rachel (Kathryn Hahn) is a highly educated stay-at-home mom living in an airy modern home in the affluent L.A. neighborhood of Silver Lake. She volunteers for fundraisers at the JCC. She goes to wine-and-chats with the ladies. She works out and sees her therapist regularly. But she’s bored, she can’t get it up for her husband, and she’s starting to freak out. Enter McKenna (Juno Temple), a stripper who gives her a lap dance and whom Rachel then decides to “save,” by inviting her to move into her...
Aug 19, 2013•24 min
The dog days of August are upon us and with them, a marked slowdown in productivity. Nobody answers our calls, hardly anyone responds to emails, and those of us in the office find ourselves fantasizing about drinking icy beverages in faraway locales. Which got us wondering: What are people in Jerusalem drinking these days? Has the Holy City picked up on the craft cocktail movement currently holding sway throughout the Diaspora? And what drink best captures the life and spirit of the city? We sen...
Aug 12, 2013•18 min
In 2011, adventure-seeking rock drummer-turned-Hasidic mother of four Dalia Shusterman became a widow. At about the same time, Perl Wolfe, born and raised in the Lubavitch sect of Hasidism, married and divorced, was living with her parents and beginning to write her own music. A few months later, the two women would meet in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and soon after that, begin recording their first EP, titled “Down to the Top.” Their band name, Bulletproof Stockings —a somewhat derogatory term use...
Aug 05, 2013•27 min
David Ehrlich is best known as the founder of Tmol Shilshom , a bookstore café in the heart of Jerusalem that has long been a popular gathering place for writers and artists. It’s named after the novel by S. Y. Agnon and has hosted readings by the leading lights of Israeli literature, from Yehuda Amichai to David Grossman, as well as renowned writers from abroad. Ehrlich is himself a writer, primarily of essays and short stories. Now Syracuse University Press has published Who Will Die Last: Sto...
Jul 29, 2013•15 min
Yesterday’s sentencing of Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, was just the latest in a steady stream of blows to the democracy that President Vladimir Putin has ruled with near- dictatorial authority for more than a decade. Navalny, an anticorruption activist, was given a 5-year prison sentence for what most observers say are trumped up charges of embezzlement. If you know anything about Navalny, or about Pussy Riot, or about new laws in Russia that erode freedom of speech...
Jul 19, 2013•14 min
Nearly 120 years after the Dreyfus Affair shook the world, you would think we know all there is to know about the seminal case involving a French Jewish officer falsely accused of treason. Alfred Dreyfus was found guilty and deported to prison on a small, remote island, and it was only after his family, joined by leading intellectuals of the time, rallied in protest that he was acquitted, his case becoming a cornerstone of the democratic French republic. A flood of books on the topic followed, f...
Jul 11, 2013•20 min
Questions of character shape public discourse. From Paula Deen to Edward Snowden—the choices people make and actions people take raise questions about free will, personal responsibility, and morality. And yet, researchers in sociology, psychology, and neuroscience are increasingly asserting that the independent self that we are all so attached to doesn’t really exist. What’s more, there are philosophical traditions dating back to Aristotle, Maimonides , and Spinoza that may offer more useful way...
Jul 01, 2013•25 min
Sheldon Horowitz is a retired watch repairman and wise-cracker from New York City and a Korean War veteran relocated to Oslo, where he lives with his granddaughter and her Norwegian husband. In mourning over the recent death of his wife, Sheldon is in near constant anguish too over the loss years before of his only son—killed in Vietnam. That loss causes him to question continually the virtue of the patriotism and sense of civic responsibility that defined him and that he imparted to his child. ...
Jun 24, 2013•20 min
What are the three words a woman never wants to hear when she’s making love? Honey, I’m home. Whether their circumstances are happy or fraught, Jews have been pointing out the humor in their predicaments since the biblical era, when Sarah the matriarch saw the fact that she’d bear a child at her advanced age as a cruel joke. But it was only since the Enlightenment that, as a people, the Jews became known as a witty lot—reveling in word play, contradiction, and self-deprecation. Yiddish scholar R...
Jun 17, 2013•32 min
In his debut novel, The Path of Names , Vancouver-based writer Ari Goelman conjures Dahlia, an intrepid 13-year-old who we meet as she begrudgingly attends her first summer at Camp Arava, the Jewish overnight camp where her brother is a beloved counselor. Ever interested in figuring out sleights of hand, she’d rather spend her time learning magic. Then strange things start to happen. Dahlia spots two apparitions—little girls dressed for the 1940s who beckon to her in her bunk. Suddenly she has m...
Jun 10, 2013•13 min
Joshua Prager is a reporter best known for tracking down elusive characters whose lives were altered in an instant—people like Tehran-based photographer Jahangir Razmi , the only anonymous winner of a Pulitzer Prize, and Albert Clark , who was unexpectedly bequeathed the royalties of the wildly popular children’s books Goodnight, Moon , Runaway Bunny , and other titles by Margaret Wise Brown. Now Prager has written Half-Life , the story of how his own life changed in an instant. When he was 19 a...
Jun 03, 2013•29 min
Berlin has long had an anti-capitalist bent, part of its countercultural charm. But before the war, it was a more enterprising and bustling place, due in no small part to the nearly 50,000 Jewish-owned businesses located there. What happened to those businesses under Hitler is at the core of meticulous research by Humboldt University historian Christoph Kreutzmüller. While most of us are familiar with images of Nazi boycotts and smashed storefront windows, Kreutzmüller and his research team have...
May 20, 2013•13 min
B&H Restaurant in Manhattan's East Village was once part of a neighborhood that vibrated with Jewishness. Yiddish theaters peppered the area. Ratner’s was down the street, and the 2nd Avenue Deli was just across the way. Opened in 1942, the dairy-only B&H has outlasted most of these joints—sure, the 2nd Avenue Deli remains but in a new location and not even on 2nd Avenue—with its blintz and pierogi offerings gobbled up by hungry customers in a classic, narrow diner space brightened by li...
May 14, 2013•15 min
In 1930s Warsaw, a young beauty named Vera Gran made a name for herself as a seductive and charming cabaret singer with a voice fans likened to Edith Piaf’s and Marlene Dietrich’s. Gran (born Grynberg) was, along with her mother and sisters and thousands of other Jews, forced to live inside the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II. During her time in the ghetto, she continued performing until she managed, with the help of her Polish husband, to escape its confines and go into hiding in 1942. Her fa...
May 02, 2013•34 min
Last week, the Society of Professional Journalists named Tablet contributor Daniel Estrin a Sigma Delta Chi Award honoree for his 2012 Vox Tablet report about a new light-rail system in Jerusalem, a city hardly known for its high-functioning infrastructure. With a rapidly growing population squeezed between sacred sites, and as ground zero for an intractable territorial conflict, Jerusalem is more or less an urban planner’s worst nightmare. When the light-rail system was first proposed, it was m...
Apr 29, 2013•15 min
To read more Tablet in Warsaw coverage, click here. This week, Tablet is reporting from Warsaw, which is commemorating the 70th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. The new Museum of the History of Polish Jews , opening today after formal ceremonies, is a spectacular glass-and-concrete structure—still empty, for the most part—that has been 20 years in the making, at a cost of more than 100 million dollars. Proponents of the museum believe it represents a huge step forward in healing Polish...
Apr 19, 2013•14 min
In the wake of horrific crimes, there is a mantra from politicians, lawyers, and victims: They don’t want revenge, they say; they just want justice. Thane Rosenbaum, a novelist , essayist, and professor at Fordham Law School, says a distinction between the two is both disingenuous and misguided. In his new book, Payback: The Case for Revenge , Rosenbaum argues that the modern American judicial system in fact needs an injection of Old-Testament-style vengeance. From the killing of Osama Bin Laden...
Apr 16, 2013•24 min
In the Book of Numbers, it is written that God said to Moses: “Speak to the sons of Israel, and tell them that they shall make for themselves tassels on the corners of their garments throughout their generations, and that they shall put on the tassel of each corner a cord of blue.” Yet it is comparatively rare to see Jews wearing prayer shawls with blue thread added to the fringes. Why this intransigence? The short answer is that it's an extraordinarily difficult commandment to fulfill, and one ...
Apr 11, 2013•18 min
As an author and literary critic (including for Tablet ), Adam Kirsch has written about Lionel Trilling , Benjamin Disraeli , Emily Dickinson, and Isaac Bashevis Singer , among many others. This past August, he moved into less familiar territory when he joined the tens of thousands of Jews participating in Daf Yomi, studying a page of Talmud a day. The study cycle will take seven and a half years to complete. Since he began, Kirsch has been writing a weekly column to share his reflections on the...
Mar 29, 2013•22 min
Rachel Shukert is well known to Tablet followers as our pop culture expert, writing her Tattler column about everything from reality TV to the British royal family . She even wrote and performed an Oscar-night medley . Shukert is also the author of two memoirs: Have You No Shame? and Everything Is Going to Be Great . In her new young-adult novel Starstruck , the first of a three-part series, Shukert focuses on pop culture, but from a historical perspective. Set in the 1930s, the Golden Age of Ho...
Mar 25, 2013•16 min
