When Gili Yalo was 4 years old, he discovered that he loved to sing. It was in 1984, during a two-month trek through the desert on the first leg of a long journey from Ethiopia to Israel, where his parents believed life would be better for them. Thirty years later, Yalo is still singing, now with Zvuloon Dub System and in a musical style that encompasses the different aspects of his life—immigrant, Israeli, Jew. Based in Tel Aviv, Zvuloon Dub System plays an irresistible blend of roots reggae an...
Jun 30, 2014•8 min
Poopa Dweck is the poster woman for Syrian Jewish cooking. Her cookbook, Aromas of Aleppo , won a National Jewish Book Award. She gives lectures, does cooking demonstrations on television, and travels the world talking about the food of her ancestors. Dweck even has her own line of condiments, featuring specialties such as quince orange-blossom confit. But if you really want to see Dweck in her element, you score an invitation to visit her at her home kitchen in a seaside town in New Jersey when...
Jun 23, 2014•10 min
This is a sponsored podcast on behalf of Yale University Press and their Jewish Lives series. Sigmund Freud nearly boasted of the fact that he was ignorant of “everything that concerned Judaism.” He also held a deep mistrust of biography—so much so that the father of psychoanalysis burned his papers in order to try to thwart would-be future biographers. So you can see why Adam Phillips may have been daunted by the suggestion that he write a biography of Freud for Yale University Press's Jewish L...
Jun 16, 2014•25 min
Slava Gelman, a twentysomething aspiring writer, is trying to claw his way out of the post-Soviet Brooklyn neighborhood of his family. But his grandfather is determined to pull him back in. He wants to enlist Slava to invent life stories for Soviet émigrés in the hopes of getting money from the claims conference for Holocaust survivors, despite the fact that technically these émigrés are not survivors. It’s a preposterous—and sometimes hilarious—scenario but one that raises serious questions abo...
Jun 09, 2014•21 min
Last weekend brought bad news from Europe: Far right parties in France, Denmark, Austria and elsewhere won big in the European Parliamentary elections. And in Brussels, four people died after a shooting at the city’s Jewish Museum. The attack came in a spring punctuated by anti-Semitic violence in France, the U.K., and elsewhere. All of these incidents have elicited the question: Is it time for Jews to leave Europe? To find out if things are as hostile for Jews in Europe as they seem from the va...
May 30, 2014•21 min
The novelist Joshua Ferris made a splash in 2007 with his debut Then We Came to the End. The critically acclaimed book was a hilarious, biting satire about employees in a collapsing ad agency in Chicago at the end of the dot-com era. Ferris followed it up in 2010 with The Unnamed , a somewhat darker novel about a Manhattan lawyer who just wants to be walking; it’s an urge he cannot resist, and it undoes his life. Now Ferris is out with a new novel, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour . With the help ...
May 19, 2014•18 min
Known for frenzied takes on Yiddish and Eastern European music, the members of Golem bring the party with them wherever the band plays and no matter what they’re singing about. Their new album, Tanz , which means dance in Yiddish, covers religious rites, anti-Semitism in the former Soviet Union, dark children’s poems, and more, in a mix of rollicking interpretations of classic songs and original numbers. Golem’s founder and accordionist, Annette Ezekiel Kogan, and its violinist, Jeremy Brown, jo...
May 12, 2014•20 min
Ashkenazi Jews whose grandparents or great-grandparents hail from the Pale of Settlement tend to hold certain received notions about Poland (“bad for the Jews”) and its people (“hated the Jews”). On the basis of such notions, many Ashkenazim see little or no reason to visit the place. Jonathan Groubert felt similarly. Nevertheless, in 1994 he tacked Poland on to the itinerary of a backpacking trip through Europe. The visit was intended to do little more than confirm what he already knew. Instead...
Apr 29, 2014•13 min
Back in the early 1980s, two populations found their lives upended by the AIDS epidemic in America. There were, of course, those infected by the virus, along with everyone who cared for them. And then there were the medical professionals—researchers, doctors—desperately scrambling to figure out where the virus came from and how to interrupt its terrible progression. In 1981, Dr. Michael Saag unexpectedly found himself at the center of the latter group. At the time, Saag was just beginning a resi...
Apr 17, 2014•21 min
How do you write a Leonard Cohen song? That’s a difficult question, even for Leonard Cohen. The lyrics aren’t the problem; Cohen was a poet long before he wrote his first song. Nor has it been a question of finding the right melody. The challenge in writing a Leonard Cohen song came later, in the studio, when it was time to figure out how the whole thing should sound. So says Liel Leibovitz, anyway. Leibovitz is a senior writer at Tablet Magazine and the author of a new book on Cohen, A Broken H...
Apr 07, 2014•14 min
“A trustworthy person, one of our friends, has told us that you have been seen going around late at night with young men. You are also seen very frequently at dances, masquerades, and picnics.” So starts a letter to a young Jewish woman from her worried father who warns her of the peril that awaits if she continues her misbehavior. The letter is one of many having to do with social mores and business concerns. It is also a fiction. That is, it is a sample letter dating from 1905. Sample letters ...
Mar 31, 2014•23 min
Growing up, Lynn Jordan never knew that her father was a Holocaust survivor . She only knew, subconsciously, that he seemed fragile and that he needed her to live life for the two of them, because he had somehow missed out on most of life’s pleasures. There were other problems, too—her mother’s self-destructive habits, her parents’ frequent fights. It wasn’t until Lynn had been begging her parents for years to get help that she discovered her father’s past. At that point, she was faced with a pa...
Mar 24, 2014•16 min
Although he won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1978, Menachem Begin had a reputation for violence that chased him his whole life. During the Holocaust he fled Europe (where he had been a leader in the radical Zionist group Betar ) for Palestine, where he became a leader in the Jewish underground militia known as Etzel and was implicated in deadly events in the fight to help establish the state of Israel. Begin was reviled by the country’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, but did not let the...
Mar 12, 2014•31 min
Dudu Tassa is a major figure in the Israeli rock scene. The singer-songwriter and guitarist released his first album when he was just 13, produces music for television and film, and has collaborated with international heavy weights like Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead. Since he was a kid, Tassa has had a vague idea that his late grandfather was an important musician in his native Iraq, but it was only recently that he came to understand just how important: Tassa’s grandfather and great-uncle, Dao...
Mar 11, 2014•12 min
Fyvush Finkel, 91 years old and still cracking wise, will take to the stage this month in a pair of Purim cabaret performances . Vox Tablet caught up with the legendary actor a few years ago, on the occasion of a different show. To celebrate his impressive vigor, good humor, and all-around affability, we revisit that conversation. Finkel made his stage debut more than eight decades ago, when he was 9 years old, singing “O Promise Me” at a theater in Brooklyn. Soon after, he crossed the East Rive...
Mar 03, 2014•15 min
The myth that Jews murder Christian children and use their blood to make matzo, a legend known as the blood libel , used to rear its ugly head with frightening frequency. Arguably the most famous instance of this accusation took place in 1913, with the trial of Mendel Beilis . Beilis, a barely observant Jew, worked in a brick factory in the slums of Kiev. In 1911, he was accused of murdering Andrei Yushchinsky, a poor, 13-year-old boy. From the outset, “ritual murder” served as an excuse to accu...
Feb 24, 2014•16 min
As this endless winter drags on, making life miserable for those unfortunates living in the Midwest and Northeast, the wise among us have made the well-worn pilgrimage to South Florida. The tradition dates back to just after WWII, when Jews from cities like Baltimore, Philadelphia, and especially New York began flocking to Miami Beach for the winter. And in Miami Beach, they wanted delis just like the ones they ate in back home. In fact, the postwar years were a golden age for the Jewish deli in...
Feb 18, 2014•9 min
In the past several decades, it has become increasingly common to find religious women who are doctors, professors, scientists, and rabbis. Yet while they’ve gained acceptance as professionals in their community, their children often get very different messages in Jewish day schools about acceptable and unacceptable gender roles. There, rigorous training in Jewish thought, or math and science, for that matter, may be offered to boys only, while girls may find that more attention is paid to the l...
Feb 10, 2014•24 min
Until roughly the end of the 19th century, a shtetl was just a shtetl—that is, a town as designated in Yiddish, and nobody paid them any particular attention. Then interest in shtetls as places where Eastern Europe Jews lived picked up. Assimilated Western European Jews embarked on heritage tours to survey their exotic brethren in the east, academic interest in folk-life grew, and representations of shtetl life began appearing with more frequency in literature. After that came the Holocaust, whi...
Feb 03, 2014•31 min
David Krakauer is best-known and loved for his rocking klezmer clarinet, though he has long worked in other genres too, including jazz, classical, and funk. With his newest project, called The Big Picture , he even crosses media. In The Big Picture Krakauer takes memorable songs from films with some Jewish connection—like “Tradition” from Fiddler on the Roof , “Body and Soul” from Radio Days —and, with the help of five other talented musicians, makes them his own. The project has an additional e...
Jan 28, 2014•21 min
Many people outside Israel think that settlers in the Palestinian territories are a small but powerful group of religious zealots—back-to-the-land types who form hilltop encampments and chase Palestinians from their olive groves. Though that kind of scenario exists, it is not what anthropologist Callie Maidhof found, for the most part, when she embarked on her field research in the West Bank. Maidhof wanted to find out who lives in settlements and why they go there, so she moved to a settlement ...
Jan 17, 2014•16 min
Yascha Mounk grew up in Germany in the 1980s and ’90s. As a distinct minority, he gradually came to understand that his presence brought out a mixture of anti-Semitism, philo-Semitism, and profound discomfort in his fellow Germans. All Mounk wanted was a conversation without the fact of his Jewish background casting any special shadow. That such a conversation seemed impossible, he argues, has to do with Germany’s failure to reckon thoroughly with its own history—and it led Mounk to settle, for ...
Jan 09, 2014•23 min
If you’re a parent living in the 21st century, chances are you have occasionally used digital technology for back-up when your patience is wearing thin, either to escape into your own work or social network, or to distract the kids with virtual entertainment. (If you haven’t, well, the rest of us bow down to you in awe and admiration.) But what is the impact when parents and their kids turn to texting or video games or other electronic distractions, rather than turning to each other? According t...
Dec 31, 2013•23 min
For those who are prone to Christmas envy—particularly but not exclusively the elementary-school set—this has been a challenging year. Hanukkah ended weeks ago, and ever since, we’ve just had to grin and bear it in the face of the annual onslaught of red and green and jingle and sparkle. Ophira Eisenberg , comedian, writer, and host of the weekly NPR trivia show “ Ask Me Another ,” is no stranger to this Christmas envy. Eisenberg grew up a religious minority in Calgary, Alberta, at a time when s...
Dec 24, 2013•8 min
In the early 20th century, nearly a quarter of a million Jews lived among Muslims in Morocco's towns and villages, making common cause in commerce and culture . Over the course of the past century, nearly all of them have left. Now there are an estimated 4,000 Jews in Morocco . So few that most younger Moroccans have never met one. Aomar Boum , an anthropologist at the University... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Dec 16, 2013•22 min
Five years after Bernard Madoff admitted to his sons, and then to federal investigators, that he had been running the largest Ponzi scheme in history, the saga of his monumental ripoff continues to unspool. Lawsuits, settlements, and criminal trials are still ongoing, and Madoff himself, now 75, is just at the start of serving his prison sentence, with a fantastical projected release date in November 2139. Like a Mafia capo, he went down professing his own guilt but offered little in the way of ...
Dec 06, 2013•9 min
A warning to listeners: This episode of Vox Tablet contains explicit language and content you wouldn't normally hear on our podcast. To censor such language, offensive as it may be, felt contrary to the spirit of Lambert's argument, which posits a connection between “obscenity” and Jewish culture and continuity. Jews are oversexed. That’s a long-held stereotype. And, like most stereotypes, it’s baloney. What is true, however, is that Jews in America have been fighters on the front lines in produ...
Dec 02, 2013•31 min
The Hanukkah song “Ocho Kandelikas” (Eight Little Candles) is often referred to as a “traditional Sephardic song.” In fact, it was written in 1983 by Flory Jagoda, an 88-year-old Sephardic folk singer who still performs today. “Ocho Kandelikas” is one of dozens of songs Jagoda has written and recorded , drawing from a rich musical tradition and sung in Ladino, or Judeo-Spanish , the language she grew up with as a child in Bosnia. She carried that language and musical tradition with her to the Un...
Nov 25, 2013•16 min
Esther Amini’s mother—or Bibi (“grandma” in Farsi), as the family calls her—grew up in Mashhad, a holy Islamic city in Iran. To escape persecution, Bibi and other Jews kept their religious observance well-hidden. She immigrated in 1948 to the United States, where Esther was born. In the years that followed, the holiday of Thanksgiving—celebrating, among other things, the gift of religious freedom—came to hold a privileged place for her and her family, alongside Rosh Hashanah and Passover. Amini’...
Nov 19, 2013•13 min
We know from witness testimony, and the work of historians, that though there were a handful of women among the most notoriously violent Nazi camp guards and bureaucrats, for the most part, German women were absent from Nazi positions of power. That might lead us to conclude that they were not active participants in the genocide that took place. In Hitler’s Furies , historian Wendy Lower tells us such a conclusion is wrong. She argues that many young women seeking opportunity during the war head...
Nov 04, 2013•22 min
