What 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 about t...
Mar 29, 2015•52 min
Marcus 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 artis...
Mar 18, 2015•27 min
The 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 project, ...
Mar 04, 2015•24 min
Tablet 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 o...
Feb 19, 2015•26 min
Valentine’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 Israel...
Feb 11, 2015•57 min
“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 Universit...
Feb 06, 2015•33 min
When 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 the Na...
Jan 21, 2015•32 min
The 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 of b...
Jan 05, 2015•1 hr 2 min
[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, she...
Dec 26, 2014•18 min
It 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 like ...
Dec 19, 2014•7 min
When 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 terrific mas...
Dec 15, 2014•13 min
David 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 melanc...
Dec 08, 2014•29 min
Archie 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 and fi...
Dec 02, 2014•24 min
Visitors 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 whis...
Nov 24, 2014•56 min
Writer 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 crea...
Nov 03, 2014•19 min
Are 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 or...
Oct 27, 2014•1 hr 1 min
In 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 Valy, wh...
Oct 20, 2014•24 min
In the annals of biblical kings, David stands out. A humble shepherd, he slew Goliath, wrote poetry, dethroned his predecessor, and reigned in Israel for 40 years. His heroics inspired artists throughout history from Michelangelo to Shakespeare to Leonard Cohen. But David’s achievements in helping unite the Jews did not come without costs—he had innocent people killed, looked away at violence among his children, bedded married women. In David: The Divided Heart , out from Yale University Press’s...
Oct 13, 2014•18 min
Growing up in a Hasidic community, Basya Schechter heard music all around her—not rock music or even folk—but religious nigguns , or tunes. There were the zmirot –songs sung after Sabbath meals; the communal singing at Hanukkah; the prayers recited in unison in holiday liturgies. In her late teens, Schechter abandoned that world and its music. After college, she traveled extensively through the Middle East and North Africa and learned to play instruments from the region like the darbuka and oud....
Sep 29, 2014•25 min
This month’s episode of Israel Story is devoted entirely to Chaya’s story. Chaya Ben Baruch grew up as Enid, in a Conservadox family in Far Rockaway, N.Y. Midway through college, she left that world behind to study sea otters in Fairbanks, Alaska. Fast-forward a decade: Enid is now married to a nice Catholic salmon fisher named Stan. She’s just given birth to her sixth child, and discovers he has Down syndrome. Many parents in her position would be devastated. Some might place their baby in an i...
Sep 22, 2014•57 min
This is a sponsored podcast on behalf of Yale University Press and their Jewish Lives series. When the composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein died nearly 25 years ago he left a broad legacy. He wrote music for Broadway . He devoted himself to education through the Young People's Concerts . He conducted the world’s finest orchestras. He wrote poetry. And he wrote classical pieces. While some critics cheered the range of his engagements, others argued that in spreading himself thin he squandered...
Sep 15, 2014•28 min
Around the country, kids are settling into their classrooms for a new school year, unaware of the wars over curriculum, teacher evaluations, school funding, and other hot-button education topics. Just north of New York City, in the district of East Ramapo in Rockland County, one such battle has been brewing for nearly a decade, churning up racial and ethnic tensions as it goes. In 2005, the school board in East Ramapo underwent a change when Hasidic Jews living in the area voted enough Orthodox ...
Sep 08, 2014•20 min
We’ve all got our go-to story about brushes with fame, but Harold Fruchter’s is truly a conversation stopper. Fruchter, a singer and guitarist in a Jewish wedding band , and the son of a rabbi, was born in 1952. When he was a baby, and up to the age of 2, his family lived in the upstairs apartment of a two-story flat in Memphis. Their downstairs neighbors were the Presleys. The two families formed a friendship, and the future King of Rock, just a teenager then, learned to pick up the cues when t...
Aug 25, 2014•8 min
In our very first episode, the Israel Story team delves into the realm of fakes, forgeries, and mimicry. Three stories, from different periods and places, of people pretending to to be something they are not. (You can find Sipur Israeli , the original, Hebrew version of Israel Story , here .) [ Listen to full episode here, or download from iTunes .] Prologue: The Israeli This American Life ?!... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Aug 18, 2014•59 min
Several years ago, a group of four young Israelis—friends since childhood—got to work making a Hebrew-language radio show inspired by This American Life , the public-radio show two of them had grown to love while living in the United States. On the airwaves in Israel all that was available was talk radio and music, and the guys wanted something to listen to that was akin to the Ira Glass-hosted program with which they’d become obsessed. So, though they had never before made a radio story, they r...
Aug 11, 2014•19 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 used ...
Aug 04, 2014•26 min
In 2009, a visitor to the British Museum presented curator Irving Finkel with a fascinating artifact—a 4,000-year-old Babylonian cuneiform tablet that told of a flood, and an ark, but with mysterious details unfamiliar from previously discovered tablets of that period. Finkel’s official title is Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian script, languages, and cultures; a discovery like this was right up his alley. He spent the next several years turning the tablet over and over (literally and fig...
Jul 28, 2014•23 min
It was all over the Dutch press this past spring—the revelation that in the years immediately following the Nazi occupation, Amsterdam authorities came after the small trickle of returning Dutch Jews who owned property and told them they owed outstanding leasehold fees from the time they were away – indeed, the authorities demanded that they not only pay those fees, but also fines for late payment. The person who first discovered this mind-bogglingly absurd requirement was Charlotte van den Berg...
Jul 21, 2014•20 min
Passover, Sukkot, and Shavuot are harvest festivals that hearken back to a time when Jews were farmers just like everyone around them. But Jews as professional farmers did not endure in fact or as a stereotype. Instead, Jews moved into more highly skilled fields—as moneylenders, traders, doctors, lawyers. What happened centuries ago that caused most of the world’s Jewry to move from tilling fields to work that required them to be able to read and write? That’s the question that a pair of economi...
Jul 14, 2014•29 min
This is a sponsored podcast on behalf of Yale University Press and their Jewish Lives series. Students of Jewish history—and the history of Mandate Palestine—are familiar with the name Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky. Born in Odessa, Jabotinsky was a journalist and an ardent Zionist committed to the establishment of the state of Israel. He was also a talented novelist, poet and screenwriter. In Jabotinsky: A Life , writer Hillel Halkin examines the full extent of Jabotinsky’s influence. He joins Vox T...
Jul 07, 2014•22 min
