Vox Tablet

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 of 8,000 people—she likens it to an American bedroom community—for nearly a year. The answers she found challenged the perception that religious Zionism has motivated nearly one in 10 Israeli Jews to put down roots in the West Bank and raised the new question of why that perception...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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 now, in the United States. In Stranger in My Own Country: A Jewish Family in Modern Germany, the 31-year-old Mounk looks at how Germans have dealt with the...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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 to Catherine Steiner-Adair, these habits pose a serious threat to families, friendships, and even childhood as we know it. Steiner-Adair is a clinical psychologist and school consultant, and she draws on conversations with more than...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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 schools saw no need to take an inclusive approach to religious and cultural traditions. Here’s her tale of Christmases past, which was brought to our...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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 help or information about the complicity of others. Some of those others—from the wealthy money managers who like Madoff had the trust of their clients to Madoff’s office staff charged with helping conduct the fraud—have clung to their claims of victimization at the hands of a man whose career as one of the world’s most sophisticated investors was, as he infamously put it, “one big lie.” In Manhattan, the trial of five key Madoff employees—who are charged with fabricating and mailing client...  See acast.com/

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 producing, distributing, and defending sexually explicit materials for more than a century. Josh Lambert, a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts and a Tablet contributing editor, addresses why that has...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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 United States, after WWII destroyed most of her family and the way of life she’d known. Here, Jagoda offers her memories of making music with her mother, grandmother, aunts, and uncles as a child, and of her...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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’s account of this family tradition is one of eight narratives in Saffron and Rosewater: Songs and Stories From Persian Women, a theatrical production of the

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 headed to the eastern territories where the vast majority of the killing took place. There they took on essential roles as teachers, nurses, secretaries, and wives and lovers. In those capacities, they were not only aiding in the Final Solution but also witnessing it, and in some cases committing acts of violence...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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 activity. His wife has left him and taken the children, and his neighbors are reacting with growing menace. The film is brutal and haunting, invoking the horrors of the...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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, resonating with Jewish audiences comfortable enough in their assimilated lives in America to be able to look fondly back at the shtetl their parents left behind. How the play got made and what its significance has been for peoples of all ethnicities and backgrounds is the subject of a new book by Columbia University professor Alisa Solomon. Solomon joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to discuss

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 political, journalistic, and literary (he wrote the critically acclaimed novel The Rise of David Levinsky) ranks of 20th century America is the topic of The Rise of Abraham Cahan, a new biography by Seth Lipsky. In 1990, Lipsky founded the English-language Forward. He joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to discuss how Cahan managed to wear the seemingly conflicting hats...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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 also a great advocate of Yiddish, and of the Jewish people. Readers and critics considered him the “Jewish Mark Twain” and when he died from tuberculosis in 1916 at the age of 57, he left behind tens of thousands of fans in Europe and the United States. His life was relatively short but it made a lasting mark. Sholem Aleichem is now the subject of a new biography by Jeremy Dauber, a professor of Yiddish at Columbia University. The book is...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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 Zionists. A surprising number of them would go on to be leaders in the movements those two groups spawned—the peace movement on the Left, and the settlement movement on the Right. In his new book, Like Dreamers, veteran journalist Yossi Klein Halevi examines the lives of seven of these...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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 tells Vox Tablet contributor Daniel Estrin, he still dreams of kibbutz life at least once a week. In his newest short story collection, Between Friends, he revisits the early years of the kibbutz, when the collective farms were still a wild Israeli ideological experiment. Estrin sat with Amos Oz in his home in Tel Aviv for a far-ranging discussion about...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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 barking his objections with “my life is nothing!” and “you’re boring the shit out of me!” But as details of his past are revealed, Berliner’s father becomes a complex, lively figure in history, while, at every turn, the audience is compelled to adjust their perception of him. In Berliner’s newest film, First Cousin Once Removed, the filmmaker again focuses on family: in this case

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 memoir published last year and titled Whatever Is Contained Must Be Released: My Jewish Orthodox Girlhood, My Life as a Feminist Artist, engaged with the liberation movements of her time—women from patriarchy, the colonized from colonizer, the earth from nuclear devastation—until she tackled the ultimate liberation: that of God from man. Now, at 82, Aylon...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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 undertaken with his band Barbez—he joined the podcast in 2007 to discuss his album inspired by the work of Paul Celan—Bella Ciao draws on poetry and uses theramin, vibraphone, and more traditional instruments to produce an invigorating mix of sound and ideas. He joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to talk about how he...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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 overly broad generalizations to indict an entire country—but that criticism didn’t hurt the book’s reception; it was a phenomenal success in Germany and around the world. Nearly 20 years later, Goldhagen has broadened his scope in a new work. The Devil That Never Dies: The Rise and Threat of Global Antisemitism offers an in-depth look at anti-Semitism around the world. He argues...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.