Vox Tablet

Rodger Kamenetz’s Burnt Books, the latest volume in the Nextbook Press Jewish Encounters series, is a dual biography of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav and Franz Kafka, the great surrealist writer. Both men left instructions that their writings be destroyed after their deaths, nearly a century apart; both men’s wishes were ignored. In time, both men became icons: On Rosh Hashanah each year, thousands of Jews make a pilgrimage to Nachman’s grave in Ukraine; debate rages still over the fate of Kafka’s papers. Kamenetz sees Nachman and Kafka as kindred spirits, men whose works speak to one another about the challenges of maintaining tradition in the face of modernity. Kamenetz spoke to Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about the two men, about the relationship each had to the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, and about how Nachman’s fable about a turkey responds to Kafka’s tale of an insect. Running time: 17:57. Your browser does not support the audio element.

Growing up in Memphis, Clare Burson first heard about the Holocaust in school. Her grandparents were Jews from central and eastern Europe, but her mother warned her not to ask them questions about it. Burson heeded that warning until college, when a year spent in Germany prompted her to talk to her grandmother about her childhood in Leipzig, about her emigration in 1938, when she was 19, and about the fate of the parents—Clare’s great-grandparents—she left behind. Those conversations led to more travel, including a trip to Leipzig with her grandmother, and they inspired Silver and Ash, a new album that weaves fragments from her family history into deceptively simple, often haunting, indie-folk songs. Burson, who now lives in Brooklyn, invited Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to her apartment to talk about her research, her music (influenced equally by Vienna and Nashville), and the twists of fate that mark her family’s past. She also sings a song. Running time: 23:07. Your browser does not support the audio element.

In his new essay collection, Half Empty, author and actor David Rakoff dissects a variety of cultural phenomena—from the musical Rent, to the patient-therapist relationship—with insight, sharp wit, and deep wariness. His is a deeply pessimistic perspective, as he’s the first to acknowledge. But, as he argues explicitly in the first essay and implicitly elsewhere, pessimism is not the same as a bad attitude, and it may, in fact, be an effective survival strategy. On Vox Tablet this week, host Sara Ivry presents Rakoff, a Tablet Magazine contributing editor, with three scenarios generally deemed to be good fun and asks him to present his more cautious take on them. (Sound designer Jonathan Mitchell helped her in the project.) Rakoff also discusses the origins of his pessimism and how he copes with a life-threatening illness—while writing the book, he learned he had cancer and is now undergoing chemotherapy—without the armor of positive thinking. Your browser does not support the audio element.

The Jewish people and the Founding Fathers of the United States have at least one thing in common: the belief that they were chosen by God. But chosen for what, exactly? That is a question that has vexed Jews, Americans, and everyone else for ages. Tablet Magazine’s Liel Liebovitz and sociologist Todd Gitlin have come up with an answer, and, in their new book, The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election, they delve into the moral implications of being chosen, both in the American context and the Jewish one. They joined Sara Ivry on Vox Tablet to talk about the origins and tenacity of the idea of chosenness, how it affects contemporary politics, and how to make good on a concept that has not always served either people well. Your browser does not support the audio element.

More than two decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, the history of discrimination against Jews there and the reprisals against those who sought to leave are a distant memory for many—as is the Struggle for Soviet Jewry, the U.S. movement that formed in response. One way the movement raised awareness of Soviet Jewry was to encourage American Jewish teens to adopt a Soviet “twin” with which they shared their bar and bat mitzvah celebrations—as journalist Gal Beckerman did at his bar mitzvah in 1989. When he wondered recently what became of his twin, Maxim Yankelevich, Beckerman’s curiosity led him to write When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry, a comprehensive study of the movement. He joined Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to discuss the movement’s beginnings, some of the key refuseniks—including Natan Sharansky—whose plight galvanized American students, and the secret role Israel played in fomenting Western sympathies for those refuseniks. Your browser does not support the audio element.

A rabbi is challenged to boil down all of Judaism into a few sentences. He rises to the occasion, saying: What is hateful unto you, do not do unto your neighbor. This is the whole Torah, the rest is commentary. Now go and learn. Though uttered some 2,000 years ago by the great Talmudic rabbi, Hillel, that advice is still apt today. Its astuteness has so impressed Rabbi Joseph Telushkin over the years that Hillel has become one of Telushkin’s personal heroes. Now Telushkin has written a book about Hillel for Nextbook Press. It’s called Hillel: If Not Now, When? and Telushkin joins Sara Ivry on Vox Tablet to talk about the Talmudist’s approach to conversion; his chief rabbinical rival, Shammai; and about how Hillel would rather sit in the snow than risk missing a good Torah lesson. Your browser does not support the audio element.

In just a few days, 12 high-concept sukkahs, or “booths,” will crowd Manhattan’s Union Square. They are the finalists in an international architectural competition called “Sukkah City,” which was launched by the social entrepreneurs of Reboot five months ago in anticipation of the Sukkot holiday. While designs had to conform with both biblical law and New York City building codes, they don’t lack for originality. Reporter Eric Molinsky spoke with the creative minds behind the competition, as well as with judges and competition entrants, about this latest attempt to give Sukkot, and the sukkah, a shot in the arm. Your browser does not support the audio element.

Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is for many American Jews the one day each year they dedicate to thinking about their lives, their transgressions, and their futures. But some people think about their actions much more frequently, and writer Darin Strauss is among them. Much of what he’s thought about over the past 20 years is a fatal car accident during his last days in high school; Strauss was driving, and a classmate was killed. In a new memoir, Half a Life, Strauss writes about the crash and its aftermath. He joined Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to talk about how this tragedy has shaped his life, about guilt and doubt, and about his fears for his children. Your browser does not support the audio element.

Football season is upon us once again—it kicks off on Rosh Hashanah, with a game between the Super Bowl champion New Orleans Saints and the Minnesota Vikings, a team that boasts the only Jewish quarterback in the NFL, Sage Rosenfels. (His playing time has been eclipsed mightily by Brett Favre.) But Rosenfels isn’t the only Jew in professional football. Tablet Magazine’s Marc Tracy has been keeping tabs on his coreligionists on the gridiron. He spoke with The Atlantic Wire‘s Ray Gustini, a similarly avid fan who formerly wrote for the National Football Post, about which teams are friendly to the Jews—and which could end up as Tablet Magazine’s favorite squad. Your browser does not support the audio element.

In the early 20th century, a group of Jewish composers including Joel Engel in Moscow and Mikhail Gnesin in St. Petersburg sought to find, record, and preserve the music of the shtetls in the Pale of Settlement. They then used that music as inspiration for their own high art compositions, hoping to create a Jewish national music that would be celebrated across Russia and Europe. In The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire, James Loeffler, a professor of Jewish history at the University of Virginia, tells the story of these musicians and their legacy. (Adam Kirsch’s reviewed The Most Musical Nation here.) Loeffler spoke to Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about what he discovered while writing this new book. Your browser does not support the audio element.

David Preiss Skipp Porteous has been a minister, a First Amendment activist, a convert to Judaism, and a mole hired by the FBI to infiltrate neo-Nazi groups. But it’s his work over the past few years as a private investigator that led him to the famously unsolved case of a man known only by the alias “D.B. Cooper,” who hijacked an airplane in 1971 and left it, midair, via the aft stairway with parachutes and $200,000 ransom, never to be seen or heard from again. As Porteous recounts in his new book Into the Blast: The True Story of D.B. Cooper, he was contacted nearly four decades after the Cooper incident by a man who had come to believe that his brother was the hijacker. After a two-year investigation, Porteous is inclined to agree. Reporter Jon Kalish spoke to this unusual private eye. Your browser does not support the audio element.

Fresh out of college, Rachel Shukert, who majored in acting, landed a job with a theater company bound for Central Europe. In her new memoir, Everything Is Going to Be Great, she recounts the pleasures and humiliations of her time abroad, unabashedly exposing her own prejudices and the prejudices of others. For this week’s Vox Tablet, she reads an excerpt that chronicles the denouement of an ill-fated romance. The man in question is Berthold—Viennese, twice her age, and both overprotective and dismissive when it comes to Shukert’s self-identification as a Jew. (“No, no,” he assures her, “you are beautiful.”) Their differences come to a head during a wander through Vienna’s best-known flea market, which contains some chilling artifacts from the city’s past. Your browser does not support the audio element.

This week, Vox Tablet invites listeners to consider some unconventional summer reading. Gary Shteyngart and Joshua Cohen have both come out with new novels that paint a very dark picture of the future. In Super Sad True Love Story, Shteyngart envisions a not-so-distant world in which the United States is a crumbling, militarized empire, public and private life are indistinguishable and projected for all to see through social networking technologies, and the reading of books is a lost art. In Cohen’s novel Witz, a mysterious plague has claimed the lives of all but one of the world’s Jews, and that last Jew, Benjamin Israelien, is subject to the passions of a public that is equal parts philo- and anti-Semitic. The novelists take their dystopian visions in radically different directions—Shteyngart has written a fast-moving love story, while Cohen’s is more stream-of-Jewish-consciousness, dense with wordplay and religious and cultural references. Tablet Magazine Editor-in-Chief Alana Newhouse sat down with the two of them for a sometimes bookish, other times bawdy, conversation over drinks and smoked fish, on a sweltering summer day on the boardwalk of Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach. Your browser does not support the audio element.

Israel may be a small country, but when it comes to classical music, it’s a powerhouse. From his position on the board of New York’s Mannes School of Music, David P. Goldman has had the chance to witness Israeli prominence in the field firsthand. In an effort to get a better handle on the phenomenon, Goldman, a political commentator and music theorist, recently traveled to Israel to investigate the secret to Israel’s classical music success. He wrote an essay for Tablet Magazine based on his trip, and he also played some pieces for Tablet’s Gabriel Sanders while discussing how Russian immigrants have changed the study of music in Israel and how interpreting a piece of music is akin to the study of Talmud. READ GOLDMAN’S ESSAY HERE. Your browser does not support the audio element.

The Bowls Project is an unusual sound and architectural installation now on display at the Yerba Buena Center for Arts in San Francisco. A combination of a song cycle, a double-vaulted masonry dome, strangers’ secrets, and inscriptions found in Babylonian Jewish amulets known as “demon bowls,” the Bowls Project is the creation of the composer and performer Jewlia Eisenberg, together with her band, Charming Hostess, and a gang of volunteer architects, masons, and engineers. Tablet Magazine contributor Hadara Graubart spoke to Eisenberg about the project shortly before its opening on July 6. It runs through August 22, and it includes an opportunity to shed some demons of your own. (If you’re abstaining from music during the Three Weeks that precede Tisha B’Av, you’ll want to wait until July 21 to listen.) Your browser does not support the audio element.