Vox Tablet

Two years ago, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, which is devoted to the study and preservation of Ashkenazic culture, published the trailblazing Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. A remarkable resource, it offers some 1,800 entries on everything from general topics like art to key figures like Ludwik Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto. Earlier this month, YIVO launched an online version, which not only offers free access to scholars and students the world over, but also provides supplemental material like audio and video recordings that the print edition couldn’t. To discuss the project, and the new possibilities offered by its digital version, Tablet Magazine’s Gabriel Sanders had a chat with the encyclopedia’s editor in chief, McGill University historian Gershon Hundert. Your browser does not support the audio element.

The six-person band Yiddish Princess takes the sounds of ’80s rock—from the ethereal vocalizations of Kate Bush to the pounding drums and guitar riffs of Bon Jovi—and marries them with Yiddish songs. Some of the songs are Yiddish poems; some are original works by Sarah Gordon, the band’s lead singer. Gordon comes to the Yiddish repertoire honestly; her mother is Adrienne Cooper, who’s been described as “the premier female Yiddish vocalist and interpreter of Yiddish song.” Other band members are similarly fluent in Yiddish musical traditions. Michael Winograd, the band’s keyboard player, is well known as a clarinetist who has played with Frank London, the Klezmatics, and Socalled. Yoshie Fruchter, the band’s guitarist, also plays with Pitom, which has recorded an album on John Zorn’s Tzadik Records. Vox Tablet’s Sara Ivry joins Gordon, Winograd, and Fruchter in Winograd’s bedroom-turned-studio to talk about their debut eponymous EP, out this week, and to play a little music on the fly. Your browser does not support the audio element.

Alan Furst’s bestselling spy novels depict the secret allegiances and betrayals that animated interwar and wartime Europe, but what distinguishes his work from others who’ve toiled in the genre is the attention he pays to the flavor of everyday life. Amid the forged documents and concealed identities, he still manages to conjure things like the meal a well-to-do couple traveling through the Belgian countryside might have eaten in1941: radishes, salted beef tongue, “some kind of white, waxy cheese,” dried winter apples, and a loaf of bread. In Furst’s latest, Spies of the Balkans, he introduces us to Constantine “Costa” Zannis, a high-level Salonika detective who, somewhat inadvertently, becomes one link in a chain of operatives shepherding Jews out of Germany. Vox Tablet’s Sara Ivry speaks to Furst, in his home in Sag Harbor, Long Island, about how, in 1986, a Django Reinhardt cassette led him to the time and place he’s written about ever since; about his upbringing on Manhattan’s Upper West Side; and about his attraction to unattached, intellectual heroes. Your browser does not support the audio element.

“Thou shalt not make graven images.” Thus reads the second commandment, which has been widely interpreted by Jews to mean that they are forbidden from depicting the human body. Yet, according to art historian Eliane Strosberg, during the 20th century Jewish artists in Europe and the United States defied that prohibition and almost exclusively painted and sculpted likenesses of themselves and of people they knew. They did so even while non-Jewish peers were jumping into Cubism, Expressionism, Fauvism, and other avant-garde genres. In a new book, The Human Figure and Jewish Culture, Strosberg explores the reasons why these Jewish artists set themselves apart. Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry speaks with Strosberg about Chaim Soutine, Amedeo Modigliani, Lucien Freud, and others, about renderings of the body in ancient Jewish art, and about the mother as muse. Your browser does not support the audio element.

In 2007, Ian Buruma profiled Tariq Ramadan, the high-profile European Muslim professor who’d been denied an entry visa to the United States the prior year, in The New York Times Magazine. Though some see Ramadan as a moderate voice in an increasingly radicalized European Islamic community, others see him as dangerous. Buruma offered a noncommittal assessment, and that seeming insouciance infuriated the writer Paul Berman, who has been examining the liberal response to terrorism and the growth of political Islam for the past decade. In his new book, The Flight of the Intellectuals, he takes Buruma and other writers to task for insufficiently challenging Ramadan and, by failing to do so, becoming apologists for Muslim fundamentalists. (The Flight of the Intellectuals is reviewed in Tablet Magazine today by Christopher Hitchens.) Berman spoke to Vox Tablet’s Sara Ivry about Ramadan’s family ties (his grandfather founded the Muslim Brotherhood), about the link between Islamism and fascism, and about whether the camps for and against Ramadan parallel the camps that either embrace Israel, flaws notwithstanding, or take every opportunity to criticize it. Your browser does not support the audio element.

The holiday of Shavuot marks the giving of the law at Mount Sinai. To celebrate, people stay up all night studying. They also eat dairy foods—milk, blintzes, and cheesecake—although there seems to be little agreement as to why. Fred Schuster opened S&S Cheesecake in 1960; he now has help from his son-in-law, Yair Ben-Zaken. Together, they supply steakhouses and gourmet shops around the country—Dean & Deluca, Morton’s, Smith & Wollensky. Reporter Blake Eskin decided to make a pilgrimage, by subway, to their windowless one-story brick bakery at 238th Street in the Bronx, home to what many consider to be the best cheesecake in the country. Here’s his audio postcard, from our archive. Your browser does not support the audio element.

In May 1967, at the annual Israel Music Festival in Jerusalem, a song was born. Singing to a live and radio audience of millions, Shuli Natan debuted “Yerushalayim Shel Zahav,” or “Jerusalem of Gold.” With elegiac music and patriotic lyrics by Naomi Shemer (with a sentence or two borrowed from Yehuda Halevi), it immediately won the hearts of many in the audience; three weeks later, after the Six-Day War and the unification of Jerusalem under Israeli rule, the song gained the status of a near-national anthem. On Jerusalem Day, celebrated this year on May 12, it’s inescapable. But the song has its detractors, and it comes with some surprising historical baggage. Tablet Magazine’s Liel Leibovitz tells the story. Your browser does not support the audio element.

Growing up, Mark Oppenheimer was always itching for a fight. He didn’t want the kind involving jabs and hooks—rhetorical skill and quick wit were his weapons—but, even so, neither his peers nor the hands-on-activity-loving teachers at his progressive elementary schools shared his inclinations. Salvation came in middle school, when he discovered the world of competitive debate. There, verbal agility was rewarded, as Oppenheimer, a Tablet Magazine contributing editor, recounts in his new memoir, Wisenheimer: A Childhood Subject to Debate. He discussed how debate skills do and don’t contribute to journalistic endeavors, and what this all has to do with being Jewish, and his third-grade nemesis—a teacher named Lisa—with Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry. Your browser does not support the audio element.

Eitan “Croc” Einoch is a thirtysomething, not terribly introspective Tel Aviv resident who suddenly finds himself lauded as a national hero after narrowly surviving three terrorist attacks within several days. Fahmi Sabih is a pensive twentysomething Palestinian in the West Bank who belongs to the terrorist cell responsible for the attacks. The two characters alternate as narrators in Assaf Gavron’s new darkly comic novel, Almost Dead, his first book translated into English. Writing with humor and empathy, Gavron examines the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the lens of these ordinary lives. He spoke with Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about the Israeli response to Almost Dead, anxious commutes during the Second Intifada, and the pleasures and pains of translating Philip Roth, J. D. Salinger, and his own work. Gavron will be participating in the PEN World Voices Festival, and in book readings across the country, this month and next. Your browser does not support the audio element.

Yann Martel’s 2001 novel Life of Pi chronicled a young Indian man’s 227 days adrift at sea with a Bengal tiger. Part fable, part exploration of religion, ritual, and story-telling, it was a tremendous international success and earned Martel the prestigious Man Booker Prize. With his new novel, Beatrice and Virgil, Martel once again uses animals to tell his story. Ostensibly, the novel is about an acclaimed novelist who’s lost his calling and an aloof taxidermist who comes to him for literary advice. Within the novel is a play about a persecuted donkey, named Beatrice, and monkey, Virgil, whose circumstances come to look frighteningly similar to those of Europe’s Jews during the Holocaust. Both the novel and the play within the novel probe the difficulty of representing historical events that are all but unimaginable. Martel spoke by phone with Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry from a hotel in London, where he was on book tour, about the strengths and weaknesses of Holocaust literature as we know it, about the mixed messages of taxidermy, and about our over-identification with animals and under-identification with our own species. Your browser does not support the audio element.

With his graphic-novel trilogy James Sturm’s America, comic-book artist James Sturm gained a devoted following for his skillful storytelling, sharp eye, and deft hand. The books examined 18th- and 19th-century America through the lens of religious revivalists, desperate gold miners, and a scrappy team of Jewish (and presumed to be Jewish) baseball players. Now, in Market Day, Sturm imagines Jewish life in industrializing Europe, following 24 hours in the life of Mendelman, a highly skilled rug maker who confronts economic changes that might destroy his livelihood—and with it, the pleasure he takes in seeing the world through his craft. Influenced by Art Spiegelman and R. Crumb, among others, Sturm is not only a cartoonist but also the director and co-founder of the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vermont. He spoke to Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about his introduction to shtetl life, his grim (or, he argues, not so grim) choice of subject matter, and his Center’s spiritual founder, Inky Solomon. Your browser does not support the audio element.

Tablet’s Gabriel Sanders decided it was time to teach his 21-month-old son the seder’s Four Questions, but, in looking back over the text, he found he has some questions of his own—about the seder’s structure, about similarities between the Mah Nishtanah and other children’s songs, and about just what it means to teach a child questions before he’s developed the power to ask. Your browser does not support the audio element.

Judith Shulevitz grew up in a house divided; mom observed Shabbat, and dad did not. She’s not the only one. What for some is a meaningful respite from the daily grind is, for others, an antiquated and oppressive ordeal. Indeed, the Sabbath has always raised questions and posed challenges for those who observe it, Jews and Christians alike. In her new book, The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time, Shulevitz, a journalist and cultural critic who has been a columnist for the New York Times and Slate and is a contributing editor to Tablet Magazine, explores how the Sabbath has been understood over the course of millennia and how Sabbath observance affects social and familial relations, ethics, civic life, and individual well-being. Vox Tablet spoke with Shulevitz at her home in Manhattan about how the Sabbath has influenced her, her children, Jesus and his disciples, and Supreme Court justices, among others. Your browser does not support the audio element.

The Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement is known for its outreach among non-Orthodox Jews, encouraging them to become more religious. Chabadniks are posted to about 75 countries, where their efforts are generally met with curiosity, indifference, or, at worst, irritation. But in Ramat Aviv, an upscale, liberal, and famously secular neighborhood of Tel Aviv, the sect’s arrival has prompted a much stronger reaction: fury. Chabad’s presence in Ramat Aviv is growing, and secular residents—who in the fall formed a residents association to oppose the Chabad incursion—are convinced that the Hasidim are trying to brainwash their children and take over the neighborhood. Now, every Friday, the two camps face off outside schools and in other public spaces, where Chabad representatives approach passersby, mostly kids, and invite them to wrap tefillin and pray. The battle has caught the attention of the Israeli press, even prompting an angry column, accusing the secular residents of anti-Semitism, from one of the country’s best-known columnists, Gideon Levy. Tablet contributor Daniel Estrin filed a report on the growing conflict in Ramat Aviv. Your browser does not support the audio element.

Illustration by Paul Rogers Novelist Steve Stern wasn’t raised in a traditional Jewish home—indeed, he says, his childhood in Memphis was virtually devoid of “heritage.” But he has made up for that as an adult, delving deeply into Jewish history, fiction, liturgy, and mysticism in his work. All of that comes into play in The Frozen Rabbi, his ninth work of fiction, which Tablet Magazine begins serializing today. The story begins in the basement of one Bernie Karp, a pimply and spiritually bereft teen who, intent on pleasuring himself in the liver-aided manner of Alexander Portnoy, gets distracted when he discovers at the back of the meat freezer a 19th-century rabbi from the Pale of Settlement. From there, we are transported between the past and the present, along the way encountering shtetl kabbalists, Lodz peddlers, Lower East Side gangsters, New Age hucksters, and more. Stern spoke to Vox Tablet about Charles Dickens and Isaac Bashevis Singer, libel suits, and how he came to write this comic-tragic tale of modern European Jewry. The Frozen Rabbi will be published in May. Your browser does not support the audio element.