Vox Tablet

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, a then 21-year-old mild-mannered intern working at the Amsterdam City Archives. Back in 2011, she happened upon letters, written by Jews who had been in concentration camps, or in hiding during the Occupation, and asking that the fees please be dropped, given the circumstances of their non-payment. Amsterdam-based reporter Jonathan Groubert wanted to meet her, to ask how she made the discovery, and what led her to go public with it. He also investigates how the city, and Amsterdam’s Jewish community, are handling the revelations.

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 economists—Maristella Botticini of Bocconi University in Milan, and Zvi Eckstein of the School of Economics at ICD Herzliya in Israel, set out to answer in their recent book, The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70-1492. What they found is surprising. The common explanations used to understand why Jews were moneylenders—that they were forbidden from owning land throughout the Muslim World and in Europe—do not hold up. Using an economics lens, Botticini and Eckstein rethink why, then, Jews landed in the professions they did as far back as the Middle Ages. From her office in Milan, Maristella Botticini joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to discuss how the fall of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 C.E. led to greater literacy among Jews, what happened to Jews who could not afford to educate their sons as per rabbinical decree, and what they will cast their gimlet eyes on next—namely, why Jews were not inventors in the Industrial Revolution.

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 Tablet host Sara Ivry to discuss the liberal Jewish European milieu in which Jabotinsky grew up, his literary talents and polarizing political style, and who Jabotinksy’s successor would be in Israel’s current political climate.

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 and classical Ethiopian pop. They are now touring the United States to celebrate the release of their new album, Anbessa Dub. Independent producer Ann Heppermann recently met up with Yalo and Yaacov Lilay, another member of the band, and sent us this dispatch. *** Like this article? Sign up for our Daily Digest to get Tablet Magazine’s new content in your inbox each morning.

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 she’s got her sleeves up and is elbow deep, once or twice a year, in soaking tamarind. That’s what producer Emma Morgenstern did earlier this spring to find out how to make ou’, the tamarind concentrate that defines so much of Syrian Jewish cooking. Click here for one of Dweck’s ou’-dependent recipes.

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 Lives series. Nevertheless, he decided to have a go at it. A psychoanalyst, the editor of the Penguin Modern Classic translations of Freud published in 2006, and an accomplished writer, Phillips took on the task of exploring Freud’s early years in Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst. Phillips joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to discuss Freud’s strong identification with Jewishness even as he rejected religion, his perilous and revealing indifference to the politics of his day, and what Freud’s teachings have to offer us today.

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 about truth, fiction, and suffering. Those matters are at the heart of A Replacement Life, the debut novel from émigré writer Boris Fishman. Fishman joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to discuss if and how his protagonist can shed his Soviet habits and affiliations and become American, what attracts Fishman to his grandparents’ generation, and why Bernard Malamud is a literary hero.

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 vantage point of U.S. shores, Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry speaks with two young European Jewish leaders. Andi Gergely grew up in Hungary and is the chairperson of the World Union of Jewish Students. Though now based in Israel, Gergely travels to Europe frequently and has family there still. Jane Braden-Golay, raised in Switzerland and now based in Brussels, is the president of the European Union of Jewish Students. Gergely and Braden-Golay discuss the reaction among Jewish student leaders in Europe to recent events there, their own Jewish upbringings in Switzerland and Hungary, and how statistics about violence and elections fail to tell the whole—much more uplifting—story about being Jewish in Europe today. *** To read a transcript of the conversation, click here

Jewish-American family lore is full of stories about how a great uncle or grandmother passed through Ellis Island when they came to the United States from Riga or Salonika or any other number of places in Europe. What we don’t typically hear about are Jews who entered the United States illegally, sneaking over the border in El Paso or being smuggled in along with a shipment of booze during Prohibition. The term “illegal alien” isn’t one usually uttered by Jews in conjunction with Jews. Yet in her new book After They Closed the Gates: Jewish Illegal Immigration to the United States 1921-1965, historian Libby Garland demonstrates that in the early part of the 1900s, when immigration quotas were imposed to keep out undesirable populations, many Jews defied the law in search of safe haven and opportunity. Some succeeded in their efforts. Others were arrested and deported. Garland joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to talk about why quota laws were imposed, what Jewish communal leaders in the United States did to respond to these restrictions, and how the battle over immigration from 100 years ago presages the battle over immigration today.

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 of a somewhat petulant, loner dentist the book takes on existential dread, what it means to be a Jew, and Red Sox fandom in a mix of the absurd, the droll, and the profound. Ferris joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to discuss what compels him about belonging to a faith community, what kind of research—biblical and medical—he had to undertake to write his novel, and why he envies the Jews.

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, join Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to talk about the band’s surprising Mexican fan-base, how painful it is to sing the song “Odessa” now that Ukraine is in the throes of Russian occupation, and their ambivalence (now overcome) about singing about religious topics when the band members themselves are not particularly devout.

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 it left him confused and determined to dig deeper into his family’s past and into Konin, the town they left behind. Here he shares his story. Groubert is a radio host and producer based in the Netherlands. A version of this story first aired on his podcast, “The State We’re In,” which is a co-production with WBEZ Chicago.

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 residency in internal medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. By the following year, he had helped open the 1917 Clinic, a comprehensive AIDS treatment and research center at UAB. In a new memoir called Positive: One Doctor’s Personal Encounters With Death, Life, and the U.S. Healthcare System, Saag looks back on those years—the successes, failures, and remarkable people he met along the way. He also offers a scathing critique of the U.S. healthcare system, which he sees as posing an equal or greater challenge than HIV did for those concerned with taking care of the most vulnerable people in our society. On today’s podcast, he talks with Tablet Magazine Editor Wayne Hoffman about his experiences, the lessons he learned, and the Jewish values he brought to the work.

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 Hallelujah: Rock and Roll, Redemption, and the Life of Leonard Cohen. It comes out this week, after four years of Leonard Cohen immersion, which led Leibovitz to many insights—including this one on why it took Cohen so long to reach a wide audience, and why it took the audience so long to embrace him.

“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 were written in the late 19th and early 20th century to help teach people not just how to read and write, but also how to conduct themselves in all aspects of a modernizing world. These letters were written in different languages and targeted at different populations, Jewish and non-Jewish, across Europe. The specifically Yiddish sample letters that were collected in manuals, called brivnshteler, not only taught Jews across the Pale of Settlement literacy and acculturation, they also served as entertainment for their readers. In Dear Mendl, Dear Reyzl: Yiddish Letter Manuals From Russia and America, Alice Nakhimovsky, a professor of Russian and Jewish Studies at Colgate University, and Roberta Newman, the director of digital initiatives at YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, explore what these brivnshteler tell us about the world their readers would have lived in. Nakhimovsky and Newman join Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to discuss how Yiddish letter manuals differed from letter manuals targeting non-Jewish audiences and why the letters so rarely grapple with political matters, and point out what strikes them in particular about a few stand-out samples, read for us quite memorably by Wayne Hoffman, Gabriel Sanders, and Amelia Kahaney.