Vox Tablet

Growing up, Lynn Jordan never knew that her father was a Holocaust survivor. She only knew, subconsciously, that he seemed fragile and that he needed her to live life for the two of them, because he had somehow missed out on most of life’s pleasures. There were other problems, too—her mother’s self-destructive habits, her parents’ frequent fights. It wasn’t until Lynn had been begging her parents for years to get help that she discovered her father’s past. At that point, she was faced with a painful question: Given what he’d been through, should she go on living for him? Or could she make a break and start living for herself? It would take an encounter with a stranger whose parents were survivors of a different kind for Lynn to resolve that question once and for all. Mark Betancourt brings us their story.

Although he won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1978, Menachem Begin had a reputation for violence that chased him his whole life. During the Holocaust he fled Europe (where he had been a leader in the radical Zionist group Betar) for Palestine, where he became a leader in the Jewish underground militia known as Etzel and was implicated in deadly events in the fight to help establish the state of Israel. Begin was reviled by the country’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, but did not let the contempt he endured from Labor Party rivals run him out of politics. Instead he embraced his role as an opposition leader committed to Jewish peoplehood and, after eight tries, finally became prime minister himself. In Menachem Begin: The Battle for Israel’s Soul, the newest title in the Jewish Encounters series from Nextbook Press and Schocken, Daniel Gordis investigates the choices Begin made throughout his life. Gordis joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to discuss Begin’s complicated legacy.

Dudu Tassa is a major figure in the Israeli rock scene. The singer-songwriter and guitarist released his first album when he was just 13, produces music for television and film, and has collaborated with international heavy weights like Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead. Since he was a kid, Tassa has had a vague idea that his late grandfather was an important musician in his native Iraq, but it was only recently that he came to understand just how important: Tassa’s grandfather and great-uncle, Daoud and Saleh Al Kuwaiti, are considered by some critics to be the founders of modern Iraqi music. Their legacy was nearly forgotten when Tassa dug up old recordings of his grandfather’s music and set them to a modern groove. The result, the album Dudu Tassa and the Kuwaitis, came out in 2011. Now, for the first time, he’s bringing this music to the United States, starting with a performance at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City this Wednesday, at SXSW in Austin, Texas, this weekend, and in San Francisco next week. Reporter Daniel Estrin met up with Dudu Tassa last week at his apartment in Tel Aviv to find out more about this unusual roots and rock project.

Editor’s note: Fyvush Finkel died on August 14, 2016, at the age of 93. This interview was recorded in 2010. Fyvush Finkel, 91 years old and still cracking wise, will take to the stage this month in a pair of Purim cabaret performances. Vox Tablet caught up with the legendary actor a few years ago, on the occasion of a different show. To celebrate his impressive vigor, good humor, and all-around affability, we revisit that conversation. Finkel made his stage debut more than eight decades ago, when he was 9 years old, singing “O Promise Me” at a theater in Brooklyn. Soon after, he crossed the East River to take roles in the famous Yiddish theaters of Second Ave. From there, he made his way onto Broadway and then into films by the likes of Sidney Lumet, Oliver Stone, and the Coen brothers. Finkel also had recurring roles on Picket Fences, for which he won an Emmy, and Boston Public. In this podcast from 2010, Finkel regales Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry with stories about the early days of Yiddish theater, his expedited entry into serial television, and the mesmerizing maggid of his neighborhood shul. And he sings for her, too.

The myth that Jews murder Christian children and use their blood to make matzo, a legend known as the blood libel, used to rear its ugly head with frightening frequency. Arguably the most famous instance of this accusation took place in 1913, with the trial of Mendel Beilis. Beilis, a barely observant Jew, worked in a brick factory in the slums of Kiev. In 1911, he was accused of murdering Andrei Yushchinsky, a poor, 13-year-old boy. From the outset, “ritual murder” served as an excuse to accuse a Jew, despite ample evidence that the crime was the work of a local gang—not Jewish. In A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel, writer and TV producer Edmund Levin digs up a wealth of archival material to introduce us to the heroes, villains, and ordinary villagers who either bolstered this preposterous allegation or helped quash it. Levin joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to discuss how Mendel Beilis came to be implicated in this murder, why Tsar Nicholas II was so invested in the trial, and what can be learned about present-day Russia from the Russia of 100 years ago.

As this endless winter drags on, making life miserable for those unfortunates living in the Midwest and Northeast, the wise among us have made the well-worn pilgrimage to South Florida. The tradition dates back to just after WWII, when Jews from cities like Baltimore, Philadelphia, and especially New York began flocking to Miami Beach for the winter. And in Miami Beach, they wanted delis just like the ones they ate in back home. In fact, the postwar years were a golden age for the Jewish deli in Miami Beach, from Raphil’s to Wolfie Cohen’s Rascal House and Pumperniks. Times change, though, and the popularity of delis has faded around the country. In South Florida, there are other changes, too. The Jewish population has shifted, geographically and culturally. Trina Sargalski talks to food historian Ted Merwin about the rise and fall of Miami delicatessens of yesteryear, and to Josh Marcus, owner and chef of Josh’s Deli, about how he’s reinventing the genre with a local twist.

In the past several decades, it has become increasingly common to find religious women who are doctors, professors, scientists, and rabbis. Yet while they’ve gained acceptance as professionals in their community, their children often get very different messages in Jewish day schools about acceptable and unacceptable gender roles. There, rigorous training in Jewish thought, or math and science, for that matter, may be offered to boys only, while girls may find that more attention is paid to the length of their sleeves, and skirts, than to their questions about Rashi. Differential treatment of boys and girls is not unique to Jewish day schools. But for those invested in giving their kids a religious education, it should be cause for great concern. So argues Elana Sztokman in Educating in the Divine Image: Gender Issues in Orthodox Jewish Day Schools, co-written with Chaya Rosenfeld Gorsetman and the recent winner of a National Jewish Book Council Award. Sztokman speaks with Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about how schools can squash girls’ spiritual desires, what Jewish modesty rules erroneously teach kids about sexual desire (men have it; girls don’t), and why changes in the Orthodox world offer hope for gender parity. For a full transcript of Vox Tablet’s interview with Elana Sztokman, click here.

Until roughly the end of the 19th century, a shtetl was just a shtetl—that is, a town as designated in Yiddish, and nobody paid them any particular attention. Then interest in shtetls as places where Eastern Europe Jews lived picked up. Assimilated Western European Jews embarked on heritage tours to survey their exotic brethren in the east, academic interest in folk-life grew, and representations of shtetl life began appearing with more frequency in literature. After that came the Holocaust, which dealt life in the shtetl a final blow. Yet in a sense the shtetl did not die at that point. In fact, it—or the idea of it—has thrived in the decades since the end of WWII as artists, filmmakers, and writers have depicted shtetls—and what they imagine them to be—in their work. In his new book Shtetl: A Vernacular Intellectual History, Rutgers University Jewish Studies Professor Jeffrey Shandler, who has a particular interest in Yiddish culture, examines how the original meaning of shtetl has morphed and acquired so much cultural baggage over the past century. He joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to discuss early instances of shtetl fetishization, examine why misperceptions about what shtetls were like persist, and tell us about a Plimoth Plantation-like project that would have modern tourists become shtetl re-enactors.

David Krakauer is best-known and loved for his rocking klezmer clarinet, though he has long worked in other genres too, including jazz, classical, and funk. With his newest project, called The Big Picture, he even crosses media. In The Big Picture Krakauer takes memorable songs from films with some Jewish connection—like “Tradition” from Fiddler on the Roof, “Body and Soul” from Radio Days—and, with the help of five other talented musicians, makes them his own. The project has an additional element: A visual-effects team called Light of Day has made a series of short films to accompany Krakauer’s invigorating renditions. The animated films and songs will be presented together in a series of live concerts at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan throughout February. David Krakauer joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to talk about how this unique and lush project came about and how it embodies his own coming-of-age as a musician and as a Jew.

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 persists. Maidhof joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to discuss how Israelis inside Israel view settlers, how the American dream is responsible for settlement growth, and how her experiences living on the settlement compare to where she lives now: in the heart of Ramallah.

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 Holocaust in the decades since its conclusion, moving from denial to contrition to defensiveness and a desire, finally, to be done talking about the Holocaust once and for all. Mounk joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to discuss how those arcs affected his interpersonal relationships, as well as Germany’s own self-interests—from its engagement with the European Union to its treatment of immigrants from Turkey and elsewhere. Plus: Read Adam Kirsch’s review of Stranger in My Own Country.

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 1,000 children, parents, and educators to support her argument in The Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age, which was named one of the top 10 nonfiction titles of 2013 by the Wall Street Journal. As a new year gets under way, and with it the impulse to take stock of our lives, we ask Steiner-Adair to share some insights with Vox Tablet about what parents miss out on when they are constantly checking their phones; why letting kids fend for themselves in the digital world is a recipe for failure; and what guidance Judaism can offer as the digital universe grows vaster still.

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 attention after she shared it at a live story-telling event for The Moth.

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 of Arizona, did meet Jews growing up in Morocco—that is, once he moved from his small village in the Anti-Atlas mountains to the city of Marrakesh for school. He went back to his birth country to find out what Moroccans—four generations of them—think of their former neighbors and acquaintances, particularly in light of current tensions between Arabs and Jews in the Middle East. The result of his investigation is Memories of Absence: How Muslims Remember Jews in Morocco. Boum joins Vox Tablet’s Sara Ivry to discuss how he became interested in Moroccan perceptions of Jews, how myths about blood libel and world domination distort the thinking of the country’s youth, and what can be gained by trying to understand the truth.

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 statements and other documents detailing trades that never happened—is currently under way. This week, Frank DiPascali, Madoff’s former finance chief, testified that the staff was well aware of the fraud, that indeed no one so close to the scheme could possibly have missed it. Defense attorneys for the workers—Annette Bongiorno, Daniel Bonventre, JoAnn Crupi, Jerome O’Hara, and George Perez—say DiPascali, who has already pleaded guilty to a raft of fraud charges, is squealing in hopes of a lighter sentence. But some of the other people who made Madoff’s crime possible—his biggest investors and boosters—continue on. J. Ezra Merkin, who ran one of the largest feeder funds for Madoff’s investment operation and who brought in contributions from Jewish institutions ranging from the Fifth Avenue Synagogue to Yeshiva University and the Ramaz School, faces continued litigation despite agreeing last year to pay more than $400 million to settle a suit by the New York attorney general. Of all the feeders, Jeffry Picower was the biggest. An accountant and investor who became a billionaire many times over by funneling funds to Madoff, Picower had, not long before his death, been listed No. 371 on the Forbes list of the wealthiest Americans. On Oct. 25, 2009, nearly a year after Madoff’s arrest, Barbara Picower and her housekeeper fished Jeffry’s lifeless body out of his Palm Beach swimming pool; the local coroner ruled that he suffered a massive heart attack and drowned. His widow was left to face authorities. In 2011, Barbara Picower agreed to pay $7.2 billion in a settlement with Irving Picard, the trustee overseeing the bankruptcy of Bernard L. Madoff Securities. By settling with Picard, she bought immunity from a host of individual lawsuits by victims who had invested with her husband. Indeed, some of those victims, notably Adele Fox, fought a hard but unsuccessful battle in federal court to have Picard’s settlement with Picower overturned so they could pursue their claims individually. Picower’s widow has continued to carve out a life as a philanthropist, making grants in healthcare research, poverty alleviation, and environmental study. Other top Madoff feeders died before ever having to defend their actions. Stanley Chais, who the SEC says funneled more than $1 billion to Madoff without disclosing that fact to any of his clients, succumbed to a blood disease in 2010. Chais’ Beverly Hills phone number was at the top of Madoffs speed-dial list in his Lipstick Building office, yet before he died his only response was to blame the government for not catching Madoff sooner. Picard continues to pursue those at major institutions who also turned a blind eye to Madoff’s methods. He was recently given a green light by a federal judge, Jed Rakoff, to pursue $8 billion in claims through cases against a host of financial institutions with units said to have acted as feeder funds to Madoff, including Bank of America, [...]