Vox Tablet

About a decade ago, novelist Emily Raboteau went to Jerusalem to visit a childhood friend who’d made aliyah. The trip provoked yearnings in Raboteau, the biracial daughter of an African-American father and white mother, for a place where she could feel at home, a Zion of her own. Six years later, that yearning led her to embark on a long journey to learn more about those who leave everything behind in search of a better life in a place they feel they belong. Following in the footsteps of others in the African diaspora, she traveled back to Israel to talk to Ethiopian Jews and African Hebrew Israelites; to Jamaica and Ethiopia to meet with Rastafarians; and to Ghana, home to expats from the United States and elsewhere who wanted to return to the place from which their ancestors were forcibly deported as slaves. As she chronicles in her new book, Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora, Raboteau learned how difficult and disappointing the pursuit of Zion can be and came to recognize Zion less as a geographical destination and more as a place of inner strength and well being. In this episode of Vox Tablet, she speaks with Julie Subrin about these and other discoveries. [Running time:23:28.] Your browser does not support the audio element.

Lily Brett didn’t care much for rock ’n’ roll, but her job was with a rock magazine, so, reluctantly, she hung out with Mick Jagger. And Jimi Hendrix. And the Who and Cat Stevens and Jim Morrison and just about any great rock star you can think of. It was the ’60s, before musicians had publicists and armies of assistants, so Brett could ask them just about anything she wanted. She did, which often meant she would ask the rock stars about their parents or tell them about hers, two Holocaust survivors who had given birth to their only daughter in a German DP camp. The result was powerful journalism that helped cement Brett’s reputation as one of her profession’s brightest stars. She’s also an acclaimed novelist: Earlier this year, her latest work of fiction, Lola Bensky, was released in her native Australia. It’s about a young woman, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, who becomes a rock journalist and travels to England and America and meets some of rock ’n’ roll’s most legendary performers and has the kinds of conversations you’d never expect with the sort of men you’d never think were capable of talking about much more then themselves. Tablet Magazine’s Liel Leibovitz spoke with Lily Brett about fame, fear, and rock ’n’ roll. [Running time: 31:00.] Your browser does not support the audio element.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews have sex through a hole in the sheet—right? Actually, that’s one of many misconceptions outsiders have about sexual relations within the Haredi community. That said, it is true that the high value strictly religious Jews place on modesty can prevent essential information about sex and sexuality from reaching people who need it: soon-to-be newlyweds; those who are sexually inexperienced, yet questioning their sexuality; couples who are struggling with sexual dysfunction or incompatibility. That’s where David Ribner comes in. Ribner is an Orthodox sex therapist in Jerusalem and co-author, with Jennie Rosenfeld, of The Newlywed’s Guide to Physical Intimacy, the first sexually explicit manual written for strictly religious Jews. On today’s Vox Tablet, guest host Daniel Estrin talks with Ribner about the questions and concerns his clients bring to him, and about what he, and Jewish thought, can offer them. Please be advised that this conversation (not surprisingly) includes sexually explicit language. This conversation is the first in a new series we’re calling Hidden Jerusalem. Over the course of the next few months, with Estrin as our guide, we will peel back the layers that cloak this monumental, mythical city, looking at familiar sites and neighborhoods from new angles, and striking up conversations about topics that are usually hushed.

Joel Meyerowitz has had many careers as a photographer over the past 50 years. He first made a name for himself at 24 as a New York City street photographer in the tradition of Robert Frank. A few years later he switched to color photography at a time when most art critics and gallerists dismissed it as too “commercial.” Later, Meyerowitz delved into landscape photography and portraits. Then, in the months after Sept. 11, 2001, he became the self-designated archivist of Ground Zero, persuading city authorities to grant him complete access to the site despite the fact that it had been designated a crime scene. This month, Meyerowitz’s half-century of work is being honored with a two-part retrospective at the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York City and with the publication of a deluxe, two-volume limited-edition monograph of that work titled Taking My Time. (You can also get a sense of his work in our slideshow, above left.) Vox Tablet invited Meyerowitz to talk about how his Jewish family and upbringing have influenced his photography. He speaks with guest host Julie Burstein, author of Spark: How Creativity Works, about the Bronx tenements where he grew up; about his father the dry-cleaning-supplies salesman, boxer, and Catskills emcee; and about the spiritual weight he felt at Ground Zero during the months he spent there. [Running time: 45:16.] Your browser does not support the audio element. For listeners who might want a preview of the longer conversation, here’s a short clip where Meyerowitz recalls the day he decided to become a photographer. It was 1962. He was working at a New York City ad agency and had been sent by his art director to accompany a photographer who was taking photos for a pamphlet he’d written. The photographer was Robert Frank. Seeing this master in action was a revelation to Meyerowitz and changed his career from that point forward. Here’s what happened next: Your browser does not support the audio element.

That Jews wrote many of the most beloved Christmas songs in the holiday songbook is no secret. “White Christmas,” by Irving Berlin, is perhaps the best-known example, but there are countless others, including “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” (Johnny Marks), and “Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow” (lyricist Sammy Cahn and composer Jule Styne). At age 27, Benj Pasek is now in a position to add his name to that illustrious lineage. Pasek is one half of the songwriting team Pasek & Paul. The two met as undergraduates at the University of Michigan, where they wrote their first production, a song cycle about twenty-something confusion called Edges. Several co-productions later, they were brought on to write the music and lyrics to A Christmas Story, adapted from the 1983 blockbuster movie. The show is now on Broadway and has been delighting crowds and critics alike. Pasek speaks with Vox Tablet about how he and partner Justin Paul collaborate, about his own relationship to Christmas, and about his aspirations to apply his musical-theater talents to create more contemporary expressions of Jewish communal life. Guest host Rebecca Soffer, a New York-based writer and producer, is a former Colbert Report producer. Most recently she was the national network coordinator at Reboot. [Running time: 23:06.] Your browser does not support the audio element.

Last summer, 18people paid anywhere between $2,000 and $4,000 to plant cucumbers, scrub potatoes, and build a chicken coop on 200 acres in Goshen, N.Y., all while speaking in a language few of them know. They were enrolled in the first full session of Yiddish Farm, the brainchild of 26-year-old Naftali Ejdelman. Ejdelman comes by his Yiddish honestly; he is the grandson of the late Yiddish professor Mordkhe Schaechter and grew up speaking the language at home. His farming experience, however, is less extensive (as he’s the first to admit). That didn’t stop him from procuring land, recruiting a partner, Yisroel Bass, and launching the first and only Yiddish-language-based shomer-shabbos working organic farm. In September, Vox Tablet sent reporter Nina Porzucki to find out how the farm, and its farmers, were faring. [Running time: 10:40.] Your browser does not support the audio element.

Growing up in the Netherlands, Simon Kuper was raised on soccer and on stories of the Dutch resistance during World War II. It was only as an adult that Kuper, a columnist for the Financial Times, began to understand the level of complicity on the part of the Dutch: more than 75 percent of the Jews in the country were killed during the war. And yet ordinary life—including soccer playing and viewing—continued with little disruption. In his book Ajax, the Dutch, the War: The Strange Tale of Soccer During Europe’s Darkest Hour (just out in the United States), Kuper looks at soccer culture during the war and offers fresh insight into the treatment of Dutch Jews. In particular, he digs into the archives and institutional memory of Ajax Amsterdam, the country’s premier club and one that has long been associated with the city’s Jews. Kuper, who has written three other books about soccer, spoke from Paris with Vox Tablet’s Sara Ivry about what he uncovered in his research and about how echoes of wartime anti-Jewish attitudes still reverberate in the Netherlands today. [Running time: 20:54.] Your browser does not support the audio element.

It is hard to overstate 30-year-old cellist Alisa Weilerstein’s musical achievements. In 2011, she was named a MacArthur fellow, aka “genius,” for her accomplishments as a musician and as an “advocate for contemporary music.” She is constantly in demand, performing, giving master classes, rehearsing, and recording with the world’s best orchestras. And she’s just released an album on Decca Classics—the first time the label has signed on a cellist in over 30 years. The CD, Elgar, Carter: Cello Concertos, features concertos by Edward Elgar and Elliott Carter along with Max Bruch’s Kol Nidrei and is conducted by Daniel Barenboim and performed with the Berlin Staatskapelle. The last few weeks have been particularly tumultuous for her, with the last-minute cancellation of her Carnegie Hall concert because of the danger posed by a crane dangling above the concert hall as a result of Hurricane Sandy, and then the death, at age 103, of Carter, whom she greatly admired. And then there was last week’s last-minute invitation, which she accepted, to play Brahms with the New York Philharmonic, stepping in for the principal cellist, Carter Brey. Still, she made time to come to the studio, cello in hand, to talk about the new CD and her work with Barenboim, to remember Elliott Carter, and to play, quite beautifully, two movements from Bach’s Cello Suite in C Major. [Running time: 27:45.] Your browser does not support the audio element.

Some people say the way to measure the health of a society is by the status of its women. Others look to the GDP, or to voter turnout. For Tablet’s Liel Liebovitz, it’s a question of beats, rhymes, and samples. When he was 13, Leibovitz had something of a crisis of faith in his home, as well as his homeland, after his father landed in jail with a 20-year sentence. He could no longer stomach the saccharine tunes that made up the mainstream of 1980s Israeli music. That was when he discovered American hip-hop. It would take a few years before Israel got a hip-hop scene of its own, and its output, quality, and popularity have waxed and waned in the intervening decades. (We have an essay on some of the best new talent here.) Leibovitz, now living and raising a family in New York, finds that his feelings toward his homeland have followed a parallel course. [Running time: 8:41.] Your browser does not support the audio element.

At first glance, the appeal of an essay collection titled Jewish Jocks might seem limited to a small, if fervent, readership. In fact, the anthology, edited by former Tablet writer Marc Tracy and New Republic editor Franklin Foer, is lively and full of surprises, even for readers with no horse in this race. In essays by writers as varied as Simon Schama, David Bezmozgis, Emily Bazelon, and David Brooks, there are entries on the usual suspects, such as Barney Ross and Sandy Koufax. But the collection also includes profiles of lesser-known talents like Soviet weightlifter Grigory Novak, Brooklyn-born matador Sidney Frumpkin, as well as downright mediocre (but beloved to some) players like Mets right-fielder Art Shamsky. Finally, there are those included in the collection for the ways they elevated sport (Raiders General Manager Al Davis, sportswriter Robert Lipsyte) or, conversely, besmirched it (basketball point-shaver Jack Molinas, Third Reich-representing fencer Helene Mayer). Vox Tablet’s Sara Ivry is joined by Tracy and Foer to talk about how they determined whom to include and whom to leave out, and about some of their favorite contributions to the collection. [Running time: 25:00.] Your browser does not support the audio element.

In the mid-1990s, East German novelist Benjamin Stein crossed paths with then-celebrated Holocaust memoirist Binjamin Wilkomirski at a literary conference, in a pleasant enough encounter. Soon after, Wilkomirski was exposed as a fraud who had invented his identity as a child Holocaust survivor; in fact he was Christian, born and raised in Switzerland. In The Canvas, a novel just translated from German into English, Stein takes that encounter and builds from it a riveting story, told in two parts, about two fictional men who become intimately involved in the rapid rise and subsequent fall of a Wilkomirski-like character named Minsky. One protagonist is Amnon Zichroni, who is sent away from his ultra Orthodox Jerusalem community after he’s discovered reading secular literature. Zichroni remains religious but also pursues training as a psychotherapist and later aids Minsky in delving into his traumatic past. The other protagonist is Jan Wechsler, the writer who exposes Minsky only, it seems, to then flee from his own past in a similar fashion. These two stories meet, literally (and dramatically), at the center of the book—you can begin either with Zichroni’s life or with Weschler’s and must turn the book over to get from one to the other. Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry speaks with Benjamin Stein about this unusual novel and about the ruptures in his own past, first when as a teen he decided to become a practicing Jew (having been raised in a nonreligious, staunchly Communist family) and later with the fall of the Berlin wall. We also hear from the book’s translator, Brian Zumhagen, whose voice and name may be familiar to New York City listeners from his day job as a news anchor at WNYC. [Running time: 26:42.] Your browser does not support the audio element.

This week, Barbra Streisand returns to Brooklyn for her first public performances in her native borough since moving away more than 50 years ago. News of her homecoming shows was announced in May—with tickets to performances tonight and Saturday selling out months before the $1 billion Barclays Center, where she’ll appear, even opened. How did this happen? In 1960, Streisand was a 17-year-old kid from Flatbush trying to make it big in Manhattan. Four years later, she was the country’s top-selling female recording artist and was starring on Broadway as Fanny Brice in Funny Girl. How she and her loyal associates transformed her into a beloved and critically acclaimed star is the subject of Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand, a new biography by William Mann. (Mann’s previous subjects include Elizabeth Taylor and Katharine Hepburn.) Mann joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to talk about how Streisand exaggerated her “kooky” persona—since traded in for a more poised demeanor, how she sassed Mike Wallace on national television, and how she capitalized on her nontraditional looks. [Running time: 23:05.] Your browser does not support the audio element.

Harold Kushner first brought comfort and insight to many in 1981 with his best-selling self-help book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Since then, he’s continued to offer life- and faith-affirming messages, with such titles as When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough, and Living a Life That Matters. Now he returns to his original theme of suffering with The Book of Job: When Bad Things Happened to a Good Person. In Job’s anguish and anger toward God, Kushner finds lessons on how one might remain faithful to a God who does not protect us from suffering. Kushner talks with Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about the very personal roots of this exploration, dating back to the 1970s, when his son Aaron was diagnosed with a rare and incurable disease (Aaron died in 1977, at age 14); about the depth and complexity of the Job verses; and about why he believes we must choose between an all-loving God and an all-powerful one. [Running time: 19:57.] Your browser does not support the audio element.

Ever since the founding of the state of Israel, the country’s leaders have favored overwhelming military might over diplomatic finesse in confronting conflicts with their neighbors. Such is the argument made by veteran journalist Patrick Tyler in his new book, Fortress Israel: The Inside Story of the Military Elite Who Run the Country—and Why They Can’t Make Peace. Tyler has spent a combined 26 years reporting for the New York Times and the Washington Post, covering the U.S. State Department, the Pentagon, the intelligence community, and the Middle East. In his book, Tyler focuses on the latter, offering a fascinating account of the Israeli military establishment—its victories, defeats, mistakes, and cover-ups. Beginning with David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan in the 1950s and continuing almost up to the present, Tyler details a military mindset that pervades nearly all of Israeli culture and that, as he sees it, has made peace in the region all but impossible. Tyler speaks with Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about the similarities between the ancient Greek warrior state of Sparta and modern Israel, about the “sabra code” to which Israel’s leaders largely adhere, and about the influence of the past on the current stand-off with Iran. [Running time: 22:48.] Your browser does not support the audio element.

In 1952, Meyer Levin had every reason to believe he would bring Anne Frank’s diary to the stage. Levin, an American who served as a war correspondent in Europe during World War II, first came across Frank’s diary in a Paris bookshop in 1951. He immediately contacted Frank’s father, Otto, and was instrumental in getting the book published in the United States, and then in attracting the interest of readers, thanks to a glowing review he wrote for the New York Times. Otto Frank granted Levin the rights to adapt the diary for stage, but Levin would never see that dream realized. The production only got as far as a preliminary radio play. It’s hard to pin down why. Some say the Anne Frank that Levin was so moved by—indeed revered—was too Jewish a character for early 1950s American audiences. Others say Levin’s difficult personality and lack of writing ability scuttled the project. Either way, Levin eventually relinquished the stage rights, shunned by Frank and his cohort. The failure left Levin embittered. Now, three decades after Levin’s death, L.A. based theater director Jennifer Strome is resurrecting Meyer Levin’s Anne Frank, with a new production of Levin’s 35-minute radio play. Sixty years after its poorly received national broadcast, Levin’s rendering of Anne Frank will meet a new audience, one perhaps better equipped to judge her authenticity. Strome’s production will be available as a podcast from Sept. 15 to 18 here. Producer Eric Molinsky brings us the story of Meyer Levin and his legacy. [Running time: 10:43.] Your browser does not support the audio element.