Vox Tablet

If you ask a kid to name a Jewish baseball hero it’s likely she’ll answer Kevin Youkilis if she’s thinking current day icons, or, if this theoretical kid is more historically oriented she’ll cite the great Dodger Sandy Koufax. But long before either of them put on a glove, there was Hank Greenberg. Greenberg made his major league mark in the 1930s and ’40s, playing primarily for the Detroit Tigers. He was a first-baseman and a phenomenal batter. In 1938, in a single season, he hit 58 home runs. He made the All Star team five times, was twice named American League MVP, was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1956, and still holds the American League record for runs batted in by a right-handed batter in a single season: 183 in 1937. Over this entire career, he had a whopping 1,276 RBIs. Like Koufax, Greenberg sat out a game that fell on Yom Kippur; in Greenberg’s case it was during the 1934 pennant race. It sealed his fate as Jewish hero in an era that was virulently anti-Semitic at home and abroad. Greenberg accepted this role graciously but with some discomfort. Writer Mark Kurlansky has a new biography out about the star. It’s called Hank Greenberg: The Hero Who Didn’t Want to Be One. Kurlansky speaks with Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about Greenberg’s improbable status as a Jewish icon (he was far from observant), the challenges he faced as arguably the highest profile Jewish sportsman in the mid-1930s, and why he is not better remembered by baseball fans today. [Running time: 15:41.] Your browser does not support the audio element.

Death—always around us—seemed especially present in recent days. The killing of Osama Bin Laden revived memories of his 9/11 victims, while Yom HaShoah brought to mind those who perished in the Holocaust. Yet every day, private acts of mourning take place—people grieve over the loss of a loved one, a friend, a neighbor. In the short story “Walter and Edith,” Miami-based writer Jeremy Glazer offers a more intimate glimpse into the experience of personal loss. His story comes to Vox Tablet by way of Alicia Zuckerman, a senior producer of the radio show Under the Sun at WLRN in Miami. [Running time: 9:32.] Your browser does not support the audio element.

In the late 1950s, Florence Greenberg was a housewife in Passaic, N.J., with an itch to get into the music business. A tip from her daughters led her to a quartet of young African-American singers. Under Greenberg’s tutelage, the women became the legendary Shirelles, the group behind such hits as “I Met Him on a Sunday” and “Dedicated to the One I Love.” Greenberg’s name in the business was made. She formed three record labels—Tiara, Scepter, and Wand—and had a hand in the successes of talents including Dionne Warwick and the Isley Brothers. As the curtain rises on Baby It’s You, a new musical celebrating Greenberg’s life and work, Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry speaks with Slate Magazine music critic Jody Rosen about the obstacles Greenberg might have faced as a pioneering woman, about her ability to identify voices and styles that others didn’t think America was quite ready for, and about the real meaning of the song “Say a Little Prayer for You.” [Running time: 20:05.] Your browser does not support the audio element.

The alleged cruelty of April is mitigated, for some people anyway, by the arrival of two things: Passover and National Poetry Month. To celebrate this collision of good fortune, Vox Tablet asked some poets to share works that engage the themes of the holiday. Andrea Cohen, author most recently of Kentucky Derby, Robert Pinsky, author of The Life of David from Nextbook Press and the newly published Selected Poems, and Mark Levine, whose most recent collection is The Wilds, share some poems and speak about them with Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry. [Running time: 16:22.] Your browser does not support the audio element. Exodus The flat bread that scratched our throats was not symbolic. We left too quickly to bring the symbols. Neither did the bread portend of manna. It was bread. We left with the skin on our backs, with the imprint of whips. The symbols came after, finding us the way a lost dog, crossing deserts, pinpoints the master who can’t live without him. —Andrea Cohen Macaroons I get it now. You’re dead. You can’t do everything you used to. Reruns instead of new episodes. I get it. You can’t send macaroons this Passover, those dense confections without flour, conforming to the rules of kashrut, the rules of engagement, which in the case of our people, involved fleeing, trading slavery for the desert. The land of milk & honey was a kind of paint- by-numbers kit everybody lugged in his head through sandy ditches. It’s best not to commit directions to Nirvana to paper: they could be stolen or confiscated, or worse: the place itself obliterated. Forty years is a long time to get where you’re going. Where are you promised? In the end you spoke of a boat ride, of booking passage second- class, on a vessel that lacked a rudder, an engine, a sail. Kaput, you said. You were looking for a solution. Why now? someone asked—less question than demand. You had to go. I get it. We prepped you for a journey, because the mind gets stuck on the speed bumps of Fin, of Finito. The mind insists on one more road, one more hello. I get it: you won’t be posting macaroons this year. No problem, mom. Just send the recipe. —Andrea Cohen Paschal Easter was the old North Goddess of the dawn. She rises daily in the East And yearly in spring for the great Paschal candle of the sun. Her name lingers like a spot Of gravy in the figured vestment Of the language of the Britains As Thor’s and crazed Woden’s Stain Thursday and Wednesday. O fellow-patriots loyal to this Our modern world of high heels, Vaccination, brain surgery: May the old Apollonian flayers And Jovial raptors pass over us— Those ordainers of suppers Of encrypted dishes: bitter, unrisen, Infants as bricks for the taskmaster Quota. Fruit and nuts ground In wine to recall the mortar: On the compass platter, traces Of the species that devises The Angel of Death to sail Over our legible doorpost Smeared with sacrifice. —Robert Pinsky, from Gulf Music, (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2007) Refuge Event was them in motion beside the open cart on steel wheels drawn by a tawny mule in the modern day having bartered for cart and animal in motion beside orchards bordering the receding town receding crows on the roof and a boy watching them above his shovel in his pose animal poked with a stick between lurid exhalations and a finch flicking itself at gnats in the air in motion and the crate or cart mounded with leathers tools from the workshop drill press/lathe/iron forms/dyer’s vat them bartering in syllables anonymously in August in wool coats and hats in the documentary evidence in stiff polished boots laced high and unbroken-in spring rain had rutted the road with a gap in motion in eventual summer axle needed mending bucket needed washing with the wash and the boiling water (good-bye mother with her bag of wash) in a surge of details past slumbering countryside in a past tense wing or cargo hold —Mark Levine, from The Wilds, (University of California Press, 2006)

For those who adhere strictly to the laws of Passover, this is a busy time of year. Homes are purged of anything leavened, or anything that might become leavened. Out go the cereal, the crackers, and the flour. Just how strict we need to be when it comes to the presence of grain elsewhere in the food chain is a matter of some debate. In Israel, kosher certifiers insist that that for milk, eggs, and meat to be considered fit for the holiday, the cows and chickens from which they are derived must also be grain-free. Reporter Daniel Estrin went on a tour of a dairy farm outside Jerusalem to find just what this entails. [Running time: 6:20.] Your browser does not support the audio element.

In the late 1800s, Solomon Schechter, the scholar and teacher whose name is familiar to scores of Jewish day-school students, discovered a remarkable trove of Jewish documents stuffed in an attic-like space in a Cairo synagogue. Ranging from liturgical texts to shipping orders, the documents were mostly written in Judeo-Arabic, Aramaic, and Yiddish and dated back to the Middle Ages. It was a geniza, a store room for documents containing the name of God and awaiting ritual burial. The Cairo Geniza, as the collection has become known, has since fueled decades of scholarship on centuries-old poets and theologians, as well as long-forgotten details of daily existence. In Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza, new from Nextbook Press, poet and translator Peter Cole and essayist Adina Hoffman recount the history of the Cairo Geniza and the scholars who dedicated their professional (and sometimes private) lives to its holdings. Cole and Hoffman spoke to Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about how such a remarkable collection of documents came to exist, the many characters—from Schechter to a woman from the Middle Ages known as “Wuhsha the Broker”—associated with it, and what its contents reveal about historical celebrations of Passover. [Running time: 25:54.] Your browser does not support the audio element.

In the late 1970s, the Italian seaside town of Ladispoli, about an hour’s drive northwest of Rome, became a way station for Soviet Jewish refugees, many stuck there for months while they awaited visas to enter the United States or Canada. The writer David Bezmozgis, then a child, was among the Jews waiting in limbo there, until his family eventually made it to Toronto, where he set his acclaimed first book, Natasha and Other Stories. For his debut novel, The Free World, Bezmozgis turned to Ladispoli, anchoring the book’s action there. It focuses on Samuil Krasnansky, a grumpy Communist who’s left the Soviet Union against his will; his son Alec, a happy-go-lucky lothario; and Alec’s wife, Polina, a non-Jewish Russian haunted by regret over leaving her aging parents. Bezmozgis spoke to Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about his recollections of life in Ladispoli, the political differences that tore Jewish families apart in the early years of the Soviet Union, and the seamier side of immigrant life. [Running time: 13:38.] Your browser does not support the audio element.

Half a century ago, the Hebrew Union Congregation in Greenville, Miss., was the state’s largest synagogue; its sanctuary overflowed during the High Holidays, attracting worshipers from the city and surrounding communities. But many children of those earlier congregants have moved away, and by 2000, the temple dismissed its full-time rabbi. One tradition, though, has held on: Hebrew Union’s annual deli luncheon, a fundraiser for the Temple Sisterhood and a much-anticipated event for both the Jews and non-Jews of Greenville. (In 2009, 1,400 corned beef sandwiches were served.) Reporter Philip Graitcer attended this year’s luncheon earlier this month and filed this dispatch from a tradition that might not endure. [Running time: 7:50.] Your browser does not support the audio element.

It can take someone outside your own background to make you realize how much your tradition has to offer. Such was the case for veteran journalist Steve Roberts. Now a professor, Roberts grew up Jewish but non-religious in Bayonne, New Jersey. It was only after he married his Catholic wife, Cokie Roberts, in 1966, that his family held their first seder, at her insistence. Steve and Cokie, a longtime National Public Radio correspondent, have been hosting Seders together since, and the haggadah they use is one they’ve compiled over more than four decades. It forms the basis of Our Haggadah: Uniting Traditions for Interfaith Families, which combines traditional Seder elements with references to contemporary history and the traditions of other faiths—most notably Christianity. Steve and Cokie Roberts spoke to Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about their first Seder, why Passover is particularly well-suited to interfaith families, and their inclusive approach to celebrating it, which includes Christian references, Hebrew readings, and legumes. [Running time: 22:16.] Your browser does not support the audio element.

When Adolf Eichmann, the notorious Nazi many hold responsible for the Final Solution, went on trial in Jerusalem 50 years ago, the proceedings riveted people around the world. Eichmann, who’d been captured by Israeli agents a year earlier in Argentina, was being prosecuted in a country whose existence was in part due to his crimes. The trial re-focused attention on one of the century’s greatest horrors and drew criticism for the prosecutor’s decision to have survivors testify about their traumas. Such testimony was seen by many as distracting from facts and playing on emotions; it would also force victims to relive the brutality they’d experienced in the Holocaust. These and other issues form the basis of The Eichmann Trial, a new book by Emory University historian Deborah E. Lipstadt from Nextbook Press. Lipstadt is no stranger to the courtroom or to the perils of anti-Semitism. In 1996, she was sued by David Irving, who’d accused her of libeling him by calling him a Holocaust denier. Lipstadt won her case at trial in 2000. She joined Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to talk about the importance of survivor testimony, about the controversy surrounding the 1961 trial, and about how her courtroom experience changed the way she thinks of Eichmann’s. [Running time: 21:26.] Your browser does not support the audio element.

When John Galliano was fired earlier this week as the chief designer for Christian Dior because of his stunning anti-Semitic outburst, some saw the start of a trend. Charlie Sheen had taunted the creator of his CBS sitcom, Two and a Half Men, Chuck Lorre, by calling him Chaim Levine. And Julian Assange, of Wikileaks, allegedly accused a group of journalists of being part of a Jewish conspiracy to smear his organization. But does it matter if a celebrity gets drunk and utters something offensive? Might it be counterproductive to call attention to every stupid remark? Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry asked Anti-Defamation League chief Abraham Foxman, Atlantic national correspondent and blogger Jeffrey Goldberg, New York magazine cultural critic Emily Nussbaum, and public-relations guru Matthew Hiltzik. [Running time: 16:05.] Your browser does not support the audio element.

Yael Ben-Zion came to the United States from the small town of Arad, in southern Israel, to study law. A decade later, she’s a New York City-based photographer who trains her lens on the place she left behind. In 5683 Miles Away, her recently published collection of photographs—the title is the distance from John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York to Ben-Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv—Ben-Zion depicts ordinary moments in family and friends’ lives in ways that convey affection but also ambivalence toward her subjects. In one, a mother is lifting a child up into the air, a classic image of maternal affection, while the child’s camouflage onesie reminds us that warfare is never far away in Israel. Other visual clues echo that sense of constant, if peripheral, anxiety, from the emergency-notification system atop a beachside pavilion to the barbed wire that circles the trunk of an old tree. Named a best book of 2010 by Photo-Eye Magazine, 5683 Miles Away was a selected title for the 2011 German Photo Book Award. The photos from the book will be on exhibit from March 2 to May 5 at 92Y’s Weill Art Gallery in Manhattan. Ben-Zion spoke to Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about her project. [Running time: 12:14.] Your browser does not support the audio element.

When the Soviet Union fell and the Cold War was declared over, most people happily forgot that tens of thousands of nuclear warheads were still poised to go off at a moment’s notice. Ron Rosenbaum is less complacent; he has become obsessed with the persistence of the threat of a nuclear attack, whether purposeful or accidental. (Nine countries have roughly 20,000 nuclear warheads, according to the Brookings Institution, and that figure accounts only for those weapons of which there is a record.) It’s a likelihood that is growing as unstable regimes race to acquire warheads of their own, he argues in his new book, How the End Begins: the Road to a Nuclear World War III, in which he examines the extent of this threat and looks for ways to resolve it. He spoke to Vox Tablet’s Sara Ivry about the obsolescence of deterrence in our geopolitically unstable world, the close calls in the history of the nuclear age, and the prospect of realizing President Barack Obama’s goal of eliminating nuclear weapons. [Running time: 16:55.] Your browser does not support the audio element. Read an except from How the End Begins here.

Adah Isaacs Menken was known for her beauty, her daring, and her ability to flout just about every convention of her day. Her most famous role was as the warrior prince Mazeppa in a play inspired by Lord Byron’s poem. As Mazeppa, Menken was strapped to the side of a galloping horse while wearing nothing but a body stocking, which earned her the nickname “The Naked Lady.” Menken lived only 33 years, but in that time she had five husbands and a string of lovers, including the writer Alexandre Dumas and the poet Algernon Swinburne. She gambled, posed semi-nude, and made headlines across the country. And, as Michael and Barbara Foster reveal in their new biography, A Dangerous Woman: The Life, Loves, and Scandals of Adah Isaacs Menken, 1835-1868, America’s Original Superstar, she was also a committed Jew and frequently published poems and essays defending her people. The Fosters join Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to speak about Adah Isaacs Menken’s political allegiances, her public liaisons, and her ethnic pride. [Running time: 17:14.] Your browser does not support the audio element.

Like so many celebrated moments in show business, Lenny Bruce’s midnight concert at Carnegie Hall—held 50 years ago this weekend, it was an uninterrupted two-hour monologue on everything from the newly inaugurated president Kennedy to female anatomy—nearly didn’t happen. With New York blanketed under nearly three feet of snow, the comedian, young and relatively new to the scene, didn’t expect to find many people in the audience. But the house was packed, a testament to Bruce’s reputation as a sharp and controversial entertainer. And he left the stage a legend. But where does Bruce, with his long and associative ruminations, fit in America’s comedy cannon? And why doesn’t he have any disciples today? Tablet Magazine’s Liel Leibovitz says it’s because Bruce was always a prophet, not an entertainer. [Running time: 8:45.] Your browser does not support the audio element.