Vox Tablet

Poet and writer Rita Gabis grew up surrounded by grandparents with accents—Russian, Yiddish, Lithuanian. That makes it sound like a familiar Jewish immigrant tale, but it was far from that. While Gabis’s father came from a family of Russian Jews who immigrated to the United States well before WWII, her mother was born in Lithuania. She and her family emigrated in the 1950s. And they were Catholic. As a child, Gabis was vaguely aware that these two different family backgrounds were at odds with each other. It was as an adult, however, that she came to understand that the divide went much deeper, and that her mother’s father, her beloved Senelis as she called him...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

For the past nine years, at this time of year, Andy Bachman, a favorite Vox Tablet guest, would be gathering his thoughts in order to lead High Holiday services at Brooklyn’s Congregation Beth Elohim. Bachman was the head rabbi there. It’s a synagogue with a reputation for community engagement and social activism, and claims among its congregants a host of outspoken and influential personalities (Sen. Charles Schumer and Jonathan Safran Foer are among them). This year is different. Bachman stepped down from the pulpit earlier this summer and...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

There are roughly three weeks until the summer clock unofficially runs down. How will you spend these last lazy days? Maybe you’ll be under an umbrella by the sea or in a hammock next to a green meadow or flopped on a big, soft couch in your very own living room. Wherever you are, you’ll want a good book by your side. To help you figure out exactly what that good book will be, Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry asked some experts what they’ve enjoyed reading this summer and what they’re still yearning to dive into. Music for this week’s podcast comes from Podington Bear. *** Book Recommendations:

First there was Vox Tablet. Then there was Israel Story. Now, we are excited to present Unorthodox, Tablet’s newest podcast and part of Slate’s Panoply network. Hosted by Tablet Editor-at-Large Mark Oppenheimer and featuring Deputy Editor Stephanie Butnick and Senior Writer Liel Leibovitz, the weekly show includes fresh, fun, and “disturbingly honest” (says Oppenheimer) discussion of the latest Jewish news and culture, plus interviews with two guests—one Jewish, the other not. In the first episode, which you can listen to below or by subscribing to Unorthodox on iTunes, after a weighty disquisition on the place of Adam Sandler and Andy Samberg in contemporary Jewish culture, the panelists chat with...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In 1961, a librarian in a municipal archive in Strasbourg caught a visitor tearing pages out of a manuscript and stuffing them into his briefcase. The visitor, it turned out, was a widely respected historian who had done ground-breaking scholarship on the history of Jews in France. It soon became apparent that this was not the first time Zosa Szajkowski had procured documents by questionable means. He’d been doing so for years, before, during and especially after the Holocaust, and the thousands of pages he’d collected had in turn been sold to important archives throughout the United States and Israel. Why did he...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

For many Jews, the fact that Albert Einstein was Jewish is a point of pride. But what do we know about his Jewish self-identification? And how many folks out there could claim to have a basic understanding of his General Theory of Relativity? In Einstein: His Space and Time, biographer Steven Gimbel tackles these and other fundamental aspects of Einstein’s life and work. Gimbel is chairman of the philosophy department at Gettysburg College. He spoke with Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about Einstein’s religious period (it came to an abrupt end when he discovered geometry at age 10), his clashes with all forms of authority, and his love of Israel, which fit uneasily with his profound distrust of nationalism. Gimbel also lays out the basic tenets of Einstein’s achievements in physics in terms that will make even science-phobes comfortable.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Photo: Jessica Fechtor Jessica Fechtor was just 28 years old when a blood vessel in her brain burst while she was exercising on a treadmill. Newly married, she was pursuing a Ph.D. in Jewish literature at Harvard, and she and her husband had just started thinking about having a baby. Now, suddenly, she was facing a long and difficult recovery–one that got even harder when complications arose after an initial surgery. Before she was even out of the hospital, Jessica started making lists. Not to-do lists, but grocery lists. She’d always loved cooking, and suddenly, the act of mixing ingredients to produce something delicious for herself and for the people around her felt more important than ever. She describes what happened in a new book that’s two parts memoir and one part cookbook. It’s...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

More than a decade ago, an Italian-born Jerusalem-based singer named Shulamit learned of a collection of songs composed in concentration camps during WWII. Written by a handful of women most of whom perished in the war, the songs nearly possessed her. Shulamit began performing them, and in 2013 started working with trumpet player Frank London, of the Klezmatics, and the Israeli pianist Shai Bachar, to make arrangements and adaptations for an album. That album, called For You the Sun Will Shine: Songs of Women in the Shoa, is now out. From her apartment in Jerusalem, Shulamit tells Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about the individual...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

These days it’d be pretty hard to walk without a ticket onto a boarding airplane bound for an international locale. Between the TSA and sniffer dogs, any would-be stowaway would likely see the inside of a jail cell pretty fast. But before September 11, in fact, before 1970, it wasn’t quite as challenging. When Victor Rodack, now a psychiatrist in his 60s, was a young teenager he had but one dream: to get to Israel. He tells Vox Tablet producer Julie Subrin exactly how he made that dream come true. Bonus track: Listen to Victor’s press conference at JFK Airport, just after he landed back in the United States. (Thanks to Victor Rodack and Paul Ruest for making this archival interview...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The 16th president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, was known for many things, among them his humble origins, his commitment to ending slavery, his assassination exactly 150 years ago at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C. Less well-parsed were his relationships with Jews. And there were many such ties. Lincoln and the Jews, by Jonathan Sarna and Benjamin Shapell, examines scores of documents and archival materials to show that Lincoln befriended many Jews and also worked to include them in various strata of government. Sarna, a historian at Brandeis University, joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

What do we talk about at Passover? Slavery, plagues, food, and of course all the unforgettable stories from Seders past. In this Passover special, produced by Vox Tablet for public radio stations (and you), we’ve got all that and more—hosted by Sara Ivry and Jonathan Goldstein, with stories from Etgar Keret, Sally Herships, Debbie Nathan, Michael Twitty, and Jonathan Groubert. We’ll Be Here All Night, Part 1: Plagues Co-host Jonathan Goldstein speaks with writer and filmmaker Etgar Keret about the narrative strengths and weaknesses of the Passover story, ending with an animated discussion of the 10 plagues. Next, reporter Sally Herships takes us into the home of Abigail Rosenfeld...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Marcus Rothkowitz was born in 1903 in Dvinsk, a town in the Pale of Settlement. As a child, he moved with his family to the United States. It was a journey that changed his life—and that of the world of modern art. Rothkowitz grew up to become the painter Mark Rothko. He’s the focus of Mark Rothko: Toward the Light in the Chapel, a new biography by Annie Cohen-Solal. She joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to discuss Rothko’s revolutionary approach to painting, his ideas about the role of the artist in society, and what made him a Jewish artist. Plus, get ready for a Vox Tablet Passover extravaganza. We’ve got a...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The Book of Esther is among the Bible’s shortest stories. It tells the tale of a young Jewish woman who saves her people from a genocidal plot conceived of by Haman, an adviser to King Ahasuerus. It’s a story Jews around the world celebrate on Purim with costumes and revelry. Robert Alter, a professor of comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley, has been working for years on new translations of all the books of the Bible. Included in the most recent edition of project, Strong as Death Is Love, is Alter’s take on the Book of Esther. In...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Tablet Magazine’s Matthew Fishbane likes to find Jews far from home. He’s reported from Venezuela, the Solomon Islands, and Uganda. His latest assignment took him to Manipur, India, where people from disparate hill tribes who identify themselves as Jewish—and who are known as the Bnei Menashe—prepared to make aliyah. Fishbane was there shadowing Michael Freund, an Orthodox Jew who is something of a savior to these people and who has spent 17 years working to bring hidden Jews and...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Valentine’s Day is not native to Israel, but the country does not lack for tales of love and romance (or pursuit thereof). In this, our sixth and final episode of Israel Story’s first season, we bring you some of those. Writer, director, and actor Ghazi Albuliwi looks back at the twists and turns of his arranged marriage in Tulkarm. A husband and wife in their sixties look back at their 37 years together. Mishy Harman eavesdrops on the matchmaking quest of his downstairs neighbor. And an Israeli and a Palestinian confront the barriers to love. Listen to the full episode here, or download from

“Pack peddlers,” known in other parts of the world as smous, ambulantes, kloppers, weekly men, and a host of other names, are a staple of Jewish family lore everyplace that Jews headed when they left Europe starting in the 19th century. But the specifics of that job, and the impact it had on Jews’ success or failure in their new homelands, have not been much considered until now. In Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way, New York University historian Hasia Diner examines what the lives of Jewish peddlers were really like day to day. Where did they sleep every...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

When journalist Roger Cohen was just 3 years old, in 1958, his mother underwent electroshock treatment. Raised in South Africa, June Cohen, who was later diagnosed with manic depression, had moved with Roger’s father to England just a couple of years earlier. Immigrants in England, they’d chosen to uproot themselves from Johannesburg and the warm embrace they’d known there. Their own families were themselves immigrants to South Africa—they’d skirted the Holocaust, leaving Lithuania before the Nazi reign of terror but in a period when Europe was increasingly hostile to Jews. Along with a genetic predisposition, Cohen believes all this dislocation may have contributed to his mother’s condition. What...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The fate of Israel has long been seen by religious people of various stripes as intimately tied to cows. In the beginning, there was Moses’ battle over the Golden Calf, in which he struggled to bring his people around to monotheism. Then came the folks who believe, based on a passage in the Book of Numbers, that an essential step for hastening the coming of the Messiah is the sacrifice of a red heifer. In this episode of Israel Story, we bring together stories of these and other instances of bovine worship. Yochai Maital traces the origins of

[Podcast audio below.] Roz Chast is best known for her New Yorker comics—colorful and witty depictions of everyday humiliations and grievances. Often those come at the hands of the people closest to her: family members. In Chast’s recent book, a graphic memoir called Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? that has rightfully earned a place on many annual lists of the year’s best new non-fiction, she tells the story of her parents. In particular, she looks back at how, as an only child, she dealt with their steep decline at the end of their lives—with love and sadness, but also with frustration and guilt. It’s a poignant and often unexpectedly hilarious account and one that...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

It all started back in 2001, when Sarajevo-born folk singer Flory Jagoda invited roughly a dozen other Sephardim in the Washington area to join her for conversation over burekas and bumuelos (fritters, or doughnuts). More specifically, she invited them for conversation in Judeo-Spanish, also known as Ladino, the language spoken by Jews in medieval Spain and later in the far-flung lands to which they fled after the expulsion in 1492. Today, the language is all but forgotten, except by those like Jagoda who spoke it growing up. The group has grown to include more than 20 participants. At their monthly meetings—which...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.