Vox Tablet

When some of the Tablet staff started talking about Hanukkah, it became apparent how little we could assert about the holiday’s particulars. Some knew it involved violence. Others that there was eight days’ worth of oil to light a menorah. Still others that the word “Hanukkah” means dedication. But how did those elements fit together in an origin story? To find out, we asked Tablet readers and friends to send in their take of the Hanukkah story. Many people obliged us—you can find a terrific mash-up of their answers here:

David Ben-Gurion looms so large in Israel’s mythology, it’s like he’s George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln all rolled into one—the country’s Founding Father and the architect of many of its earliest and most crucial achievements. But maybe the comparison with America’s greatest presidents is flawed, for while we love nothing more than to discover the humanity of our historical leaders—Washington chopping down that cherry tree, Jefferson and his indiscretions, Lincoln’s melancholia—Ben-Gurion does not lend himself to such intimacy. He appears to be as inscrutable as he is inevitable, there in every major juncture in Israeli history yet never really familiar. That is, until...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Archie Bunker, George Jefferson, Mary Hartman, Maude Findlay are just a handful of the iconic characters Norman Lear created for television. In his storied career, Lear tackled abortion, cancer, racism, rape, abuse, interracial relationships, single motherhood, alcoholism, and poverty—subjects many shows today won’t even consider as viable fodder for entertainment. Now 92 years old, Lear got his start writing bits for showmen like Danny Thomas and Jerry Lewis before moving into television and film and then embarking on a second career as an activist (he co-founded People for the American Way). Now Lear has moved into a new medium—print. He has written

Visitors to Israel—or at least Jerusalem, or, OK, the Old City in Jerusalem—can reasonably expect to bump into a missionary or two. Chances are, though, those missionaries hail from elsewhere. In this, our fourth episode of Israel Story, called “A Man on a Mission,” we introduce three Israelis who are not religious but have pursued unusual hobbies with missionary zeal. One is a hitman-for-hire, another collects a highly specific classification of autographs, and the third is a professional whistler. This has earned them, variously, animus, accolades, and celebrity in far-flung places (here’s the

Writer Tillie Olsen died in 2007, at age 94. During her life, she worked at many jobs—as a union organizer, waitress, hotel maid, and factory worker, among others—and, with her husband, raised four daughters. That didn’t leave a lot of time to write. But once Olsen got to it, publishing her first story at the age of 43—she made a name for herself, writing elliptical, realist short stories and often angry essays taking on the plight of working people, social injustice, and the many ways that creativity is stifled. Several years before she died, Olsen recruited her grandson Jesse Olsen Bay to help her move out of her San...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Are Jews still “the people of the book”? Are Israelis? What does that even mean today? In the third episode of Israel Story, we’ve got three stories that all revolve around people who rescue books, chase after books, or otherwise allow books to determine their destiny—from a Yiddish book collector based in the Tel Aviv central bus station to a lonely college student to bibliophiles in search of the lost fragments of the Aleppo Codex. And we chat with Israeli writer Etgar Keret, who has some original thoughts on where the “people of the book” tagline came from. (Listen to the full episode

In 2007, journalist Sarah Wildman discovered a hidden cache of letters in her grandfather’s home office. By that time, her grandfather Karl was no longer living, but he had been a strong presence for most of her life—a worldly bon vivant and successful doctor whose smooth escape from Vienna in 1938 was part of the family lore. The letters, written mostly in German, came from people he’d left behind—people Wildman had never heard of before and, in particular, one young Jewish woman named Valy, whose letters made clear that she and Karl had been much more than friends. The letters—sent between 1939 and 1941—overflowed with love and yearning, but also conveyed that her...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In the annals of biblical kings, David stands out. A humble shepherd, he slew Goliath, wrote poetry, dethroned his predecessor, and reigned in Israel for 40 years. His heroics inspired artists throughout history from Michelangelo to Shakespeare to Leonard Cohen. But David’s achievements in helping unite the Jews did not come without costs—he had innocent people killed, looked away at violence among his children, bedded married women. In David: The Divided Heart, out from Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives Series, Rabbi David Wolpe takes a look at this Jewish hero—warts and all. Wolpe joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Growing up in a Hasidic community, Basya Schechter heard music all around her—not rock music or even folk—but religious nigguns, or tunes. There were the zmirot–songs sung after Sabbath meals; the communal singing at Hanukkah; the prayers recited in unison in holiday liturgies. In her late teens, Schechter abandoned that world and its music. After college, she traveled extensively through the Middle East and North Africa and learned to play instruments from the region like the darbuka and oud. In 1998, Schechter formed the band Pharaoh’s Daughter, which ventured into all sorts of musical genres. Now with Pharaoh’s Daughter Schechter...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This month’s episode of Israel Story is devoted entirely to Chaya’s story. Chaya Ben Baruch grew up as Enid, in a Conservadox family in Far Rockaway, N.Y. Midway through college, she left that world behind to study sea otters in Fairbanks, Alaska. Fast-forward a decade: Enid is now married to a nice Catholic salmon fisher named Stan. She’s just given birth to her sixth child, and discovers he has Down syndrome. Many parents in her position would be devastated. Some might place their baby in an institution, or put him up for adoption. For Enid, the birth of Angkor started her and her family on an incredible journey—to Tzfat, Israel, and...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This is a sponsored podcast on behalf of Yale University Press and their Jewish Lives series. When the composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein died nearly 25 years ago he left a broad legacy. He wrote music for Broadway. He devoted himself to education through the Young People’s Concerts. He conducted the world’s finest orchestras. He wrote poetry. And he wrote classical pieces. While some critics cheered the range of his engagements, others argued that in spreading himself thin he squandered his compositional talents. In

Around the country, kids are settling into their classrooms for a new school year, unaware of the wars over curriculum, teacher evaluations, school funding, and other hot-button education topics. Just north of New York City, in the district of East Ramapo in Rockland County, one such battle has been brewing for nearly a decade, churning up racial and ethnic tensions as it goes. In 2005, the school board in East Ramapo underwent a change when Hasidic Jews living in the area voted enough Orthodox Jews into office to make them a majority. Yet by and large the children in the public schools the board oversees come from African American, Caribbean, and Latin American households, while the children of the area’s...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

We’ve all got our go-to story about brushes with fame, but Harold Fruchter’s is truly a conversation stopper. Fruchter, a singer and guitarist in a Jewish wedding band, and the son of a rabbi, was born in 1952. When he was a baby, and up to the age of 2, his family lived in the upstairs apartment of a two-story flat in Memphis. Their downstairs neighbors were the Presleys. The two families formed a friendship, and the future King of Rock, just a teenager then, learned to pick up the cues when the Fruchters needed someone to turn on a light or unlock a door on Shabbos. The Fruchters, for their part, helped Elvis out materially (if not...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In our very first episode, the Israel Story team delves into the realm of fakes, forgeries, and mimicry. Three stories, from different periods and places, of people pretending to to be something they are not. (You can find Sipur Israeli, the original, Hebrew version of Israel Story, here.) [Listen to full episode here, or download from iTunes.] Prologue: The Israeli This American Life?!...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Several years ago, a group of four young Israelis—friends since childhood—got to work making a Hebrew-language radio show inspired by This American Life, the public-radio show two of them had grown to love while living in the United States. On the airwaves in Israel all that was available was talk radio and music, and the guys wanted something to listen to that was akin to the Ira Glass-hosted program with which they’d become obsessed. So, though they had never before made a radio story, they rolled up their sleeves to create what eventually became Sipur Israeli. This year, the men—Ro’ee Gilron, Mishy...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In 2011, adventure-seeking rock drummer-turned-Hasidic mother of four Dalia Shusterman became a widow. At about the same time, Perl Wolfe, born and raised in the Lubavitch sect of Hasidism, married and divorced, was living with her parents and beginning to write her own music. A few months later, the two women would meet in Crown Heights, Brooklyn and soon after that begin recording their first EP, titled “Down to the Top.” Their band name, Bulletproof Stockings—a somewhat derogatory term used to refer to the opaque stockings worn by some Orthodox women—hints at their insider status as Hasidic women and also at a kind of freedom or...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In 2009, a visitor to the British Museum presented curator Irving Finkel with a fascinating artifact—a 4,000-year-old Babylonian cuneiform tablet that told of a flood, and an ark, but with mysterious details unfamiliar from previously discovered tablets of that period. Finkel’s official title is Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian script, languages, and cultures; a discovery like this was right up his alley. He spent the next several years turning the tablet over and over (literally and figuratively), trying to decode its message, and to forge a path between that text and the story that would appear in the Book of Genesis some 1,000 years later. His new book, The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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....  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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,

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...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.