Vox Tablet

When Gili Yalo was 4 years old, he discovered that he loved to sing. It was in 1984, during a two-month trek through the desert on the first leg of a long journey from Ethiopia to Israel, where his parents believed life would be better for them. Thirty years later, Yalo is still singing, now with Zvuloon Dub System and in a musical style that encompasses the different aspects of his life—immigrant, Israeli, Jew. Based in Tel Aviv, Zvuloon Dub System plays an irresistible blend of roots reggae and classical Ethiopian pop. They are now touring the United States to celebrate the release of their new album,

Poopa Dweck is the poster woman for Syrian Jewish cooking. Her cookbook, Aromas of Aleppo, won a National Jewish Book Award. She gives lectures, does cooking demonstrations on television, and travels the world talking about the food of her ancestors. Dweck even has her own line of condiments, featuring specialties such as quince orange-blossom confit. But if you really want to see Dweck in her element, you score an invitation to visit her at her home kitchen in a seaside town in New Jersey when she’s got her sleeves up and is elbow deep, once or twice a year, in soaking tamarind. That’s what producer Emma Morgenstern did...  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. Sigmund Freud nearly boasted of the fact that he was ignorant of “everything that concerned Judaism.” He also held a deep mistrust of biography—so much so that the father of psychoanalysis burned his papers in order to try to thwart would-be future biographers. So you can see why Adam Phillips may have been daunted by the suggestion that he write a biography of Freud for Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives series. Nevertheless, he decided to have a go at it. A psychoanalyst, the editor of the Penguin Modern Classic translations of Freud published in...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Slava Gelman, a twentysomething aspiring writer, is trying to claw his way out of the post-Soviet Brooklyn neighborhood of his family. But his grandfather is determined to pull him back in. He wants to enlist Slava to invent life stories for Soviet émigrés in the hopes of getting money from the claims conference for Holocaust survivors, despite the fact that technically these émigrés are not survivors. It’s a preposterous—and sometimes hilarious—scenario but one that raises serious questions about truth, fiction, and suffering. Those matters are at the heart of A Replacement Life, the debut novel from émigré writer Boris...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Last weekend brought bad news from Europe: Far right parties in France, Denmark, Austria and elsewhere won big in the European Parliamentary elections. And in Brussels, four people died after a shooting at the city’s Jewish Museum. The attack came in a spring punctuated by anti-Semitic violence in France, the U.K., and elsewhere. All of these incidents have elicited the question: Is it time for Jews to leave Europe? To find out if things are as hostile for Jews in Europe as they seem from the vantage point of U.S. shores, Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry speaks with two young European Jewish leaders. Andi Gergely grew up in Hungary and is the chairperson of the World Union of Jewish Students. Though now based in...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The novelist Joshua Ferris made a splash in 2007 with his debut Then We Came to the End. The critically acclaimed book was a hilarious, biting satire about employees in a collapsing ad agency in Chicago at the end of the dot-com era. Ferris followed it up in 2010 with The Unnamed, a somewhat darker novel about a Manhattan lawyer who just wants to be walking; it’s an urge he cannot resist, and it undoes his life. Now Ferris is out with a new novel, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour. With the help of a somewhat petulant, loner dentist the book takes on existential dread, what it means to be a Jew, and Red Sox fandom in a mix of the absurd, the droll, and the profound. Ferris joins...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Known for frenzied takes on Yiddish and Eastern European music, the members of Golem bring the party with them wherever the band plays and no matter what they’re singing about. Their new album, Tanz, which means dance in Yiddish, covers religious rites, anti-Semitism in the former Soviet Union, dark children’s poems, and more, in a mix of rollicking interpretations of classic songs and original numbers. Golem’s founder and accordionist, Annette Ezekiel Kogan, and its violinist, Jeremy Brown, join Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to talk about the band’s surprising Mexican fan-base, how painful it is to sing the song “Odessa” now that Ukraine is in the throes of Russian occupation, and their ambivalence (now...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Ashkenazi Jews whose grandparents or great-grandparents hail from the Pale of Settlement tend to hold certain received notions about Poland (“bad for the Jews”) and its people (“hated the Jews”). On the basis of such notions, many Ashkenazim see little or no reason to visit the place. Jonathan Groubert felt similarly. Nevertheless, in 1994 he tacked Poland on to the itinerary of a backpacking trip through Europe. The visit was intended to do little more than confirm what he already knew. Instead it left him confused and determined to dig deeper into his family’s past and into Konin, the town they left behind. Here he shares his story. Groubert is a radio host and producer based in the Netherlands. A version of this story first aired on his podcast, “

Back in the early 1980s, two populations found their lives upended by the AIDS epidemic in America. There were, of course, those infected by the virus, along with everyone who cared for them. And then there were the medical professionals—researchers, doctors—desperately scrambling to figure out where the virus came from and how to interrupt its terrible progression. In 1981, Dr. Michael Saag unexpectedly found himself at the center of the latter group. At the time, Saag was just beginning a residency in internal medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. By the following year, he had helped open the 1917 Clinic, a comprehensive AIDS treatment and research center at UAB. In a new...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

How do you write a Leonard Cohen song? That’s a difficult question, even for Leonard Cohen. The lyrics aren’t the problem; Cohen was a poet long before he wrote his first song. Nor has it been a question of finding the right melody. The challenge in writing a Leonard Cohen song came later, in the studio, when it was time to figure out how the whole thing should sound. So says Liel Leibovitz, anyway. Leibovitz is a senior writer at Tablet Magazine and the author of a new book on Cohen, A Broken Hallelujah: Rock and Roll, Redemption, and the Life of Leonard Cohen. It comes out this week, after four years of Leonard Cohen immersion, which led...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

“A trustworthy person, one of our friends, has told us that you have been seen going around late at night with young men. You are also seen very frequently at dances, masquerades, and picnics.” So starts a letter to a young Jewish woman from her worried father who warns her of the peril that awaits if she continues her misbehavior. The letter is one of many having to do with social mores and business concerns. It is also a fiction. That is, it is a sample letter dating from 1905. Sample letters were written in the late 19th and early 20th century to help teach people not just how to read and write, but also how to conduct themselves in all aspects of a modernizing world. These letters were written in different languages and targeted at different...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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