Podcasts

 

The Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement is known for its outreach among non-Orthodox Jews, encouraging them to become more religious. Chabadniks are posted to about 75 countries, where their efforts are generally met with curiosity, indifference, or, at worst, irritation. But in Ramat Aviv, an upscale, liberal, and famously secular neighborhood of Tel Aviv, the sect’s arrival has prompted a much stronger reaction: fury. Chabad’s presence in Ramat Aviv is growing, and secular residents—who in the fall formed a residents association to oppose the Chabad incursion—are convinced that the Hasidim are trying to brainwash their children and take over the neighborhood. Now, every Friday, the two camps face off outside schools and in other public spaces, where Chabad representatives approach passersby, mostly kids, and invite them to wrap tefillin and pray. The battle has caught the attention of the Israeli press, even prompting an angry column, accusing the secular residents of anti-Semitism, from one of the country’s best-known columnists, Gideon Levy. Tablet contributor Daniel Estrin filed a report on the growing conflict in Ramat Aviv.

 

Novelist Steve Stern wasn’t raised in a traditional Jewish home—indeed, he says, his childhood in Memphis was virtually devoid of “heritage.” But he has made up for that as an adult, delving deeply into Jewish history, fiction, liturgy, and mysticism in his work. All of that comes into play in The Frozen Rabbi, his ninth work of fiction, which Tablet Magazine begins serializing today. The story begins in the basement of one Bernie Karp, a pimply and spiritually bereft teen who, intent on pleasuring himself in the liver-aided manner of Alexander Portnoy, gets distracted when he discovers at the back of the meat freezer a 19th-century rabbi from the Pale of Settlement. From there, we are transported between the past and the present, along the way encountering shtetl kabbalists, Lodz peddlers, Lower East Side gangsters, New Age hucksters, and more. Stern spoke to Vox Tablet about Charles Dickens and Isaac Bashevis Singer, libel suits, and how he came to write this comic-tragic tale of modern European Jewry. The Frozen Rabbi will be published in May.

 

In 1965, two beat poets on New York’s Lower East Side, Tuli Kupferberg and Ed Sanders, put together a band called the Fugs. (The name is a euphemism that means what it sounds like and was borrowed from Norman Mailer’s novel The Naked and the Dead.) The Fugs have been recording and performing irreverent rants about sex, drugs, and war since then, often with Kupferberg delivering deadpan lyrics in what the New York Times recently described as his “rabbinical monotone.” The group’s latest album, Be Free, comes out this week, though Kupferberg has been confined to his home since the fall, after two strokes left him virtually blind. He continues to make himself heard by way of daily dispatches, which he calls “perverbs,” posted on YouTube. He doesn’t consider himself religious, but his songs, poems, and missives are steeped in the Yiddish culture he grew up in. Reporter Jon Kalish profiled the performer—who, be warned, uses some explicit language.

Yehuda Halevi was, some say, the greatest Hebrew-language poet who ever lived. Also a physician and philosopher, he had the good fortune of living in a time and place—Andalusia, in southern Spain, in the 11th and 12th centuries—where the ability to write verse well was highly valued, and where there existed a culture of lively, if not always peaceful, exchange among Muslims, Jews, and Christians. In a new Nextbook Press biography, Hillel Halkin chronicles the life and work of Halevi, including his spiritual yearnings, which would ultimately lead him to make aliyah at a time when such a journey was all but unheard of. Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry spoke by phone to Halkin, who lives north of Tel Aviv, about Halevi’s ability to knock off a few lively verses in exchange for a jug of wine, about the tenuous nature of La Convivencia, “The Coexistence,” and about how he and Halevi found similar resolutions to midlife crises about what it means to be a Jew. 

 

The 19th arrondissement of Paris, on the city’s northern edge, is home to large populations of Sephardic Jews, Muslim immigrants from Africa, and a growing Lubavitch community. It has been known as a hub of anti-Semitic violence, but, surprisingly, it’s been calmer lately, even as anti-Semitic attacks have spiked in France, and throughout Western Europe, in the past year. Credit for the relative tranquility goes to clergy on all sides, who’ve worked with their communities to keep tensions from rising. Reporter Léa Khayata visited the area; her dispatch will appear on Tablet tomorrow. First, she spoke to Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about the recent efforts to build bridges in the 19th arrondissement.

 

In 1914, a Russian Jew writing under the name S. An-sky wrote a play called The Dybbuk. It concerns a young bride-to-be possessed by the spirit of her former lover, and it would go on to become one of the most popular plays in the Jewish- and Yiddish-theater repertoire. But An-sky’s pre-Dybbuk work might be his most valuable contribution to Jewish culture: from 1912 to 1914, the playwright led ethnographic expeditions throughout Russia’s Pale of Settlement, collecting Jewish folk tales, rituals, music, and other artifacts of daily and religious life. An-sky’s research has been an invaluable resource to students of Jewish history and culture. Now, a new body of material from those expeditions has come to light: approximately 350 photographs, comprising perhaps the most comprehensive visual record available of these small towns and the people who inhabited them. The photos are remarkable not only for the wealth of detail they offer about a way of life in transition, but also for the immediacy of the subjects themselves.

A collection of nearly 200 of these newly discovered photos is now available in a volume titled Photographing the Jewish Nation: Pictures from S. An-sky’s Ethnographic Expeditions. Vox Tablet spoke to two of the book’s editors, Eugene Avrutin and Harriet Murav, both professors at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, about the importance of this collection for anyone interested in shtetl life in the Russian Empire. A gallery of photos from the book appears below.

 

Jews have lived in what today is Hungary since the 11th century, and despite the devastation of World War II and discrimination under Communism, Hungary is home to the largest Jewish community between Paris and Moscow. Today, roughly 80,000 Jews live in Budapest alone. Over the years, Jewish culture has woven itself deeply into Hungarian life, particularly in the kitchen, where many dishes that are typically thought of as Hungarian actually have Jewish origins. London-based reporter Hugh Levinson took a culinary tour of Budapest with Bob Cohen, an American ethnomusicologist who has lived there for more than 20 years. Cohen writes a foodie blog, plays fiddle in his band, “Di Naye Kapelye,”  and is an expert on the tastes and tales of the local cuisine. Their first stop was Kádár, a tiny, legendary restaurant in the heart of the old Jewish district.

 

Daniel Menaker is a good talker. He has to be; the former New Yorker fiction editor and Random House executive editor-in-chief has long been highly sought for schmoozing opportunities of all sorts. In a freewheeling new book, A Good Talk: The Story and Skill of Conversation, Menaker writes about both why he believes conversation matters and the elements that make for a good conversationalist. (Curiosity, humor, and impudence, he says, are key.) For Vox Tablet, we asked him to have a chat with Joshua Halberstam, a philosopher and the author of Schmoozing, about private conversations among American Jews. It was Menaker and Halberstam’s first meeting, but it turned out they had a lot to say to each other, on topics ranging from ultra-Orthodox demographics to logical positivism.

 

The French Revolution is not generally considered a key moment in Jewish history.  But in his new book, Emancipation: How Liberating Europe’s Jews from the Ghetto Led to Revolution and Renaissance, Michael Goldfarb argues that the period that began with the Revolution and Jews’ consequent enfranchisement and ended nearly two centuries later with the Holocaust was marked by astonishing contributions by Jews to Western culture—in philosophy, industry, politics, literature, music, and the sciences.  Newly liberated Jews were in a unique position to challenge received wisdom in all areas, after experiencing such radical changes in their own way of life.  But their integration into European society also came at the expense of religious and cultural identity.

Goldfarb, former London bureau chief for National Public Radio and now an independent journalist living in London, speaks to Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about signifcant moments and personalities of that period, from philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, who left his Talmud studies in the Dessau ghetto to become what some referred to as “Germany’s Plato,” to the Rothschild dynasty and its antithesis, Karl Marx.

 

Children’s music has become much more interesting in the past decade. Now there are world-music lullaby collections, educational albums put out by indie rockers, and classical music repurposed for kids.  What about Jewish children’s music, has it kept up with the trend?  Tablet Magazine parenting columnist Marjorie Ingall assesses releases from 2009, measuring success by how long the album would be tolerated on a family road trip.