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Reporter Digs Up Converso Past
New York Times writer Doreen Carvajal goes to Spain to understand why her ancestors hid their Jewish roots
Doreen Carvajal was raised Catholic and had no occasion to question her religious or cultural heritage growing up. Even when she became a journalist (she’s currently a European correspondent for the New York Times and International Herald Tribune) and readers, seeing her byline, wrote to tell her that her last name was a common Sephardic Jewish name, she remained incurious. It took moving to Arcos de la Frontera, an ancient town in Andalusia, Spain, for her to finally confront the likelihood that her ancestors were conversos—that is, Spanish Jews who 600 years ago converted to Christianity rather than face death or exile during the Inquisition.
In a new memoir, The Forgetting River, Carvajal describes her search for definitive answers to questions about her identity. That search took her to Costa Rica, university archives and genetic specialists, frontier towns in Spain, and her own cache of forgotten memories and keepsakes. She speaks with Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about what she found out. [Running time: 17:30.]
Women Join Talmud Celebration
As the daf yomi cycle of Talmud learning concludes this week, a Jerusalem study group breaks a barrier
Leonard Cohen’s Long, Strange, Sometimes Tortured Road to Mastering His Own Sound
Liel Leibovitz, who has a new book out on the rock ’n’ roll poet, looks at how Cohen’s songs evolved from bleak to transcendent
‘Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah’: Inside 19th-Century Yiddish Letter-Writing Manuals
Correspondence templates taught Jews both literacy and how to be modern. A new anthology shows their entertainment value.
When a Daughter of the Holocaust Meets a Daughter of the Third Reich
No one Lynn talked to understood how she, the child of a survivor, could cut ties with her family. Then she met Inga.
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