Tablet Magazine - a new read on Jewish life
by natalie zemon davis
double trouble


A stereoscope card featuring photographs of the actor Adah Isaacs Menken (1835-68), an American actress known best for her performance in the melodrama Mazeppa based on the life of the Ukrainian legend Ivan Mazepa (1639–1709). The story goes that as a young man, he was caught in flagrante with a noblewoman, whose husband punished him by tying him naked to a wild horse. When the horse reached the Cossacks, Mazeppa became their military leader. The story underwent many adaptations, including one by the English poet Lord Byron and, in the United States, a melodramatic burlesque in which Menken played a female Mazeppa. Menken was the first American Jewish performer to cultivate an outrageous stage personality.
A Feminist Avant La Lettre
Yalta
The Talmud reports that Yalta (the second most mentioned woman in the Talmud after the daughter of Rav Chisda) was a “bright spark,” educated by her father, and had “vast medical knowledge.” A story in Tractate Chulin describes a ruling she made for herself after challenging rabbis on an affair having to do with menstruation. As the scholar Mia Amram explains, Yalta’s record of “adjudicating for women’s issues, contradicting the highest regarded rabbis, and rewriting ancient laws to finally include women in Jewish practices” might maker her the first Jewish feminist.
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Ep. 3: Dartmouth and the Jews Who Loved It
How a laid-back college in the mountains became an unlikely oasis for midcentury Jews
September 20, 2022
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Those who do not remember the past are ... probably not Jewish
sassoon splendour
Known as the Rothschilds of the East, the Sassoon family made its money in the cotton trade in Iraq and the opium trade in its more recent home in the United Kingdom. But they branched out. Rachel Sassoon-Beer was the editor-in-chief of The Observer and The Sunday Times and David Solomon Sassoon was an avid collector of Judaica. The Sassoon Codex will be auctioned off at Sotheby’s this month for a projected price of no less than 30 million. A new exhibit, “Through the Saga of the Sassoon Family,” is now on at the Jewish Museum.







