Vox Tablet

Five years after Bernard Madoff admitted to his sons, and then to federal investigators, that he had been running the largest Ponzi scheme in history, the saga of his monumental ripoff continues to unspool. Lawsuits, settlements, and criminal trials are still ongoing, and Madoff himself, now 75, is just at the start of serving his prison sentence, with a fantastical projected release date in November 2139. Like a Mafia capo, he went down professing his own guilt but offered little in the way of help or information about the complicity of others.

Some of those others—from the wealthy money managers who like Madoff had the trust of their clients to Madoff’s office staff charged with helping conduct the fraud—have clung to their claims of victimization at the hands of a man whose career as one of the world’s most sophisticated investors was, as he infamously put it, “one big lie.”

In Manhattan, the trial of five key Madoff employees—who are charged with fabricating and mailing client...

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A warning to listeners: This episode of Vox Tablet contains explicit language and content you wouldn't normally hear on our podcast. To censor such language, offensive as it may be, felt contrary to the spirit of Lambert's argument, which posits a connection between “obscenity” and Jewish culture and continuity.

Jews are oversexed. That’s a long-held stereotype. And, like most stereotypes, it’s baloney. What is true, however, is that Jews in America have been fighters on the front lines in producing, distributing, and defending sexually explicit materials for more than a century.

Josh Lambert, a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts and a Tablet contributing editor, addresses why that has...

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The Hanukkah song “Ocho Kandelikas” (Eight Little Candles) is often referred to as a “traditional Sephardic song.” In fact, it was written in 1983 by Flory Jagoda, an 88-year-old Sephardic folk singer who still performs today.

“Ocho Kandelikas” is one of dozens of songs Jagoda has written and recorded, drawing from a rich musical tradition and sung in Ladino, or Judeo-Spanish, the language she grew up with as a child in Bosnia. She carried that language and musical tradition with her to the United States, after WWII destroyed most of her family and the way of life she’d known.

Here, Jagoda offers her memories of making music with her mother, grandmother, aunts, and uncles as a child, and of her...

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Esther Amini’s mother—or Bibi (“grandma” in Farsi), as the family calls her—grew up in Mashhad, a holy Islamic city in Iran. To escape persecution, Bibi and other Jews kept their religious observance well-hidden. She immigrated in 1948 to the United States, where Esther was born. In the years that followed, the holiday of Thanksgiving—celebrating, among other things, the gift of religious freedom—came to hold a privileged place for her and her family, alongside Rosh Hashanah and Passover.

Amini’s account of this family tradition is one of eight narratives in Saffron and Rosewater: Songs and Stories From Persian Women, a theatrical production of the

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We know from witness testimony, and the work of historians, that though there were a handful of women among the most notoriously violent Nazi camp guards and bureaucrats, for the most part, German women were absent from Nazi positions of power. That might lead us to conclude that they were not active participants in the genocide that took place.

In Hitler’s Furies, historian Wendy Lower tells us such a conclusion is wrong. She argues that many young women seeking opportunity during the war headed to the eastern territories where the vast majority of the killing took place. There they took on essential roles as teachers, nurses, secretaries, and wives and lovers. In those capacities, they were not only aiding in the Final Solution but also witnessing it, and in some cases committing acts of violence...

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Last year, a film was released in Poland that was so controversial it was banned in some towns. Opening in New York on Friday and Los Angeles later this month, Pokłosie—or, Aftermath—is a thriller that tells the story of a rural farmer on a mission. At night, Józek Kalina digs up Jewish grave markers that were looted from a local cemetery and used by fellow villagers in their roads and gardens. Józek is trying to give the village’s Jewish dead a proper burial, but there’s a high cost to his activity. His wife has left him and taken the children, and his neighbors are reacting with growing menace.

The film is brutal and haunting, invoking the horrors of the...

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It’s fairly common nowadays to hear renditions of “Sunrise, Sunset,” for instance, or “The Sabbath Prayer,” memorable melodies from the Fiddler on the Roof, at bar mitzvahs or weddings. Songs from that musical—whose story is inspired by the work of Sholem Aleichem—have become an indelible part of our popular cultural lexicon not just in the United States, but worldwide. Directed by Jerome Robbins and starring Zero Mostel, Fiddler debuted on Broadway in 1964 and quickly became a smash, resonating with Jewish audiences comfortable enough in their assimilated lives in America to be able to look fondly back at the shtetl their parents left behind. How the play got made and what its significance has been for peoples of all ethnicities and backgrounds is the subject of a new book by Columbia University professor Alisa Solomon.

Solomon joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to discuss

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For most of its first 50-plus years, the Yiddish language Jewish Daily Forward (now 116 years old) was edited by its founder, Abraham Cahan. Cahan was a Lithuanian immigrant and socialist who came to this country alone at the age of 22, in 1882. Within five years, he’d established himself as a leader of the Jewish immigrant community and as an industrious reporter with friends like the muckraker journalist Lincoln Steffins and the literary critic William Dean Howells.

How Cahan climbed the political, journalistic, and literary (he wrote the critically acclaimed novel The Rise of David Levinsky) ranks of 20th century America is the topic of The Rise of Abraham Cahan, a new biography by Seth Lipsky. In 1990, Lipsky founded the English-language Forward. He joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to discuss how Cahan managed to wear the seemingly conflicting hats...

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When people hear the name Sholem Aleichem, they very often think of Tevye the Dairyman and his Broadway showstoppers. It’s true, Sholem Aleichem wrote the stories on which Fiddler on the Roof is based, but his body of work is much broader than that. In dozens of stories, novels, newspaper articles, plays, and even poems, Sholem Aleichem, who was born Sholem Rabinovich, depicted the humor and despair that characterized shtetl life at a moment when it faced threats from within and without. He was also a great advocate of Yiddish, and of the Jewish people. Readers and critics considered him the “Jewish Mark Twain” and when he died from tuberculosis in 1916 at the age of 57, he left behind tens of thousands of fans in Europe and the United States.

His life was relatively short but it made a lasting mark. Sholem Aleichem is now the subject of a new biography by Jeremy Dauber, a professor of Yiddish at Columbia University. The book is...

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