Vox Tablet

In 1952, Meyer Levin had every reason to believe he would bring Anne Frank’s diary to the stage. Levin, an American who served as a war correspondent in Europe during World War II, first came across Frank’s diary in a Paris bookshop in 1951. He immediately contacted Frank’s father, Otto, and was instrumental in getting the book published in the United States, and then in attracting the interest of readers, thanks to a glowing review he wrote for the New York Times.

Otto Frank granted Levin the rights to adapt the diary for stage, but Levin would never see that dream realized. The production only got as far as a preliminary radio play. It’s hard to pin down why. Some say the Anne Frank that Levin was so moved by—indeed revered—was too Jewish a character for early 1950s American audiences. Others say Levin’s difficult personality and lack of writing ability scuttled the project. Either way, Levin eventually relinquished the stage rights, shunned by Frank and his cohort. The failure left...

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Hanna Rosin’s new book The End of Men argues that changes in the U.S. economy—specifically the vast reduction of manufacturing jobs combined with growth in health, human resources, education, and other traditionally female-dominated professions—are leaving men in the dust in corporate culture, at universities, in families, and in popular culture. To what extent are these trends reflected in Jewish American communal life and leadership?

Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry is joined by Andy Bachman, rabbi of Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn (and U.S. history and politics buff), and Shifra Bronznick, founding president of Advancing Women Professionals and the Jewish Community, to discuss Rosin’s thesis, and how it might resonate in a Jewish context. They speak as Jewish leaders, as people who are privy to the private concerns of Jewish men and women who are struggling with these changes, and as parents of sons and daughters who will have to navigate...

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Zach Fredman is a musician, composer, and rabbi-in-training now in his fifth year at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Over the past several years, he has worked to combine his spiritual and musical passions by composing devotional songs that draw on his favorite musical traditions. Those include Indian raga, North African rhythms and forms of chanting, as well as the Grateful Dead and Aretha Franklin.

For lyrics, he turned to Torah and other religious texts. For collaborators, he turned to musicians whose work, like his, isn’t easily categorized. Perhaps most surprising is his singer Alsarah, a Muslim woman who grew up in Sudan and Yemen, went to Wesleyan University, and now leads the band Alsarah and the Nubatones from her base in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Together, the 10-person band, which is called the Epichorus, is releasing their first album, One Bead, available here at the end of this...

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When Theodore Ross moved with his newly divorced mother and brother to the Gulf Coast of Mississippi at age 9, the family pretended not to be Jewish. This deceit was his mother’s idea, and years later it led Ted to question whether he should consider himself a Jew at all, having been discouraged from embracing any religious identification as a young person. In recent years, the desire to answer that question led him to seek out other Jews who are outliers in some way, from crypto-Jews in the Southwest, to the “lost tribe” Ethiopian Jews now resettled in Israel, to ultra-Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn who welcome him into their homes for Shabbat.

Ross writes about these journeys in Am I a Jew? Lost Tribes, Lapsed Jews, and One Man’s Search for Himself. He joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to talk about why his mother demanded that he hide his religious identity, what it was like pretending not to be entirely himself, and why he chose to...

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Originally from Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, and now based in and around Tel Aviv, the Alaev Family includes three generations of musicians. They’re led by Allo Alaev, the family patriarch, who’s now 80 and who spent 50 years as a percussionist with the Folk Opera of Dushanbe. These days he leads the seven-person family ensemble, which includes his sons and grandchildren. Together, they update traditional Jewish and Central Asian folk songs to create a propulsive and almost ecstatic new sound.

This month, the Alaevs concluded a world tour with a gig at Lincoln Center’s Out of Doors Festival. They also have a new CD, produced with Tamir Muskat, the drummer of the high-energy dance band Balkan Beat Box. And, come fall, they’ll be hitting the road once again, bringing their singular sound to...

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David Rakoff, a contributor to our site, died Aug. 9, 2012, after a battle with cancer. He was 47.

Some years ago, Rakoff wrote an essay on the life and work of Viennese writer Felix Salten. The creator of Bambi, Salten was a European Jew who wrote soft porn and a prominent critic in early 20th-century Austria. In concert with this essay, Rakoff joined Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry for a podcast conversation about the brutality in Bambi, about Salten’s place in literary society, and about the dark side of fairy tales—and life.

We re-run this piece now to celebrate David Rakoff, whose wit, warmth, and grace come across in every utterance, and whose reading of a particularly wrenching scene from Bambi gives a sense both of the work's violence and of Rakoff’s own captivating voice....

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Most of us would just as soon avoid airports, with their long lines and testy patrons. But Betty Sussman thrives there. She is one of approximately 90 volunteers who work a four-hour shift each week at the Palm Beach International Airport, greeting visitors as “airport ambassadors.” Sussman (who turns 81 this month) is not your typical South Floridian. She is still employed; four days a week she works as an office manager for an ophthalmologist. For her, being an airport ambassador eases some of the loneliness she experiences during the weekend—time she used to spend with her husband before he died six years ago. Plus there are perks: She makes good use of the meal voucher she earns each shift, redeemable at any of the airport’s concessions.

Miami-based radio producer Trina Sargalski trailed Betty on one of her Sunday-morning shifts and sent us this dispatch. This...

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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....

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With the start of the Summer Olympics just days away, the International Olympic Committee remains firm in its insistence that there will be no commemoration marking the tragedy that took place 40 years ago, at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, Germany. It was there that 11 Israeli athletes and coaches were taken hostage and then murdered by a Palestinian terrorist group known as Black September. A German police officer and five of the hostage-takers also died in the standoff.

The United States, Germany, Australia, and Israel have called for a public remembrance at this summer’s games in London. Their efforts have been for naught. The IOC says it does not want to “politicize” the event with a memorial service even while international pressure—including from President Obama—to hold such a commemoration mounts.

David Clay Large is a historian of modern Germany who has written about the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Munich under Nazi rule, and, most recently,...

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Many people think of Islam, or religion generally, as disempowering for girls and women. The Light in Her Eyes, a documentary by Laura Nix and Julia Meltzer, challenges that notion. It follows Houda al-Habash, a conservative Muslim, wife, mother, preacher, and founder of a girls’ religious school in Damascus. In observing al-Habash, her children, students, and colleagues at school, at home, in shopping malls, and at outdoor cafés, the film explores how modernity and Muslim faith co-exist, challenging many Western assumptions that such co-existence is a fallacy.

Meltzer and Nix join Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to talk about the difficulties they had filming as American women—one Jewish, one Christian—in Syria and about their audiences' reactions to the seemingly contradictory values and aspirations expressed by al-Habash and her students.

The Light in Her Eyes airs on the PBS series “POV” on July 19, 2012, and...

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