Vox Tablet

By Vox TabletSociety & Culture Religion & Spirituality Arts Judaism

Vox Tablet episodes

February 13, 2012 The Projectionist
Actor Antony Sher has won accolades for playing Shylock, Richard III, Cyrano de Bergerac, Macbeth, and Primo Levi. Knighted in 2000, he’s traveled a great distance from his quiet middle-class upbringing in Cape Town, South Africa, and even further from the world of his grandparents, who were Jewish immigrants from Lithuania. Now Sher is returning to his roots in Travelling Light, an acclaimed new play by Nicholas Wright being produced by England’s National Theatre. (Selected National Theatre productions are broadcast to movie theaters worldwide via its NT Live program. Additional U.S. screenings of Travelling Light are scheduled for cities including Brooklyn, N.Y., Los Angeles, Chicago, Phoenix, and Minneapolis.) He plays Jacob Bindel, a wealthy timber merchant turned movie producer in an Eastern European town in the early 1900s. Through Bindel, the play explores how so many Jews came...
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17 min
February 06, 2012 Cheap Eats

The Ukrainian city of Lviv, also known as L’vov or Lemberg, has a rich but complicated past. On the eve of World War II, the city was home to the third-biggest Jewish population in what was then Poland, behind Warsaw and Lodz. Then came a familiar story: Nazi occupation, pogroms, a ghetto, and concentration camps, and finally the Soviets took over and erased whatever traces of Jewish life remained. The past remains a painful subject in Lviv, and there have been few public efforts to deal with the city’s dark Jewish history. And so a young Ukrainian entrepreneur sensed an opportunity. He opened Under the Golden Rose, a theme restaurant that he says honors the city’s Jewish past. It’s a place where diners are...
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17 min
January 30, 2012 Grace Notes
Virtuosic mandolin and clarinet player Andy Statman recently released his first album in five years. It's called Old Brooklyn, and it includes collaborations with a number of top-notch musicians, including Béla Fleck and Paul Shaffer. Perhaps most unusual, though, is the track titled “The Lord Will Provide.” The song is an 18th-century hymn, and this beautifully spare version is a collaboration between Statman, an Orthodox Jew, and country music star Ricky Skaggs, an evangelical Christian. Independent radio producer Stephanie Coleman wondered how this collaboration came about. Here's the story, as told to Coleman by Statman and Skaggs. [Running time: 10:20.]
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11 min
January 23, 2012 Goodbye to All That
The Jewish community in Caracas has long been lively, prosperous, tight-knit, and devoted to the country that accepted so many of them as refugees during and after World War II. At its height, it numbered as many as 40,000 people. But in the years since President Hugo Chávez came into office, their sense of well-being has eroded significantly. Like other wealthy Venezuelans, they have seen their economic opportunities diminished. Unlike other wealthy Venezuelans, they’ve been singled out in a rhetoric of class warfare that is sometimes implicitly, other times explicitly, anti-Semitic. In a few cases, that rhetoric has led to violence, as in 2009, when vandals broke into the Mariperez Synagogue, defacing it with anti-Semitic graffiti and destroying property. With their future uncertain, younger Jews are leaving Venezuela in droves, in many cases with their parents and grandparents following in their footsteps. Tablet’s Matthew Fishbane traveled to Caracas to
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18 min
January 17, 2012 Who Shall Live
When Varian Fry, an American journalist, went to Europe in 1941 on behalf of the Emergency Rescue Committee, he went with a mission: to save a group of European artists and intellectuals from the Nazis. His endeavor succeeded. With the help of a small team, he rescued Hannah Arendt, Marc Chagall, and more than 2,200 others. But at a time when Oskar Schindler and Raul Wallenberg are familiar names, Fry has been largely forgotten.
Journalist Dara Horn was determined to tell his story. In a revelatory Kindle Single published today by Tablet Magazine, Horn reports on how Fry came to his rescue work and what became of him after the war. (You can read a preview on Tablet.) But how did this hero decide whom to save in the first place? Horn spoke to Vox Tablet host Sara Ivy about Fry's exploits, the arguably eugenics-like nature of his mission, the cultural heritage that was...
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23 min
January 09, 2012 Hope Less
What if the Holocaust’s most famous victim hadn’t died in Bergen-Belsen but had continued living in hiding, moving furtively from attic to attic, until she found herself a perch in a house in upstate New York? That’s the premise of Hope: A Tragedy, the new novel by Shalom Auslander. It follows Solomon Kugel, the owner of the house, who discovers an ancient, haggard Anne Frank upstairs struggling to finish a follow-up to her famous diary. Kugel is put-upon; his marriage is strained, he flails at work, and his mother, who lives with him, is obsessed with Jewish persecution and pretends that she herself was a victim of the Nazis. In addition, Kugel is in ongoing conversation with a guru who posits that nothing good ever comes of optimism.
The novel, Auslander’s first, is both entertaining and disconcerting and Auslander, a
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21 min
December 19, 2011 Settling Down
Chani Getter was married off by her ultra-Orthodox family when she was 17. By the time she was 24, she had three children. She was deeply religious and deeply unhappy. She knew she was gay and could not stay in her marriage, but she also knew that she wanted to stay within the ultra-Orthodox community and raise an observant family. She is one of seven women (including a male-to-female transsexual) profiled in DevOUT, a new documentary produced and directed by Diana Neille and Sana Gulzar. Each of the women in the film is attempting to follow the strictures of Orthodoxy while embracing a sexual identity that the religious tradition has labeled an abomination.
This film is not covering entirely new turf. In 2001, Sandi Dubowski’s Trembling Before G-d also profiled gay Orthodox men and women. But DevOUT’s subjects are are settling down, raising families, and forcing their communities to come to terms with their existence...
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19 min
December 12, 2011 Disney’s World
Walt Disney was not a controversial figure during his lifetime. But after his death in 1966, historians began putting forth a variety of disquieting revelations about him: The animator and studio chief had testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, it turned out, and he may have been an FBI informant. He was allegedly interested in cryogenics. And he was reportedly prone to making anti-Semitic remarks. But subsequent biographers disagreed, sparking a long battle over Disney’s legacy.
Eric Molinsky worked in the animation industry, and has long wondered not only if the claims of Disney’s anti-Semitism are true but also why they remain a point of fascination and ridicule among cartoonists and others nearly a half-century after his death. For this week’s Vox Tablet, Molinsky, now a radio producer, spoke to an animation historian, a Disney-obsessed playwright, and a fairy-tale scholar in an effort to understand if Disney the man, or Disney’s world view, was truly bad for the...
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11 min
November 29, 2011 Wonderstruck
Several years ago a fan of the multi-instrumentalist Basya Schechter approached her with a copy of a book of Yiddish poems. The verses were by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who arrived in the United States from Europe in 1940, when he was 33 years old. Heschel was born in Poland and gained renown for his theological works and for his role as a Civil Rights activist. He was far less known for his poetry, written when he was in his early 20s, about intimate relationships—both with God and with people. Schechter’s fan asked her to set Heschel’s poems to music. It took some time for Schechter, who was raised in the Orthodox Brooklyn neighborhood of Borough Park and who heads the band Pharaoh’s Daughter, to take up that...
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25 min
November 18, 2011 American Master
It was 1982, and Robert Weide was 22 years old, when he first approached Woody Allen about profiling the comic in a documentary. Weide, a fan of comedy legends since his childhood, had already made The Marx Brothers in a Nutshell, an acclaimed film about Groucho and his brothers, but Allen politely turned him down. Instead, the filmmaker turned his focus to Mort Sahl, about whom he made 1989’s Mort Sahl: The Loyal Opposition, and Lenny Bruce, subject of his Emmy- and Oscar-nominated 1998 film, Lenny Bruce: Swear to Tell the Truth. Then he helped Larry David create Curb Your Enthusiasm, for which he served as executive producer for five seasons. When he approached Allen again, in 2008, the answer was yes.
The result is Woody Allen: A...
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19 min

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This is Vox Tablet, the weekly podcast of Tablet Magazine, the online Jewish arts and culture magazine that used to be known as Nextbook.org. Our archive of podcasts is available on our site,…

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