Vox Tablet

Is there a custom to place a cat, pieces of cake, or something else in the crib before one lays the child in it? Is biting off the protuberance at the end of an etrog considered a protection for a pregnant woman? If two zaddikim quarreled in this world, do they make peace in the next world?

These are questions from the Jewish Ethnographic Program, a vast questionnaire developed by ethnographer S. An-sky between 1912 and 1914 for dissemination throughout the Pale of Settlement, the part of Eastern Europe that was then home to 40 percent of the world’s Jews. An-sky, best known as the playwright of The Dybbuk, hoped the questionnaire would record waning folk beliefs and practices that he believed were at the core of Jewish life. But World War I interfered, and his ethnographic expedition was called off. An-sky died in 1920, and...

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It’s been nearly two months since the Occupy Wall Street protesters unrolled their first tarps in Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park. What was once merely a blip on a few Twitter feeds is now a world-wide phenomenon, with occupations in more than a thousand cities and towns in 80-odd countries. But in the absence of any leadership or specific set of demands, it’s hard to say what this movement is, who it represents, and where it’s headed. Even those who agree with its basic message–that the income gap between the rich and the rest in this country is immoral and unsustainable–disagree about Occupy Wall Street’s potential to bring about meaningful change.

At their respective pulpits, physical and virtual, Andy Bachman, senior rabbi at Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and Marc Tracy, Tablet Magazine’s Scroll blogger, have had a lot to say about the movement since its inception. This week on Vox...

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These days there is a lot to worry about: global warming, financial collapse, terrorism—you name it. For writer Max Brooks, the threat that trumps them all is zombies. He sounded a warning call about these walking dead in 2003 with The Zombie Survival Guide, followed three years later by World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, an immensely popular account of a massive zombie outbreak (the movie version, starring Brad Pitt, is due out in December 2012).

Brooks joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry on the podcast to discuss the perils of dressing up like a zombie on Halloween, the particular horrors that a zombie infestation represents to Jews, and the origins of his own zombie fears—traced to one fateful night circa 1985 when Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft opted not to hire a babysitter. [Running time: 14:40.]

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In 1900, a 14-year-old Jewish boy in Poland named David Gruen founded a Zionist youth group. He made his way to Palestine when he was 20, where he eventually changed his last name to Ben-Gurion. He went on to become a founding father of Israel and its first prime minister. One of Ben-Gurion’s key aides in founding the Jewish state was Shimon Peres, now the country’s president. Thirty-seven years younger than his hero, Peres similarly emigrated from Poland to Palestine and similarly served as Israel's prime minister. Peres won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994, along with Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, for his efforts in the talks that led to the Oslo Accords.

With the help of journalist David Landau, Peres has written a new biography of Ben-Gurion, his mentor: Ben-Gurion: A Political Life, available now from Nextbook Press. Landau, a former...

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Every day, people gather in lower Manhattan to pay tribute to an American icon. They are waiting, often for hours, for the ferry that will take them to the Statue of Liberty. While most visitors to the statue are familiar with the rousing poem displayed inside its base—“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” and so on—very few can name the poet who wrote it, Emma Lazarus. Even fewer know that Lazarus was a Sephardic Jew and a scholar, playwright, and novelist.

In 2006, Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry went to the Statue of Liberty ferry terminal to talk to visitors about Lazarus and solicit from them a group...

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Sukkot, which begins later this week, celebrates the end of the harvest season. People decorate their sukkahs with branches and fruits as a way of giving thanks for the season’s bounty. Yet Jews generally shy away from nature worship, with its echoes of idolatry and paganism. It is even argued that Judaism’s human-centered worldview—the belief that humans alone are made in God’s image—makes us particularly ill-suited to respond to warnings about shrinking glaciers and dying species.

How, then, does a religious Jew who is deeply concerned about threats to the environment galvanize her community? Evonne Marzouk, the founder and executive director of Canfei Nesharim, a Jewish environmental organization, addressed that question for Vox Tablet. She spoke to host Sara Ivry about rabbinical and Torah-based justifications for making environmental sustainability a priority, her own journey to...

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Blasphemy and Other Serious Crimes, the latest album from the jazz-metal band Pitom, has a title that makes explicit reference to the vidui, or confession—one of Yom Kippur’s central prayers. The vidui is a recitation of the many ways in which we sin—by robbery, by lying, by blasphemy. But while the album may flirt with sin in its raucous approach, it comes from a place of devotion. Yoshie Fruchter, the leader of Pitom, is the son and grandson of cantors, and professes an abiding love for the traditional melodies sung on Yom Kippur. The songs on the album, which was released by John Zorn’s Tzadik label, are meant to invoke the intense emotions that accompany the holiday’s centuries-old prayers. The result is rich, loud, and cathartic.

For Vox Tablet, Fruchter and Jeremy Brown, Pitom’s violinist, played a stripped-down version of the track “Neilah,” and they explained to host Sara Ivry why a...

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Like Isaac Bashevis Singer, his fellow Yiddish writer, Chaim Grade (his last name is pronounced GRAH-duh) fled the Russian Empire and settled in New York, where he established himself as a major figure in the literary world. But while Singer’s fame flourished in America, Grade’s reach grew more limited. After Grade died in 1982, scholars, translators, and publishers tried to acquire his unpublished works for posthumous publication but were stymied by Grade’s widow. Fiercely protective of her husband’s legacy, Inna Grade rebuffed nearly all who approached her. Meanwhile, the Grade apartment in the Bronx would become an impassable and grimy shrine to her husband’s papers and books.

Inna Grade died last year. In the ensuing months, Yiddishists have thrilled to the possibility that they will finally gain access to her husband’s...

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In her best-selling memoir, The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit, journalist Lucette Lagnado brought to life the multiethnic metropolis of Cairo in the 1940s and 1950s. Lagnado’s father, Leon, a debonair man-about-town, thrived in that cosmopolitan world, and young Lucette basked in his glow. But Egypt’s 1952 revolution changed all that. The family held on for a time, finally immigrating to the United States in 1962, and Lagnado’s book—winner of the 2008 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature—arrestingly described her father’s steady decline.

Now she has written a second memoir, The Arrogant Years: One Girl’s Search for Her Lost Youth, that offers a loving and often devastating portrait of her mother and all that she sacrificed to keep her family...

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