Vox Tablet

Poet and writer Rita Gabis grew up surrounded by grandparents with accents—Russian, Yiddish, Lithuanian. That makes it sound like a familiar Jewish immigrant tale, but it was far from that. While Gabis’s father came from a family of Russian Jews who immigrated to the United States well before WWII, her mother was born in Lithuania. She and her family emigrated in the 1950s. And they were Catholic.

As a child, Gabis was vaguely aware that these two different family backgrounds were at odds with each other. It was as an adult, however, that she came to understand that the divide went much deeper, and that her mother’s father, her beloved Senelis as she called him...

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For the past nine years, at this time of year, Andy Bachman, a favorite Vox Tablet guest, would be gathering his thoughts in order to lead High Holiday services at Brooklyn’s Congregation Beth Elohim. Bachman was the head rabbi there. It’s a synagogue with a reputation for community engagement and social activism, and claims among its congregants a host of outspoken and influential personalities (Sen. Charles Schumer and Jonathan Safran Foer are among them).

This year is different. Bachman stepped down from the pulpit earlier this summer and...

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There are roughly three weeks until the summer clock unofficially runs down. How will you spend these last lazy days? Maybe you’ll be under an umbrella by the sea or in a hammock next to a green meadow or flopped on a big, soft couch in your very own living room. Wherever you are, you’ll want a good book by your side.

To help you figure out exactly what that good book will be, Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry asked some experts what they’ve enjoyed reading this summer and what they’re still yearning to dive into.

Music for this week’s podcast comes from Podington Bear.

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Book Recommendations:

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First there was Vox Tablet. Then there was Israel Story. Now, we are excited to present Unorthodox, Tablet’s newest podcast and part of Slate’s Panoply network.

Hosted by Tablet Editor-at-Large Mark Oppenheimer and featuring Deputy Editor Stephanie Butnick and Senior Writer Liel Leibovitz, the weekly show includes fresh, fun, and “disturbingly honest” (says Oppenheimer) discussion of the latest Jewish news and culture, plus interviews with two guests—one Jewish, the other not.

In the first episode, which you can listen to below or by subscribing to Unorthodox on iTunes, after a weighty disquisition on the place of Adam Sandler and Andy Samberg in contemporary Jewish culture, the panelists chat with...

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In 1961, a librarian in a municipal archive in Strasbourg caught a visitor tearing pages out of a manuscript and stuffing them into his briefcase. The visitor, it turned out, was a widely respected historian who had done ground-breaking scholarship on the history of Jews in France.

It soon became apparent that this was not the first time Zosa Szajkowski had procured documents by questionable means. He’d been doing so for years, before, during and especially after the Holocaust, and the thousands of pages he’d collected had in turn been sold to important archives throughout the United States and Israel. Why did he...

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For many Jews, the fact that Albert Einstein was Jewish is a point of pride. But what do we know about his Jewish self-identification? And how many folks out there could claim to have a basic understanding of his General Theory of Relativity? In Einstein: His Space and Time, biographer Steven Gimbel tackles these and other fundamental aspects of Einstein’s life and work. Gimbel is chairman of the philosophy department at Gettysburg College. He spoke with Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about Einstein’s religious period (it came to an abrupt end when he discovered geometry at age 10), his clashes with all forms of authority, and his love of Israel, which fit uneasily with his profound distrust of nationalism. Gimbel also lays out the basic tenets of Einstein’s achievements in physics in terms that will make even science-phobes comfortable.

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Jessica Fechtor was just 28 years old when a blood vessel in her brain burst while she was exercising on a treadmill. Newly married, she was pursuing a Ph.D. in Jewish literature at Harvard, and she and her husband had just started thinking about having a baby. Now, suddenly, she was facing a long and difficult recovery–one that got even harder when complications arose after an initial surgery.

Before she was even out of the hospital, Jessica started making lists. Not to-do lists, but grocery lists. She’d always loved cooking, and suddenly, the act of mixing ingredients to produce something delicious for herself and for the people around her felt more important than ever.

She describes what happened in a new book that’s two parts memoir and one part cookbook. It’s...

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During his political career, Léon Blum—who served three short terms as French prime minister between 1936 and 1947—was derided by his detractors as “a woman,” a “weak Jew,” and even a traitor. Meanwhile, he was worshiped by many French workers, grateful to him for introducing the 40-hour work week, vacation time, and other legislation from his Socialist agenda. According to sociologist Pierre Birnbaum, author of the new biography Léon Blum: Prime Minister, Socialist, Zionist, none of these characterizations captures the complexity of this under-appreciated figure.

In an interview with Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry, Birnbaum describes Blum as a remarkably brave, intelligent, and unflappable leader...

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More than a decade ago, an Italian-born Jerusalem-based singer named Shulamit learned of a collection of songs composed in concentration camps during WWII. Written by a handful of women most of whom perished in the war, the songs nearly possessed her. Shulamit began performing them, and in 2013 started working with trumpet player Frank London, of the Klezmatics, and the Israeli pianist Shai Bachar, to make arrangements and adaptations for an album.

That album, called For You the Sun Will Shine: Songs of Women in the Shoa, is now out.

From her apartment in Jerusalem, Shulamit tells Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about the individual...

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These days it'd be pretty hard to walk without a ticket onto a boarding airplane bound for an international locale. Between the TSA and sniffer dogs, any would-be stowaway would likely see the inside of a jail cell pretty fast. But before September 11, in fact, before 1970, it wasn't quite as challenging.

When Victor Rodack, now a psychiatrist in his 60s, was a young teenager he had but one dream: to get to Israel. He tells Vox Tablet producer Julie Subrin exactly how he made that dream come true.

Bonus track: Listen to Victor’s press conference at JFK Airport, just after he landed back in the United States. (Thanks to Victor Rodack and Paul Ruest for making this archival interview...

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