Vox Tablet

In the annals of biblical kings, David stands out. A humble shepherd, he slew Goliath, wrote poetry, dethroned his predecessor, and reigned in Israel for 40 years. His heroics inspired artists throughout history from Michelangelo to Shakespeare to Leonard Cohen. But David’s achievements in helping unite the Jews did not come without costs—he had innocent people killed, looked away at violence among his children, bedded married women.

In David: The Divided Heart, out from Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives Series, Rabbi David Wolpe takes a look at this Jewish hero—warts and all. Wolpe joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry...

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Defense attorneys—they’re the ones standing behind the chair of the accused on Law & Order and the 6 o’clock news. In cases where the defendant appears to be innocent, the defense attorney is our hero. But if it’s likely that the defendant is guilty, especially if the crime is violent, we look at these lawyers and wonder how they can represent such clients.

Erica Heilman wondered this herself. She’s the producer of a radio program called Rumblestrip Vermont, and for a recent hourlong episode called “The Defense,” she collected the stories, rants, and...

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Growing up in a Hasidic community, Basya Schechter heard music all around her—not rock music or even folk—but religious nigguns, or tunes. There were the zmirot–songs sung after Sabbath meals; the communal singing at Hanukkah; the prayers recited in unison in holiday liturgies. In her late teens, Schechter abandoned that world and its music. After college, she traveled extensively through the Middle East and North Africa and learned to play instruments from the region like the darbuka and oud. In 1998, Schechter formed the band Pharaoh’s Daughter, which ventured into all sorts of musical genres.

Now with Pharaoh’s Daughter Schechter...

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This month’s episode of Israel Story is devoted entirely to Chaya’s story. Chaya Ben Baruch grew up as Enid, in a Conservadox family in Far Rockaway, N.Y. Midway through college, she left that world behind to study sea otters in Fairbanks, Alaska.

Fast-forward a decade: Enid is now married to a nice Catholic salmon fisher named Stan. She’s just given birth to her sixth child, and discovers he has Down syndrome. Many parents in her position would be devastated. Some might place their baby in an institution, or put him up for adoption. For Enid, the birth of Angkor started her and her family on an incredible journey—to Tzfat, Israel, and...

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This is a sponsored podcast on behalf of Yale University Press and their Jewish Lives series.

When the composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein died nearly 25 years ago he left a broad legacy. He wrote music for Broadway. He devoted himself to education through the Young People's Concerts. He conducted the world’s finest orchestras. He wrote poetry. And he wrote classical pieces. While some critics cheered the range of his engagements, others argued that in spreading himself thin he squandered his compositional talents.

In

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Around the country, kids are settling into their classrooms for a new school year, unaware of the wars over curriculum, teacher evaluations, school funding, and other hot-button education topics. Just north of New York City, in the district of East Ramapo in Rockland County, one such battle has been brewing for nearly a decade, churning up racial and ethnic tensions as it goes. In 2005, the school board in East Ramapo underwent a change when Hasidic Jews living in the area voted enough Orthodox Jews into office to make them a majority. Yet by and large the children in the public schools the board oversees come from African American, Caribbean, and Latin American households, while the children of the area’s...

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We’ve all got our go-to story about brushes with fame, but Harold Fruchter’s is truly a conversation stopper. Fruchter, a singer and guitarist in a Jewish wedding band, and the son of a rabbi, was born in 1952. When he was a baby, and up to the age of 2, his family lived in the upstairs apartment of a two-story flat in Memphis. Their downstairs neighbors were the Presleys. The two families formed a friendship, and the future King of Rock, just a teenager then, learned to pick up the cues when the Fruchters needed someone to turn on a light or unlock a door on Shabbos. The Fruchters, for their part, helped Elvis out materially (if not...

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In our very first episode, the Israel Story team delves into the realm of fakes, forgeries, and mimicry. Three stories, from different periods and places, of people pretending to to be something they are not. (You can find Sipur Israeli, the original, Hebrew version of Israel Story, here.) [Listen to full episode here, or download from iTunes.]

Prologue: The Israeli This American Life?!...

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Several years ago, a group of four young Israelis—friends since childhood—got to work making a Hebrew-language radio show inspired by This American Life, the public-radio show two of them had grown to love while living in the United States. On the airwaves in Israel all that was available was talk radio and music, and the guys wanted something to listen to that was akin to the Ira Glass-hosted program with which they’d become obsessed. So, though they had never before made a radio story, they rolled up their sleeves to create what eventually became Sipur Israeli.

This year, the men—Ro’ee Gilron, Mishy...

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In 2011, adventure-seeking rock drummer-turned-Hasidic mother of four Dalia Shusterman became a widow. At about the same time, Perl Wolfe, born and raised in the Lubavitch sect of Hasidism, married and divorced, was living with her parents and beginning to write her own music. A few months later, the two women would meet in Crown Heights, Brooklyn and soon after that begin recording their first EP, titled “Down to the Top.”

Their band name, Bulletproof Stockings—a somewhat derogatory term used to refer to the opaque stockings worn by some Orthodox women—hints at their insider status as Hasidic women and also at a kind of freedom or...

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