Vox Tablet

In 2009, a visitor to the British Museum presented curator Irving Finkel with a fascinating artifact—a 4,000-year-old Babylonian cuneiform tablet that told of a flood, and an ark, but with mysterious details unfamiliar from previously discovered tablets of that period. Finkel’s official title is Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian script, languages, and cultures; a discovery like this was right up his alley. He spent the next several years turning the tablet over and over (literally and figuratively), trying to decode its message, and to forge a path between that text and the story that would appear in the Book of Genesis some 1,000 years later.

His new book, The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the...

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It was all over the Dutch press this past spring—the revelation that in the years immediately following the Nazi occupation, Amsterdam authorities came after the small trickle of returning Dutch Jews who owned property and told them they owed outstanding leasehold fees from the time they were away – indeed, the authorities demanded that they not only pay those fees, but also fines for late payment.

The person who first discovered this mind-bogglingly absurd requirement was Charlotte van den Berg, a then 21-year-old mild-mannered intern working at the Amsterdam City Archives....

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Passover, Sukkot, and Shavuot are harvest festivals that hearken back to a time when Jews were farmers just like everyone around them. But Jews as professional farmers did not endure in fact or as a stereotype. Instead, Jews moved into more highly skilled fields—as moneylenders, traders, doctors, lawyers. What happened centuries ago that caused most of the world’s Jewry to move from tilling fields to work that required them to be able to read and write? That’s the question that a pair of economists—Maristella Botticini of Bocconi University in Milan, and Zvi Eckstein of the School of Economics at ICD Herzliya in Israel, set out to answer in their recent book,

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

Students of Jewish history—and the history of Mandate Palestine—are familiar with the name Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky. Born in Odessa, Jabotinsky was a journalist and an ardent Zionist committed to the establishment of the state of Israel. He was also a talented novelist, poet and screenwriter. In Jabotinsky: A Life, writer Hillel Halkin examines the full extent of Jabotinsky’s influence. He joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to discuss the liberal Jewish...

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When Gili Yalo was 4 years old, he discovered that he loved to sing. It was in 1984, during a two-month trek through the desert on the first leg of a long journey from Ethiopia to Israel, where his parents believed life would be better for them.

Thirty years later, Yalo is still singing, now with Zvuloon Dub System and in a musical style that encompasses the different aspects of his life—immigrant, Israeli, Jew. Based in Tel Aviv, Zvuloon Dub System plays an irresistible blend of roots reggae and classical Ethiopian pop. They are now touring the United States to celebrate the release of their new album,

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Poopa Dweck is the poster woman for Syrian Jewish cooking. Her cookbook, Aromas of Aleppo, won a National Jewish Book Award. She gives lectures, does cooking demonstrations on television, and travels the world talking about the food of her ancestors. Dweck even has her own line of condiments, featuring specialties such as quince orange-blossom confit.

But if you really want to see Dweck in her element, you score an invitation to visit her at her home kitchen in a seaside town in New Jersey when she’s got her sleeves up and is elbow deep, once or twice a year, in soaking tamarind. That’s what producer Emma Morgenstern did...

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

Sigmund Freud nearly boasted of the fact that he was ignorant of “everything that concerned Judaism.” He also held a deep mistrust of biography—so much so that the father of psychoanalysis burned his papers in order to try to thwart would-be future biographers. So you can see why Adam Phillips may have been daunted by the suggestion that he write a biography of Freud for Yale University Press's Jewish Lives series. Nevertheless, he decided to have a go at it.

A psychoanalyst, the editor of the Penguin Modern Classic translations of Freud published in...

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Slava Gelman, a twentysomething aspiring writer, is trying to claw his way out of the post-Soviet Brooklyn neighborhood of his family. But his grandfather is determined to pull him back in. He wants to enlist Slava to invent life stories for Soviet émigrés in the hopes of getting money from the claims conference for Holocaust survivors, despite the fact that technically these émigrés are not survivors.

It’s a preposterous—and sometimes hilarious—scenario but one that raises serious questions about truth, fiction, and suffering. Those matters are at the heart of A Replacement Life, the debut novel from émigré writer Boris...

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Last weekend brought bad news from Europe: Far right parties in France, Denmark, Austria and elsewhere won big in the European Parliamentary elections. And in Brussels, four people died after a shooting at the city’s Jewish Museum. The attack came in a spring punctuated by anti-Semitic violence in France, the U.K., and elsewhere. All of these incidents have elicited the question: Is it time for Jews to leave Europe?

To find out if things are as hostile for Jews in Europe as they seem from the vantage point of U.S. shores, Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry speaks with two young European Jewish leaders. Andi Gergely grew up in Hungary and is the chairperson of the World Union of Jewish Students. Though now based in...

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jewish-American family lore is full of stories about how a great uncle or grandmother passed through Ellis Island when they came to the United States from Riga or Salonika or any other number of places in Europe. What we don’t typically hear about are Jews who entered the United States illegally, sneaking over the border in El Paso or being smuggled in along with a shipment of booze during Prohibition. The term “illegal alien” isn’t one usually uttered by Jews in conjunction with Jews.

Yet in her new book After They Closed the Gates: Jewish Illegal Immigration to the United States 1921-1965, historian Libby Garland demonstrates that in the early part of the...

See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.