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Vox Tablet
Vox Tablet episodes
- Pin the Crime on the Jew: Blood Libel and the Case of Mendel Beilis
The myth that Jews murder Christian children and use their blood to make matzo, a legend known as the blood libel, used to rear its ugly head with frightening frequency. Arguably the most famous instance of this accusation took place in 1913, with the trial of Mendel Beilis.
Beilis, a barely observant Jew, worked in a brick factory in the slums of Kiev. In 1911, he was accused of murdering Andrei Yushchinsky, a poor, 13-year-old boy. From the outset, “ritual murder” served as an excuse to accuse a Jew, despite ample...
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17 min - As If You Needed It, Yet Another Reason To Be in Miami: The Delis
As this endless winter drags on, making life miserable for those unfortunates living in the Midwest and Northeast, the wise among us have made the well-worn pilgrimage to South Florida. The tradition dates back to just after WWII, when Jews from cities like Baltimore, Philadelphia, and especially New York began flocking to Miami Beach for the winter. And in Miami Beach, they wanted delis just like the ones they ate in back home. In fact, the postwar years were a golden age for the Jewish deli in Miami Beach, from Raphil’s to Wolfie Cohen’s Rascal House and Pumperniks.
Times change, though...
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10 min - Talmud for Boys, Challah-Making for Girls—Gender Rules in Orthodox Day Schools
In the past several decades, it has become increasingly common to find religious women who are doctors, professors, scientists, and rabbis. Yet while they’ve gained acceptance as professionals in their community, their children often get very different messages in Jewish day schools about acceptable and unacceptable gender roles. There, rigorous training in Jewish thought, or math and science, for that matter, may be offered to boys only, while girls may find that more attention is paid to the length of their sleeves, and skirts, than to their questions about Rashi.
Differential treatment of boys and girls is not unique to Jewish day schools. But for those invested in...
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24 min - How the Concept of Shtetl Moved From Small-Town Reality to Mythic Jewish Idyll
Until roughly the end of the 19th century, a shtetl was just a shtetl—that is, a town as designated in Yiddish, and nobody paid them any particular attention. Then interest in shtetls as places where Eastern Europe Jews lived picked up. Assimilated Western European Jews embarked on heritage tours to survey their exotic brethren in the east, academic interest in folk-life grew, and representations of shtetl life began appearing with more frequency in literature. After that came the Holocaust, which dealt life in the shtetl a final blow. Yet in a sense the shtetl did not die at that point. In fact, it—or the idea of it—has thrived in the decades since the end of WWII as artists, filmmakers, and writers have depicted shtetls—and what they imagine them to...Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
32 min - The Sounds of Your Favorite Films—Including ‘Cabaret’ and ‘The Producers’—Remastered
David Krakauer is best-known and loved for his rocking klezmer clarinet, though he has long worked in other genres too, including jazz, classical, and funk. With his newest project, called The Big Picture, he even crosses media. In The Big Picture Krakauer takes memorable songs from films with some Jewish connection—like “Tradition” from Fiddler on the Roof, “Body and Soul” from Radio Days—and, with the help of five other talented musicians, makes them his own. The project has an additional element: A visual-effects team called Light of Day has made a series of short films to accompany Krakauer’s invigorating...
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21 min - Living the Middle-Class Dream—Beyond the Green Line, in a West Bank Settlement
Many people outside Israel think that settlers in the Palestinian territories are a small but powerful group of religious zealots—back-to-the-land types who form hilltop encampments and chase Palestinians from their olive groves. Though that kind of scenario exists, it is not what anthropologist Callie Maidhof found, for the most part, when she embarked on her field research in the West Bank. Maidhof wanted to find out who lives in settlements and why they go there, so she moved to a settlement of 8,000 people—she likens it to an American bedroom community—for nearly a year. The answers she found challenged the perception that religious Zionism has motivated nearly one in 10 Israeli Jews to put down roots in the West Bank and raised the new question of why that perception...
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17 min - Germans Want To Put the Holocaust Behind Them. One Citizen Says, ‘Not So Fast.’
Yascha Mounk grew up in Germany in the 1980s and ’90s. As a distinct minority, he gradually came to understand that his presence brought out a mixture of anti-Semitism, philo-Semitism, and profound discomfort in his fellow Germans. All Mounk wanted was a conversation without the fact of his Jewish background casting any special shadow. That such a conversation seemed impossible, he argues, has to do with Germany’s failure to reckon thoroughly with its own history—and it led Mounk to settle, for now, in the United States.
In Stranger in My Own Country: A Jewish Family in Modern Germany, the 31-year-old Mounk looks at how Germans have dealt with the...
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23 min - Stop Texting. Make a Resolution To Reconnect the Old Fashioned Way.
If you’re a parent living in the 21st century, chances are you have occasionally used digital technology for back-up when your patience is wearing thin, either to escape into your own work or social network, or to distract the kids with virtual entertainment. (If you haven’t, well, the rest of us bow down to you in awe and admiration.) But what is the impact when parents and their kids turn to texting or video games or other electronic distractions, rather than turning to each other? According to Catherine Steiner-Adair, these habits pose a serious threat to families, friendships, and even childhood as we know it. Steiner-Adair is a clinical psychologist and school consultant, and she draws on conversations with more than...Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
23 min - The Truth About Santa, as Revealed to a Jewish Girl Circa 1980
For those who are prone to Christmas envy—particularly but not exclusively the elementary-school set—this has been a challenging year. Hanukkah ended weeks ago, and ever since, we’ve just had to grin and bear it in the face of the annual onslaught of red and green and jingle and sparkle.
Ophira Eisenberg, comedian, writer, and host of the weekly NPR trivia show “Ask Me Another,” is no stranger to this Christmas envy. Eisenberg grew up a religious minority in Calgary, Alberta, at a time when schools saw no need to take an inclusive approach to religious and cultural traditions. Here’s her tale of Christmases past, which was brought to our...
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8 min - Remembrance of Things Past: Moroccans Talk About the Jews Who Once Lived Among Them
In the early 20th century, nearly a quarter of a million Jews lived among Muslims in Morocco's towns and villages, making common cause in commerce and culture. Over the course of the past century, nearly all of them have left. Now there are an estimated 4,000 Jews in Morocco. So few that most younger Moroccans have never met one.
Aomar Boum, an anthropologist at the University...Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
23 min
About Vox Tablet
From the publisher's feed
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,…
tablet2015.wpengine.com. Vox Tablet, hosted by Sara Ivry, varies widely in subject matter and sound -- one week it's a conversation with novelist Michael Chabon, theater critic Alisa Solomon, or anthropologist Ruth Behar. Another week brings the listener to "the etrog man" hocking his wares at a fruit-juice stand in a Jersualem market. Or into the hotel room with poet and rock musician David Berman an hour before he and his band, Silver Jews, head over to their next gig. Recent guests include Alex Ross, Shalom Auslander, Aline K. Crumb, Howard Jacobson, and the late Norman Mailer.
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