This week, Vox Tablet invites listeners to consider some unconventional summer reading. Gary Shteyngart and Joshua Cohen have both come out with new novels that paint a very dark picture of the future. In Super Sad True Love Story, Shteyngart envisions a not-so-distant world in which the United States is a crumbling, militarized empire, ...

Israel may be a small country, but when it comes to classical music, it’s a powerhouse. From his position on the board of New York’s Mannes School of Music, David P. Goldman has had the chance to witness Israeli prominence in the field firsthand. In an effort to get a better handle on the phenomenon, ...

The Bowls Project is an unusual sound and architectural installation now on display at the Yerba Buena Center for Arts in San Francisco. A combination of a song cycle, a double-vaulted masonry dome, strangers’ secrets, and inscriptions found in Babylonian Jewish amulets known as “demon bowls,” the Bowls Project is the creation of the ...

Two years ago, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, which is devoted to the study and preservation of Ashkenazic culture, published the trailblazing Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. A remarkable resource, it offers some 1,800 entries on everything from general topics like art to key figures like Ludwik Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto. Earlier ...

The six-person band Yiddish Princess takes the sounds of ’80s rock—from the ethereal vocalizations of Kate Bush to the pounding drums and guitar riffs of Bon Jovi—and marries them with Yiddish songs. Some of the songs are Yiddish poems; some are original works by Sarah Gordon, the band’s lead singer. Gordon comes to the Yiddish ...

Alan Furst’s bestselling spy novels depict the secret allegiances and betrayals that animated interwar and wartime Europe, but what distinguishes his work from others who’ve toiled in the genre is the attention he pays to the flavor of everyday life. Amid the forged documents and concealed identities, he still manages to conjure things like the ...

“Thou shalt not make graven images.” Thus reads the second commandment, which has been widely interpreted by Jews to mean that they are forbidden from depicting the human body. Yet, according to art historian Eliane Strosberg, during the 20th century Jewish artists in Europe and the United States defied that prohibition and almost exclusively ...

In 2007, Ian Buruma profiled Tariq Ramadan, the high-profile European Muslim professor who’d been denied an entry visa to the United States the prior year, in The New York Times Magazine. Though some see Ramadan as a moderate voice in an increasingly radicalized European Islamic community, others see him as dangerous. Buruma offered a noncommittal ...

The holiday of Shavuot marks the giving of the law at Mount Sinai. To celebrate, people stay up all night studying. They also eat dairy foods—milk, blintzes, and cheesecake—although there seems to be little agreement as to why.
Fred Schuster opened S&S Cheesecake in 1960; he now has help from his son-in-law, Yair Ben-Zaken. Together, they ...

In May 1967, at the annual Israel Music Festival in Jerusalem, a song was born. Singing to a live and radio audience of millions, Shuli Natan debuted “Yerushalayim Shel Zahav,” or “Jerusalem of Gold.” With elegiac music and patriotic lyrics by Naomi Shemer (with a sentence or two borrowed from Yehuda Halevi), it immediately won ...