Podcast

Arc: The Podcast

Every other week, Arc Magazine's editor-in-chief, Mark Oppenheimer, is joined by guests to talk religion, politics, et cetera.

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Podcast

Rescued: The Lost Treasures of Klezmer

For decades, klezmer musicians have kept traditional Jewish music alive despite war, genocide, and erasure. They’ve done so by playing a small handful of surviving songs again and again. Many more songs—a trove of tunes with the potential to redefine the genre—have sat just out of reach, in a former Soviet archive. This music was unseen, unheard, unknown. But now, newly rescued, it’s transforming the klezmer world, the people who work in it, and our picture of 20th-century Jewish life in a destabilized Europe. Rescued: The Lost Treasures of Klezmer tells the story of that music.

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Where to Bury the Father

By Jamie L. Brummitt
From December 1799 to May 1800, as ordinary American Protestants erected monuments to Washington’s corpse and collected his relics in the form of locks of hair and images, members of the House of Representatives dithered over plans to entomb his remains in the Capitol. They disagreed over the type of marble monument that would be erected over his corpse. Some wanted an equestrian statue of Washington. Others wanted a smaller monument. On May 8, a select committee on preserving Washington’s memory reported its progress. Members proposed erecting an equestrian statue of Washington in front of the Capitol. They also planned…