Papal Envy

By Daniel Joslyn-Siemiatkoski

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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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    3. Dancing in a Jewish Way

    Klezmer activist Christina Crowder finds something personal in the music she helped return to the klezmer community. Plus, a klezmer concert in a church. From Arc magazine and Washington University in St. Louis.

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    2. Klezmerland

    A fateful Tokyo subway ride delivers hundreds of tunes to klezmerland, transforming the genre—and kugel etiquette. From Arc magazine and Washington University in St. Louis.

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Letters to the Editor

The Untapped Power of Jewish Fellowships

By Daniel Smokler
In a recent documentary exploring his work, Harvard professor Robert Putnam describes the experience of standing on the national mall for John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inauguration. As Kennedy intoned the iconic phrase “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,” Putnam felt it was “like a trumpet sounding reveille” to a new generation of American dynamism. In the film, Putnam reflects during the twilight of his life and realizes that “it was not reveille, but taps.” The early 1960s, Putnam discovered, were the high-water mark for American social trust, which has…

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What had you thought Opus Dei was?
Gareth Gore: To the public, Opus Dei presents a veneer. It pretends that it is simply a religious organization that wants to help Catholics live out their faith more deeply. But thanks to speaking to people who’d lived inside the organization, and thanks in particular to these secret documents that were smuggled out of the organization, I now understand Opus Dei to be something completely different. Opus Dei for me is a deeply political, a deeply reactionary, organization that aims to infiltrate society at the very highest levels. Infiltrating governments, the judiciary, the upper echelons of the business world. And using its influence in those parts of society to push its reactionary agenda, to turn back the clock on the sexual revolution, contraception, affirmative action.