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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“Lord, teach my hands to war, my fingers to fight”

By Rachel Wagner
What I call the cowboy apocalypse is a fictional trope, seen in movies, video games, and other media. It is drawn from a dark fantasy of the American frontier blended with a desire for return to that frontier environment after an apocalyptic transformation. In the cowboy apocalypse, America’s frontier past is idealized, depicting white gun-toting cowboys, individually meting out justice against enemies, who are depicted as an evil horde demanding what is not theirs. The cowboy apocalypse draws on an earlier idealization of the frontier, which showed up in cowboy novels of the nineteenth century, in old Western films like…