Recognizably Jewish

In the mid 1950s, more than half of the lawyers in New York City were Jewish, and Jewish law students consistently graduated in the top ranks of the best law schools. But the elite crop of New York law firms had firmly established White Anglo Saxon Protestant identities and either didn’t hire Jews at all or didn’t promote them to their partnerships. That situation led to rapid growth of de facto Jewish law firms in the mid-twentieth century. Only a few decades later, there were no longer Jewish firms and WASP firms.Episode 12 of Recognizably Jewish explores this history in detail, including the social, cultural, and business factors that contributed to the rise – and eventual obsolescence – of the New York Jewish law firm.

There are many Jewish artists who flourished during the 20th century. Mark Rothko. Amedeo Modigliani. Barnett Newman. Diane Arbus. Lee Krasner. Roy Lichtenstein. But no other visual artist was or is as closely associated with Jewish themes and imagery as Marc Chagall. Today on the Recognizably Jewish Podcast, we’ll learn about Chagall’s life, his art, and his place in the Jewish cultural canon.Check out our Substack: recognizablyjewish.substack.com

SHOW NOTESYou may not know who Sholem Aleichem is. Or you may just assume he’s a fusty old Yiddish author. But if you’ve ever laughed at an episode of Seinfeld or Curb Your Enthusiasm, you should know about Sholem Aleichem. If you’ve ever enjoyed a movie by Mel Brooks or Woody Allen, you should know about Sholem Aleichem. If you’ve ever appreciated a book by Philip Roth or Jonathan Safran Foer, you should know about Sholem Aleichem. If you’ve ever chuckled at a self-deprecating joke told by Rodney Dangerfield or Joan Rivers or Jon Stewart, you should know about Sholem Aleichem.For this second episode in our informal series leading up to an episode about Fiddler on the Roof, we’ll learn about Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem, whose tragicoming writing has been called the “anchoring work of the modern Jewish canon.” SOURCESAlisa Solomon, Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof (https://a.co/d/f9zpnBO)https://encyclopedia.yivo.org/article/1142https://blogs.loc.gov/catbird/2020/05/sholem-aleichem-the-yiddish-mark-twain/https://tikvah.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Tikvah_StudyGuide_Wisse_v3.pdfhttps://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/discover/yiddish-literature/sholem-aleichem-conversation-ruth-wisse-and-davidhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VouWU91olAhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMhLaVUb4oc

Today, January 27, is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Episode 9 of the Recognizably Jewish podcast is a deeply meaningful discussion with two people who have devoted their talents to documenting Holocaust survivors. Dana Arschin is an award-winning journalist and the official Storyteller for the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County. She is also the proud granddaughter of an Auschwitz Concentration Camp survivor, her Poppy. Brian Marcus is a renowned event photographer and the third-generation leadership of Fred Marcus Photography. He’s the co-author, with June Hersh, of the book Still Here: Inspiration From Survivors & Liberators of the Holocaust. Fred Marcus, Brian’s grandfather and the eponymous founder of the studio, was a survivor of Buchenwald. I talked to Dana and Brian about their work and about how Holocaust survivorship, and narratives of survivorship more generally, fit within the broader Jewish cultural rubric. Self-identification as a chosen but oppressed people is nothing new to Jewishness. But in the 20th century, the specific idea of “never forget” became an ingrained part of Jewish cultural identity. It’s a uniting feature that applies regardless of your religious practices or political or world views. To make “never forget” a reality requires dedicated work from documentarians of all kinds. Dana and Brian are two such documentarians, recording and celebrating the stories of the survivors themselves.

When you hear klezmer music, you know it’s Jewish. You can feel it. But why? It’s not like klezmer melodies, instrumentation, or styles are prescribed by the Torah. The answer, of course, is culture. Klezmer has been a part of Jewish culture for hundreds of years. Listen to today’s episode of Recognizably Jewish to learn all about the history and characteristics of klezmer and how it became so deeply enmeshed in Jewish culture.  My primary source for this episode/post is Yale Strom’s The Book of Klezmer: The History, the Music, the Folklore Paperback. If you want to learn even more deeply about klezmer, you should definitely read it.

For this first Recognizably Jewish episode of 2025, we’re going to talk about four words that everyone understands refer to Jewish people – Semite, Hebrew, Israelite, and Jew. The words, and derivations of the words, are used all the time. For many, the words are themselves part of one’s identity in the world. But have you ever stopped to think about where the words came from, and how they came to have the meanings they have today? Listen to today’s episode to find out. Please subscribe to the Recognizably Jewish Substack: recognizablyjewish.substack.com For all of our links, check out our Linktree: https://linktr.ee/recognizably.jewish Selected sources: This is the map I refer to in the episode: ⁠https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:12_Tribes_of_Israel_Map.svg⁠ https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/who-are-the-semites/ https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-beginnings-of-the-hebrew-language/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9aB3fLPssI https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/martinkramer/files/why_israel_is_called_israel_and_not_judea_mosaicmosaic.pdf https://www.instagram.com/reel/DCZG9Rvy8Od/

Episode 6 of Recognizably Jewish is all about the best-known and best-loved of Jewish foods - the humble but mighty bagel. You’ll learn when and how the bagel developed as a Jewish food in medieval Poland, as well as about the bagel’s arrival in, and impact on, America in the 20th century. And we’ll talk about the current bagel renaissance.  This episode includes excerpts of a phenomenal conversation I had with Joshua Pollack, the founder of Bridge and Tunnel Restaurant Group and the “Bagel Man” at Rosenberg’s Bagels (https://rosenbergsbagels.com/), my personal favorite bagel shop in Denver. You can find the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.  The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread, by Maria Balinska (https://a.co/d/7fsWyBS) This is the Eater video I mention in the episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSuAcDiwkk4&t=276s Here are some other videos worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_sPSrSwP40 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nO6AUtpquVM&t=28s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WuOZM9shZ0&t=10s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQowwnvWzos

The region of the Catskills that became known as the Borscht Belt was the social epicenter of American Jewish life in the middle part of the 20th century. At its peak, it had more than 500 hotels and over 50,000 bungalows, and catered to hundreds of thousands of Jewish visitors each year. The biggest resorts like Grossinger’s, Kutsher’s, the Concord, and the Nevele set the bar for dining and entertainment. While the resorts are now long gone, the cultural impact of the Borscht Belt remains. From cruise ships to Vegas hotels. From Dirty Dancing to The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel to the very existence of stand-up comedy as we know it today.  How did it happen that a particular slice of upstate New York came to be the premier Jewish vacation destination for most of the 20th century, one with an outsized impact on Jewish culture and American culture writ large? Listen to this episode of Recognizably Jewish to find out. Check out Apeloig Collection at apeloigcollection.com. Sources and sites: https://www.amazon.com/Welcome-Kutshers-Last-Catskills-Resort/dp/B00WYWWJPQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFUa340mdPw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4Qngt5FrbY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PWFttncdZg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ne63LEGGYWw https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borscht_Belt https://a.co/d/2mlenkY https://borschtbelthistoricalmarkerproject.org/ https://hvmag.com/life-style/borscht-belt-hotels-catskills/ https://alexprizgintas.com/borscht-belt-tourism-history/ https://www.borschtbeltmuseum.org/donate https://catskillsinstitute.northeastern.edu/ http://www.livingstonmanor.net/LMhistory/TanningIndustry.htm https://footnote.wordpress.ncsu.edu/2020/06/11/the-jewish-agricultural-society-06-12-2020/

Some representative symbols are uniquely Jewish. The menorah is the classic example. That’s not true for the Star of David, which is not mentioned in the Torah, in other parts of the Hebrew bible, or in the Talmud. Because it’s such a simple geometric figure, the Star of David has been used as a design motif by religions and cultures all over the world for thousands of years. So if the Star of David isn’t uniquely Jewish, how did it end up as probably the best-known visual symbolic representation of Judaism today? Listen to today’s episode of Recognizably Jewish to find out. Check out our website at www.recognizablyjewish.com. Check out HaYom Art at hayom.art. Sources and sites: https://www.commentary.org/articles/gershom-scholem/the-curious-history-of-the-six-pointed-starhow-the-magen-david-became-the-jewish-symbol/ https://outorah.org/p/60349/ https://embassies.gov.il/MFA/AboutIsrael/Israelat50/Pages/The%20Flag%20and%20the%20Emblem.aspx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_of_David https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seal_of_Solomon https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Magen-David-Avraham-Trugman/dp/9659171617 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tGNWdYLUaY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_2JUp90fPA https://zeevgoldmann.blogspot.com/2008/08/special-star-of-david-artifacts.html https://www.mayimachronim.com/secrets-of-the-star-of-david/ https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/10257-magen-dawid https://catalog.archives.gov.il/en/chapter/flag/

When he was born in Poland in 1886, there was no indication that David Grün would go on to greatness–let alone the singular greatness he achieved as David Ben-Gurion, the founding giant of the sovereign nation of Israel. So how did he go from an unremarkable youth in Tsarist Poland to a strident teenage Marxist Zionist political activist to the man who read Israel’s declaration of independence in May 1948? Listen to this episode of Recognizably Jewish to find out. My primary source for this episode is Anita Shapira’s 2014 Ben-Gurion: Father of Modern Israel. Today’s Yiddish phrase is: “Der ergster sholem iz beser vi di beste milkhome.” Check out the Jewish Council for Public Affairs at https://jewishpublicaffairs.org/.