History

Among the topics covered: White socks and black socks, shtreimels, kolpaks and spudiks-- which cat in which hat?; only 60 miles from Times Square but it might as well be Planet Yehupetz: inside the Chassidic Peoples Republics of New Skvir and Kiryat Yoel;; a hole in the sheets and other myths of hareidi sex life; Bobov 45 and Bobov 48: the death of a rebbe and the struggle for succession; musical traditions of various haredi sects.

The composer’s early life: family, friends, enemies, debts, politics; his controversial essay, Das Judentum in der Musik; Wagner’s Jewish friends, proteges and significant others; Wagner’s racial antisemitism; Nietzsche on Wagner’s Jew hatred; ”He was a Prophet of Nazism”: Gottfreid Wagner’s “demonumentalizing” of his great-grandfather; the controversy of banning Wagner in Israel.

The Jewish American experience is not just about Nobel Prizes, scientists, doctors, lawyers, Hollywood types and philanthropists. It’s about "doin’ what it takes," beating the odds...surviving...prospering. Boxing was a ticket out of the ghetto, an immigrant's "fighting chance," an unfortunate necessity. Between 1900 and 1940 alone there were some 27 Jewish world champions and title claimants, some still considered among the greatest of their class.

Breakdown of four major ethno-geographic Jewish groupings; Alexander the Great and the Jews; the impact of Hellenism; early Greek anti-Judaism; history of the Jews of Byzantium; the Orthodox Christian Church and the Jews; the Sephardim of Salonika; mores and folkways of the Jews of the Island of Rhodes; Greek Jewry and the Holocaust; Greek Jewry today.  

Rabbinic lore on the David vs. Goliath story; development of the Davidic tradition: biography or hagiography? the census, corvee labor and the beginnings of the schism between Israel and Judah; Talmudic apologetics justifying the adultery of David and Bathsheba; a dysfunctional royal family: ”O Absalom, My son, My son”;