March 23, 2008

Broadcast Date: 
Mar 23 2008

The Lower East Side Tenement Museum tries to block a union drive; the controversy over who can conduct Orthodox conversions; plus a new collection of translated poetry from the golden age of Spain

Episode segments
  • Union drive at the Tenement Museum
    Labor, New York Politics

    Maida Rosenstein is president of UAW Local 2110

    Hildegarde Hoeller and Lethia Nall are educators at New York City's Tenement Museum
    Esther Kaplan and Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark

    Some 40 educators and tour guides at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum signed up to join UAW Local 2110 last May, but managers at the museum, which promotes the history of working people, have refused to recognize the union

  • The controversy over Orthodox conversions
    Religion, Jewish Life
    Rabbi Marc Angel is Rabbi emeritus of Congregation Shearith Israel, the historic Spanish and Portuguese synagogue in New York City
    Nan Rubin

    The Chief Rabbinate of Israel has taken a restrictive view on conversions to Judaism, imposing nearly impossible standards that go above and beyond the requirements of Jewish law, and most Orthodox leaders in the United States have capitulated

  • Hebrew poetry from Spain's golden age
    Arts & Culture, Literature

    Peter Cole is editor and translator of The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950–1492 (Princeton University Press)
    Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark

    A discussion with Peter Cole about a new collection of translated poetry from the period of Muslim rule in Spain, a linguistic and cultural crossroads that produced what Harold Bloom has called "the blooming of a Hebrew poetry that, at the very best, could rival the magnificences of Scripture"