Beyond the Pale | Jewish Culture and Politics

BEYOND THE PALE explores cutting edge Jewish culture and offers local, national, and international political debate and analysis from a Jewish perspective.

Sundays, noon to 1 p.m., on WBAI/New York, 99.5 FM

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February 03, 2013 — The NYC Housing Authority (NYCHA) failed miserably during Hurricane Sandy. We talk with two journalists (Michael Moss of The New York Times and Sasha Chavkin, a freelance reporter for The New York World) whose investigative stories in recent weeks shed new light on NYCHA's failures.

Roberta Grossman, producer and director of Hava Nagila: The Movie, explains why this familiar tune is a musical Zelig. The film opens on March 1st at Lincoln Plaza Cinema.

And scholar and journalist Daniel Mendelsohn talks with us about his latest collection of essays, Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture, just out from New York Review Books.

January 27, 2013 — Israel went to the polls on January 23rd. Hosts Marissa Brostoff and Kiera Feldman talk with journalist Max Blumenthal, who covered the elections for The Nation and argues the results were a victory for Israel's pro-settler right.

Israel plans to build 3000 new settlement homes in the E1 corridor, which would connect Jerusalem to the settlement of Maale Adumim, splitting the West Bank in half. In response, Palestinians erected a tent encampment on the site of the planned settler homes--private Palestinian land. They called it Bab al-Shams ("Gate of the Sun"). We speak with Palestinian activist Abir Kopty.

Mohammed Fairouz has garnered international attention for his melding of middle eastern modes with western musical structures. BBC news has called him “one of the most talented composers of his generation." Fairouz joins us in-studio.

January 20, 2013 — Host Eve Sicular has put together a wide-ranging selection of 20th and early 21st century music that she dubs the "something old, something new, something balkan, something jew-ish show." Her selections include music related to the documentary, Cabaret Berlin: The Wild Scene, showing this week at the NY Jewish Film Festival; Sly and the Family Stone; new albums, Bad Old Songs (Daniel Kahn and The Painted Bird), and Forshpil (Forshpil); Molly Picon; and little-known Jewish composers Mikhail Gnesin and Alexander Krein, who are among the earliest Jews admitted to the music conservatories of Czarist Russia.

January 13, 2013 — Revolutions, once and future.

Co-hosts Alex Kane and Lizzy Ratner kick off the show with an interview with Frederick Stanton, the director of Uprising, a new film about the first heady days of the Egyptian revolution.

Then, Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark interviews Israeli sociologist Yehouda Shenhav about his bold, new(ish) book, Beyond the Two State Solution. Translator and journalist, Dimi Reider, joins the conversation.

January 06, 2013 — It looked as if the nomination of former Senator Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Defense was fated to follow a familiar pattern: the prospective nominee's name is leaked, the right-wing piles on her/him with a series of smears, the wounded candidate withdraws from the fray. Today's host, Esther Kaplan, talks with Ali Gharib, senior editor for The Daily Beast's Open Zion, about why the Hagel nomination seems to be breaking with the pattern. And what is there for liberals to like, if anything, in the Hagel nomination?

For four years Jewish Week reporter Hella Winston has indefatigably reported on the failure of prosecutors in New York City and New Jersey, notably Brooklyn District Attorney Hynes's office, to aggressively prosecute cases of sexual abuse and evidence of a pattern of intimidating and discrediting victims within ultra-orthodox communities. Winston talks with Beyond the Pale about two recent developments: the conviction of Nechemya Weberman, an unlicensed counselor from the Satmar community, for repeatedly sexually abusing a girl in his care and the filing of charges by the Brooklyn DA against several men for attempted interference in the case; and the disclosure by The Foward newspaper, of a decades long cover-up of sexual abuse accusations against two teachers at Yeshiva University's high school for boys, a bastion of modern orthodoxy.

You cannot buy an assault weapon in New York State, but that hasn't deterred New York's economic development officials from subsdizing the manufacture of assault weapons in the state. Beyond the Pale talks with Nathaniel Herz, a reporter with The New York World about his discovery (with the Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting) that New York ranks second nationally in the size of its aid to these manufacturers.