Recognizably Jewish – Details, episodes & analysis

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/.

The widespread adoption of Western-style hereditary surnames by Ashkenazi Jewish communities didn’t happen until around 200 years ago. Why is that? And when it did happen, how did certain names–names like Schwartz, Segal, Katz, Goldberg, Rosenthal, and Weissman–become so recognizably Jewish? How did some American Jews end up with last names that aren’t clearly Jewish? And what happened to Jewish names when Hebrew was resurrected as a living language? 

Listen to this episode of Recognizably Jewish to find out.

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Check out Zaidy’s Deli & Bakery: https://www.zaidysdeli.com/

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If you’re interested in the subject of this episode, check out these other sources:

• A Rosenberg by Any Other Name: A History of Jewish Name Changing in America (Kirsten Fermaglich) (https://www.amazon.com/Rosenberg-Any-Other-Name-Goldstein-Goren-ebook/dp/B07C5WCR1H/)
• People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present (Dara Horn) (https://www.amazon.com/People-Love-Dead-Jews-Reports/dp/1324035943/)

• https://www.commentary.org/articles/benzion-kaganoff/jewish-surnames-through-the-agesan-etymological-history/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_surname
• https://www.jewishgen.org/education/mythbusters.htm
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjWfieO49y0
• http://www.billgladstone.ca/on-jewish-surnames/
• https://forward.com/opinion/391341/did-jews-buy-their-last-names/
• https://forward.com/opinion/415910/how-did-ashkenazi-jews-end-up-with-famous-non-jewish-last-names/
  

Welcome to Recognizably Jewish, the podcast where we explore the Jewish cultural inheritance. Hosted by Jason Spitalnick. This is Episode 1: Shalom.

You can find the podcast wherever you listen: Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube, etc. To find links, you can go to our website: www.recognizablyjewish.com.

I hope you’ll listen to some episodes and share the podcast with your friends, families, and Jewish communities. Thanks for listening.

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/

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

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/
  

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.

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.

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