Protesting the protests and concentrating the camps
Plus some Orthodox wife swapping too
Are children really protesting now? Phoebe Maltz Bovy on back-to-school culture wars
From kindergarten through eighth grade, I attended a private all-girls school in New York City. But today, being 41 years old, with kids of my own in school and daycare in Toronto, I cannot say I give my years in a green plaid jumper a tremendous amount of thought—apart from the school building’s tendency to serve as a backdrop to some school anxiety dreams. The past is always present…
Auschwitz is ‘detached from the Jewish experience’: On the Disney-fication of Holocaust tourism
On a recent trip to Poland, the writer Tanya Gold visited the Auschwitz concentration camp memorial site. In her lengthy travel essay on the visit, “My Auschwitz Vacation“, published in the September 2024 edition of Harper’s Magazine, she details the numerous absurdities of the Disneyfied extermination camp, from its notable lack of Jews to the oft-overlooked nearby castle, waterfall and theme park.
She joined Bonjour Chai to discuss her deeply personal journey, intermingled with the shifting lens of Holocaust memory in Poland, rising antisemitism in Europe, and the trap of focusing Holocaust education on death instead of life.
After that, hosts Avi and Phoebe discuss exploding Hezbollah pagers (are the jokes and memes hypocritical?) and the swift implosion of the storied British publication, the Jewish Chronicle.
Down the rabbit hole
Olive Days is a novel whose author has so far received the most attention at the revived website of Playboy, as author Jessica Elisheva Emerson seeks an audience for salacious fiction about the modern Orthodox community in Los Angeles where she discovered personal meaning in Judaism thanks to the religious diversity she observed.
