What is Judaism; Chanukkah

For the season I dug up an old podcast, which unfortunately has podfaded: What is Judaism. Journalist Larry Josephson speaks with Rabbi Ismar Schorsch about Jewish Holidays. I returned to the podcast about Channukkah. Dr. Ismar Schorsch is Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. Larry Josephson is a veteran public radio host and interviewer, whose programs have been heard in New York, and nationwide for over 35 years. As part of a personal search after his Jewish identity, Larry engaged in this program with his teacher Schorsch.

What makes Chanukkah especially interesting today is that the story of Channukah is a story about tradition versus new influences from outside. One can also see in it the struggle between secularism and old school religiousness. As religious feasts go, religion gets the victory. Schorsch explains though, that the way the victory of the Chasmonaim over the Greeks is remembered is in many ways of a Greek style. The old is preserved by means of borrowing some of the new.

The podcast contains, in addition to Schorsch recounting of the story of Chanukkah, also a discussion about the way it is celebrated today and about its meaning, both in the diaspora as well as in Israel. In addition Schorsch reveals his own personal meanig in Channukah with a very moving personal story. 58 minutes of great radio. Chag Sameach!

BBC History Magazine (Dec 2007)

In advance of publishing the December issue of BBC History Magazine, the podcast reveals a couple of the subjects that will be in it:

How to capture a castle
From blowing them up to simply asking politely, Julian Humphrys presents 10 methods for seizing a stronghold. The podcast features an interview with Julian Humphrys. It turns out that asking for surrender was in many ways more effective than destroying the bastions.

How the Allies beat Japan
Max Hastings talks to Rob Attar about the dramatic, bloody end of the Second World War and its enduring legacy in Asia. The podcast also features an interview with Rob Attar. There is a lot of emphasis on the Australian side of the war.

Next in the podcast (and in the magazine?): We follow Jim Leary into the earliest history of Britain. Neolithic remains in Silbury Hill.

When Judah recognized Tamar

Once the Torah begins telling about Jacob's sons, the bulk of the stories is about the sibling rivalry towards Joseph. Joseph gets the striped garment. Joseph has the megalomaniac dreams. Eventually the brothers have had enough of it and decide to take it out on him. They throw him in a pit and then sell him into slavery.

Before we continue onwards to Egypt with Joseph a story about Judah is interjected. KMTT's podcast about Parshat Vayeshev delves into the question what this story does here. Judah meets Tamar, gets her pregnant, wants to kill her, but then she makes him turn around and recognize her. Eventually she gives birth to Paretz the forefather of King David. Only them we will return to Joseph and follow his adventures as a slave in Egypt.

To make a long explanation short, the moment Judah recognizes Tamar is a major turn around for Judah. Before he was as rough as his brothers and this we can see in his treatment of Joseph, but as Tamar manages to get him into recognizing her, he says: You are more righteous than me. As of this moment we can see him develop as the leader, the king among his people. I always supposed why Judah turned into the most important brother and not Joseph - surely there is much more to be said about that.

Searching podcasts

What you'd really need on the quest for podcasts would be a search engine, such as the known search engines on the web, that can take your keyword and look for it inside audio and video. MIT is developing such an engine and calls it the Lecture Browser.

The Lecture Browser is a web interface to video recordings of lectures and seminars that have been indexed using automatic speech recognition technology. You can search for topics, much like a regular web search engine.

Follow the link to the Lecture Browser and you can experience this search adapted onto the lectures of MIT. I suppose from here it will not take too long and in your search engine, in addition to text search and image search, you will have audio search.

As a side note on image search: for now, the search is with keywords in the text that accompany the pictures, but technology is also being developed to recognize text inside the picture (either captions or captured text) and include that in the search.

Geography of World Cultures by Martin W. Lewis

Stanford's Geography of World Cultures by Martin W. Lewis is not my first enhanced podcast. In the summer of 2006 I followed a World Cup podcast by The Guardian, which was enhanced, but this hardly made a lasting impression on me. It did make clear, though, what enhancement in a podcast entails. The podcast is chopped up in subsections. In your iPod you can navigate from section to section with the next and previous click. And each section carries a different picture, displayed on the screen. With the football show, this was a mere illustration, but in GWC, these are the maps that go along with the lecture.

As a consequence, the screen on my iPod nano is way too small to be of much help, but the sound level is too low for iPod anyway. Enhanced podcasts are not mp3 files and as a consequence, I could not enhance the sound with MP3Gain, on acount of an unsupported format. In front of my PC, the podcast can be enjoyed, for better sound and for larger visuals. The result is enchanting.

GWC engages into a search for the boundaries in the world. Pondering language, religion and political divides and concluding, in advance, these categorizations hardly run along each other and promising for some splendid in depth lectures. And wonderful maps. Not just for map addicts such as myself, but for everybody a great podcast right from the start.

Stanford on iTunes U

I have complained in the past about the way Stanford offered their audio. What is still true is that you still have to go to iTunes U, but my main critique has turned obsolete. I do not know when exactly this was changed, but today I found out that in addition to a button 'get tracks', you now also have the possibility to 'subscribe'. So now Stanford content has been syndicated and can truly be called podcasts. As far as content was concerned they always ranked among the best with amazingly good series such as Historical Jesus and Hannibal. Now I am off to listen to my new find: Geography of World Cultures by Martin W. Lewis.