Gladio Free Europe

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At the dawning of the 20th century, new songs of an ancient nation rang across the world. Yiddish, the native language of the Ashkenazi Jews, had assumed the status of a literary standard and was at the center of a political movement demanding freedom and dignity for its speakers. Though the events of this century would not allow this, Yiddish endured. The Jewish language survived the rise of fascism and nationalism, persisting even through the murder of millions of its speakers in the Holocaust. Today, in spite of all, Yiddish is a living and growing language.
Alaskan Yiddish scholar Wilf returns to Gladio Free Europe to discuss the continuing history of one of the world’s most remarkable languages. This episode charts the course of Yiddish history from the 17th century onward, beginning with the diarist Glückel of Hamelin and moving through the social transformations of early modern Jewish life, including reactions to the failed Messianic movement of Sabbatai Zevi and the transformations of the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment. During this time, Yiddish remained under scrutiny from both Jews and Gentiles. Disparaged as less holy than the Hebrew of the scriptures or the standard German of the newspapers, it was not until the 19th century that significant numbers of educated Jewish people came to embrace their native tongue.
Writers and folklorists such as Mendele Moher Sforim and Sholem Aleichem took part in a broader movement of ethnographic reflection, embracing the Yiddish language at a time when its use was strongly politicized. Yiddish came to be associated with the celebration of the Jewish diaspora and all it stood for. The language would be a medium of communication for many political causes, perhaps mostly prominent labor radicalism and social reform. Yiddish-language theater, music, and cinema would spread out of Eastern Europe to all corners of the Jewish world. In the 1920s Yiddish would become the native language of nearly a quarter of New Yorkers.
But just a their language was coming into its own, the rise of political antisemitism would inflict new horrors on the Jewish people. World War 2 and the Nazi Holocaust would destroy the traditional homeland of Yiddish, and very nearly wipe out its speakers. But despite this unprecedented tragedy, Yiddish would endure. As it had been a hundred years ago, Yiddish is often considered a symbol of a diasporic culture opposed to nationalist visions that disparage the diaspora. The ongoing revival of Yiddish, in both secular and religious circles, connects the modern world with the old Jewish shtetl and keeps alive a cultural and literary tradition as brilliant and as dignified as German or English or Chinese or Hebrew. Perhaps most importantly, Yiddish gives us some of the most charming concepts and expressions in the human lexicon, such as chutzpah and “the alrightnik.”
Yiddish Cinematheque

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Across the world, over two billion people believe that a human being is God. This confession of faith lies at the very heart of Christianity, a movement that exalts the life of a single individual far beyond that of any other world religion. But who was this man? What do we know about Jesus of Nazareth?
This epsiode of Gladio Free Europe explores the historical question and historical personage of Jesus, an apocalyptic Jewish preacher from 1st-Century Galilee who was crucified by the Romans. Though this preacher is not attested in any contemporary documentation, his life and his death would have consequences more far-reaching than perhaps any other human up to this point.
Liam, Sam, and Jackson chart the past three centuries of rationalist inquiry into the existence of Jesus, beginning with Enlightenment firebrands like Hermann Reimarup, moving through the development of mythicist speculation by figures such as Bruno Bauer and Arthur Drews, and the development of contemporary New Testament scholarship as represented by figures such as Paula Fredriksen, John Meier, and Bart Ehrman.
Effectively all historians today agree that Jesus existed. Beyond this, there is not much certainty. Different scholars have different criteria for assessing the historical reliability of evidence on Jesus, predominately the Christian Gospels and the writings of Paul of Tarsus, but also roughly contemporaneous Greek and Roman sources, such as the great Greek Jewish historian Josephus. Additional insights can be gleaned through research into the Jewish religion of Jesus, the cultural and archaeological landscape of Ancient Palestine, and broader developments in Greco-Roman philosophy and spirituality.
In addition to sharing contemporary academic findings concerning this peculiar individual, Liam, Sam, and Jackson share their own thoughts on the significance of the life and afterlife of Jesus. The earliest history of Christianity, as documented by texts such as the Acts of the Apostles, is enormously relevant to reconstructing the story of its founder. In addition, the spread of Christianity from an underground sect to the largest religious tradition in human history presents striking parallels with contemporary social movements. The Quest for the Historical Jesus, as so-described by Albert Schweitzer in 1906, thus holds profound consequences not only to Christians, but to anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the human capacity for passion and perseverance.

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"Herod the king, in his raging, charged he hath this day: his men of might, in his own sight, all young children to slay." So goes the Coventry Carol, a traditional English Christmas song commemorating the Massacre of the Innocents in Bethlehem. According to the Christian Gospel of Matthew, the jealous ruler of Judea so feared the arrival of the messiah that he ordered this slaughter of his own infant subjects. Herod's name rings through the ages with tyranny and evil. But who was Herod the Great?
This episode of Gladio Free Europe explorers the life and afterlife of Jewish history's most consequential monarch. Liam and Russian Sam situate King Herod in his historical context, as a pious Jewish monarch and a Hellenistic warrior-king. Born into an ambitious family descended from the conquered backwater of Edom, nobody expected Herod would ever assume control of the Hasmonean Kingdom of Judea. But as the Mediterranean world collapsed into a century of bloody turmoil, Herod used dynastic conflicts in both Jerusalem and in Rome to propel himself to the greatest heights of power. After he was suddenly named King of the Jews by the Roman Senate, Herod had to contend with ruling the most fractious kingdom in the Near East, and the most defiant corner of the vast Roman Empire.
Though his ancestors were converts to Judaism, brought into the Israelite fold at the point of a sword, Herod reigned as a pious Jew. Even scholars who doubted his commitment to the faith acclaimed his act of rebuilding the temple in Jerusalem, the center of all Jewish ritual. Though a Roman puppet who never attempted to liberate his subjects from foreign domination, Herod brought enormous prosperity and glory to his kingdom. The land that he once ruled is still marked by great works, built in Hellenistic fashion both to honor his God and to honor his own glory.
Despite his great successes, Herod was cruel, vindictive, and unceasingly murderous. Although his role in folklore derives from fiction and rumor rather than actual acts, his reputation for cruelty is well-deserved. Deeply paranoid and acutely aware of his own vulnerabilities, Herod dispatched every threat to his reign with unflinching violence. Even his own wives and children could not escape this violence. After his death, Herod would be immortalized not for his contributions to his kingdom and his faith, but instead for his wickedness. This episode will touch on the origins of Hanukkah and of Christmas to understand the career of one of the most fascinating and terrifying figures of the ancient world.

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At the dawn of the Middle Ages, small numbers of Jewish families ventured across the frozen Alps, seeking a new life in a foreign land they called Ashkenaz. In their workshops, at the market, and around the shabbat table, these people created a new language in secret: one that joined together the Hebrew writing system of ancient Palestine with the Germanic vocabulary of their Christian neighbors. Despite its obscure and polygenic medieval origins, this neighborhood speech would grow to become a fundamental element of Jewish history and identity and a true world language: Yiddish.
This episode of Gladio Free Europe explores the origins and development of Yiddish with the help of Wilf, esteemed circumpolar Yiddish scholar and longtime friend of the pod. Wilf guides Liam and Russian Sam through the complexities of the language's development and grammar. The many influences on Yiddish, from its Semitic alphabet to its Slavic grammatical structures and its unexpected Romance loans, tell the story of the Ashkenazi Jewish people. So too does the resilience and growth of Yiddish in spite of centuries of hostility and, in the 20th century, near-total annihilation. 
Putting Yiddish in the context of the rise of rabbinical Judaism and the expansion of the diaspora, we see how this Germanic vernacular developed alongside the liturgical language of Hebrew. While widespread bilingualism meant Yiddish and Hebrew would influence each other throughout their history, the two languages were often perceived in conflict. Yiddish would be demeaned and degraded throughout its history, both by vicious bigots who hated its Jewishness and pious scholars who thought it not Jewish enough. Yet despite centuries of hardship, the language would blossom across the medieval period into a literary language along the lines of French and Italian. Medieval Jewish writers eagerly took part in the broader European tradition of chivalric romance. Yiddish adventure stories about Jewish knights, Jewish princesses, even a Jewish King Arthur were widely read and have some lingering influence on Jewish folklore to this day. As Yiddish spread eastward, out of the German lands and into the kingdoms of the Slavs and Hungarians, the language of the Ashkenazi Jews ceased to be a medium of communication with Christians, but instead an ethnolect that could only be understood by Jews. The unique situation of Eastern European Jews, more numerous and more culturally distinctive than their Western European neighbors, would be fundamental to the later development of Yiddish.
Listen to the newest episode of Gladio Free Europe to understand what makes Yiddish, the heymish mother tongue of the Jewish hearth, unique among the languages and such a treasured aspect of the Jewish experience. Borek-habo!

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From 1880 to 1930, life on Earth was reshaped in ways previously inconceivable. Nowhere was this transformation more total than in Florida. In a single generation, a peninsula hardly charted since the days of Ponce de Leon was molded into a testing ground for new modes of living and capital accumulation. This episode of Gladio Free Europe drains the marshy mysteries of time to understand how Florida, once the most foreign of all the contiguous territories, became perhaps the most fundamentally American state of all.
Jackson (@GraceCathedralPark) returns to the show for a deep exploration of modern Florida history, running from the noble failures of Reconstruction up through the reassertion of Confederate control and the establishment of a new society, a unique and twisted marriage of northern venality with southern barbarity. Gilded Age robber-barons like Henry Flagler took to the waters for pleasure and for profit, turning the remote Sunshine State into a secret garden for the idle rich. Railroads soon connected Florida to the American mainland north and south, bringing both well-heeled investors and threadbare farmers down the peninsula. Poor whites in particular saw Florida as a beacon of the New South, where a man could make his fortune in land sales or the orange boom. But these newcomers had little interest in sharing their wealth with the African American residents of Florida, some of whose ancestors had been working the swampy soil since the Spanish era.
Florida after Reconstruction experienced some of the worst racial terror anywhere in the United States, with an exceptionally high rate of lynchings and episodes of mass violence at Ocoee and Rosewood, where white mobs ransacked black neighborhoods and murdered dozens upon dozens. Then the swamps, once a refuge for escaped slaves and Seminole Indians, were drained out to the sea, paved over to make room for America's newest feat of social engineering: the suburb.
By the Roaring '20s, Florida's economy primarily revolved around real estate and tourism. Middle-class Americans flocked to the new neighborhoods that sprawled across the ruined wetlands, many of which were designed for cars rather than people, and most of which were racially segregated. Meanwhile significant numbers of Cuban immigarnts migrated to the Gulf port of Tampa, turning a small fishing town into a cigar city that rivaled Havana.
Transformations along these lines happened across the United States, particularly in other Sun Belt regions such as Arizona and Southern California. But nowhere else were these changes so extreme, so rapid, and so destructive... not only to the natural landscape upon which these plains were laid, but on the residents pushed aside to built this petty-bourgeois fantasy. The state has been a theme park since decades before the Mouse spread his ears. In many ways, Florida is its own kind of twisted intentional community, and perhaps America's most successful utopian experiment.