Covering Their Tracks is the extraordinary story of a young man’s escape from a moving train bound for the Auschwitz concentration camp during the Holocaust, and his fight to hold the French national rail company, the SNCF, accountable for their actions as they later bid for lucrative high-speed rail contracts in the United States. For more information visit http://tabletmag.com/coveringtheirtracks or search for Covering Their Track wherever you get your podcasts ..read more

What topic is more controversial, sensational, and endlessly captivating than college admissions? It’s a billion-dollar industry. It sends celebrities to jail. The Supreme Court is weighing in on who gets in and why. We might think we have read all there is to read on the issue, and heard all there is to hear. But if you want to understand everything that’s going on with college admissions today—not just the battles over diversity, but the very existence of college applications, the essays and interviews and standardized tests—you have to look at the first group that tried to diversi ..read more

Dara gets us in the Halloween spirit with a reading of “The Dead Town” by Yiddish writer I.L. Peretz. (Translated by Helen Frank and Hillel Halkin, abridged and adapted by Dara Horn ..read more

Holocaust education has proliferated in the United States, along with a nationwide emphasis on anti-bias education. But recent years have also seen an undeniable rise in antisemitism. How did we get here? To find out, host Dara Horn rewinds back to the stunning success of Gentlemen’s Agreement, a 1947 Oscar-winning Hollywood blockbuster in which Gregory Peck plays a journalist who poses as a Jew in order to expose American antisemitism. The movie’s premise is hilariously blunt: People shouldn’t hate Jews, because Jews are Just Like Us! Of course, this premise contains an unspoken comprom ..read more

The Jewish community of Charlotte, North Carolina has been embarrassed by their city’s monument honoring Judah Benjamin, the Confederacy’s Jewish Secretary of State, ever since they were cajoled into paying for it back in 1948… and the 2020 racial justice protests finally accelerated their decades-long attempt to get rid of it. But Benjamin-- a brilliant lawyer, one of the first Jewish senators, a Supreme Court nominee, the “Brains of the Confederacy,” Caribbean-born, openly Jewish, and not-openly gay-- made people uncomfortable during his own lifetime. Even back then, he was impossible to get ..read more

Our stories so far have explored relationships between Jews and non-Jewish societies that have ranged from awkward to, well, murderous. But in this case, the social snubbing of Jews actually worked to everyone’s advantage, resulting in the biggest historical discovery in the history of the world.  Here, two genius Scottish identical twins match wits with one half of a pair of genius Hasidic Romanian identical twins in order to track down some of the oldest existing manuscripts of the bible. They embark on an Indiana-Jones style adventure in 1890s Egypt, and wind up with much more than th ..read more

In this episode, we explore the marvelous and terrifying life of the massively renowned Soviet Yiddish actor Solomon Mikhoels: international star of stage and screen, director of the Moscow State Yiddish Theater, and leader of the Soviet Union’s Jewish Antifascist Committee during World War Two… and later, in a rather less desirable role, the leading man in the Soviet Jewish nightmare that came to be known as the “Night of the Murdered Poets,” a group of world-class Jewish artists and leaders executed by Stalin one night in 1952.  Mikhoels wasn’t one of those Murdered Poets, but he was i ..read more

In this episode, Dara Horn revisits Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster Holocaust movie Schindler’s List, along with Spielberg’s blockbuster dinosaur movie Jurassic Park-- which he worked on simultaneously, returning from the brutal Polish concentration camp set each evening to edit brutal velociraptor footage. Together these movies reveal many aspects of what we expect from Hollywood storytelling. What’s the cost of applying that narrative arc to a story about the Holocaust? And what might be the moral motivations of a Tyrannosaurus Rex? Horn takes us through Spielberg’s elaborate process (which ..read more

In this episode, Dara Horn explores the bizarre afterlife of a chance encounter that later caused an entire empire to lose its mind. In 1904, the American Jewish financier Jacob Schiff randomly met a Japanese banker at a dinner in London and decided to give Japan a $200 million loan in order to help ensure its victory in the Russo-Japanese War. A generation later, when Japanese military officers were first exposed to an antisemitic conspiracy theory, they assumed, based on their country’s experience with Schiff, that it must be true-- and convinced their government to take action. In twist up ..read more

In the first episode of this new limited-release series, Dara Horn ponders a prickly question: Why are so many people so moved by the memory of dead Jews, yet so disinclined to truly embrace the ones who are very much alive? The question first presented itself to Horn when she was a teenager, sent by a teen magazine to cover the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. She filed a moving report, but an elderly acquaintance, a Holocaust survivor, was having none of it, challenging Horn to rethink the way she approached memory, history, and other things Jews spend a lot of time co ..read more