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France's New Anti-Semitism and Anne Rice, From Vampires to Christ and Back Again
January 16, 2015
Summary: What's lurking behind Europe's spike in anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. And--six years ago, Anne Rice told us she was abandoning vampires and committing to Christ. Now her faith has fled...and the vampires are back.
Frayed Nerves for Jews and Muslims in France January 16, 2015
France is home to half a million Jews, and many of them are terrified. The recent Kosher market attacks by an Islamic extremist are just the latest acts of violence against France’s Jewish community in the last 15 years, and most are linked to religious zealotry on the far edges of Islam. And Muslims are bracing for a backlash. This week, what's behind the brewing anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim sentiment in France.

Pictured: Amedy Coulibaly, the alleged attacker behind the Kosher market shootings in Paris.

Akbar Ahmed, author of Journey into Europe: Islam, Immigration, and Empire
Charles Asher Small, Director of the Institute for the Study of Global Anti-Semitism and Policy
Maud Mandel, author of Muslims and Jews in France: History of a Conflict

Knopf
Anne Rice: Called Back to the Darkness? January 16, 2015
Vampire novelist Anne Rice has a conflicted soul. When we talked to her in 2009, she had abandoned atheism and returned to the Catholicism of her youth, committing herself to chronicling the life of Jesus. She told the world she was “called out of darkness," and swore off books about the fashionably undead. But just a year later, her faith fled once again, and the vampires came back. Guest interviewer Mark Oppenheimer finds out what happened.

Anne Rice, author of many books including Interview with the Vampire and her latest, Prince Lestat
Mark Oppenheimer, author of the "Beliefs" column for The New York Times

Anne Rice in her office, right before our interview.



Listen to our original 2009 interview with Anne Rice, when she had just come back to the church:

History of the American Cantorate Project
Hazzans: Judaism's Sacred Singers January 16, 2015
For more than a thousand years, sacred singers called cantors, or hazzans, have led Jewish congregations through sung prayers. The melodies are a mix of traditions, designed to make worship more effective, and more beautiful. Now there's an online home for more than 100 examples of cantor songs, first recorded in the mid-1980s for the "History of the American Cantorate" project. From October 2013.

Mark Slobin, professor of music and American studies at Wesleyan University
Mark Kligman, professor of Jewish Musicology at Hebrew Union College


Visit their collection of cantor recordings.