About Us

Tablet is a daily online magazine of Jewish news, ideas, and culture. Launched in June 2009, it’s a project of the not-for-profit Nextbook Inc., which also produces the Nextbook Press Jewish Encounters book series. Our archive holds all the articles and features that originally appeared on the website Nextbook.org.

WRITING FOR TABLET MAGAZINE

Tablet welcomes submissions from freelance writers. Please submit a full pitch—including a detailed description of what you’d like to write, a brief biography, links to previously published stories, and, if necessary, a short writing sample—to the appropriate section editor. Do not submit a completed piece. Successful pitches will display a working knowledge of Tablet Magazine and the content it publishes.

Arts and culture pitches should go to Matthew Fishbane, mfishbane@tabletmag.com.
Life and religion pitches should go to Wayne Hoffman, whoffman@tabletmag.com.
News and politics pitches should go to Bari Weiss, bweiss@tabletmag.com.
Vox Tablet pitches should go to Julie Subrin, jsubrin@tabletmag.com.

MASTHEAD

Editor-in-chief: Alana Newhouse
Publisher: Jesse Oxfeld
Managing editor: Wayne Hoffman
Literary editor: David Samuels
Senior editors: Matthew Fishbane, Bari Weiss
Senior writers: Allison Hoffman, Liel Leibovitz
Staff writer: Marc Tracy
Executive producer, audio: Julie Subrin
“Vox Tablet” host: Sara Ivry
Assistant art director: Abigail Miller
Copy editor: Sian Gibby
Editorial assistant: Stephanie Butnick
Editorial intern: Miriam Krule

Contributing editors: Elisa Albert, Gal Beckerman, Mayim Bialik, Emily Botein, Robin Cembalest, Douglas Century, Adam Chandler, Joshua Cohen, Jeremy Dauber, Vanessa Davis, Blake Eskin, Alexander Gelfand, Jeffrey Goldberg, Rebecca Goldstein, Hadara Graubart, Jesse Green, Ben Greenman, Marit Haahr, Lynn Harris, Dara Horn, Marjorie Ingall, Rodger Kamenetz, David Kaufmann, Ari Kelman, Adam Kirsch, Stuart Klawans, Melvin Konner, Elena Lappin, Adam Lebor, David Lehman, Hugh Levinson, Gideon Lewis-Kraus, Josh Lambert, Seth Lipsky, Deborah Lipstadt, Eryn Loeb, Jonathan Mahler, David Margolick, Daphne Merkin, Joan Nathan, Victor Navasky, Sherwin Nuland, Mark Oppenheimer, Willa Paskin, Robert Pinsky, Eddy Portnoy, David Rakoff, Nessa Rapaport, Lauren Redniss, Jody Rosen, Jeannie Rosenfeld, Jonathan Sarna, Esther Schor, Gary Shteyngart, Rachel Shukert, Ilan Stavans, Mimi Sheraton, Joseph Telushkin, Nathan Thrall, Michael Weiss, Leon Wieseltier, Jonathan Wilson, Ruth Wisse, Wesley Yang, Robert Zaretsky

WHO WE ARE

Stephanie Butnick is an editorial assistant at Tablet Magazine. She earned a bachelor’s degree in religion from Duke University and a master’s in journalism and religious studies from NYU.

Joshua Cohen is the author of six books including, most recently, Witz. He lives in Brooklyn.

Matthew Fishbane, senior editor
Matthew oversees cultural coverage for Tablet Magazine. A graduate of New York University’s Journalism Institute, Matthew’s reporting has taken him from Colombian jungles to Chinese backwaters, writing for The New York Times, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Salon, Outside, The Walrus, and other publications.

Jeffrey Goldberg, a national correspondent for The Atlantic, is working on a book about Judah Maccabee for the Nextbook Press Jewish Encounters series. Before joining The Atlantic in 2007, he was a correspondent for The New Yorker, and, previously in his career, he wrote for The New York Times Magazine and New York.

Allison Hoffman, senior writer
Allison Hoffman believes being a journalist is the best job in the world. She splits her time between New York and Washington, covering politics and the Jewish community. Before joining Tablet, she was the Jerusalem Post’s New York correspondent. Allison also worked for the Associated Press in its San Diego bureau, covering politics, the military, and legal affairs. She began her career at the Los Angeles Times, where she contributed to the paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting on the 2003 California wildfires, and also worked as a fact-checker at the New Yorker. Allison earned her undergraduate degree in politics, philosophy, and economics from Balliol College, Oxford, and holds a master’s degree from Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Wayne Hoffman, managing editor
Wayne Hoffman, who also supervised Tablet’s Life & Religion section, edited What We Brought Back: Jewish Life After Birthright, as well as Taglit-Birthright Israel’s Traveling Companion and Birthright Israel NEXT’s Literary Companion to Shabbat. He has written two novels—Hard and Sweet Like Sugar—and his essays and short fiction have appeared in such anthologies as Mama’s Boy, I Like it Like That, and Generation Q. His cultural reporting has appeared in the Washington Post, Village Voice, Billboard, the Forward, and elsewhere. He has a bachelor’s degree in social politics from Tufts University, and an master’s in American studies from NYU.

Marjorie Ingall writes about parenting for Tablet Magazine. The former “East Village Mamele” columnist for The Forward, she has also been a contributing writer at Self, a contributing editor at Glamour, and a writer and editor for Sassy. She has written for The New York Times, Redbook, New York, Seventeen, Ms., Food & Wine, and Wired. She is the author of The Field Guide to North American Males and the co-author of Hungry.

Sara Ivry, “Vox Tablet” host
Sara, a graduate of Barnard College and Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, has written about business, books, education, art, and health for The New York Times, The Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, Real Simple, Bookforum, and other publications. She hosts Tablet Magazine’s weekly podcast, for which she interviewed Michael Chabon, Aline Crumb, and many other culture makers; reported a podcast about the Jewish roots of West Side Story; and offered her takes on Red Sox and Bob Dylan fandom. Her day-school elementary education enabled her to inform her mother, in a letter written at age 8, that “You are like the pharaoh and I am like all these slaves.”

David Kaufmann lives in Washington, D.C., and teaches literature at George Mason University.

Etgar Keret, who writes Tablet Magazine’s monthly column from Israel, is the author of five books, including, most recently, The Girl on the Fridge. He has contributed to The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and This American Life. Keret is also a filmmaker, and his 2007 movie, Jellyfish, won the Camera d’Or prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

Adam Kirsch, a book critic., is a senior editor at The New Republic. He has written several books of poetry and poetry criticism and is the author of Benjamin Disraeli, a biography in the Nextbook Press Jewish Encounters series.

Josh Lambert received a bachelor’s degree from Harvard, where he contributed to the Harvard Lampoon, and a doctorate in English literature from the University of Michigan. He is the author of American Jewish Fiction, and he has earned fellowships from the Center for Jewish History and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, as well as a residency at the MacDowell Colony.

Liel Leibovitz, senior writer
Liel is the author, most recently, of The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ideals of Divine Election, co-written with Todd Gitlin. A native of Tel Aviv, he completed his doctoral studies in communications at Columbia University, researching the ontology of video games. This means he spends more time playing games than a grown man should.

Abigail Miller, assistant art director/webmaster
Abigail, who makes sure Tablet Magazine has pictures, was a letterpress printer, a nanny, a bookseller, a typesetter, an apprentice plasterer, and a puppet maker before joining the staff. She graduated from Harvard with a degree in literature and studio art, placing her on this obvious career path.

Joan Nathan is Tablet Magazine’s food columnist and the author of ten cookbooks including the new Quiches, Kugels and Couscous: My Search for Jewish Cooking in France. She is a regular contributor to The New York Times and Food Arts Magazine, among other publications. She lives in Washington, D.C., and Martha’s Vineyard.

Alana Newhouse, editor-in-chief
Alana joined Nextbook in September 2008 and oversaw its redesign and relaunch as Tablet magazine. Before that, she spent five years as culture editor of the Forward, where she supervised coverage of books, films, dance, music, art, and ideas. She also started a line of Forward-branded books with W.W. Norton and edited its maiden publication, A Living Lens: Photographs of Jewish Life from the Pages of the Forward. A graduate of Barnard College and Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, Alana has contributed to The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and Slate.

Jesse Oxfeld, publisher
Jesse joined Tablet Magazine to work on its launch, and he served as its executive editor until the end of 2011, when he took on his publishing duties. Also the theater reviewer for The New York Observer, he was a senior editor at New York magazine, working on its “Intelligencer” section, and the founding editor of the Daily Intel blog on nymag.com. He has been the editor of Gawker; on staff at Brill’s Content, Editor & Publisher, Book magazine, Mediabistro.com, and, for six weeks, ABC News; and he started his career as an intern at Newsweek. A graduate of Stanford University, Jesse was inexplicably named to the Forward 50, the newspaper’s list of the 50 most influential U.S. Jews, in 2005.

Eddy Portnoy teaches Yiddish language and literature at Rutgers University, where he specializes in Jewish popular culture.

David Samuels, literary editor
David, Tablet Magazine’s literary editor, is a contributing editor at Harper’s and a regular contributor to The Atlantic and The New Yorker. He is the author of two books, The Runner and Only Love Can Break Your Heart, a collection of his journalism.

Julie Subrin, executive producer, audio
Julie has produced the site’s weekly podcast since 2005. She was previously an associate producer of Public Radio International’s The Next Big Thing, and she holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Michigan and a master’s from Stanford. Her favorite podcasts from the archive include Gregory Warner’s dispatch from a makeshift memorial in Rwanda, Sara Ivry’s conversation with novelist Howard Jacobson, and a story about a batch of love letters discovered by a German stamp collector.

Marc Tracy, staff writer
Marc writes Tablet Magazine’s daily blog, The Scroll, and contributes other articles to the site. A graduate of Columbia University, he previously covered small businesses for Slate and corporate legal developments for a newswire. His book reviews have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Slate, the Village Voice, and elsewhere. He does not live in Brooklyn.

Bari Weiss, senior editor
Bari was most recently an assistant editorial features editor at The Wall Street Journal, where she edited and wrote op-eds. A 2007 graduate of Columbia University, she studied history and founded The Current, a journal of politics, culture, and Jewish affairs. Bari has written for Haaretz, the New York Sun, and the Forward, and sits on the board of the Civic Education Initiative.