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. and the sister organization of Nextbook Press, which publishes a line of Jewish-themed books. Our archive holds all the articles and features that originally appeared on the website Nextbook.org.
Editor-in-chief: Alana Newhouse
Deputy editor: Gabriel Sanders
Executive editor: Jesse Oxfeld
Senior editor: Sara Ivry
Senior writer: Allison Hoffman
Associate editor: Hadara Graubart
Staff writers: Marissa Brostoff, Marc Tracy
Contributing editors: Elisa Albert, Gal Beckerman, Mayim Bialik, Emily Botein, Robin Cembalest, Douglas Century, Joshua Cohen, Jeremy Dauber, Vanessa Davis, Blake Eskin, Alexander Gelfand, Jeffrey Goldberg, Rebecca Goldstein, Jesse Green, Ben Greenman, Eve Grubin, Lynn Harris, Dara Horn, Marjorie Ingall, Rodger Kamenetz, David Kaufmann, 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, Jay Michaelson, Victor Navasky, Sherwin Nuland, Mark Oppenheimer, Willa Paskin, Robert Pinsky, Eddy Portnoy, Alyssa Quint, David Rakoff, Nessa Rappaport, Lauren Redniss, Jody Rosen, Jeannie Rosenfeld, Jonathan Sarna, Esther Schor, Gary Shteyngart, Rachel Shukert, Ilan Stavans, Mimi Sheraton, Noga Tarnopolsky, Joseph Telushkin, Nathan Thrall, Ellen Umansky, Michael Weiss, Leon Wieseltier, Jonathan Wilson, Ruth Wisse, and Wesley Yang
Executive producer, audio: Julie Subrin
Executive producer, video and interactive: Liel Leibovitz
Consulting producer: Marit Haahr
Art director/webmaster: Len Small
Assistant art director/webmaster: Abigail Miller
Managing director, special projects: Wayne Hoffman
Editorial intern: Jordan Hirsch
Communications intern: Jill Finkelstein
Mayim Bialik, a contributing editor for Tablet, starred in NBC’s Blossom from 1990 to 1994. She has also appeared on Curb Your Enthusiasm and Saving Grace and has a recurring role on ABC Family’s The Secret Life of the American Teenager. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two sons.
Marissa Brostoff, staff writer
A veteran of the Forward, Marissa has written for The Hartford Courant and New Voices. She graduated from Wesleyan University with an interdisciplinary degree in history, literature, and philosophy. Her favorite fast day is Tisha B’Av.
Joshua Cohen writes two columns for Tablet, one on literature in translation and the other as a critic-at-large. He is the author of five books with a sixth, Graven Imaginings, a novel about the last Jew, to be published in spring 2010. He lives in Brooklyn.
Vanessa Davis, who draws a monthly illustrated column for Tablet, published Spaniel Rage, an illustrated memoir, in 2005. Her comics have appeared in The Best American Comics 2007, Kramers Ergot, and The New York Times. She lives in Santa Rosa, California.
Alexander Gelfand is Tablet’s music columnist. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Economist, Wired.com, the Forward, and elsewhere. He lives in Queens with his wife and two children.
Jeffrey Goldberg, a national correspondent for The Atlantic, writes Tablet’s “Searching for Judah” column, which is based on his upcoming book for Nextbook Press’s 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.
Hadara Graubart, associate editor
Hadara joined the staff in 2007, while earning a master’s degree from the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at NYU. She is the deputy editor of both The Scroll, Tablet’s blog, and the magazine’s arts coverage. She previously wrote a blog for Nextbook called The Schlockford Files, in which she nurtured her affinity for Jewish ephemera. Hadara also dabbles in audio production, once parsing her family’s myriad superstitions with her mother for a Nextbook podcast.
Marit Haahr, consulting producer
Marit worked in public radio, where she produced and edited the shows Fair Game from PRI with Faith Salie and The Infinite Mind, before joining Nextbook in 2008. She got her start as a reporter for KQED in San Francisco, and her pieces have aired on Studio 360, All Things Considered, Morning Edition, and Marketplace. Marit is a Harvard graduate. Her favorite podcasts include “Meat Up,” in which Sara Ivry explored the history of the Jewish delicatessen, and “Her Body, Her Self,” a conversation between Ivry and a transgender professor at Yeshiva University.
Allison Hoffman, senior writer
Allison thinks being a journalist is the best job in the world. As the New York correspondent for The Jerusalem Post, she went to the Oscars, watched Bernard Madoff get handcuffed, and talked to David Lynch about how transcendental meditation can solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She’s also worked for the Associated Press, in its San Diego bureau, and The New Yorker, as a fact-checker. She began her career at the Los Angeles Times, where she contributed to the paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting on the 2003 wildfires. Allison earned her undergraduate degree in politics, philosophy, and economics from Balliol College, Oxford, and graduated from Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism in 2003.
Wayne Hoffman, managing director, special projects
As half of Nextbook Inc.’s communications department, Wayne works on publicity and partnership efforts for Nextbook and Tablet. He previously spent more than a decade as an editor at the Forward, Billboard, and the New York Blade, and over the past 20 years his cultural reporting has appeared in The Washington Post, the Village Voice, The Nation, Out magazine and elsewhere. Wayne holds a bachelor’s degree from Tufts and a master’s in American studies from NYU. His debut novel, Hard, was published by Carroll & Graf in 2006.
Marjorie Ingall writes about parenting for Tablet. She is a contributing writer at Self and the former East Village Mamele columnist for the Forward. A former writer and editor for Sassy, she has written for The New York Times, Glamour, Redbook, Seventeen, Ms., Food & Wine, and Wired. Hungry, a memoir Ingall co-wrote with Crystal Renn, will be published this fall.
Sara Ivry, senior editor and “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’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. She oversees the site’s coverage of life and religion. 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 is a cultural critic for Tablet. He lives in Washington, D.C., and teaches literature at George Mason University. His book on the painter Philip Guston will be published next year.
Etgar Keret, who writes Tablet’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 is Tablet’s book critic. 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 Nextbook Press’s Jewish Encounters series.
Josh Lambert writes Tablet’s weekly publishing roundup. He 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, executive producer, video and interactive media
Liel is the author, most recently, of Lili Marlene: The Soldiers’ Song of World War II, published in 2008 by W.W. Norton. 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. He is obsessed with coffee.
Seth Lipsky, a political columnist for Tablet, is the founding editor of The New York Sun and the English-language Forward. He is a former member The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board.
Abigail Miller, assistant art director/webmaster
Abigail, who makes sure Tablet 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.
Victor Navasky, a Tablet political columnist, is the author of Kennedy Justice (1971), Naming Names (which won a National Book Award in 1982), and A Matter of Opinion (which won the George Polk Book Award in 2005), among other works. He worked as an editor at The New York Times Magazine, and he wrote a column, “In Cold Print” for The New York Times Book Review. Beginning in 1978, he was editor and then publisher of The Nation, America’s oldest weekly magazine, where he is now publisher emeritus. He is currently a professor at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism and the chairman of the Columbia Journalism Review.
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, executive editor
Jesse, who is also a theater critic for The New York Observer, was most recently a senior editor at New York magazine, working on its “Intelligencer” section, and he was 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. He has done freelance work for The Daily Beast, Us Weekly, and Time Out New York, and has continued to contribute to New York. A graduate of Stanford University, Jesse was inexplicably named to the Forward 50, the paper’s list of the 50 most influential U.S. Jews, in 2005. He is licensed to perform weddings.
Eddy Portnoy writes a monthly column on Jewish history for Tablet. He teaches Yiddish language and literature at Rutgers University, where he specializes in Jewish popular culture.
Jeannie Rosenfeld is Tablet’s art critic. She was an editor at Art+Auction from 1999 to 2003 and has written about fine arts, decorative arts, and Judaica for publications including Interior Design, ArtNews, and the Forward.
Gabriel Sanders, deputy editor
Before joining the staff in 2008, Gabriel worked at Vanity Fair and later the Forward. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, The Jerusalem Report, Time Out New York, and other publications, and he moderates a monthly discussion series at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage. Gabriel holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin and a master’s in European history from the University of Chicago. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, the writer Amelia Kahaney, and their son, Ezra, whose teeth were the focus of a Nextbook podcast.
Mimi Sheraton, who writes a monthly food column for Tablet, has written about food and travel for 55 years. She was the New York Times restaurant critic and has written for Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Conde Nast Traveler, New York, and other publications. Mimi has written 16 books including, most recently, Eating My Words: An Appetite for Life, a memoir.
Len Small, art director/webmaster
Len earned a master’s in design from the School of Visual Arts in 2008. While a student there, he worked for Empax, a non-profit design firm, and edited the SVA design blog, CRIT. He started his web career at R/GA in 2000, designing for clients like IBM and Nike, and he later became an art director at Fry Inc, focusing on e-commerce websites for Kraft Foods. He’s also done freelance work for Razorfish, MTV, 800Flowers.com, and Taste of the Nation Brooklyn. Len holds a bachelor’s in fine art from Washington University in St. Louis.
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’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.
