Author

Alana Newhouse

Alana Newhouse is Tablet's editor-in-chief. She 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.


Recently by Alana Newhouse

U.S.

Introducing Tablet Magazine

Our new online magazine is inspired by century-old journalistic traditions— and two rough-hewn pieces of stone
By Alana Newhouse | 8:29 PM Jun 8, 2009

Dear friends,
Welcome to Tablet Magazine, “a new read on Jewish life.”
That’s our nifty, if somewhat inaccurate, tagline. Tablet isn’t entirely new—it’s a beefed-up, rebranded, refocused update of Nextbook.org, which from 2003 until earlier this year published a range of great writing on Jewish arts and culture. We’ve expanded our mandate to cover, break, and analyze ...

Ritual & Observance

The Young and the Restless

The unfortunate side effects of religious pressures to marry too soon
By Alana Newhouse | 10:05 AM May 24, 2006

Hard-to-marry-off children have been worrying parents since Genesis, when Leah, her eyes tender from the sadness of being unwanted, took part in a hoax to trick Jacob—her younger, prettier sister’s suitor—into marrying her. There’s no indication of how old Leah was at betrothal, but the tone of the text prompts a mortifying thought: Had she ...

Audio 

Music

Immaterial Girl

Madonna, Kabbalah, and me
By Alana Newhouse | 10:50 PM Dec 28, 2005

Alana Newhouse grew up in a Modern Orthodox community in Lawrence, Long Island. She studied Torah and Talmud in high school, but in her free time supplemented that with whatever she could get her hands on—Shakespeare, General Hospital, and Top 40.
Back then, it never occurred to her that these two worlds—the Jewish world and the ...