Ah, dear commenter. You know us not.

Our new feature, by contributing editor and genius lyricist Rachel Shukert, has only been up a few hours, and it’s already doing its job of enlightening, challengingm and infuriating people. Called The Tattler, Rachel’s column will be a funny and sassy yet incisive take on what people are talking about—or should be talking about—each week, from big ideas and prominent culture stories to a single photograph, a cameo in one episode of your favorite television show, or, yes, a stray New Yorker cartoon. Think of it as the pleasure of cultured conversation without anxiety, guilt, or even the need to leave home.

A nervous Adler told me over the phone that he wasn’t advocating Obama’s assassination by Mossad agents. “Of course not,” he said.

But do you think Israel should consider it an option? “No.”

But do you believe that Israel is in fact considering the option in its most inner circles? “No. Actually, no. I was hoping to make clear that it’s unspeakable—god forbid this would ever happen. I take it you’re quoting me?”

Yes. “Oh, boy.”

This man can barely speak for himself, let alone anyone else. And now Adler, who to judge from that interview never expected a spotlight outside of his small paper, is being hounded online—and presumably offline too—by angry hordes. I suppose it’s appropriate, in a dotting the “i” way, for the Secret Service to be involved, but the folks who really need to have their motives investigated are the readers, including all of those righteous tweeters sharing their livid reactions to the tossed-off comment of a patently simple man. These people, one presumes, want to be spoken for by more responsible, thoughtful journalists, and yet not enough of them have been interested in actually paying for this expertise. Barely a year goes by without news of yet another Jewish newspaper folding—the most recent of which, in Portland, actually died as the community itself grew. How loudly can I scream this from a rooftop? Journalism is hard and expensive, and communities that don’t pony up adequate resources for this privilege have only themselves to blame when they find unskilled men and women making un-thought-through comments ostensibly in their name.

But Gawker is a different story. Cook—who knows his way around trenchant, often excellent reporting and criticism—had the chance, on a site dedicated to covering the media, to make an important point about the desiccation of communal journalism. Adler is clearly no great thinker and no skilled journalist. Once Cook realized this, he might have dug for a teensy bit more backing before presenting Adler as any sort of communal voice, and indeed, in the tradition of worthwhile media criticism, might have made many of the points I made in the previous paragraph. Instead, Cook wrote a post that may not have been meant as a dog whistle for anti-Semites, but which certainly had that effect. (“Why the American tax payer has to pay billions each year to maintain peace for Israel comes down to one thing,” asserted an average commenter: “Israel’s lobby in the USA and the willingness of many American Jews to put another country’s interests over the one they were born in.”) If some random Muslim writer from a local giveaway in Dearborn called for jihad against the United States, would Cook have highlighted it in this same manner? I’d hope not. That’s the kind of tactic for which far-right lunatics like Pamela Geller are regularly, legitimately denounced. So, why is it acceptable to treat the Jewish community in this shoddy way? To tacitly present Adler as representative of anyone—particularly the day after Barack Obama effortlessly raked in a half a million dollars at a Jewish fundraiser—is so facile that it’s hard not to view it as purposefully malicious.

I have to imagine that isn’t the case. This is, at least in part, because Cook is married to Allison Benedikt, who last year caused a firestorm with an essay about her disillusionment with Israel. Whatever your feelings about that piece—and, by the way, most of the published reactions to it were either moronic or reprehensible—there is no debating that Benedikt was honestly grappling with an important personal and communal conflict. In doing so, she subjected herself to the harsh limelight of an increasingly vicious conversation about the relationship between American Jews and Israel, but because she is a real journalist, she did so with actual knowledge, insight, and measured awareness of the consequences of her argument. With her as one of the best examples, I’d argue that any media writer, and particularly one with the privilege of sharing Benedikt’s breakfast-table, should be able to discern what a genuine journalist is, and what one isn’t—and, given the differences, make the requisite responsible decisions about his or her coverage of this landscape.

This may have been news to some, but it wasn’t to Senior Editor Matthew Fishbane, who visited the country last summer. He returned with a riveting story, published this morning, about a prosperous, paradisaical Jewish community under assault—and the consequential personal and communal conflicts that happen in its wake. Eerily, the Times reported that Chavez concluded an aerobic 9-hour speech this week by reading a passage from Nietzsche on the importance of will in overcoming obstacles—the exact same line used by one of Matthew’s lead subjects as an epigraph of his memoir. When you finish Matthew’s extraordinary piece, you’ll understand: This was no coincidence.

The Dispossessed

In 1941, a young Harvard-educated classicist named Varian Fry arrived in occupied France on a daring mission to rescue more than 2,000 of Europe’s leading writers, artists, and intellectuals from the Nazis. Hounded by the Gestapo, he smuggled Marcel Duchamp, Marc Chagall, Hannah Arendt, and dozens of other 20th-century cultural luminaries out of France and brought them to America. So, why did even the people Fry saved want to forget him? In this fascinating psychological profile, acclaimed novelist Horn, chosen by Granta as one of the 25 best young novelists in America, follows the peculiar life and legacy of an American Oskar Schindler. You don’t need a Kindle to read this piece; just follow the download instructions here. And to hear more about the making of it, check out the Vox Tablet podcast with Dara.

Next, I’m thrilled to welcome Irin Carmon, one of our favorite contributors, to our stable of columnists. One of our most popular columns has been The Diasporist, penned from its start by contributing editor Michelle Goldberg. Michelle will be going on hiatus to cover the presidential campaign for The Daily Beast, and Irin will be picking up her mantle. Currently a staff writer at Salon, where she writes about politics and culture, Irin was named one of Forbes’ “30 under 30″ in Media, and received the Hillman Foundation’s Sidney award for her reporting on the Mississippi “Personhood” battle. An Israeli raised in the United States, she speaks Hebrew, Spanish, and Portuguese. And she holds multiple passports, though one of them, as she writes in her first Diasporist column, recently went awry—with very unexpected consequences.

The Rescuer
Who Shall Live
End of the Line

Heads-up, peacocking commenters: Addario, who is one of the most famous photojournalists on the planet, entered the checkpoint with her very hard-to-come-by press credentials on her, along with a quite substantial Google trail behind her—both of which, as any actually knowledgeable observer or user of checkpoints knows, quickly convinced those on duty that she wasn’t a terrorist. So, stop that rubbish; it only makes you look silly.

And “silly” isn’t bad as “retrograde misogynist,” which roughly describes the other category of negative reaction to this post: those who lambasted Addario for entering the checkpoint while pregnant. It’s a nifty defense mechanism—in Israel, bad things only happen to people who deserve them!—but it is poison. Jews, especially, should reject the notion that victims of violence somehow did something to have it coming, a false logic applied throughout history to rationalize our own persecution. And reveals nothing so much as the utterer’s utter ignorance. The belief that war reporters are simple adrenaline junkies is proof that you have never actually met one. Nor do you have any idea what they endure—or for whom. Addario and her colleagues risk their lives to bring us (that includes you) the information we need (you too) to make informed decisions about our (and your) world. That she does this while pregnant is an additional mark of bravery for which we should all be grateful. The refusal to see this, and to instead attack her, belies nothing more complicated than simple misogyny.

So, let’s call a spade a spade: A few young soldiers made a mistake and badly mistreated a paramount professional—one who risks her life so that all of us might have the information we need to make the decisions of civic life. Mistakes, even terrible mistakes, happen; when they do, though, what must follow is a robust and believable apology from the adults in the room.

Those of us who know and love Israel believe that Addario’s experience was an anomaly, and so are well within our right to wonder why this happened. The incident and the lack of proper apology is a black mark on Israel’s record of defending free press. At a time when those who want the end of Israel are finding any foothold, any convoluted excuse to chip away at the Jewish state’s legitimacy (I mean, pinkwashing?), is it wrong for us to want Israel not to make it easy for them?

Earlier: Israel’s Infuriating Treatment of Lynsey Addario

As we hope you’ll agree, the changes are extensive without being disruptive. We’ve revamped the homes of everyone’s favorite features, like Vox Tablet, and introduced a slew of new ones, including platforms for multimedia (slideshows, videos, and even recipe cards) and—right on time—special index pages for the Jewish holidays, each featuring Tablet’s trademark FAQs, essays, and special reports. The Scroll now scrolls, enabling readers to glean more of it at a glance, and new drop-down menus at the top of the homepage also enable viewers to preview the contents of the each section.

But the changes go beyond the technical: We have a brand new Arts and Culture section, introduced here by Literary Editor David Samuels and Senior Editor Matthew Fishbane. And today we also welcome Bari Weiss, who will be taking over the News and Politics section.

Special thanks to Rob Giampietro, Prem Krishnamurthy, Chris McCaddon and Andrew Le Clair of Project Projects, our original designers to whom we turned yet again for their singularly inspired guidance. Tablet Magazine should live until 120, if only for the chance to keep working with them.

I came to Rescue Me fairly recently, when I casually downloaded an episode one night last July and ended up watching all 13 shows of season one in a single sitting. Looking back, I think I expected the show to be shallow and self-important, but what I encountered was something else: a drama, a comedy, an extended frat-house romp, an essay on the white ethnic melting pot in which Irish, Italians, and Jews have stewed together for the past century, and one of the filthiest soap operas ever made. It was also, I soon realized, a surprisingly useful mourning ritual—and possibly the culture’s best artistic engagement with the traumatic events of Sept. 11.

***

Rescue Me’s competition in the field of Sept. 11-related art has not been all that impressive. There was the Sex and the City episode in which Carrie exhorts “the girls” to shop in support of their wounded city, and Neil LaBute’s more poignant though ultimately just as glancing 2002 play, The Mercy Seat. Paul Greengrass’ United 93 was a real-time, delicately fictionalized recreation of the harrowing flight of the plane driven by hijackers into a Pennsylvania field, a film that applied the cleansing antiseptic of fact to the wounds of that day but fell short of being able to offer the ameliorative bandage of feeling. Then there was Oliver Stone’s 2006 World Trade Center, which, through its combination of off-putting bravado and ham-handed sentimentality, managed to offer neither.

Rescue Me had the courage to look squarely at the aftermath of Sept. 11 while also venturing bravely into the fog of the overwhelming, often inexplicable, and long-lasting emotions that the day aroused. The show was created by television producer Peter Tolan and actor Denis Leary, the latter of whom also stars as its lead, Tommy Gavin—a “seething urgent animal” who, driven by an otherworldly combination of bravery, rage, sweetness, alcoholism, an insatiable sex drive, and a wicked wit, is a character worthy of Greek myth.

Tommy is also a black hole that threatens to swallow any (sometimes all) of the characters in the show—which, it should be said, was cast to perfection. John Scurti played Tommy’s slovenly, witty best friend; Daniel Sunjata was the Puerto Rican dreamboat; Mike Lombardi and Broadway veteran Steven Pasquale were resident bumbling idiots with terrific comedic timing; and Andrea Roth and the inimitable Callie Thorne stood as the two pulsing female poles between which Tommy pings for all seven seasons: Janet, his long-suffering, insufferable blonde wife, and Sheila, the lunatic brunette mistress, who—because this crowd really does seem to model its family values on the House of Atreus—is also his dead cousin’s widow. It’s a motley crew, but that’s the point: Each character’s relationship to the others, and to Sept. 11, is different. By tracking all of them simultaneously, and over the long haul of seven seasons, Rescue Me managed to present a grieving process that felt both intimate and also like a collective portrait of the experience of an entire city in mourning.

Somewhere in the middle of watching the third season, the thought occurred to me: Was Sept. 11 the moment I officially became a New Yorker? I moved to the city from leafy, suburban Long Island in 1993 to attend Barnard; by my mid-20s, my college fling with New York had matured into a grown-up commitment. But I knew none of the thousands of people who died on Sept. 11, 2001, and so to ground my connection to the city in a tragedy that was so directly personal for so many of my near-neighbors felt mawkish and pretentious. As I continued to watch Rescue Me, though, I realized the show was proposing something altogether different.

***

Television offers the ability to experience a cast of characters over a simultaneous extended period of their lives and our own: They grow (or don’t) as we grow (and don’t). This matters even more when the operative emotions being processed are grief and fear, both of which need nothing as much as the long arc of time to become comprehensible. And yet, for all this seemingly woo-woo chatter, Rescue Me was never for the faint of heart. It was a button-pushing, boundary-flouting, testosterone-fueled slayer of artifice pulling at scabs and seemingly healthy skin alike. Everyone—the Irish, the Jews, the Puerto Ricans, the Italians, the Catholic Church, Sept. 11 widows—was routinely tweaked with matter-of-fact, sometimes-gasp-inducing vulgarity, and none of the show’s best lines can be quoted here. These include the dialogue in one of my favorite moments: a knockout scene that takes place when misogynistic comments to a female firefighter land the crew in sensitivity training. (Let’s just say George Carlin could be the episode’s patron saint.)

Many of the storylines were patently ridiculous, and some of the scenes were unspeakably gruesome—including one in which Tommy looks up after giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a badly burned black boy. “Uh, Tommy,” someone awkwardly notes, “The kid’s lips. … They’re, uh, they’re stuck to yours.” In another one of the show’s most talked-about episodes, Tommy rapes his wife; in the next scene, she is placidly reading a magazine on the couch. Later, one of the characters asserts his belief that Sept. 11 could have been an inside job—an idea that, in a department that lost 343 men that day, is not simply unpatriotic; it’s psychologically destabilizing.

As I hit the third season, I realized that the show’s truly radical element was its lithe toggling between absurd stand-up comedy; reflexive raunchiness; a commitment to civic values, if not the circus of politics; and, last but not least, enough proximity to death to appreciate the importance of emotional and psychological clarity. That’s about as close to a personal motto as I get, which might be why—despite their obvious and insane flaws—I started to almost wish I could know, even live among, the characters of Rescue Me.

Experiencing their perseverations over seven seasons has been, at times, unbelievably frustrating: Tommy’s two concubines approach and repel him like magnets that reverse their charges each morning; Pasquale and Lombardi’s characters rarely stray far from low comedy; and—the see-saw on which every other episode seems to hinge—Tommy routinely jumps on and off the wagon. For a while, this last bit of back-and-forth was the most maddening for me—until I realized that Tommy’s dance with alcohol mimics exactly what it feels like to writhe in a certain kind of extended pain: excruciating, soon exasperating, eventually even boring. In such instances, reaching to anything for relief—including levers that have, time and again, proven useless and even toxic—is not just human; it is almost hopeful. Tommy is an alcoholic who can be racist, chauvinist, manipulative, and cruel, but at least he is fighting to stay alive. And the longer he does, the safer the rest of this city will be. “Let me tell you something,” Tommy spits, before storming out of the sensitivity training session. “Next time I walk into a burning building and refuse to bring out anyone who’s not the same color as me, that’s when you can bring my angry, sober, pink, Irish ass back down here.”

This kind of values-based impropriety is the show’s real argot, and it made working- and middle-class New York sexy again—a welcome respite after the one-two punch of shows like King of Queens, which marked the outer boroughs as havens of schlubby quaintness, and Sex and the City, which gave well-off Manhattan a monopoly on sex and pathos. On Rescue Me, pretense is the hobby of the privileged, and a meaningless, boring one at that. By contrast, Tommy Gavin and Co. live the way we all should—not, as Hallmark cards instruct us, as if every day could be our last, but as if every day was, miraculously, another day: another opportunity to laugh, eat, work, have sex, drink, or smoke, and hardly a thing to waste on superficial rectitude. “The best place to get into a discussion is a firehouse,” according to Tommy. “There’s nothing sacred here.”

Purity demands space—room to keep everyone and everything looking pristine. People in firehouses don’t have the luxury of physical or spiritual space from the imperatives of their own best and worst impulses, or from each other. “That’s the beauty and the terror of it,” Leary told me recently. “I have this group of people who will know everything about me, whether I like it or not—and sometimes before I do.”

It was in this way that Rescue Me’s firehouse grew into a metaphor for my city. Here we live pressed up against each other, in a sweaty, passionate, uncomfortable crush that can, if you let it, melt away artifice and bring out your crudest, most generous, maybe most obnoxious but finally truest self. In the period after Sept. 11, this crush—which I had always viewed as an uncomplicated good—began to seem like a terrifying liability, because it was what made me, and everyone around me here, so vulnerable: One can do so much damage in a small space. Taking this idea as their Archimedean point, the creators of Rescue Me crafted the love letter to New York that I didn’t have the fortitude to write—not a note of simple infatuation, but an unquiet missive from a heartbroken partner, desperately trying to burn off enough pain and fear and rage to stay put.

Between this email and the news that hundreds of volunteers had poured in to help the Shomrim, the police, and eventually even the FBI canvass Borough Park and other parts of Brooklyn, it seemed clear that the Internet was being used to mobilize an already astonishingly mobilizable ultra-Orthodox community—one already related to Orthodox communities outside of Brooklyn. Given the historically complex relationship that the fervently observant have to technology—paradoxically both early adopting and often enduringly resistant—it was hard not to feel a sense of pride and, against evidence already mounting to the contrary, a tiny sliver of hope. This community was using all available tools to do what every community was meant to do: care for its own.

Which is why I gasped yesterday when I read that investigators believe it may have been this very asset—the efficient, powerful activation of up-to-date resources—that caused the suspect in Leiby Kletzky’s murder to panic and kill the child.

I had been sure that nothing could worsen the discovery that an 8-year-old walking home alone from camp for the first time in his life, lost and surely already scared, somehow managed to stumble into the confusing, frantic world of a deeply disturbed man; but it is simply unbearable to imagine that his parents, and the scores of police officers, canvassers, and prayer-givers who sought to help the parents might be made to believe that they had, however inadvertently and with whatever great intentions, played a role in his death. The injunction at last night’s funeral, in which one speaker “reminded the community to be careful, urging the adults to protect their children from strangers,” must have stabbed the hearts of Leiby’s parents, who allowed their child a small measure of freedom with the most unthinkable of consequences. It is a lesson embedded in Orthodox life, one for which the religious are routinely dismissed as backwater provincials. Yet this morning, it is hard not to sympathize with the insular-minded. Would contracting one’s world prevent tragedies like Leiby Kletzky’s murder? Tell me where to recycle this computer.

Let me be the one to say it: This act of violence was utterly unforeseeable—the random result of a set of cascading tragic coincidences. If the picture being drawn by investigators is true, Leiby Kletzky’s parents, however ravaged by guilt they undoubtedly are at this moment, did nothing wrong, and anyone who claims otherwise is a sinner of the first order. These two adults were engaged in that delicate dynamic that turns parenting into an art: the alternating two-step of protecting a child while slowly, thoughtfully allowing him progressively wider experiences of independence. That a madman allegedly stepped into this dance was a terrible fluke—or even, if you’re so inclined, an act of God. But as far as we mortals are concerned it was not the result of the Kletzkys’ misjudgments, and their son’s murder must not be turned into an excuse for self-punishment. Trying to make sense of this story is an understandable impulse, but it is deeply misguided. And there are, without question, enough victims already.

Ha’makom yenahem etkhem betokh she’ar avelei Zion v’Yerushalayim.

7 Blocks To Walk, Brooklyn Boy Never Got Home [NYT]
Leiby Kletzky Murder Suspect Levy Aron Confesses to Authorities [ABC]
Police, Hundreds of Volunteers Search for Missing Brooklyn Boy [NY Post]

Along with our daily reporting on news and culture as well as The Scroll, Marc Tracy’s
National Magazine Award-winning blog—which will continue to provide up-to-the-minute analysis of the Jewish world’s political, cultural, and seemingly endless athletic news—Goldblog will provide our readers with even more rigorous, insightful journalism about the Jewish world and beyond.

“Not since the glory days of Seth Lipsky’s Forward have I read a Jewish publication as entertaining, stimulating, sophisticated and complicated,” said Goldberg, who will remain a national correspondent at The Atlantic. “I want to be part of that conversation in Tablet.”

Goldblog’s future home will be at tabletmag.com/goldblog. Bookmark it now, and stay tuned. (And stay tuned also for his upcoming Nextbook Press book, on the Hanukkah hero Judah Maccabee.)

The question is more complicated than it might seem. For me, fashion used to be inextricably linked to my Jewishness. Mainly this is because the catwalk of my past was the synagogue aisle: As I’ve written, for me, good clothes and shiny hair were the particular trappings of Shabbat and holidays; prettying oneself was a unique form of hidur mitzvah, or glorifying the commandment. (The same principle is responsible for your sterling silver candlesticks, or that nice carved mezuzah from the Old City.) When I got older and started circulating in a wider community, I found that these values were calcified in the term “JAP,” which, despite its arguable historic connotations of misogyny and even anti-Semitism, I reluctantly embraced, because there was no other readily available term that meant something both to me and to the culture at large.

Then, a couple of years ago, a colleague asked me who I consider to be a truly Jewish designer—not as in Ralph Lifshitz, the Jewish boy from the Bronx who created the ultimate sartorial phantasmagoria of the WASP lifestyle, but as in designers who created the fashions that most spoke to the Jewish story of upward mobility, conspicuous consumption, desire for assimilation, and, at some far point, acceptance and even leadership. I offered up Emanuel Ungaro, whose garish prints seemed to me reflective of aspiration, that most feverish of American Jewish traits; at the other end of the spectrum, I said, was Prada, whose aggressive minimalism revealed nothing if not confident insiderdom.

But I’m no longer sure. So I put the question to you: Who’s a Jewish designer? And—perhaps more importantly—does it even matter anymore?

Related: Fashion’s Fascists [Tablet Magazine]
The Jap [Lilith]
Earlier: Golly, Galliano!
Resignation over John Galliano
A Plea on Behalf of John Galliano

Alright, I guess you can have him, too. Sigh.

Signed,
Alana

Film of John Galliano’s Racist Rant In Bar [The Sun]
Earlier: A Plea on Behalf of John Galliano

I’ll give up Sheen and Gibson, but can I keep Galliano? Pretty please? He didn’t mean it, I swear. He’s just … British.

Signed,
Alana

Dior’s John Galliano Suspended for Alleged comments [On the Runway]

The call was issued on the Dance Insider’s Website by Paul Ben-Itzak, a writer whose alter egos include “DJ Yo Mama,” on January 13 — the very day that Stewart died. (I’m going to believe this is a coincidence—that Ben-Itzak did not intentionally attack the theater on the day it lost its patron saint—mainly because to believe otherwise would cause a depression that not even hours of videos of cats hugging their teddy bears could alleviate.)

Ben-Itzak argued that the “net effect [of La MaMa's participation] will be to help whitewash Israel’s ongoing Apartheid policies, destruction of Palestinian homes and olive orchards, theft of Palestinian land, failure to take any responsibility for what a UN investigation deemed war crimes and possible crimes against humanity in its invasion of the Gaza strip in which it killed 1400 people, the majority civlians [sic], lethal attack on the Turkish flotilla attempting to break Israel’s illegal Gaza blockade of vital goods, denying Palestinians married to Israelis the right to even enter the country, new restrictions on Israeli peace groups, and, most recently, killing a Palestinian woman who was simply watching a demonstration against Israel’s illegal Apartheid wall with American-manufactured tear gas.”

Read that again. This man just blamed an experimental avant-garde theater on East Fourth and the Bowery for the Middle East conflict.

Listen to me, Paul: There was only one La MaMa, and Yo Mama doesn’t deserve to be in the same blogpost as her. But I will put you here, in the hopes that her spiritual presence somehow shames you into admitting your mistake. As for everyone else: Do you care about—oh, take your pick: Israel? New York City? Ellen Stewart? dance? artistic freedom? justice? truth? anything? Then I urge you to support La Mama against this effort. (One way is to donate here.)

And now, in celebration of Mr. Ben-Itzak’s stupendous feeble-mindedness, I think a Yo Mama joke-off is in order. Winner not only gets a Nextbook Press book of choice; I will formally make my donation to La MaMa in his or her honor. Here, I’ll start us off easy: “Yo Mama is so stupid he thought he could get away with this bullshit.” Your turn.

Say It Ain’t So (La) MaMa [Dance Insider]
Ellen Stewart, Off Off Broadway Pioneer, Dies at 91 [NYT]

I did not play basketball in high school—or ever. Rather, this site has captivated my attention because it opens a window onto an important part of my adolescence. For all of my early education (K-12), I attended a modern Orthodox yeshiva in Cedarhurst, Long Island, less than a mile away from the house in which my parents still live, in Lawrence. But my school, HAFTR, was informally part of a league of modern Orthodox yeshivot throughout the Tri-State Area, which included Ramaz in Manhattan, Yeshivah of Flatbush in Brooklyn, Frisch in New Jersey, SAR in Riverdale, Central and MTA—the two Yeshiva University-affiliated high schools in the region—and others across the country. The connections among the schools emerged mainly in the interstices of teenage life, where the students got to interact: Chiefly camp, sophomore seminars, and the myriad sports games that each played against the others. (If the words “Satran” or “Sarachek” mean something to you, you hail from whence I come.) And so, despite my lack of proficiency with a ball or puck of any kind, I still maintain some yichus: My first (alright, he was my second) boyfriend played on the legendary (fine: “legendary”) Yeshivah of Flatbush hockey team (okay, okay, it was floor hockey, but still.)

Which is why I have found myself, deep into the night, trawling endlessly through Jewish Hoops America. It has, above all else, made me wistful for modern Orthodoxy’s days of yore, before the tug rightward, before infinitesimal distinctions—“she’s a Bais Yaakov girl,” “he wears a kipa sruga”—became fundamental differences, when a girl could walk the hallways of HAFTR proudly preening in her boyfriend’s Yeshivah of Flatbush jacket.

So how could I resist a teaser like, “The best game of the night may be #2 YULA vs #22 Shalhevet”? Or Josh Stern’s VH1-inspired “Where Are They Now?” personal essay? Or the headline, “Is Reni Shulman TOO GOOD for Yeshiva Girls Basketball?”? And all of that even before you get to the breathless account of the January 2 game between Frisch and Kushner (yes, those Kushners; and, by the way, b’sha’ah tova, you crazy kids).

This entry, from the reader forum, needs to be read in full:

Elana Goldstein is by far the best player to ever exist. Standing at a mean 5’8 she has a sick jumpshot, and crashes the boards like no other. Kushner is currently 10-1 and she has been a main part of this streak. She won MVP and Lady Elite and Yaffee Memorial Tournament in 2008. She has a sick three point shot, and has the best defense ever. She has been compared to other players such as Dwayne Wade. One thing is for Certain, you better watch out for #13 on the Kushner Cobras, she will take you down.

And for those of you who favor multimedia over text, there is this can’t-miss video of Aaron Lieberman (Valley Torah) dunking on YULA.

In other news, Jewish Hoops America recently started a hockey forum. I really should have kept that jacket.

Related: The Young and the Restless [Nextbook.org]

Later, when he carefully studied scans of them at his home in Johannesburg, Mr. Goldblatt, now 80, said he began to realize that many of the photographs in “House of Bondage” had been cropped severely to enhance their impact in a powerful anti-apartheid polemic. But the full frames showed Mr. Cole’s artistry.

Now where have I heard this before? Oh, right:

Vishniac released, over the course of a five-decade career, an uncommonly small selection of his work for public consumption—so small, in fact, that it did not include many of his finest images, artistically speaking. Instead the chosen images were, in the main, those that advanced an impression of the shtetl as populated largely by poor, pious, embattled Jews—an impression aided by cropping and fabulist captioning done by his own hand. … Vishniac, who often strained to present himself as superior to others, in fact never showed the world some of his best work.

Homecoming for Photos of Apartheid [NYT]
Related: A Closer Reading of Roman Vishniac [NYT Magazine]
Out of Focus [Tablet Magazine]

Throughout the vagaries of my connection to religion, I’ve never once had doubts about my connection to its material culture—the challah knives, washing cups, mezuzahs, etc., of Jewish life. Of this stuff, and it is stuff, none has been more alluring for me than our various candle holders. That these pieces occupy the particularly female realm of our religious universe is relevant, but that the point of these accoutrements is to hold fire is even more so. The Hebrew word shamayim—the heavens —is comprised of two words: aish, or fire, and mayim, which means water. As rabbi Shlomo Riskin, among others, has noted: “[While] fire has the ability to bring warmth, it can also devour and destroy. … [C]loud and fire—the lack of clarity expressed by a cloud and the inability to gaze directly into a flame—likewise express one of the deepest truths of the Jewish message: religion is not so much paradise as it is paradox. God demands fealty even in the face of agonizing questions and disturbing uncertainty.”

Sabbath candles certainly fit the bill, as they demand our weekly attention to the challenge of this uncertainty. But what of the chanukiah, the nine-armed fire-holder that represents, in addition to Judaism’s essential paradox, the assertion of a miracle—an alleged interruption into our earthly landscape by the Divine? And here we are, back at the original problem: God.

Ah, but we don’t need to be—and that is one of the enduring gifts of Jewish life. Take a look at the chanukiahs—the proper name for the menorahs used at Hanukkah—collected here, which show evidence not of God’s hand so much as of man’s: the seemingly eternal creative engagement of human beings with our history and tradition. Of these, my favorite is Candlesticks United by Reddish, a partnership of the Israeli designers Naama Steinbock and Idan Friedman. As Daniel Belasco of the Jewish Museum recently observed, the Reddish piece is part of a trend of repurposing regular or Sabbath candlesticks into menorahs. But in Candlesticks United, this trick moves beyond clever to poignant: Built out of orphaned Sabbath candles Steinbock and Friedman found at flea markets and vintage stores, it enables the Jewish past not simply to speak to the Jewish present, but to create it. It’s almost inspired enough to make us forget something perhaps more perplexing, more painfully out of reach, even than God: our own human history, and the fact of what our ancestors chose to, or were made to, leave behind.

Lori Shabtai, a New York commercial real estate executive, says she bought her first Leiber as a bride-to-be 29 years ago, and since then, her ritual is purchasing at least one Judith Leiber a year. She associates each with a special occasion: her daughter’s Bat Mitzvah, where she carried a beige snakeskin; a black clutch with large crystals was for a big date.

“Judith Leiber has been through all of that with us,” says Ms. Shabtai.

To highlight the generational gap, Lagnado also quoted a 26-year-old fashion writer named Jessica Misener musing snarkily about the silliness of Leiber’s trademark bags, which have manifested as peacocks, tomatoes, Fabergé eggs, Socks the White House cat, and more. But Leiber also offered other, less organically-inspired creations—simple animal-skin bags, in muted colors, topped with delicately jeweled clasps and spare chains.

My mother had two of these, and, as with Shabtai, for her they have life-cycle associations: The first bag, a black snakeskin pouch, was purchased before my sister’s wedding; the second, a beige clutch with a pale pink quartz clasp, my mother bought for herself before my bat mitzvah. And so, as I read the piece, I realized I maintained my own affection for Leiber’s kooky totes—a feeling that, depressingly, punted me out of Misener’s generation and into … my mother’s?

Not even, it seems. When I called my mother to commiserate about those unsentimental young people, I didn’t get quite the response I was looking for. “I’d sell mine!” she exclaimed, upon which she promptly matriculated from a decade of refusing to learn how to use her cellphone and texted me pictures of her two Leiber bags, along with a message: “Ask Judith if she wants these back!”

I was stunned. Forget about my sister—it’s every daughter for herself here—didn’t she have any nostalgia for my bat mitzvah?

“Alana,” she said, wearily, “I don’t have the dress I wore that day anymore, and I certainly don’t have the weight I lost.”

She added, “It’s just a pocketbook, honey.”

Purse Pursuit: Designer Embarks on a Shopping Spree to Bag Her Own Bags [WSJ]

Those questions may appear nebulous, simultaneously too elusive and too deep for anyone to attempt to answer seriously. But look at the landscape of Jewish life and two broad currents suggest themselves, two divergent agendas that address much more than the question of conversion alone. On the one hand, those who imagine Judaism as an exclusive enterprise advocate that the religion and its followers alike should move in ever-diminishing circles, orbiting around a small nucleus of rabbis entrusted with parsing the halachic laws. This approach is not without its merits; trying to make sense of an ancient faith in a modern world is a mighty and baffling task, and the drive inward, toward purity and certainty, is both instinctive and immensely reassuring.

But those of us who believe that Judaism’s survival also depends on its ability to adapt to the spiritual and practical challenges imposed by modernity must reject the urge to narrow our common horizons. Instead, we must examine our boundaries and beliefs and work to welcome new people, new traditions, and new ideas into the fold. To some, such talk may have the airy, hollow ring of universalist New Age spirituality. But that is not the case—as we think will be clear from the collection of essays by rabbis and writers, scholars and cooks, comedians and community leaders in Tablet Magazine’s High Holiday package. Some of these articles and essays are personal, others historical. In them, we hope each reader will find his or her own path toward answering Judaism’s essential questions, impossible and beautiful and all-encompassing—the only questions worth asking.

Judaism’s greatest sages have always plunged into the depths of doubt in an effort to find morsels of wisdom. This holiday season, two of our contributors evoke the memories of such men: Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, in an essay coming tomorrow, writes about Hillel the Elder, who defined Jewish peoplehood in radically inclusive terms, and Rodger Kamenetz recalls his journey to commune with the spirit of the late Nachman of Bratslav, a 19th-century rabbi who made his home among the non-believers in the hope of showing them the merits of faith.

These rabbis—and other, less illustrious but no less righteous men and women throughout history—embody Judaism’s finest qualities. As their respective communities sought solace and comfort in closed doors and closed minds, they ventured out and struggled to expand the boundaries of peoplehood, occasionally disregarding the letter in service of the spirit. It is doubt, they realized, that makes the believer’s faith more meaningful, and it is compassion for others that makes one’s understanding of oneself more complete. Armed with these convictions, they engaged with the world; more than any enforcer of strict rules or arbiter of stern edicts, they taught us what it means to be Jewish.

As we approach Rosh Hashanah, we would do well to abandon the pointless fights that have embroiled so many of us for so long, and to insist instead that there are other, better, more urgent questions for us to be asking. We must ask how we can invite as many newcomers to partake in Judaism—as those interviewed by Joan Nathan for her food column have done—without eroding the religion’s core tenets. We must ask what forms of innovative communal structures we might erect to serve the needs of those whom consequences placed just outside the reach of tradition’s grasp, as Rabbi Andy Bachman does in a Vox Tablet podcast about, of all things, burial customs.

Most important, we must ask which of our beliefs guide us forward and which are merely vantage points to the past. And we must do so without turning denominational divides into weapons of divisiveness. In the course of recent American Jewish history, Reform and Conservative rabbis have sometimes preferred strict interpretations of Jewish law, while Orthodox rabbis have allowed room for ambiguity. Indeed, it is the Orthodox rabbi Avi Shafran who here reminds us of the inherent dangers of generalizations and collective judgments, a shortcoming from which Jews of all stripes are not immune.

Unlike Passover or Purim, Rosh Hashanah has no haggadah or megillah, no seminal text that invites us to ponder the meaning of the holiday. It is up to us to stir up debate, to ask what traditions still matter and what should be reconsidered. We hope you’ll find kindling for conversation in the articles and other content we’re publishing this week. And even if not, at the very least try the pomegranate martini.

Shanah tova, from everyone at Tablet Magazine.

We were delighted. We’ve been aiming for that “so us” spirit in our choice of food (a smorgasbord of dishes from our favorite restaurants), music (a mix of bluegrass and jazz standards), and, most important, with the ceremony itself. We’ve worked hard to strike the right balance between our love of tradition and our progressive values. And so we’ve opted for a Conservative egalitarian ketubah, a double-ring ceremony, and to include the sheva berakhot, or seven blessings recited over the groom and bride, in Hebrew and English, read by friends and family, Jews and non-Jews. The process has been challenging but productive, pushing us to clarify our Jewish identity as a couple—figuring out what is “so us” when it comes to belief and practice.

But of all the issues we’ve managed to traverse, we’ve run into a bit of trouble on an odd set: how, or even if, to incorporate the traditional pre-ceremony rituals of the tish and bedeken.

Having attended very few traditional Jewish weddings, I first heard about these customs early in my relationship with Daniel, when he told me with glee about the tish he’d attended at the wedding of a family friend. His eyes glowed as he described how the male guests had gathered for the pre-ceremony celebration in which the hatan, or groom, delivers a d’var Torah while his friends do their best in a schnapps-fueled revelry to throw him off course. With a couple of klezmer musicians to back them, Daniel and the other men had sung, whistled, and heckled the groom in a kind of Torah-tinged roast. After 20 minutes, the men danced over to where the female guests waited with the bride, and the bedeken got underway, with the groom tenderly “checking” (that is, after all, what “bedeken” means) to make sure that this woman was, in fact, his beloved, before lowering a veil over her face to indicate to the world that she was his bride. He wouldn’t want to be caught in the pickle in which Jacob found himself, having mistakenly been tricked into marrying Leah instead of Rachel, his intended.

It was a raucous good time followed by a loving moment, said Daniel, and best of all, it was grounded in centuries of tradition, giving the wedding an appealing “old-world feel.”

“I’d love to have something like that when I get married,” he’d said, a huge grin spreading across his face. We were far from marriage at the time, but there was something thrilling about hearing him talk so excitedly about his hypothetical wedding.

“It sounds great,” I said, swept up by his enthusiasm. “By the way, what do the women do during the tish?”

“Oh, I’m not sure,” he said, shrugging.

Seven years later, this is one of the main questions that we’re seeking to answer in our wedding planning.

Traditionally, while the groom engages in what one rabbi I spoke with described as a “rabbinic bachelor party,” the kallah, or bride, also receives a send-off, hers from the women in the community. She is seated in a thronelike chair (drawing on the imagery of the groom and bride as king and queen) that has been draped in a white sheet to represent her purity, as her female guests greet her to offer their blessings.

The groom is then brought over to his seated beloved, whom he has not seen in many days, where he then checks her identity. Having avoided the pitfalls of Jacob’s cautionary tale, the groom then lowers the bride’s veil, preserving her modesty and indicating that she is taken.

The more I learned about these rituals, the more inclined I felt to nix them. At the most superficial level, I wouldn’t be wearing a traditional wedding dress and so aesthetically a veil felt out of place, but, more significant, I didn’t want to be hidden or protected behind one. And anyway, the thought that after eight years, Daniel would mistake me for someone else felt, if not offensive, then at least implausible.

My feelings about the tish were more ambivalent. I was uncomfortable with the notion that our male guests would have an alcohol-fueled good time, heckling Daniel and dancing to music, while the women stood decorous, greeting me in my not-so-pure splendor. As an alternative, I learned that in some Modern Orthodox circles, there are two tishen, one for the men and one for the women, but having never delivered a d’var Torah in my premarital life, it seemed disingenuous to do so at my wedding. There was, of course, the possibility that Daniel could have a tish, and I could do nothing. But then what would the women do while the men celebrated? The absence of an activity for female guests felt just as unequal as the traditional set-up.

The feminist magazine Lilith recently published an eloquent d’var Torah delivered by editor Ilana Kurshan at the egalitarian tish she and her husband shared last winter. In an email from Jerusalem, Kurshan told me that the decision to do so was a natural extension of the studying she and her fiancé had been doing together. “Many of our dates involved learning,” she wrote to me. Though the couple composed their d’vrei Torah separately, they helped each other along—Kurshan’s portion focusing on creating a beit chatanot, or wedding house.

Lev Meirowitz Nelson, a student in the pluralistic rabbinical program at Hebrew College outside Boston, says he’s seen an increase in both tishen and bedeken among his friends, much to the surprise of his parents’ generation, who shed many traditions that they saw as too religious. “There’s been a movement to claim and update and egalitarianize traditions that had been written off as too Orthodox or unequal,” he said. When he and his wife were married in November, they knew they wanted to include one. “The tishen we’d been to at friends’ weddings had been tons of fun—why wouldn’t we do it if it was fun?”

“I’m always thinking about, how do you engage people who didn’t grow up with this ritual or who are turned off by it?” said Lev Baesh, rabbi at B’nai Or Boston and the director of the Resource Center for Jewish Clergy at InterfaithFamily.com. Baesh has adapted rituals to make them more accessible, leading tishen at which the guests engage in group art projects or move back and forth between the bride and groom, offering premarital advice. At one tish, the guests made batik Buddhist prayer flags, which they then used to decorate the chuppah. “Anything we can do from a religious or spiritual standpoint to help the couple and the people around them focus on the beauty of the event—and to do it as a community—is a really important thing.”

In learning about these solutions, I’ve been particularly inspired by how unique they are to each of the couples, and I’ve surprised myself by reconsidering the bedeken, which I’d been so quick to excise early on.

Baesh told me about a bedeken ritual he’s developed in which the couple is brought together back to back, before being turned around to face one another. Baesh then has the couple take several deep breaths before asking each, “Is the person in front of you the one you’re going to marry today?”

When he described this moment to me over the phone, I got goose bumps, similar to that mythic moment when a bride tries on a wedding dress and knows that she’s found the one that is hers. When Baesh told me about this bedeken, I knew it was mine—and when I told Daniel about it, he agreed.

We’re still figuring out the tish. We’ve got some ideas, and I feel confident that we’ll find something that works. But what I’m most looking forward to now is that moment right before we publicly make a lifetime commitment, when we turn around and look at one another. I’ll say easily, “Yep, he is so mine.” And he’ll say, “Yes, she’s so mine.” It’ll be so us.

Katie Robbins is a freelance writer who splits her time between California and New York. She last wrote for Tablet Magazine about herring.

Years later, Ami would admit that this was, in fact, exactly what he was thinking. But that afternoon, as I sulked dejectedly at my desk, he did something deeply, profoundly generous: He gave me another assignment. I got this one right, and over the next few months, I became—in no small part because of his guidance, insight, and friendship—a journalist.

Yesterday, Ami was given responsibility for overseeing (and, I hope, revamping) JTA, the historic Jewish news agency. It’s a move that is good for the Jews, good for JTA readers, and even good for non-JTA readers—since, if my experience working with Ami is any indication, he will give every one of his competitors a run for their money. That includes Tablet Magazine, as well as that other official publication of American Jewry. In short, yesterday was a banner day not just for Ami and the JTA and the Jews, but for American journalism.

JTA Publisher Steps Down, Editor Tapped To Lead Agency [JTA]

Last night, Rebecca Thomson, a 22-year-old graduate of the Manchester School of Art, took home top prize in London’s 2010 Graduate Fashion Week Gala for a collection that, she said, was inspired by Vishniac’s iconic pictures of Jews in prewar Eastern Europe.

Oy.

Thomson is not the first designer to plumb Jewish life for sartorial inspiration. But, with only a few exceptions—including Alexandre Herchcovitch, whose work I profiled a few years ago—most fashion minds have used Jewish culture as a crutch, passing off a fetishization of insularity and faux-quaintness as a replacement for genuine art. (A moment of silence, please, for Monsieur Gaultier’s fantastic 1993 mishap.)

Given this history, it is almost strange that no designer had been inspired by Vishniac before. He was, after all, one of the main people responsible for the two-dimensional caricature of pre-Holocaust Jewish life, a shtetl nostalgia that has nearly colonized pop culture’s ideas about that time and place. His images—or rather, the ones we knew of until recently—seem almost, well, tailor-made for Gaultier-ian exploitation. I can see the runway set already: “Shtetl Chic: Resort 2012.”

I am pleased to report this isn’t the case: Thomson’s collection is beautiful and sumptuous, and telegraphs none of the threadbare desolation I feared. The clothing is indeed driven by nostalgia, but not the nostalgia for some dangerously insipid idea of the Jewish “shtetl.” Rather, it is the nostalgia for the artisanal, the hand-tailored, the romantically local—qualities that are, in fact, remarkably modern. That she found that freshness and modernity in Vishniac’s pictures—and not even the newly discovered ones!—is a wonder, and a delight.

Also, check out that bow. Who doesn’t love bows?

Britain’s Got New Talent [British Vogue]
Related: Out of Focus [Tablet Magazine]
A Closer Reading of Roman Vishniac [NYT Magazine]
Schmatte Chic [Slate]

Of all the characters on whom Zarin has bestowed the gift of her toxic love, she was perhaps most generous with Bethenny Frankel, the Housewife who, until this season, wasn’t a wife at all; as the only single member of the cast, Frankel essentially emerged as the Jewish daughter to Zarin’s Jewish mother: beautiful, primped and eternally presentable, yet alone—and thus clearly (clearly) in need of guidance. Zarin and Frankel luxuriated in the bathos of their mother-daughter dynamic for two seasons—until, that is, Frankel found a man and belatedly began doing what children do: separate, as in individuate (and not, as both Zarin and Frankel would later describe it, as in a husband-and-wife split).

Given the obscurantist editing of reality television, it’s unclear how exactly a few wrong moves snowballed into the slow hacking murder of a relationship, though the subject has been Talmudically parsed by viewers and critics alike. The vast majority of folks have been siding with Frankel—New York Magazine included in their weekly round-up a recurring feature outlining “why Jill Zarin is a disgusting person”—a group to which I belonged until last night. In the season finale, Zarin offered Frankel the most heartfelt apology that will ever grace one of these absurd shows, to which Frankel responded with the self-satisfied churlishness and unearned righteousness of a hormonal teenager (“You have a lot of changing to do,” she tells Zarin, at the close of the episode). But why? Frankel is at a wonderful moment in her life, in which—according to her—she finally has everything she has always wanted: a husband, a  career, an apartment “downtown” and a new baby. Isn’t this the time to be generous, to be forgiving? As I watched her maintain iciness, I couldn’t help but think: Jesus, Bethenny, basta already with the kishke-schlepping.

And then, all of a sudden, it occurred to me: The daughter is becoming the mother.

She still has some distance to go, though. As her former friend could teach her, there’s a time to kvetch and there’s a time kvell: When the camera panned to Zarin in her last encounter with Frankel, she looked both genuinely contrite and also happy for someone she loved—even though the brat was too spoiled to appreciate it. At that moment, Zarin was, in a word, a mother. A Jewish one? Maybe, maybe not. But certainly a good one.

And so imagine my surprise this morning when I opened my email to see that this week’s column from Rabbi Avi Shafran of Agudath Israel, the ultra-Orthodox communal organization, is about none other than Q-Tip (delightfully referred to as “Mr. Tip”). Titled “Rapper’s Sabbath”—an allusion to “Rapper’s Delight”? I don’t want to ask, lest it not be true—the piece notes that the rapper recently confessed to falling for the Jewish Sabbath while filming Holy Rollers, the new film about Hasidic ecstasy smugglers in the 1990s. “I’m going to enjoy Sabbath on Saturday, so on Friday at sunset I’m going to turn off my TV, my radio—I’m not going to do anything,” Q-Tip told the New York Daily News. “And then when the sun sets on Saturday night, I’m going to raise hell!”

Remarkably, Shafran doesn’t exploit Q-Tip as an easy target for ridicule and condescension, but rather as a potentially useful example for Orthodox Jews. “When the Sabbath ebbs away—especially during the long days of summer – are we saddened a bit by the imminent loss of its holiness, pained at least a little to emerge from our day-long cocoon of connection with the Divine?” he writes. “Or are we itching … to barge as quickly as possible back into the ‘real’ world, to listen to the news, check our e-mail, get in our cars—surrender without a fight to the mundane? If so, perhaps we shouldn’t smile so condescendingly at Q-Tip and his Saturday night plans, but rather recognize a bit of him in the mirror.”

Neither Shafran nor the JTA, which picked up the Daily News story, noted Q-Tip’s Muslim background. This is probably because the Jewish community has more significant concerns these days—and which may be why, for a few brief moments today, I couldn’t help but feel nostalgic for the last decade. Still, if the kind of ecumenicism espoused by Shafran is any indication, maybe there are reasons for some optimism. Mr. Tip, consider this your invitation to Shabbat dinner. I’ll even give you a new napkin.

Rapper’s Sabbath [The Matzav Network]

Many Jews who define themselves as non-Orthodox or unaffiliated tend to view those who consider their Jewishness paramount as relics, either amusing or threatening, depending on the day and circumstance. And all too many Orthodox Jews, especially those of us in the more insular haredi world, can be oblivious to the large mass of our distant relatives beyond the physical and conceptual ghettos we inhabit. And when we do think of them, we often see them essentially as objects of “outreach.” A laudable goal, to be sure, born of the desire to share something precious, but qualitatively removed from the deeper recognition that they are worthy of our concern and love as fellow Jews even if they never choose to live like us.

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

The Elephant and the Jewish Community [Matzav]

Girl in plaid dress, Mukacevo, ca. 1935–38. Unpublished.
CREDIT: Roman Vishniac. © Mara Vishniac Kohn, courtesy the International Center of Photography

In this weekend’s New York Times Magazine, I profile the work of a young curator named Maya Benton, who has made an extraordinary discovery in the collection of legendary photographer Roman Vishniac, the man credited with creating the last photographic record of Eastern European Jewry before it was destroyed in the Holocaust. As Benton learned, Vishniac released for public consumption only a small selection of the images he took—primarily those that advanced a nostalgic impression of prewar Eastern European Jewish life as “abjectly poor in its material condition, and in its spiritual condition, exaltedly religious,” according to the flap copy of his first book. In this narrated slideshow, Benton walks us through a handful of her favorite Vishniac pictures, revealing how his curating job not only skewed our understanding of this lost world, but also limited the public recognition of Vishniac’s own vast talents.

Vishniac was, in fact, part of what might be characterized as the unwitting, well-intentioned nostalgia industry of the postwar decades—one including but not limited to Abraham Joshua Heschel, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Margaret Mead and her team, Leo Rosten, the editorial staff of Mad Magazine, countless museums, communal leaders, synagogue and organizational staffs, and generations of parents who exhorted their children to revere what has turned out to be a patronizingly provincial notion of prewar Jewish life. In the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, this manufactured idea of the “shtetl” may have aided in the unavoidable, overwhelming grieving process. But 60 years later—with countless memorials, annual programs, school curricula, books, films, musicals, a federally mandated Holocaust museum in the nation’s capital, and more—do we still need to rely on a caricature in order to be able to commemorate? If anything, the victims of the lost world of Eastern European Jewry deserve to be remembered in the fullness of the life they led.

So, why won’t contemporary Jews give up the “shtetl” fantasy? Have we become nostalgia addicts?

“Many American Jews don’t want to change their perception of the shtetl,” Eddy Portnoy, who teaches Yiddish literature and culture at Rutgers, told me. “The distinction between them and their grandparents—naïve, uneducated, unsophisticated—is still what makes them feel modern.” Ah, the irony: By misrepresenting our ancestors as backward and unsophisticated, American Jews have managed to create communities that are less Jewishly diverse—and consequently, in some real ways, less sophisticated—than the fabled shtots and dorfs and shtetls of Eastern Europe. Indeed, many who have tried to engage creatively with Jewish tradition have found themselves strangled by the obsession with a misremembered past. “Often when I play in synagogues or Jewish Community Centers, or at functions like weddings, the music is there to act as a signifier of Shtetl Judaism,” said Ben Holmes, a trumpet player with several years of experience in the klezmer world. “There’s a huge temptation to take the easy path and go straight for nostalgia, and relatively little incentive to try to create something new.” In some ways, nostalgia has become an artificial opiate, one preventing the American Jewish body from naturally producing the kind of vital new culture necessary for its survival.

Given the robust organization of the Jewish philanthropic world, it is worth noting that the International Center of Photography, which is acquiring the collection, has struggled to fundraise for the Vishniac project. (The primary gift thus far has been from one of its own trustees, Andrew Lewin, who stepped up to the plate with a donation that he intended as an endowment; it has already been dipped into for operational costs.) As a result, it will be at least another year and a half before ICP has a publicly accessible archive, which is the necessary first step to putting together an exhibition and then book-length catalogue of Vishniac’s best published and unpublished work. This delay isn’t just a pity; it is an embarrassment—and a challenge. The Vishniac archive is indeed, as I wrote, a litmus test of the future of Jews in America: Are we ready to give up our shtetl nostalgia, in exchange for something more real?

Click here to view slideshow with audio commentary.

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 news and politics, and will work to tie our cultural coverage much more closely to current public discourse. Even more important, Tablet is not simply a read. On our site, you will find lengthy pieces of in-depth journalism and cultural criticism, fiery blog posts, audio podcasts and video clips, beautiful slideshows, and bits of animation. Offering up-to-the-minute reactions to the day’s news, sophisticated cultural coverage, and in-depth explorations of broad trends in Jewish life, Tablet magazine is the first fully-integrated multimedia Jewish journalistic enterprise in history.

And yet, despite all this innovation, Tablet is closely tethered to the past. We seek inspiration and owe gratitude to sources as diverse as the pioneering magazines and “big idea books” of the 1960s and 70s, the robust Yiddish (and Ladino!) dailies of the Lower East Side at the turn of the last century, and, of course, the tablets themselves—the first medium of Western civilization, whose message remains deeply relevant to our lives today.

These are difficult times for journalism, uncertain times for the economy, and challenging times for Jews throughout the world.

Launching a new journalistic site devoted to Jewish life now is, in many ways, an act of audacity. It requires faith in the journalistic profession and a strong sense of mission, but most of all it requires the right people. I cannot fact-check this assertion, but I’ll make it anyway: no other editor in the history of American journalism has amassed a team like mine. From staffers and columnists to contributing editors and even outside consultants, every single person who works on Tablet has been essential to its creation.

Tablet would not be what it is without the writers and editors we are privileged to have on our inaugural masthead. The editorial staff is led by Deputy Editor Gabriel Sanders, who has worked at the Forward and Vanity Fair, and Executive Editor Jesse Oxfeld, most recently an editor at New York Magazine and previously the editor of Gawker. Senior Writer Allison Hoffman joined Tablet after stints at the Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times, and the New Yorker. Senior Editor Sara Ivry has bestowed her vast talents on Nextbook for six years now, while newly minted senior editor Michael Weiss, formerly of Jewcy, came on-board earlier this year. Hadara Graubart, our associate editor, joined the staff in 2007 while earning a master’s degree from the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at NYU; Marissa Brostoff, a veteran of the Forward, is staff writer; Julie Subrin and Marit Haahr produce our podcasts, and Liel Leibovitz is our video and interactive guru. Len Small, our art director, and Abigail Miller, our assistant art director, ensure that the site moves smoothly and looks beautiful.

Tablet and its readers are blessed with a roster of phenomenal regular columnists, including Victor Navasky and Seth Lipsky on politics, Adam Kirsch and Joshua Cohen on books, Mimi Sheraton on food, Marjorie Ingall on parenting, and more. Our expanded family also includes a slate of contributing editors whose wise counsel will keep us responsible as well as ambitious.

We are privileged to be part of Nextbook Inc., an organization headed with a rare combination of firm leadership and warm encouragement by Morton Landowne, our executive director. He is joined by Marylee Raymond Diamond, our director of finance and administration; Wayne Hoffman, managing director of special projects, and Ella Leitner, managing director of marketing; Debbie Schuval, associate director of public programs; Diana Fishbeyn, our office manager, and Zhanetta Chernyak, bookkeeper.

And then there is Jonathan Rosen, who runs Nextbook Press, our sister organization, which publishes the Jewish Encounters series with Schocken. Very few people in life get to work with their journalistic heroes, and I am lucky enough to be one of them. In 1990, Jonathan created the Arts & Culture section of the Forward newspaper, which I read religiously for the entire decade he was at its helm. Years later, I was privileged to take the reins as one of his successors—a job I held for five years before joining Nextbook. I am still trying to reach the intellectual bar he has set for the world of Jewish letters and ideas.

Tablet Magazine is fortunate enough to have all of these blessings. But we still need one crucial component without which no journalistic enterprise can thrive: curious, committed and caring readers, who engage with our content and speak their minds in return.

That’s where you come in.

Enjoy,

Alana Newhouse
Editor-in-chief

Or so I surmised a few months ago after a crowded Upper West Side panel on what has come to be known as the “shidduch crisis” in Modern Orthodoxy. Over the past decade, rabbis, activists, and parents have been wringing their hands over the “ever-burgeoning number of religious singles and rising percentage of failed marriages” in the community. This event was only the most recent of many discussions devoted to the topic. Having once been both single and Modern Orthodox, I recognized many of the audience members—not exact faces, of course, but types: The knitted-browed parents, bantering anxiously among themselves; the fresh-faced Stern and Yeshiva University students who seemed too young to take the bus themselves, let alone join in holy matrimony; a handful of older singles brave enough to show their faces at such a gathering. The evening’s discussion traversed a lot of ground, but it was clear that among its primary goals was the prevention of those too-often-seen tragic situations—”marriages that end, God Forbid, in divorce,” and “people who are in their late 20s, even 30, and not married.”

The timing could not have been better, or worse: Three days earlier, I had signed divorce papers; six days later, I turned 30.

Of course, the world is filled with singles wishing to be part of doubles. Since the fate of every society turns on the success or failure of its particular set of mating rituals, each one develops its own specialized system of coupling. But what happens when those rituals erode?

This is the bind in which Modern Orthodoxy has lately found itself. Over the past decade, the movement has drifted to the right—adopting, along the way, the belief that greater stringency in Jewish law and ritual equals greater religiosity. Distinctions that might seem infinitesimal to an outsider—”she’s a Bais Yaakov girl,” “he wears a kipa sruga“—have become fundamental differences, and competitions have sprouted up over who follows which obligations most strictly. Along with new perspectives on the legality of singing in the shower and smoking cigarettes on Passover, there also has emerged a more exacting code of modesty and celibacy for singles. In response, ever younger people have begun racing to the chuppah, with many of us discussing potential mates as early as high school.

This is the system used successfully by the ultra-Orthodox, who place more emphasis on God, family, and community than on individual choices: Each person has confidence in her mate not only because he is right for her, but because he is right for everyone and everything in her life. On the other end of the spectrum, the secular world offers a method based on individualism: Release yourself from everyone else’s expectations, and date as many people as it takes to find the one. The problem is that both of these opposing philosophies are now circulating in the Modern Orthodox community, and their coexistence is causing static—mixed signals, false expectations, miscommunications. The confusion might be surmountable, but muddling through it requires two things that Orthodox Jews who’d like to remain marriageable don’t have: experience and time.

The first inkling that I did not have nearly enough time to find a mate was in my junior year of yeshiva high school. We were learning about Amuka, an area in northern Israel where the prayers of people looking for their basherts (destined partners) are, allegedly, answered, when I was seized with confusion.

“Can each person only have one bashert?” I asked.

“I think so,” said the rabbi.

“But what about a woman who remarries after her husband dies? Which one was her bashert?”

“Only God knows,” came the reply.

“What if my bashert lives in, like, Pakistan?”

“You have to just believe, Alana.”

I can’t, I thought suddenly. I don’t know enough about the world.

And with that, Amuka became my Archimedean point, the place where I stood when I inadvertently lifted my entire religious world off its axis. After this, the questions came quickly—even leading, briefly, to a period of greater observance. By the time I started my second year at Barnard, I was taking classes on other religions, had an Episcopalian best friend, and regularly attended non-Jewish campus events on Friday night, as long as I could walk to them. But as my curiosity about the larger world expanded, the atmosphere of Modern Orthodoxy contracted. I wanted to engage with the secular world—to learn about it as well as to experience it—but the same adventures that might have once been par for the Modern Orthodox course now threatened to make me an outcast.

I was too attached to religious life and thought to abandon it entirely. Instead, I made the kind of unspoken compromises with my parents (and, by extension, the community) that some people make with God: I will not go to services often, but when I do I’ll attend Orthodox synagogues; I will eat non-kosher in restaurants, but at home will abide by rules strict enough that the Rebbe could snack in my kitchen; I will avoid premarital sex, but won’t follow the laws of negiah.

This last item was, in fact, the only one for which I had an intellectual defense. I was shy and insecure about sex, and knew enough to fear its power as an obfuscating force in relationships. The more I knew, I thought, the better my chances that I wouldn’t mistake lust for love. Fooling around before marriage has, historically, not been an uncommon practice among Modern Orthodox Jews; after all, they gave the world the “tefillin date,” so named for the men who brought along their phylacteries in hopes they wouldn’t be home in time for morning prayers.

By my early 20s, the community had moved significantly to the right. People found themselves caught between rules of the old world and the kind of curiosity about sex and dating fostered in the new one. “It is bad enough to be alone, but to be not sexual is almost as bad, and the two together is terrible,” writes an anonymous Orthodox blogger. “I have had fantasies of killing myself. I have considered hiring a male prostitute and getting it over with. No, I have not tried either of those last two things, chas vishalom….To all the married people out there telling older singles that they should deny themselves, I wish I could respond ‘let he who is 34 and never been kissed cast the first stone.’”

I was 25 when I married—a bit old compared to my yeshiva classmates, but still within respectable limits. To a casual observer, Daniel might have seemed like a rebellious choice: He did not grow up Orthodox, his father is not Jewish, his last name is Scotch-Irish. But he was almost as connected to the community as I was, having just gotten out of a relationship with another Orthodox woman. He had started learning Hebrew, loved Shabbat, had relatives in Israel. And, unlike me, he had yichus, a distinguished lineage: His grandfather was a famed civil-rights lawyer and Zionist activist. He was different enough, and yet similar. After a year of dating, we wanted to move in together, but I knew this was unheard of in our circles. So I made another silent compromise: I’d marry the person of my choosing, but at an age and in a way that would be acceptable within the community.

Daniel and I married before we should have, a step that put undue pressure on a young relationship and two people still struggling to define themselves. When the marriage ruptured, so did the thin thread holding me to Orthodoxy. I became angry at the community for depriving me of my adolescence or, rather, for being too rigid to encourage it. As psychologist Naomi Mark said at the panel on the shidduch crisis that I attended, the community expects young adults to have marriage, education, and careers settled, or at least on track, by their early 20s, leaving no time to make the kind of mistakes that teach us who we are. My effort to avoid these mistakes—to experience the world but not so much that I’d be forced from the community’s safe corral—threatened to split the baby. And the baby was me.

In the end, I chose self-definition over religion. As Plato promised, the examined life is indeed fulfilling—firsthand experience of oneself trumps guesswork any day—but it’s not nearly as pretty as the brochure implies. For me, the ugliness lies not in the fact that by opening the door to all experience I’ve ushered in pain as well as joy, or because in the course of learning about myself, I’ve unearthed a few things I’d rather never have known—though both have certainly happened. What most disquiets me is the limbo. Unlike my Orthodox peers, who can be sure of the basic contours of their lives, I writhe with uncertainty: Where will I be living ten years from now? What school will my kids attend? How kosher will my kitchen be? Sometimes, the fog gets so intimidating that I start to wonder if there’s still time to go back, to abandon all this liberty and just get comfortable again. Alas, I fear all this experience has ruined me; I’ve lost too many virginities—intellectual, emotional, psychological and, well, otherwise—to mesh again with that life. Plus, as the panel proved, the community hardly needs another 30-year-old woman in need of marrying off, especially one without a younger, prettier sister to use as bait.

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 world of popular culture—would someday collide. But collide they did, and she traces that meeting to a single afternoon in high school when she was home alone, and ventured to open the door to a bearded man who came knocking. Later that day, she was faced with a choice—Madonna or Kabbalah. It’s a choice that’s become more complicated with the passage of time.