Gabriel Sanders is Tablet's deputy editor. Before joining the staff in 2008, he 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.
Recaptured prewar Poland with vivid memories and brilliant canvasses
| 12:29 PM Nov 24, 2009
Mayer Kirshenblatt, a painter and chronicler of prewar Jewish life in Poland, died at his home in Toronto on Friday. He was 93. Kirshenblatt was born in 1916 in the Polish town of Apt, and in 1934, at the age of 17, he, his mother, and his three siblings immigrated to Toronto to join his ...
Filmmakers reinterpret the 5th commandment
| 4:51 PM Nov 16, 2009
Reading an article in yesterday’s Times on documentaries about famous parents by their children, it was striking to realize that the overwhelming majority of those who have been so profiled—the architect Louis Kahn, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, Brooklyn-born folksinger Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and the lawyers William Kunstler and Martin Garbus—were Jews.
What to make of ...
And makes an observer proud to be an American, where there's church-state separation
| 4:00 PM Nov 9, 2009
Reading about the “Who is a Jew?” case now before British Supreme Court, the American observer can’t help but feel a little smug. Ah, if only they did things our way and kept church and state separate, the American thinks, they wouldn’t be in this mess. But, then, at a time when the push for ...
But will presented weird incentives for dad
| 3:00 PM Sep 25, 2009
This morning, we mentioned the case of the Chicago man whose grandchildren were disinherited for marrying non-Jews. The Illinois Supreme Court ruled that dentist Max Feinberg and his wife, Erla, were within their rights when drafting wills that made marrying Jews a condition of receiving a share of their estate. Legally speaking, this seems logical. ...
What Obama’s trade-in program owes to the Singer company
| 10:00 AM Aug 6, 2009
The “Cash for Clunkers” concept is nothing new, technology historian Edward Tenner wrote the other day in blog post for The Atlantic. It was an idea employed already a century and half ago by Isaac Merritt Singer and Edward Clark, the duo that founded the Singer Sewing Machine Company. Flush with confidence in the quality ...
A day in the imagined life of David Axelrod
| 10:00 AM Aug 4, 2009
Did Benjamin Netanyahu call David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel “self-hating Jews” (as was reported) or not (as his aides insist)? Tablet Magazine got hold of the Obama senior adviser’s private diary from one day last week, and it suggests Bibi was (or wasn’t, maybe) right.
Woke up at 5:30. Total of three hours of sleep. Finished ...
And some bold claims about Holocaust fiction
| 12:35 PM Jul 20, 2009
Saturday’s New York Times brought word that a Random House imprint has paid Canadian novelist Yann Martel around $3 million for his latest novel, a Holocaust allegory that features dialogue between a donkey and a monkey. In an interview with the paper, Martel, whose 2001 Life of Pi won the Man Booker Prize, decried what ...
Lettuce-clad activists visit Capitol Hill, while videographers hit kosher plant
| 4:22 PM Jul 16, 2009
When the animal-rights group PETA released grisly undercover footage shot in 2004 at the Agriprocessors kosher slaughterhouse in Postville, Iowa, it began four-year cycle of bad press and misfortune for the company that is only now coming to a close. We couldn’t help but think of the meat plant—and feel a little pang of ...
Did an Israeli interviewee actually get the better of Brüno?
| 1:05 PM Jul 13, 2009
In 2006, when Borat came out, it didn’t take long before Sacha Baron Cohen started fielding complaints (and lawsuits) from those who felt they’d been unfairly mocked. This time around, with Brüno, the complaints started well before the premiere—in one case, a full year before. In a piece he wrote for the Forward last June, ...
But he thinks British
| 1:08 PM Jul 10, 2009
By this point, much ink and many pixels have been devoted to highlighting the “Jewishness” of Sacha Baron Cohen’s humor. And, to a certain extent, the point is incontestable. In what amounted to a movie-length wink, the “Kazakh” spoken by his Borat was actually a well-polished Hebrew. And his interest in Hasidic garb predates Brüno ...