News from Home

One of the sad parts of my job is that exciting new hires often come in the wake of losing valuable, beloved staffers. Next week, Bari Weiss, who has fearlessly and brilliantly run our news and politics section for the last year and a half, will be leaving us for the Wall Street Journal—where she’ll be the associate op-ed editor. I console myself with the fact that she will never be able to write headlines like this one over there.

The blow is also softened by the news that she will be replaced by the spectacular Allison Hoffman. For the past four years, Allison has been a senior writer responsible for some of the magazine’s finest pieces. (Her full archive can be found here, if you’re in need of weekend reading.) Before joining Tablet, Allison was the Jerusalem Post‘s New York correspondent. Allison has also worked as a fact-checker at The New Yorker and as a reporter for the Associated Press in its San Diego bureau, covering politics, the military, and legal affairs. She began her career at the Los Angeles Times, where she contributed to the paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting on the 2003 California wildfires. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband, Adam Goldman, and son, and will be starting her new job in August, once she returns from maternity leave.

In addition, I am thrilled to announce the addition of two new writers to our stable: Yair Rosenberg and Batya Ungar-Sargon, both of whom are already well-known to Tablet readers. But here’s a bit more about each.

Yair Rosenberg graduated Harvard College in 2012, where he majored in Jewish Studies and minored in History and was the movies editor of The Harvard Crimson. Since then, his writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Guardian, the Jewish Review of Books and, of course, Tablet. He is also the creator of “AIPAC bingo.” Yair lives in New York and edits the English-language blog of the Israeli national archives.

Batya Ungar-Sargon is currently finishing a Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley, on the relationship between consent and fiction in the 18th-century novel. Her work has appeared in City Limits, Bookslut, and Tablet—for whom she’s published in-depth articles on a slew of fascinating topics, from threatened Lower East Side landmarks to mystery stones in New Mexico.

Please join me in welcoming Batya and Yair, in congratulating Allison on her new position, and in bidding Bari the fondest of farewells.