Collections

The Tablet Profile is about more than just a person. It’s about the historical, political, and intellectual contexts that shaped the influential people whose ideas and actions move the world. Peering behind the veneer of celebrity and beyond the prevailing social-media psychodrama, Tablet finds the deeper veins of American mythmaking that bring to light the compelling life-stories of amazing individuals.

Few countries over the last 100 years can match Ukraine’s achievements in art, music, literature, and science; fewer still have suffered as much violence, war, and tragedy. Before it had a Jewish president and became a battlefield for the future of freedom and democracy, Ukraine occupied a central place in Jewish history for centuries—and still does today. As it fights a war for survival, Ukraine remains one of the most important countries for Jews, Americans, the West, and the world.

From protest movements to battles in academia, policing, schooling, and free speech, the sensitivities of Jewish life in America and across the globe can be harbingers of broader societal change.

The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action regulating the development of Iran’s nuclear program remains the most consequential and high-stakes piece of foreign policy in the geopolitics of the Middle East, and Tablet has covered the treaty from before its inception under Obama, through the Trump years, and now into Iran Deal 2.0 under the Biden/Blinken Administration.

Over the years, Tablet has fearlessly engaged with the unfathomable legacy of humanity’s greatest crime, looking back with new perspectives and forward into the future of a people’s heavy burden.

Purim is the ultimate holiday to talk about queens, whether you admire Esther or Vashti more. But Tablet loves queens all year round, whether they’re ruling over empires or commanding a stage.

The last decade has seen radical transformations in the way news is gathered, disseminated, and consumed in the United States and the world. At the intersection of free speech and politics, of legacy or mainstream media and tech platforms, are issues fundamental to a functioning American democracy. Tablet has chronicled the profound consquences of the decline of an old guard and the rise of a new one in the American press.

So goes the debate: Treyf is delicious why would anyone deny themselves that? Antiquated dietary restrictions are guidelines not rules. But Kosher is a time-honored ritual that ties us to the ancient world and gives us the discipline that is our religion’s best quality. Plus, pig’s a filthy animal. Tablet won’t resolve this debate, but we certainly dive into it trotters first⁠—and not just about food.

Jewish women shaped the American feminist movement, leading the charge for everything from women’s suffrage to birth control and workplace equality. Decades later, a new generation of women, Jewish and otherwise, are navigating their own nuanced relationships to feminism—what it means for their religious traditions, how it intersects with their politics, and how it inspires them as wives, friends, leaders, and mothers.

For more than 40 years, Jews have been affected by the HIV/AIDS epidemic—as doctors, activists, and artists, as well as those suffering from the disease and their loved ones. Tablet has shared these people’s stories, focusing on how they bring Jewish values to the ongoing battle against AIDS, and how that battle has affected their lives as Jews.

Addiction spares no community, even those with the strictest moral codes, where the values of individual responsibility and sobriety are prized, and where the blessings of the kiddush are weekly ritual. From personal essays about unbreakable habits to news stories about opioids and America’s fentanyl crisis, Tablet has wrestled with the demons of dependency, their effects on individuals and societies, and their challenges for Jewish life.

Stories of enduring love, loss, lust, religious law, ritual, sacrifice, romance, beauty, art and the many human mysteries of affection.

In Spring 2023, Tablet staff decamped to Riyadh and Jeddah to cover the past, present, and future of the birthplace of Islam, the leader of the Sunni Middle East, and perhaps, one day, Israel’s partner in peace.

Discriminated against while being held up as models of success, these two groups have long followed a common road. Now their prosperity leads to cries of ‘unearned privilege.’ What does this mean for America and its minorities?

“This is a very simple game. You throw the ball, you catch the ball, you hit the ball. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes it rains. Think about that for a while.” —Manager Joe Riggins, ‘Bull Durham’

From libertarian absolutists to corporate censors of hate speech and every position in between, the First Amendment remains fundamental not just to America as an idea, but also to the place of Jews within that. Who can say what, about whom, in what contexts?

From the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to the Black Hebrew Israelites, the ‘People of the Book’ have been a source of faith and conspiracy, inspiration and hatred. Tablet explores the unique role that Jews, living and dead, have played in the history of African-American social, spiritual, and political thought.

Interfaith relationships are increasingly the norm in certain parts of the Jewish community: According to a 2020 Pew survey of Jewish Americans, 42% of married respondents had a non-Jewish spouse, and those numbers are on the rise. According to the same study, among those who got married since 2010, 61% were intermarried—and excluding Orthodox Jews, among whom intermarriage remains rare, 72% were intermarried. Intermarried couples face unique issues about how to observe holidays, join religious communities, deal with their respective families, and raise children.