Collections

All of Tablet’s coverage of the October 2023 attack on Israel and the world’s response.

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 publication on July 16, 2023, of an article by Jacob Siegel and Liel Leibovitz calling for an end to U.S. aid to Israel opened a fresh debate over a topic dominated by outdated assumptions and emotional entreaties. To deepen the conversation, Tablet invited a group that includes a retired IDF general, U.S. senators and members of Congress, former Middle East diplomats, and writers from various political persuasions to offer their thoughts on the issue. Their articles, and more from Tablet’s archive, are collected here.

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.

You know the Jewish history of Manhattan’s Lower East Side: pushcart peddlers, crowded tenements, Yiddish storefront signs. But Tablet has explored another world beneath all that—crooks, mobsters, thugs, and violent criminals.

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.

Kabbalah or the Jewish Mystical tradition endured and evolved over centuries and continues today. Tablet looks at the many forms Kabbalah has taken, historically and currently, including its enigmatic leaders, its intellectual textual traditions, and the distinctive customs of its practitioners.

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.

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.

It’s more than frites.

Passover commemorates our liberation from Egypt—but it can also offer a window into other struggles for liberty: physical, emotional, or political.

Antizionists comprise a small but growing constituency of American Jews. They join a long tradition of Jews who have attempted to cleave Judaism away from Israel, Jewish peoplehood, and decades of identity-building.

Tablet pays tribute to the ordinary and the extraordinary heroes of one of the great movements for human freedom of the 20th century, which helped topple the Soviet Empire—and which distilled the purest values of mutual responsibility and love in the global Jewish community in a way that immeasurably strengthened Jews in America, as well as the State of Israel. The date we have chosen to feature these pieces commemorates Feb. 11, 1986, the day Natan Sharansky arrived in Israel for the first time.

October 7th marked a rupture in time—a moment that made the before and after feel irreconcilable. Israel and the Jewish people now live in the fallout of that day. This collection presents reflections on grief and war by a new generation of Israeli writers, whose work will shape our imagination of the future.

How to feel, and what to do, in the wake of the Oct. 7 massacres.

In the wake of the October 2023 Hamas attacks, Jewish leaders were shocked to read the egregious statement put out by Darren Walker, the President of the Ford Foundation, who declined to acknowledge the massacre of Jews in Israel. They shouldn’t have been—not only because the foundation’s namesake was a notorious antisemite, but because the Ford Foundation is at the center of an elite nonprofit complex fueling this crisis both at home and abroad. In addition to the major nonprofit foundations, the American establishment remains dominant in two other areas of life: elite prep schools and universities, and the “deep state.” It’s not a coincidence that these three sectors—NGOs, higher ed, and the federal bureaucracy—have become the power centers of wokeness. The face of “resistance” may be a young radical, but the funding, strategy, and power are decidedly not. On Sunday night, Walker issued a second press release. With no explanation given, it was not clear why two statements were released. “Henry Ford, our founder, was among the twentieth century’s most virulent American antisemites. And yet, to me, our past confers a special obligation to engage, not to retreat—no matter the complications or the consequences.”

What are the barriers preventing full participation in the community—and who’s trying to overcome them?

A free anthology of some of Tablet’s best writing, for you and your hammock.

What’s it like to be an LGBTQ Jew today? Instead of hearing from theorists and pundits, this collection explores first-person stories at the intersection of LGBTQ identities and Judaism. From rejection, acceptance, transformation, and connection, Tablet sheds light on the unique challenges and journeys of the LGBTQ Jewish community.

From sleeping in cabins to playing Ga-Ga, falling into drama among friends, waging color war, sharing Shabbat meals, and learning to exist on your own, summer camp still holds a transcendent allure for Jewish American kids and nostalgic adults.

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’

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.

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.

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

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.