Tablet Magazine - a new read on Jewish life

David Milch is the genius behind shows like ‘Deadwood’ and ‘NYPD Blue,’ with fundamental insight into the crooked workings of humanity, and the human soul

byTed Mann

Rage Against the Algorithm

Katie Alice Greer’s new album is a vibrant, entirely man-made world

byDavid Meir Grossman

Music algorithms push discovery. Open up an algorithmic playlist and you’ll hear a new song every three to five minutes, a few from artists you know and several you don’t. The point is not to dwell but to flow, moving from peak to peak. It’s possible to listen to these songs again, but why would you? There are already five more playlists to go through, and then there will be five more the next day, and the day after that.

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Library of Congress

E. F. Cooper/Wikimedia Commons

BODIG/ULLSTEIN BILD VIA GETTY IMAGES

Wikimedia Commons

Lucian Bert Truesdale/Wikimedia Commons

Wikimedia

‘The Oppermanns’ Brings Us Some Bad News From 1933

Everything you thought would prepare you for success instead narrows your chances of survival

byMarco Roth

FICTION

A Brief History of the Jewdle

A Purim spiel on one of Judaism’s most majestic creatures

byMaxim D. Shrayer

Alain Delon and Juliet Perto in 'Mr. Klein' (1975)

A Legend of Innocence

French Jews find themselves in a delicate position as once-settled debates about the country’s wartime past flare up again

byDaniel Solomon

France’s wartime past continues to fascinate and divide the public. Eric Zemmour’s failed presidential campaign cast this reality into sharp relief, reviving a legend of national innocence in which France bore no guilt for the Holocaust and precipitating a fierce battle over the legacy of the Vichy regime. Zemmour, the son of Algerian Jews, cited outdated, erroneous historical accounts to claim that the regime and Marshal Philippe Pétain protected French Jews from deportation. He averred that the puppet regime had only collaborated with the Nazis.

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Hollywood’s Echoes of Odessa

byJake Marmer

FICTION

A Brief History of the Jewdle

A Purim spiel on one of Judaism’s most majestic creatures

byMaxim D. Shrayer

A Legend of Innocence

French Jews find themselves in a delicate position as once-settled debates about the country’s wartime past flare up again

byDaniel Solomon

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The German and His Temple

A story of murder and a mysterious man who lived north of Jerusalem

byMatti Friedman

Pink Dolphins and Electronica

The new album from jazz-electronic duo Anteloper is a challenge for the sonic imagination

byDavid Meir Grossman

There’s something special happening when you decide to listen to a truly weird album. It might not happen every day, because there are lots of great three-to-four-minute songs out there to fill your life with catchy beats and great hooks. But sometimes a moment comes when you decide to push your sonic barriers. It’s always a gamble; you could find yourself listening to repetitive noise that doesn’t give you time to think. That’s not the case with Anteloper, the jazz-and-electronica duo behind “Pink Dolphins,” an album you likely will not find recommended to you by any algorithm (I found it on Bandcamp). It’s the product of jaimie branch and Jason Nazary, who have been working together since they met in the late 2010s in Boston. The name came from the idea of an antelope who’s an interloper, who’s not quite welcome on the scene.

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Tablet Magazine’s Printable Weekly Digest

A selection of our best articles from this week for printer-friendly and distraction-free reading. Issue 23: Summer fiction issue.

byTablet Magazine

A Walk in the Park With A.B. Yehoshua

Talking Zionism and failure with the iconic Israeli novelist, who died this week

byGil Troy

The Privilege of Being Nobody

Today’s refugees face a new pressure to narrativize and commodify their experience

byBlake Smith

The Highest Flights of the Ukrainian Soul

A translation of Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s prescient essay on the life-affirming desire for distinctiveness

byMarat Grinberg

The Founding Mother of Sapphic Hollywood

Crimea-born actress Alla Nazimova was once the highest-paid film actress in the world. After a series of scandals and box-office flops, her name is mostly lost to history.

bySamantha Shokin

A Thomas LaRue poster, from ‘New York Yiddish Theater: From the Bowery to Broadway’ by Edna Nahshon

Tevye der Shvartzer Khazn

The story of Thomas LaRue Jones, the Black cantor from Newark who captivated the Jewish world with his songs

byEdna Nahshon

Big Thief Has No Balls

byArmin Rosen

Tevye der Shvartzer Khazn

The story of Thomas LaRue Jones, the Black cantor from Newark who captivated the Jewish world with his songs

byEdna Nahshon

Big Thief Has No Balls

byArmin Rosen

Ariel PinkBorja

The Floating Space City of the Jews

In a tradition preserved in the Babylonian Talmud, Jews unhappy with the Temple of Jerusalem imagined a mythological paradise rooted in Zoroastrian mythology instead

byDan Shapira

There are many hundreds of small textual differences between the Jewish and Samaritan Pentateuchs, the most important of them being a long addition in Exodus 20:17 mentioning Mt. Gerizim, and the wording in Deuteronomy 27:2-8 (God had already chosen this place, Mt. Gerizim). A recently analyzed fragment of Deuteronomy 27:4 from Qumran possibly strengthens the “Samaritan” reading (as does the ease with which the Solomon-built Temple kingdom had disintegrated). Most Jews of our time remain confused as to the physical location of Mt. Zion—the one where the Zion Gate in Jerusalem is, a southwest hill heavily built up by Christian buildings and cemeteries, the Temple Mount (the former eastern hill), or the City of David (the southeast hill)....

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I had still been a child, and he held me in thrall with his stream of words, words that spun themselves around me the way a spider’s sticky silk threads are spun around a fly until I could scarcely breathe.

—Libido Dominandi

Original artworks, from left: Jerome Myers, ‘Old House on 29th St. East of 3rd Ave. N.Y.,’ undated; Adelaide Morris, ‘3:00 a.m.,’ undated; John R. Grabach, ‘The Lone House (The Empty House),’ circa 1929; Richard Sargent, ‘Red House,’ undated

The Sunny Side of American Life

Why our greatest writers found their inspiration in misery and failure

byDavid Mikics

‘The Northman’ Is ‘Hamlet’ for Silicon Valley

Robert Eggers’ new film is a techno-shamanistic reversion of Shakespeare’s wordy ambivalence by way of ‘Game of Thrones’

byMarco Roth

The Great Debasement

The institutions tasked with the preservation of art are reducing great works to moralizing message-delivery systems

byAlice Gribbin

To let go is to let go of the self that took so many years to cultivate as a kind of acceptable order.

Not Unpacking My Library

Boxes of books are a reminder of a lifelong, sometimes turbulent love for the written word

byJake Marmer

The Great Debasement

The institutions tasked with the preservation of art are reducing great works to moralizing message-delivery systems

byAlice Gribbin

To let go is to let go of the self that took so many years to cultivate as a kind of acceptable order.

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Richard Hamilton, 'The Transmogrifications of Bloom,' 1985, printed by Aldo Crommelynck

Leopold Bloom’s Real-Life Model

The literary friendship of James Joyce and his student and instructor in Jewish customs, the Italian businessman Ettore Schmitz, better known as the novelist Italo Svevo, gave birth to one of literature’s greatest characters. It also unites the giant of literary modernism with the founder of psychoanalysis.

byMitchell Abidor

Leopold Bloom may not keep kosher or attend a synagogue, but he’s Jewish to the core of his unorthodox soul.

—Jonah Raskin

british library

The most obvious reason Joyce made his modern-day Odysseus a (thrice-baptized) Jew is that whole wandering thing. But Leopold Bloom’s Jewishness is most compelling when it is incidental. An anti-Semitic Feinian who wears an eye patch (it is the “Cyclops” chapter) demands to know what Bloom’s “nation” is. “Ireland,” he replies. “I was born here. Ireland.” As another character later says, “And after all, why can’t a jew love his country like the next fellow?” ⁠—Marc Tracy