Tablet Magazine

The Day That Terrorism Became a Global Spectator Sport

‘September 5’ is a gripping, disturbing and true-to-life depiction of ABC’s coverage of the Palestinian terror attack on the 1972 Munich Olympics

byJudith Miller

Who Killed the Oscars?

Hollywood no longer knows how to celebrate, much less create, art. If you want to know what happened to it, look at what happened to me.

bySasha Stone

Why ‘The Brutalist’ Is Brutal to Watch

byThomas de Monchaux

Who Killed the Oscars?

Hollywood no longer knows how to celebrate, much less create, art. If you want to know what happened to it, look at what happened to me.

bySasha Stone

Jewish Bad Girl Theda Bara Never Won an Oscar

But ‘the Vamp’ of the silent screen may have spawned today’s Hollywood starlet

byRachel Paige King

Why ‘The Brutalist’ Is Brutal to Watch

byThomas de Monchaux

Jewish Bad Girl Theda Bara Never Won an Oscar

But ‘the Vamp’ of the silent screen may have spawned today’s Hollywood starlet

byRachel Paige King

Collection

Refuseniks

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.

See the full collection →︎

David Shrayer-Petrov, Leningrad, circa 1959

Nine Lives

The lives and legacies of the refusenik writer David Shrayer-Petrov

byMaxim D. Shrayer

In a Birch Forest, With the KGB

Extraordinary photographs of a refusenik picnic in 1974, when Soviet Jews were far from free

byBurton Caine

The Cult of ‘Antizionism’

American progressive ideologues have formed a new ideology based on the negation of an all-powerful phantasm they call ‘Zionism.’ To fight them, we need to understand the origins of their beliefs in the Soviet academic propaganda apparatus.

byIzabella Tabarovsky

In a Birch Forest, With the KGB

Extraordinary photographs of a refusenik picnic in 1974, when Soviet Jews were far from free

byBurton Caine

The Cult of ‘Antizionism’

byIzabella Tabarovsky

A Russian Typewriter Longs for Her Master

A portrait of my father, the refusenik writer and medical scientist David Shrayer-Petrov, as a New England poet

byMaxim D. Shrayer

Detail of a painting of the arrest of four would-be hijackers in Priozersk, by Mark Dymshits, oil on canvas, Israel, 1982

Hijacking History

Fifty years ago today in Leningrad, a small group of Soviet Jews was tried for attempting a daring escape to Israel. Eerily, their story is relevant again—this time, for American Jews.

byIzabella Tabarovsky

‘Religion is the enemy of workers of all nationalities,’ 1929-1931

The Cool Kids

Self-mutilation as a Jewish cultural strategy and the sad history of the Yevsektsiya

byDara Horn

A Fourth of July Story

Independence Day is doubly special for the legendary refusenik Natan Sharansky and his family. He sits down for a wide-ranging interview about his wife Avital, love among Jewish people, and the promise of freedom.

byDavid Samuels

The Doublethinkers

In assessing my own liberation, I recall a conformity that feels terrifyingly familiar today

byNatan Sharansky with Gil Troy

Newsletter

Film, music, visual arts, ideas, and more.

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'Essie, Ruby and Ferdinand, Children of Asher Wertheimer,' 1902, John Singer Sargent

Family Romance

Jean Strouse’s new book shines a light on John Singer Sargent’s most important but largely forgotten Jewish patrons, the Wertheimers

byElroy Rosenberg

FICTION

The St. Petersburg Traveling Circus

byMaxim D. Shrayer

In Love We Disappear

Leonard Koan, boudoir poet

byDavid Yaffe

David Yaffe

Tablet mourns the untimely passing of the writer, professor, and longtime contributor

Read his archives

By David Yaffe

Life Lessons From Joni Mitchell
What one writer learned spending decades listening, and talking to, the legendary singer
Shanah Tova From Donald Fagen
The genius of Steely Dan talks blacks, Jews, and Lenny Bruce—and his new record, Sunken Condos
The Jenny Lewis Show
The indie star’s latest is a Bakersfield sound-drenched ode to self-destruction. Don’t say she didn’t warn you.
Behind Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Tour
When the voice of a generation became the man of a thousand masks, and what we—and he—lost
Lou’s Gift: The Magic of a Rock ’n’ Roll Poet
An encounter with legendary rock star Lou Reed
And more