Tablet Magazine - a new read on Jewish life

How Kanye West Became America’s Leading Antisemite
The answer has less to do with Hitler than with Hotepism and iPhones
byHubert Adjei-Kontoh
Revue blanche magazine poster, 1890s
Revue blanche magazine poster, 1890s
Making Magic out of Mosh

The new album from Show Me the Body is rowdy music for a hardcore post-pandemic party

byDavid Meir Grossman

Did live music exist during the height of COVID lockdowns? In a practical sense, obviously. Live music exists wherever people are playing instruments and making melodies, and there were many well-intentioned virtual concerts that ultimately created lovely experiences. I watched several and am glad I did. But that’s not all live music is, is it? Last year, Julian Cashawn Pratt, the lead singer and banjo player of New York City’s Show Me the Body, explained why the hardcore band declined to participate in any Zoom concerts: “For us, if safety isn’t being risked, we’re not playing. If it’s not a volatile ceremony that we’re a part of, there’s no reason for us to play.” The band helped organize remote self-defense classes and ran clothing drives, but kept their own music mostly to themselves.

Continue reading →︎

Maus Now: Art Spiegelman in Conversation with Hillary Chute

92Y, New York City, Thursday, Dec. 1, 2022, 7:30 pm ET

more info and tickets

The Tab, Issue 42

The Tab is a curated weekly printable digest that collects recently published articles, newly relevant archival hits, recipes, an insert from our afternoon newsletter The Scroll, and more.

Bookmark The Tab archive to get your new edition every Friday morning.

Issue 42: The media’s role in FTX’s downfall, Jews with disabilities, Howard Jacobson on ‘Ulysses,’ Thanksgiving tales, and more. Plus: Joan Nathan’s roast turkey with chestnut challah stuffing recipe, on one convenient-to-print single page.

Issue 41: Midterm election analysis, Judith Shklar’s minority liberalism, Australian farms, Joan Nathan’s unbeatable hummus recipe, and more

Issue 40: Voodoo, Iran’s drones, the journalistic party line, the Rothschilds of the East, Italian sfratti cookies, and more

Issue 39: The French take Israel, the how of wokeness, colloquial Arabic, a family portrait, shawarma, and more

Issue 38: Israel’s Kahanist politician, the renewed tradition of wimpels, basketball tryouts, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and more

Issue 37: Uyghur Muslims and the NBA, Germany’s troubles, a return to the shtetl, a cabbage strudel recipe, and more

Download Issue 36: Campus diversity excludes Jews, the Hindu American vote, surrealist ethnographer Diane Arbus, etrogs past and present, and more

Issue 35: Nikole Hannah-Jones and the origins of 1619, post-Soviet Russia, Yiddish black metal, a Yom Kippur story, and more

Issue 34: Howard Jacobson remembers The Queen; censorship and big tech; Unitarian Universalist sex education; Rosh Hashanah essays; and more. Plus a holiday brisket recipe.

Issue 33: Talking with non-Jewish spouses, white-boy rap, poetry in the orange groves, an Italian plum tart recipe, and more.

Issue 32: The Iran deal’s regional realignments, psychiatry and ‘insight,’ mental health on campus, Rwandan kibbutzim, and more.

Issue 31: Hate crimes in NYC, the exhausting battles of Diego Schwartzman, Baha’i teenagers, pushcarts, and more

Beach Reads 2022: An amazing, 113-page, free anthology of some of our best writing, for you and your hammock.

Issue 26: In full, Armin Rosen’s in-depth report on the background of the uniquely American life of Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. Also: surveillance, Judaism in translation, chocolate, and more.

Take our special Summer Fiction issue to the beach!

Get Issue 13: Passover

Download the special Tablet LA edition here.

Download Issue 1 here.

The Flight From Jewish Peoplehood

From the Soviet Yiddishists of the 1920s to the American Jewish Studies Departments of today, blaming Jews for antisemitism doesn’t end well

byJoshua M. Karlip
COVID-19 and the Psychology of Totalitarianism

The transition from democracy to totalitarian technocracy is not an elite conspiracy, but the process of a whole society succumbing to a new dominant ideology

byMattias Desmet
Academic Administrators Are Strangling Our Universities

A parasitic class of self-righteous bureaucrats has taken over campus life

byJohn Londregan,Sergiu Klainerman,Michael A. Reynolds,andBernard Haykel
The Flight From Jewish Peoplehood

From the Soviet Yiddishists of the 1920s to the American Jewish Studies Departments of today, blaming Jews for antisemitism doesn’t end well

byJoshua M. Karlip
COVID-19 and the Psychology of Totalitarianism

The transition from democracy to totalitarian technocracy is not an elite conspiracy, but the process of a whole society succumbing to a new dominant ideology

byMattias Desmet

Harriet Bograd 1943-1922

kulanu

The longtime head of Kulanu, mentor to farflung Jewish communities around the world, died at age 79

Read more about the Ugandan Jews Bograd championed here.

A 1945 appearance of the swamp monster know as the Heap
A 1945 appearance of the swamp monster know as the Heap
This Is Not an Article About Jews in China
byHarry Miller
This Is Not an Article About Jews in China
byHarry Miller

On View

  • Untitled (Bathroom), 1960.
    Untitled (Bathroom), 1960.

    Peter Saul: Early Works on Paper (1957-1965)

    Nov. 14, 2022 - Jan. 21, 2023

    Venus Over Manhattan, New York

  • Brancusi’s Studio

    Through Dec. 31, 2022

    Centre Pompidou, Paris

  • Marjorie Strider, Girl with Radish, 1963
    Marjorie Strider, Girl with Radish, 1963

    New York: 1962 - 1964

    July 22, 2022 - Jan. 8, 2023

    Jewish Museum, New York

Judith Shklar in 1966
Judith Shklar in 1966

Edward Said’s assault on subtlety would become his most lasting and profound influence.

—Mardean Isaac, on the Palestinian intellectual’s Jewish influences

The Painful Mediocrity of White Boy Rap
byJayson Buford

Edward Said’s assault on subtlety would become his most lasting and profound influence.

—Mardean Isaac, on the Palestinian intellectual’s Jewish influences

The Painful Mediocrity of White Boy Rap
byJayson Buford

New York Jewish Book Festival

Sunday, Dec. 11, 2022 beginning at 10:00 a.m., The Museum of Jewish Heritage presents a daylong event featuring talks, panels, and author signings, free with registration, including many Tablet contributors: Mark Oppenheimer, Michael W. Twitty, Liana Finck, Stephanie Butnick, and many more

More info here

Featured Contributor

Blake Smith

Swipe right to read more from the a contributing writer at Tablet, currently a Fulbright Scholar in North Macedonia.

On the little-known Romanian writer Abraham Zissu, who espoused a conception of Judaism rooted in a deep love for one’s community, and a simultaneous willingness to challenge its fundamentals

ORIGINAL PHOTO: PICTORIAL PRESS LTD/ALAMY

An appreciation of Laura Riding, the great Jewish modernist poet who abandoned her genius to grow oranges in Florida.

CHRIS FELVER/GETTY IMAGES

On the poet Richard Howard, who understood that American tradition is broken—but knew it was possible to begin again

On Henri Bergson, whose original heuristic of open and closed societies emphasizes that liberalism is a religion born out of moments of mystical perception and faith

SCHLESINGER LIBRARY, RADCLIFFE INSTITUTE, HARVARD UNIVERSITY

More on Judith Shklar, who warned that liberalism can degenerate into a cult of victimhood that permits our sadistic desires to be passed off as unimpeachable virtue

Tablet Magazine’s Printer-Friendly Weekly Digest
Issue 42: The media’s role in FTX’s downfall, Jews with disabilities, Howard Jacobson on ‘Ulysses,’ Thanksgiving tales, and more
byTablet Magazine
The author in 1974
The author in 1974

University Press Week 2022

Don Cheadle and Adam Driver in Noah Baumbach’s 'White Noise'
Don Cheadle and Adam Driver in Noah Baumbach’s 'White Noise'

Featured Contributor: Marco Roth

Newsletter

Film, music, visual arts, and more.

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Diane Arbus, ‘Woman in a rose hat, N.Y.C.,’ 1966
Diane Arbus, ‘Woman in a rose hat, N.Y.C.,’ 1966
'I was a big slow fat kid but one thing I could do was shoot free throws.'
'I was a big slow fat kid but one thing I could do was shoot free throws.'

My Favorite Anti-Semite

More from our occasional series of tributes to writers, artists, philosophers, and others who hate us and to why we still find value in their work.

E. F. Cooper/Wikimedia Commons

Edith Wharton

There’s a barbarian at every gate

BY ANNE ROIPHE

Hans-Jürgen Syberberg

The director’s films tackled the grandest questions in German culture and politics, before he turned his critical eye to the Jews

BY MARDEAN ISAAC

Library of Congress

Ty Cobb

He was the greatest and strangest of all ball players, a fierce competitor, and a hateful person

BY ARI HOFFMAN

BODIG/ULLSTEIN BILD VIA GETTY IMAGES

Gregor von Rezzori

Why the German-language writer and memoirist yearned for an era he never knew

BY WESLEY YANG

AP

Amiri Baraka

Kaddish for the late poet with a history of bigotry, from a poet with a feeling for jazz

BY JAKE MARMER

Wikimedia Commons

Frank Norris

The progressive-era novelist’s greedy, red-haired, Polish Jew, Zerkow, is the 20th century’s greatest golem

BY ELISA NEW

Lucian Bert Truesdale/Wikimedia Commons

H.P. Lovecraft

The 20th-century master of horror admired Hitler but married a Jew and hated ‘alien’ cultures but created some of the most memorable ones in literature

BY HUNTER C. EDEN

Wikimedia

Rupert Brooke

Regardless of whether or not we should forgive our favorite artists for these sorts of opinions, one thing is clear: We definitely want to.

BY ALEXANDER ACIMAN

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How the Next Civil War Begins
byB. Duncan Moench
Life in the Metaverse
byRoss Anderson
Brokenism
byAlana Newhouse
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Fuck David Mamet
byClayton Fox
How Kanye West Became America’s Leading Antisemite
byHubert Adjei-Kontoh
Making Magic out of Mosh
byDavid Meir Grossman
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Feeding the Spirit
byMary Lane Potter
Signed, Sealed, Delivered
byDovid Bashevkin
Kaddish, Revised
byRebecca Sonkin
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The Failed British Double-Cross of Israel
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A New Strategic Landscape in the Middle East
byDan Schueftan
Biden Trashes the Abraham Accords
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The Wide World of Cabbage
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A Mystery Baked Inside a Cake
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