Tablet Magazine - a new read on Jewish life

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

The Return of the Cousins

Despite the proliferation of anti- and post-Zionist rhetoric in Britain, Israel remains a central pillar of Anglo-Jewish identity

byZoe StrimpelandTom Stammers

Leonard Cohen performing at the love-in at Queen's Park, Toronto, 1967

Leonard Cohen at Queen’s Park

Music made Cohen rich and famous, but it deprived us of the brilliance of his poetry

byKenneth Sherman

Leonard Cohen at Queen’s Park

Music made Cohen rich and famous, but it deprived us of the brilliance of his poetry

byKenneth Sherman

Zionism: The Tablet Guide

The definitive guide to the past, present, and future of modern Judaism’s most fantastical and magnetic idea—and the West’s most explosive political label

byTablet Magazine

The South’s Jewish Proust

byBlake Smith

For me, sometimes to talk about a stereotype, I have to exaggerate, to bring it to the grotesque. This is what evokes a discussion.

—Zoya Cherkassky

Leonard Cohen at Queen’s Park

Music made Cohen rich and famous, but it deprived us of the brilliance of his poetry

byKenneth Sherman

The South’s Jewish Proust

byBlake Smith

Zionism: The Tablet Guide

The definitive guide to the past, present, and future of modern Judaism’s most fantastical and magnetic idea—and the West’s most explosive political label

byTablet Magazine

For me, sometimes to talk about a stereotype, I have to exaggerate, to bring it to the grotesque. This is what evokes a discussion.

—Zoya Cherkassky

Zionism: The Tablet Guide

The definitive guide to the past, present, and future of modern Judaism’s most fantastical and magnetic idea—and the West’s most explosive political label

byTablet Magazine

The South’s Jewish Proust

byBlake Smith

For me, sometimes to talk about a stereotype, I have to exaggerate, to bring it to the grotesque. This is what evokes a discussion.

—Zoya Cherkassky

Norman Manea’s Exiled Shadow

Freed from the dreary, nauseating oppression of Ceausescu’s communist surveillance state, the great Romanian author is thrown back on himself, books, and the Jews

byDavid Mikics

The reading of a poem is demanding in a way that listening to a song is not. And it is that difficulty that makes poetry more of a counterculture event than even the most avant-garde song, especially given our increasingly limited attention spans.

—Kenneth Sherman

Also by David Mikics

Mel Brooks Kicks Larry David’s Skinny Ass
Part II in a continuing series on the decline of Jewish vulgarity
Let’s All Celebrate Norman Mailer
The most swaggering and macho of Jewish writers illuminated postwar America like no one else
The Horrible and Enlightening Life of Jean Améry
In an age of easy antisemitism, the Austrian Jewish Holocaust survivor’s work remains bitter, resentful, and hauntingly pro-Zionist
On Jewish Vulgarity
With John Murray Cuddihy’s ‘The Ordeal of Civility’ and Yuri Slezkine’s ‘The Jewish Century,’ Tablet begins a three-part look at the once-vibrant Jewish trait of not caring what the goyim think

Carl Andre at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, 1978

Love, Death, and Poetic Madness at Dia

My encounters with Carl Andre

byJeremy Sigler

You just can’t look at people in bars and restaurants in Odessa and not imagine them as something out of Babel.

—Edward Serotta

A Sparkle in Time

Thirteen years after Mark Linkous’ suicide, a new album from Sparklehorse serves as a reminder of the singer’s gifts

byDavid Meir Grossman

Former President Barack Obama, who turns 62 tomorrow

The Obama Factor

A Q&A with historian David Garrow

byDavid Samuels

You just can’t look at people in bars and restaurants in Odessa and not imagine them as something out of Babel.

—Edward Serotta

A Sparkle in Time

Thirteen years after Mark Linkous’ suicide, a new album from Sparklehorse serves as a reminder of the singer’s gifts

byDavid Meir Grossman

Collections

Thematic, editor-curated deep dives into Tablet’s rich archives

Explore them all

Featured Contributor

Jeremy Sigler

YouTube

The Spy Who Loved Me

JULY 17, 2023

Lucian Freud’s Fat Lady Sings

MAY 21, 2019

EMILY BERKEY

A Conversation With Marjorie Perloff

APRIL 1, 2019

HENRY GROSKINSKY/THE LIFE IMAGES COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES

The Kabbalah of Rothko

FEBRUARY 23, 2018

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND VENUS OVER MANHATTAN

Peter Saul Sabotages Everything, Including Himself

NOVEMBER 30, 2017

Corbis

Powerless in the Face of Beauty: Helena Rubinstein at the Jewish Museum

NOVEMBER 5, 2014

Babyn Yar

A response to Vladislav Davidzon

byNatan Sharansky

Ilya Khrazhanovsky arrives for the closing ceremony of the 70th Berlin International Film Festival at Berlinale Palace on Feb. 29, 2020

Chaos Comes to Babyn Yar

Ilya Khrazhanovsky, the controversial filmmaker who served as artistic director of the Babyn Yar Memorial Foundation, resigns amid an investigation into his oligarch patron

byVladislav Davidzon

The Island of the Damned

Fascism and madness in Leros

byVerdiana Garau

I, Sea Jew

Jews and water don’t mix

byHoward Jacobson

Robbie Robertson Was Everyman

How the Canadian-Jewish-Mohawk Robbie Robertson became the voice of poor white Americana

byGeoffrey Clarfield

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The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine flag hangs on the door of a hijacked TWA Boeing jet during the standoff between King Hussein and PFLP guerrillas on Dawson Field, Jordan, September 1970

The Hijacking

A new anti-memoir memoir revisits a critical moment in the history of air piracy while plumbing the false consciousness of American Jews

byMarco Roth

Featured Contributor: Marco Roth

Fables of Assimilation
‘Leopoldstadt’ and ‘The Fabelmans’
A Kafka for Our Times
A new completist edition of Kafka’s diaries lures readers into the Kafkaesque experience of seeing the author dissolve into an auto-fictional scrapheap
Rachel Aviv’s Journey to the Ends of Psychiatry
Janet Malcolm’s successor at The New Yorker has a different take on the impossible profession
Proust in Buenos Aires
Searching for what is lost in ‘Le Temps Perdu,’ María Alvarez’s artful documentary on an Argentine book club
At Our Absolute Worst
Marco Roth talks to, yells at, and pleads with Joshua Cohen about his novel, ‘Moving Kings’
And more from Tablet’s Book Critic at Large.