Tablet Magazine - a new read on Jewish life

The Temple of Bel Palmyra, Syria
The Temple of Bel Palmyra, Syria
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
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.

Listen to Tablet

Navigate to André Aciman, Sarah Wildman, and Others Build a Summer Reading List podcast page

Vox Tablet

André Aciman, Sarah Wildman, and Others Build a Summer Reading List

Looking for a good book to sink into at the beach in these waning dog days? Friends share what they’ve loved lately.

August 14, 2015

Get The Tab every Friday at tabletm.ag/tab

Post-Punk Painlessness
Nilüfer Yanya’s fast-paced, introspective sophomore album is one of the best rock records of the year
byDavid Meir Grossman
FICTION
My First Bible

Stories of life, death, and divided houses

byVal Vinokur

Featured Contributor: Blake Smith

  • Richard Howard’s Politics of Togetherness

    The poet, who died last month, understood that American tradition is broken—but knew it was possible to begin again

  • When Should Leaders Break the Law?

    Without an elite capable of making good decisions, rights and laws aren’t worth the paper they are printed on

  • A Tzaddik’s Rebellious Son

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

  • The Open Society and Its Prophets

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

A Jewish-Ukrainian Marriage

A group of ex-Soviets waits for visas and forms unexpected alliances on an Italian beach

byMaxim D. Shrayer
The Cold Centenary Comforts of Paul Celan

The Holocaust poet refused easy meaning in his work and committed suicide at 49. Now Pierre Joris and Daniel Kaufman set his poetry to music that surprisingly doesn’t suck.

byArmin Rosen
British Filmmaker Christopher Morris Explains the FBI
byArmin Rosen
The Cold Centenary Comforts of Paul Celan

The Holocaust poet refused easy meaning in his work and committed suicide at 49. Now Pierre Joris and Daniel Kaufman set his poetry to music that surprisingly doesn’t suck.

byArmin Rosen
British Filmmaker Christopher Morris Explains the FBI
byArmin Rosen

Cultural Calendar

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
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
American Freedom Is Greater Than Slavery and Ends in Death
The second in a four-part investigation of our national literature
byDavid Mikics
Yelets Women’s High School

A visit back to Russia, and an unceremonious encounter with the theatrics of the past

byMaxim D. Shrayer
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 emergence of a vital, original, plucky, politically committed and funny contemporary Ukrainian literature is one of the great stories of modern-day Europe.

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 emergence of a vital, original, plucky, politically committed and funny contemporary Ukrainian literature is one of the great stories of modern-day Europe.

Radioactive

Radioactive tells the story of a crafty bigot who used a new mass medium to spread hate and get much too close to political power. This eight-part podcast, hosted by Detroit journalist Andrew Lapin, weaves together archival materials and present-day interviews to tell the story of Father Charles Coughlin’s dangerous rise and dramatic fall. Radioactive is produced by Tablet Studios, with support from Maimonides Fund, and in association with The WNET Group’s reporting initiative, Exploring Hate: Antisemitism, Racism and Extremism. 

Listen here!

The complete series is here.

Patrick Ward/Popperfoto via Getty Images
Patrick Ward/Popperfoto via Getty Images
A Charmed British Life

A recent biography of Tom Stoppard shows the playwright coming to terms with the Jewishness buried beneath his proud English identity

byMardean Isaac

“Happiness is … equilibrium. Shift your weight.” The dots floating in the middle of the first utterance are nebulous, generating uncertainty. The monosyllabic instructions that follow assert balance. Tom Stoppard quoted these lines, over three decades after he had written them, to Hermione Lee in her recent biography, “Tom Stoppard: A Life.” Shifting from foot to foot, he told her: “Equilibrium is pragmatic. You have to get everything into proportion. You compensate, rebalance yourself so that you maintain your angle to your world. When the world shifts, you shift.” ...

Continue reading →︎

FICTION
A Brief History of the Jewdle

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

byMaxim D. Shrayer
Marjorie Perloff

Talking Duchamp and Wittgenstein with the acclaimed poetry critic

byJeremy Sigler

Taubes’ lectures represent one of the most powerful critiques of liberalism, understood not only as a political philosophy, but as a spiritual disposition, or rather a spiritual desiccation, by which liberals neutralize the radical promises of faith.

FICTION
A Brief History of the Jewdle

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

byMaxim D. Shrayer
Marjorie Perloff

Talking Duchamp and Wittgenstein with the acclaimed poetry critic

byJeremy Sigler
Ben Foster as Harry Haft in 'The Survivor,' (2021)
Ben Foster as Harry Haft in 'The Survivor,' (2021)
Making the Survivor

My father made the heart-wrenching decision to leave his family behind and escape the train to Terezin. Decades later, making a film about the choices of the Holocaust brings catharsis in unexpected ways.

byMatti Leshem

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

The Tab, Issue 18

Introducing The Tab, a curated weekly 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 at 10 a.m.

Issue 18: Getting to religious divorce, moralizing museums, Middle Eastern restaurants in London, and more.

Get Issue 17: Hezbollah in Paraguay, America’s big post-Cold War mistakes, a kitchen wunderkind, and more.

Get Issue 16: Malamud’s lover, the certainty trap, fiction, and more.

Get Issue 15: Israeli health care, Mother’s Day, and more.

Get Issue 14: Elon’s Twitter, Biden’s China, Doja Cat, Roman fish soup, and more.

Get Issue 13: Passover

Get Issue 12.

Get Issue 11 here.

Get Issue 10 here.

Get Issue 9 here.

Download Issue 8 here.

Download Issue 7 here.

Download Issue 6 here.

Direct download Issue 5 here.

Download the special Tablet LA edition here.

Download Issue 1 here.

Newsletter

Film, music, visual arts, and more.

Check iconSuccess! You have subscribed to the Tablet newsletter! Check your inbox for a confirmation message.
Check iconSomething went wrong. Please enter your email address again.
From Shona Speres’ photographic series and accompanying zine ‘A Mental Space,’ 2020
From Shona Speres’ photographic series and accompanying zine ‘A Mental Space,’ 2020
The Vanishing

The Jewish communities of America and France created liberal modernity, so it’s no accident they’re dissolving

byMarc Weitzmann
James Baldwin in his home, New York, late 1970s
James Baldwin in his home, New York, late 1970s
On Tokens and Tokenism

From George Washington to Jill Biden, Black literature has long been plagued by ignorant white patrons, who arbitrarily anoint a few writers as symbols of the Black experience

byIshmael Reed

My Favorite Anti-Semite

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

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

E. F. Cooper/Wikimedia Commons

Edith Wharton

There’s a barbarian at every gate

BY ANNE ROIPHE

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

Navigate to Arts & Letters section
Navigate to News section
Navigate to Belief section
Navigate to Arts & Letters section
Navigate to Israel & The Middle East section
Navigate to Belief section
Navigate to Food section
Navigate to Israel & The Middle East section
Navigate to Community section
Navigate to Food section
Navigate to History section
Navigate to Community section
Navigate to Science section
Navigate to History section
Navigate to Sports section
Navigate to Science section
Navigate to Holidays section
Navigate to Sports section
←︎
→︎
See All→︎
Is America the Real Victim of Anti-Russia Sanctions?
byArnaud Bertrand
Is Putin Committing Genocide in Ukraine?
byAlexander J. Motyl
Wingnuts vs. Factions
byMichael Lind
See All→︎
Post-Punk Painlessness
byDavid Meir Grossman
The Floating Space City of the Jews
byDan Shapira
The Great Debasement
byAlice Gribbin
See All→︎
Master of Miracles
byRebecca Klempner
A Class of Their Own
byRachel Frommer
Finding Meaning in the Margins
byJonathan Silin
See All→︎
The Name of the Lebanese Play? The Aristocrats!
byTony Badran
The Equality of Sickness and Death
byAnne Dubitzky
Israel’s Memorial Day
byGil Troy
See All→︎
Tel Aviv on the Thames
byLeah Koenig
Red Hot Chili Peppers
byPaola Gavin
Eitan Bernath Is on Top of the ‘World’
byLeah Koenig
See All→︎
Was Slavery in Egypt So Bad?
byCurt Leviant
Every Generation
byEtgar Keret
Bread for Sale
byNomi Kaltmann
See All→︎
“What Is ‘A Year of Saying Kaddish?’”
byUnorthodox
Join Our Podcast Team
byUnorthodox
An ‘Unorthodox’ Celebration of Conversion
byUnorthodox
See All→︎
The Auto-da-fé of Mexico City
byRonnie Perelis
How British and American Elites Failed to Stop the Jewish State
byMike Watson
Theodor Herzl’s Cursed Children
byShalom Goldman
See All→︎
Organs of the State
byMartin Elliott
Why Complex Systems Collapse Faster
byUgo Bardi
The Mask Debacle
byJacob Hale RussellandDennis Patterson
See All→︎
When in Rome, Do as the Jerusalemites Do
byElhanan Miller
Baseball’s Golden Age
byTevi Troy
Ariel Helwani Won’t Back Down
byElie Bleier
Thank you for reading Tablet.

The Jewish world needs a place like Tablet where varying—even conflicting—viewpoints can exist side by side. Our times demand an engagement with big ideas and not a retreat from them. Help us do what we do.

Support Tablet
$36
$50
$75
$125
$360
Custom