Tablet Magazine - a new read on Jewish life

Isaac Rosenberg’s self-portrait, 1915, painted in the year he enlisted. Despite being a pacifist, he believed ‘we must all fight to get the trouble over.’

Before dying in the trenches, the Bristol-born, Lithuanian Jewish painter Isaac Rosenberg became the greatest English war poet that nobody’s ever heard of

byKenneth Sherman

Rock the Bush

‘Live at Bush Hall’ is post-Brexit new wave with a punch from Black Country, New Road

byDavid Meir Grossman

One of my musical hot takes is that whenever possible, it’s worth listening to a band live before hearing their studio recordings. Most people find this counterintuitive: You go see a band live if you’ve already decided you like their recorded music, because live music is much more of an investment. When you listen to a studio track, you know that it will have a clear beginning and end, and typically won’t last more than about five minutes. Who knows where a live track will go? There’s a sense that live music is reserved for fans of an act, who can compare and contrast the live version with the recording, and enjoy the novelty of hearing a slightly different version of a song they already love. But live music can also be better than studio music for giving listeners a sense of what a band is all about. That’s the case with Live at Bush Hall, the latest release from the British band Black Country, New Road—a great introduction to a band in a new stage of its career.

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Tablet Magazine’s Printer-Friendly Weekly Digest

Vol. 2, Issue 13 Passover Special: An analysis of disinformation, a Florida Shabbos, backpacker Seders in Nepal, Haggadot before Maxwell House, and much more, including six recipes for a complete Seder meal

byTablet Magazine

The Disappearing of a Great American Novel

Vince Passaro’s ‘Crazy Sorrow’ passed nearly unnoticed through the race, class, and gender shitstorms to become the best new novel no one has read yet

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.

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Film, music, visual arts, and more.

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Escape From Mariupol

A Holocaust survivor and her family in hiding and on the run

byEdward Serotta

Notre Guerre

A graphic look at the Paris premiere of Bernard-Henri Lévy’s new doc, ‘Slava Ukraini’

byAleksi CavaillezandDavid Samuels

In the Vernadsky Library

Newly digitized recordings offer an unprecedented glimpse of the Ukrainian-Jewish past

byJake Marmer

In the Vernadsky Library

Newly digitized recordings offer an unprecedented glimpse of the Ukrainian-Jewish past

byJake Marmer

Putin’s WarMark Podwal

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

There are few examples of a nation doing so thoroughly and so quickly the deep work of digging in the darkest depths of its own crimes.

—Bernard-Henri Lévy

In the Vernadsky Library

Newly digitized recordings offer an unprecedented glimpse of the Ukrainian-Jewish past

byJake Marmer

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

Putin’s WarMark Podwal

There are few examples of a nation doing so thoroughly and so quickly the deep work of digging in the darkest depths of its own crimes.

—Bernard-Henri Lévy

Putin’s WarMark Podwal

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

There are few examples of a nation doing so thoroughly and so quickly the deep work of digging in the darkest depths of its own crimes.

—Bernard-Henri Lévy

‘American Jewish humor at its best asserted the neurotic glory of Jewishness against the white-bread norms of middle-class life’

Mel Brooks Kicks Larry David’s Skinny Ass

Part II in a continuing series on the decline of Jewish vulgarity

byDavid Mikics

Regina Spektor’s Howl

At a recent concert in Los Angeles, Spektor’s Soviet Jewishness took center stage

byJake Marmer

Salman Rushdie’s New Novel Is Stuck in the ’90s

In the best ways, and also the worst

byNicholas Clairmont

Maira Kalman, ‘Woman Holding Chicken,’ 2021

Women Holding Things

An interview with author and artist Maira Kalman

byFrances Brent

Asking questions about gender reveals its status as ideology—as the transformation of a particular, contingent interpretation of the world into an ostensibly natural fact about the world.

—Blake Smith