Tablet Magazine - a new read on Jewish life

Visitors at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem experience the Great Synagogue of Aleppo in virtual reality

A new virtual reality exhibit at the Israel Museum brings to life the Great Synagogue, and the great collapse of multinational Jewish life

byMatti Friedman

Saudi fans attend MDLBeast, an electronic music festival held in Banban, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in 2019

The Young and the Restless

Countries that stifle their children are not the future of the Middle East

byMohammed Khalid Alyahya

The Name of the Lebanese Play? The Aristocrats!

The country’s recent election was a masterpiece of counterfactual Kabuki theater—and there wasn’t a dry Western eye in the house

byTony Badran

The magazine is one of the tribunes of elite contempt for the Jewish state, reflecting the consensus of the New York faculty lounge and the sensibility of professional Brooklyn.

The Name of the Lebanese Play? The Aristocrats!

The country’s recent election was a masterpiece of counterfactual Kabuki theater—and there wasn’t a dry Western eye in the house

byTony Badran

The magazine is one of the tribunes of elite contempt for the Jewish state, reflecting the consensus of the New York faculty lounge and the sensibility of professional Brooklyn.

Israel’s Minister of the Hyphen

Matan Kahana’s lonely battle to build a religious-Zionist-labor-Orthodox-democratic Jewish state

byMatti Friedman

It’s impossible to understand Matan Kahana, the surprise star of the current Israeli government, or to grasp the spirit of the coalition that has governed here for the past year, without the idea of the hyphen. The hyphen lies at the heart of the worldview of Kahana, a blunt ex-military officer who has stirred up more controversy, and has been called more awful names, than any other figure in the embattled government where he serves in what is usually a political backwater, the Ministry of Religious Services. The hyphen is at the heart of the crisis currently threatening to splinter the government, and will play a role in whatever political constellation ends up taking shape....

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The Equality of Sickness and Death

Working in Israel’s health care sector reveals a country making precious progress toward lived coexistence

byAnne Dubitzky

Chief rabbi of Kyiv, Yonatan Markovich, arrives at Ben-Gurion Airport with family from Ukraine on March 3, 2022. Some estimates say 10,000 Ukrainian Jews will come to Israel to escape the Russian invasion; others predict 10 times that.

The New Ukrainian Aliyah

Israel’s last wave of Ukrainian and Russian Jews is preparing to absorb the next one

byMatti Friedman

Russia’s Next Target for Intimidation Could Be Israel

byKsenia Svetlova

Accommodating Iran Will Be No More Successful Than Accommodating Russia

Putin’s horrifying war in Ukraine shows the likely results of the West continuing to ignore Iran’s nuclear quest

byEmanuele Ottolenghi

The Equality of Sickness and Death

Working in Israel’s health care sector reveals a country making precious progress toward lived coexistence

byAnne Dubitzky

The New Ukrainian Aliyah

Israel’s last wave of Ukrainian and Russian Jews is preparing to absorb the next one

byMatti Friedman

The New Ukrainian Aliyah

Israel’s last wave of Ukrainian and Russian Jews is preparing to absorb the next one

byMatti Friedman

Russia’s Next Target for Intimidation Could Be Israel

byKsenia Svetlova

The Equality of Sickness and Death

Working in Israel’s health care sector reveals a country making precious progress toward lived coexistence

byAnne Dubitzky

Accommodating Iran Will Be No More Successful Than Accommodating Russia

Putin’s horrifying war in Ukraine shows the likely results of the West continuing to ignore Iran’s nuclear quest

byEmanuele Ottolenghi

Russia’s Next Target for Intimidation Could Be Israel

byKsenia Svetlova

Accommodating Iran Will Be No More Successful Than Accommodating Russia

Putin’s horrifying war in Ukraine shows the likely results of the West continuing to ignore Iran’s nuclear quest

byEmanuele Ottolenghi

Turkey Finds Israel Useful Again

After two decades of manic-depressive relations, Erdogan wants to give the Jewish state another spin

byOfra Bengio

At the end of December 2021, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan hosted a delegation of rabbis from all over the Islamic world, as well as from Russia. In that meeting, Erdogan stated that relations with Israel were “vital for the security and stability of the region,” and described both antisemitism and hostility toward Islam as “a crime against humanity.” Considering that for the past decade, Erdogan had lashed out at Israel repeatedly while employing antisemitic tropes against it, the meeting raised eyebrows. In order to understand the change in rhetoric, and whether it was a mere tactical move or more strategic and long term, it is important to examine relations between Turkey and Israel in a broader historical context....

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When I asked Itzik about human-rights abuses in places like Xinjiang, for example, he replied, ‘I think the Israelis can understand China better than anyone else.’

—Matti Friedman on Israel’s China ties

Remember Deir Yassin!

Historian Eliezer Tauber explores how Palestinian propaganda backfired by turning a bloody battle into a fateful blood libel

byGil Troy

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi shake hands at the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, Nov. 1, 2021

Israel à la Modi

Halvah with cardamom ice cream is back on the foreign policy menu

byP.R. Kumaraswamy

When I asked Itzik about human-rights abuses in places like Xinjiang, for example, he replied, ‘I think the Israelis can understand China better than anyone else.’

—Matti Friedman on Israel’s China ties

Remember Deir Yassin!

Historian Eliezer Tauber explores how Palestinian propaganda backfired by turning a bloody battle into a fateful blood libel

byGil Troy

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The New Bitcoin

The incredible strength of the shekel is playing havoc with Israel’s economy, while leaving its humble and egalitarian past in the dust

byMatti Friedman

The Most Legitimate State on Earth

Israel is the model for the nation-state idea on which the current global order was founded. That’s why opponents of the idea see it as a target.

byLiel Leibovitz

Lebanon’s State Ponzi Scheme Seeks Jewish Investors

The reeling regime in Beirut would like some of that magic Jewish money, please

byTony Badran

What to Expect From Bennett’s Iran Policy

The new government wants to work closely with Washington, reduce Israel’s dependence on it, and prepare for military action. Can it have all three?

byLahav Harkov

Lebanon’s State Ponzi Scheme Seeks Jewish Investors

The reeling regime in Beirut would like some of that magic Jewish money, please

byTony Badran

What to Expect From Bennett’s Iran Policy

The new government wants to work closely with Washington, reduce Israel’s dependence on it, and prepare for military action. Can it have all three?

byLahav Harkov

The Next Lebanon War

It will start without warning. And the consequences are likely to be enormous.

byMatti Friedman

Biden Pays Army Salaries to Iranian Ally

An unprecedented new salary assistance program for the Lebanese military is ‘cleverly’ structured to evade U.S. law

byTony Badran

Israel’s New Post-Netanyahu Government, Explained

Six essential insights about what just happened in Israel and what it means for the country’s future

byYair Rosenberg

An igloo-shaped kindergarten in Beersheba, 1974

Building Israel’s Dust City

After decades of great expectations, Beersheba often seems like a lost cause. But a recent visit revealed a city finally on the cusp of a breakthrough.

byMatti Friedman

Every city is a battle against entropy, and Beersheba (to paraphrase a famous saying about Jews) is like other cities, but more so. There’s one spot where you can stand on a rise of fresh grass overlooking a lovely new amphitheater that will stage cultural activities for the residents of Israel’s sixth-largest city. Then you turn around, without moving a step, and see electric pylons receding from the edge of town into the dun sea of the desert, the tin-shack Bedouin empire spreading over the slopes. You can call Beersheba, population 200,000, the “capital of the Negev,” and air-condition spanking new shopping malls until the jeans are cool to the touch. You can open boutique hotels and unfurl the “biggest pride flag in the Middle East.” But the desert will still hem you in, crushing you with heat at 9 a.m. If the sprinklers fail, the green grass by the new amphitheater will be trash-blown sand in a week.

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