• Eric Joffie, the top American Reform rabbi, called for an East Jerusalem settlement freeze. • Jorge Puello, the alleged human-trafficker who claims to head the Dominican Sephardic community (but probably doesn’t, and may not even be Jewish), was apprehended in the Dominican Republic. Read More »
The Armenian genocide slaughter whatever-it-was (it was a genocide) is a touchy subject for Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as it is for many Turkish people. His button was pushed most recently by the U.S. Read More »
One of us got an email from the group JONAH International directing us to their special Passover message . “With the holiday of Passover upon us and its important message of freedom,” it reads, we need help to free others from their own personal “mitzrayim” (slavery). Those coming to us for assistance desire to be free of sexual confusion. Read More »
In a thrilling contest that went down to the last minute late last night, Bruce Pearl’s Tennessee Volunteers—Tablet Magazine’s official NCAA basketball team—held off the San Diego State Aztecs 62-59 . Tomorrow, they face 14-seed Ohio, who pulled off a tremendous upset of the Georgetown Hoyas, in Providence, Rhode Island. Read More »
Everyone is reporting it: now that President Obama has further postponed his trip to Asia, he will be in Washington, D.C., next week when Prime Minister Netanyahu is visiting for the AIPAC Conference. They will sit down together next Tuesday. I’d like to pause and note that I called this on Twitter several days ago. Read More »
Today on Tablet Magazine, Senior Writer Allison Hoffman profiles (must-read!) Alan Solow, the “King of the Jews” selected to lobby the administration on the basis of his close ties to Obama. Read More »
“Elected to what?” the girl had replied, brushing crumbs from her father’s beard—because, didn’t her family live in an unrelieved penury due to the universal injustices that her absconded brothers had made the girl so keenly aware of? But Read More »
Greenberg , the new film from writer/director Noah Baumbach and starring Ben Stiller, comes out today. Considering it last week, Tablet Magazine’s Marissa Brostoff reported that while “there is little overt Jewishness” (except for the title!), Stiller’s protagonist fits squarely in the venerable tradition of the Jewish shlemiel. Read More »
• Prime Minister Netanyahu called Secretary of State Clinton to propose a series of “mutual confidence building” (“building”!) steps that Israel and the Palestinians could stage to “improve the atmosphere” and pave the way to talks. • U.S. envoy George Mitchell will head to the region after all, this Sunday. Read More »
When I was a teenager, growing up in a beachfront suburb of secular Tel Aviv, there was no taunt more effective than accusing someone of possessing the potential to one day become a ba’al teshuva . Read More »
In 1939, the same year Scarlett O’Hara mourned her lost Tara on the silver screen, a prominent Conservative rabbi named Milton Steinberg published a near-500-page work of historical fiction—never, for reasons that surely have to do with anti-Semitism, made into a movie—set in the era of the Talmudic sages. Read More »
When I was 3, I had a 10-year-old brother, and deep in my heart I hoped that when I grew up, I’d be just like him. Not that I stood a chance. My big brother had already skipped two grades and had an enviable understanding of everything, from atomic physics and computer programming to the Cyrillic alphabet. Read More »
• President Obama further postponed a trip to Asia, meaning he’ll be in town early next week, when Prime Minister Netanyahu is as well. Will they break bread? • Visiting Moscow, Secretary of State Clinton asked Russia to delay finishing a nuclear plant it’s building for Iran. Read More »
Come one, come all—or at least as many as can fit into the Laurie Beechman Theatre—next Thursday, March 25th, for the debut performance of Everything’s Coming Up Moses . The (mostly) original musical, presented by Tablet Magazine, comes from the truly unique brain of contributing editor Rachel Shukert. Read More »
Opinions! Everyone seems to have one. Can you believe, for example, that some people actually prefer vanilla to chocolate? And other people actually liked Avatar ? And then there’s that whole whatever-you-want-to-call-it between Israel and the United States right now. Read More »
Excuse the excitement and bragging, but we just got a text from our editors attending the Digital American Society of Magazine Editors awards ceremony, and: our Vox Tablet podcast series has won the National Magazine Award for Best Podcast ! This is our first ASME win. Read More »
A new memoir by a Bergen-Belsen survivor reports that her fellow prisoner distracted young children at the German concentration camp by regaling them with fairy tales. Berthe Meijer’s Life After Anne Frank casts Frank’s actions as of a piece with her remarkable (and remarkably precocious) story-telling abilities. Read More »
On March 9, a few hours after Israel’s Shas-controlled Interior Ministry announced that it intended to build 1,600 new housing units in East Jerusalem, about 30 members of Chicago’s Jewish community relations council gathered for a lunchtime meeting on the sixth floor of the city’s Jewish Federation building, in the Loop. Read More »
According to White House chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel, Vice President Biden did not, as some had alleged , tell Prime Minister Netanyahu that Israeli settlements endangered U.S. troops. But what about the venerable General David Petraeus, who heads the U.S. Read More »
Today in Tablet Magazine, Sheik Abdul Hadi Palazzi, the head of a prominent Italian Muslim organization, shows that the Quran establishes Jewish sovereignty in the Holy Land—that, yes, “Allah is a Zionist.” You’re darn right there is a Barbados Jewish community: Alexander Gelfand reports . Read More »
The NCAA Tournament begins today. And Tablet Magazine’s official team* is playing in the final game of the day. At 9: 45 P.M., the sixth-seeded Tennessee Volunteers will face the 11th-seeded San Diego State Aztecs in Providence, Rhode Island. Read More »
• While describing the East Jerusalem construction announcement as “not helpful,” President Obama denied that U.S.-Israel relations are in crisis. • Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren makes a similar description and the same denial in this op-ed. But he also stands by Israeli building in East Jerusalem. Read More »
“Tell your father if he needs anything, I’m around,” said the voice at the other end of the line. “God bless, Alex.” Its lilting Barbadian cadences belonged to Jimmy Altman, the man who has for the past several years served as my family’s consigliere in Barbados. Read More »
One of the convenient aspects of studying Jewish history is its 3,000-year-old paper trail—the texts and records of the rabbinical and intellectual elite allow us to examine contours of Jewish law and history. But we tend to know less about the lives of average Jews, who didn’t receive much attention in the writings of the intellectuals. Read More »
Between working and dreaming, Salo was unaware of his sons’ political activities. On those infrequent occasions when he saw them, he could only marvel at how much they had grown; he admired them for having turned into some rare new breed of Jew, Read More »
Over the past 15 years, the political conflict between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs has been reframed as a religious war in which leaders from Yasser Arafat to Hassan Nasrallah to Osama bin Laden have appealed to the authority of the Quran to support their goal of eliminating the State of Israel. Read More »
• The U.S. military transported hundreds of “bunker-buster” bombs, which can burrow underground and destroy (for example) secret Iranian nuclear-weapon facilities, to its Indian Ocean airbase. • The Israeli leadership is taking steps to resolve its tensions with America. Read More »
With Democratic Gov. David A. Paterson still clinging to power despite a pretty damning scandal involving his alleged intervention in an aide’s assault case, Lieutenant Governor Richard Ravitch likely won’t get the chance to cure the Read More »
Last week’s construction announcement in Israel has rippled through a political system halfway across the world. While most Republicans and many Democrats have criticized the administration, some have backed it and turned their criticism toward Israel. Read More »
What’s perhaps most impressive about Tweet the Exodus is that the group of rabbis, led by Rabbi Oren Hayon, behind it have set up not just a central feed containing provocative quotations, entertaining links, and, eventually, the story of the Read More »
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