As senior editor and “Vox Tablet” host, Sara, a graduate of Barnard College and Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, has written about business, books, education, art, and health for The New York Times, The Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, Real Simple, Bookforum, and other publications. She hosts Tablet’s weekly podcast, for which she interviewed Michael Chabon, Aline Crumb, and many other culture makers; reported a podcast about the Jewish roots of West Side Story; and offered her takes on Red Sox and Bob Dylan fandom. She oversees the site’s coverage of life and religion. Her day-school elementary education enabled her to inform her mother, in a letter written at age 8, that “You are like the pharaoh and I am like all these slaves.”
The singer shares holiday memories with British mag
| 12:09 PM Nov 30, 2009
The latest addition to the Bob Dylan chronicles is an exclusive interview the singer gave The Big Issue, a British magazine, about his new album, Christmas in the Heart, profits from which are going to charitable organizations that feed the hungry. His generally terse answers (How does he spend the week between Christmas and New ...
A brief history of polemics
| 1:30 PM Nov 24, 2009
The New York Times revisits the debate over whether the Jews have a “shared racial or biological past” today in an article tied to the publication in English of The Invention of the Jewish People, by Tel Aviv University professor Shlomo Sand. Sand is frank, writes reporter Particia Cohen, in his effort “to discredit Jews’ ...
Courtesy of Masha Gessen
| 12:19 PM Nov 23, 2009
Seventy-five years ago, 600 Jews from Ukraine and Belarus traveled across Siberia to be the first settlers of Birobidzhan, a Jewish autonomous region 50 miles short of the Chinese border. To research a book she’s writing on the would-be homeland for Nextbook Press, journalist Masha Gessen retraced their path across Russia. She arrived at a ...
Airline pulls magazine after wrongheaded Holocaust fashion shoot
| 4:00 PM Nov 20, 2009
EasyJet, a British airline, has withdrawn all copies of its in-flight magazine after being contacted by the New Statesman, a London magazine, about a Holocaust Memorial fashion photo shoot in its latest edition. In a written statement reproduced by the newspaper, easyJet apologized for the spread, which was photographed without permission at the Peter Eisenman-designed ...
China against; N.Y. pol Dov Hikind in favor
| 10:00 AM Nov 20, 2009
Curious about China’s stance on West Bank settlement expansion? Now you know: The Asian power is against it. Just days after President Obama visited China, that country’s foreign minister has criticized the planned construction of 900 new apartments in East Jerusalem, according to the Israeli paper Yediot Ahronot, a position in concert with the U.S. ...
Philip Roth and Amos Oz make list of year’s worst literary sex scenes
| 1:16 PM Nov 19, 2009
If Philip Roth’s The Humbling fails to earn him a National Book Award nomination next year, he can at least console himself with the news that he’s made the shortlist of contenders for a British award honoring bad sex in fiction. Bestowed by the London magazine Literary Review, the awards “draw attention to the crude, ...
Intel to hire shabbos goyim; a woman arrested at the Western Wall
| 4:00 PM Nov 18, 2009
Just days after Intel faced a throng of rioters who objected to the operation of a factory in Jerusalem on the Sabbath, the giant computer chip maker has offered an appeasement proposal: According to news reports, Intel says it’s in the process of training non-Jewish workers to man the machinery on the day of rest ...
In Brooklyn, where else?
| 2:05 PM Nov 17, 2009
Community-supported agriculture generally means farm-to-city deliveries of fresh produce. In Johanna Bronk’s case, it means locally grown grain for her fledgling challah baking and delivery service. The 23-year-old Massachusetts native moved to Brooklyn this fall to pursue a career in opera (a mezzo-soprano, she graduated from the conservatory at Oberlin College in the spring and ...
Protestors ransack factory for operating on Shabbat
| 1:00 PM Nov 16, 2009
At least 1,500 ultra-Orthodox Jews stormed an Intel plant in Jerusalem on Saturday, angry that the computer chip-maker is operating there on the Sabbath. The rioters, some of whom wore shtreimels and other holiday finery, threw rocks at onlookers and journalists and ransacked part of the factory, including its chapel. According to the Jerusalem Post, ...
Legendary lawyer's daughters speculate as their documentary opens
| 4:00 PM Nov 13, 2009
“I’m not a self-hating Jew,” the radical lawyer William Kunstler says in William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe, a documentary opening today. “Anyone who knows me knows I love myself.” Kunstler became famous—or infamous, depending on your point of view—for defending the Chicago Seven, the Catonsville 9 (who burned draft files to protest Vietnam), Meir Kahane’s ...