Новости за 15.01.2016

Those of us half-heartedly following the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills subplot about the travails of the sisters Richards and how Kyle was invited, then disinvited, then re-invited—albeit without her husband and two of her daughters—to the Kensington Palace wedding of her niece Nicky Hilton to James Rothschild, have a new piece of information to chew over: Nicky, the quieter, yet somehow crueler-seeming sister of Paris, is reportedly pregnant with the newest scion of the legendary Jewish banking dynasty. Читать дальше...

Too many of my days seem to begin with the discovery of dismal tidings, almost always encountered via Twitter. Thursday morning’s grim news concerned the death of actor and director Alan Rickman, who had passed away, at age 69, from cancer. My social media channels were soon awash in expressions of grief.

Every Martin Luther King Day I run into my fair share of articles that make it seem as though the only way for Jews to find a way into the conversation of MLK Day is to throw Abraham Joshua Heschel into the mix. But this entry point for Jewish media has never really sat well with me.

We are thrilled to announce that Tablet has been nominated for a National Magazine Award in the General Excellence, Special Interest category by the American Society of Magazine Editors. This is our fifth Ellie nomination; in 2010 we won an Ellie Award for our Vox Tablet podcast, and in 2011, when we won for our blog, The Scroll.

If they ever do build a new Penn Station in New York, I hope they erect a statue there of A. Philip Randolph, the union leader. A proper statue of Randolph already occupies Union Station in Washington, D.C., and a somewhat grander statue occupies the Back Bay rail station in Boston, and really there ought to be statues of the man in rail stations across the country. New York’s statue, if anyone ever puts it up, ought to be the grandest of all, given that Randolph’s union, the small but supremely... Читать дальше...

By all accounts, it sucks to be a prophet. No one wants the job. Nobody decides to do it; it gets thrust on you, and you do anything you can to get out of it (see: Jonah, Moses). Most prophets recognized in our society have been men, and the agony of shouldering a burden for the sake of others at enormous personal expense sometimes seems not unlike that of our pop-culture superheroes, like Spidey, Wolverine, or Superman. But a prophet is not a superman. He’s more like a noodge, a persecuted, driven noodge. Читать дальше...

Nearly half a century after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, Americans have clearly placed him in the pantheon of America’s most admired leaders. That’s not hard to understand. One of the greatest speakers in modern times, Dr. King put his rhetorical gifts in the service of what is rightfully regarded as one of the most just causes in American history.

Last night, three tickets won the record $1.5 billion Powerball jackpot. The media quickly reported that one of the winners was a nurse at a California nursing home, a mother of seven children. And at first, it seemed like there was even more to the already-remarkable story.

Messily—that’s the only way to eat a pastrami sandwich—and with full force. Like Inigo Montoya, a quality pastrami sandwich is capable of vengeance, and it can sense your fear coming a mile away: If you pick me up with shaky hands and a petite appetite, do not pick me up at all.

A new book called L’an prochain à Jérusalem? (“Next Year In Jerusalem?”) by the pollster Jérôme Fourquet and geographer Sylvain Manternach, argues that French Jewry is moving increasingly to the right at a time when the community is “living with a strong feeling of insecurity,” one year after the attack on the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket in Paris that left four dead, and amid continued acts of anti-Semitism.