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Exquisite Objects
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Bound for Glory
Central to the Days of Awe in modern times is the experience of walking into the synagogue to find tall stacks of High Holiday prayer books, or mahzorim. Things were not always thus. For centuries,...
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Elevated
James Snyder, director of the Israel Museum since 1997 and overseer of its recent $100-million renovation, repeated several times over the course of a two-day press junket in Jerusalem last month that...
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Today on Tablet
Today in Tablet Magazine, deputy news editor Matthew Fishbane reviews the recent “renewal” of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. We present a second part of Toby Perl Frelich’s documentary about the...
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Event Horizon
Agenda is Tablet Magazine’s weekly listing of upcoming cultural events. New York: Starting off the year of the dragon is the New York Jewish Film Festival, which starts Wednesday, screening a wide...
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Mideast Antiques Roadshow
Even though they’d been sawn in half, the items were unmistakable to the Israeli Antiquities Authority officials inspecting Jerusalem’s Old City shops: Two ancient Egyptian wooden coffin lids, dating...
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Hasidism, in Living Color
With all due respect to the impressive collection of circular fur hats, the best and most revealing exhibits at “A World Apart Next Door: Glimpses Into the Life of Hasidic Jews,” the Hasidic-themed...
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Questions About the Mishneh Torah Purchase
Earlier today, a landmark Judaica collection belonging to philanthropist and hedge-funder Michael Steinhardt’s Judaica collection went up for auction at Sotheby’s. What constitutes a landmark Judaica...
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Herod’s Edifice Complex
The press preview for the Israel Museum’s new and very shiny exhibit “Herod the Great: The King’s Final Journey” was very crowded and a bit of a balagan. I pretty much immediately lost my guide (though...
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Should Jews Be Envious of Koreans?
An omnipotent judge sitting at a desk, expert in the behavior of men, examines the souls of the dead, deciding the punishments in the afterlife that their misdeeds merit. Vivid, artful depictions,...
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The Continuing Mysteries of the Aleppo Codex
I am not sure I expected the story of the long-forgotten Aleppo Codex, the perfect copy of the Hebrew Bible, to occupy me for very long after the publication of my book on the subject in 2012. I...
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A Trip to the Library
I went on a trip, a library trip, to Israel to see archives and manuscripts and scrolls. I saw words preserved and words unearthed, words ordinary and sacred. There were two stabbings, along with a car...
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The Gertrude Stein of Anglo-Jewish Jerusalem
Writer Gertrude Stein, who would have turned 142 today, is probably best known for running a literary salon in Paris during the interwar years; Picasso used to drop by. The poet Linda Zisquit is...
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