Tablet Magazine

Geoff Bennett’s new book, Black Out Loud: The Revolutionary History of Black Comedy from Vaudeville to ’90s Sitcoms, asks a deceptively simple question: how did Martin, Living Single, Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, In Living Color, and A Different World all exist on American television at the same time? His answer — that it was a convergence of talent, timing, and cultural urgency — raises an uncomfortable question for Jews on television. We had the talent. Where was the urgency?

LOS ANGELES — When I was young in France, sweetbreads were considered a health food. The thymus and pancreas glands from veal are sweet and creamy. They are served crisped, sometimes with a lemon and caper sauce, or with a veal demi-glace, and, to my preferences, with almonds. Liver, brains, sweetbreads, tongues, and animal genitals all used to be common offerings on old restaurant menus—indeed, my grandfather used to pickle beef tongue, and always ordered liver with onions or a calf’s foot.

Walk down Fifth Avenue on a weekday morning, and you’ll notice the same bags repeated: a slouching Balenciaga City softened at the corners, a Chloé Paddington carried with one hand despite its weight, and a Dior Saddle tucked under an arm. These bags, all introduced between 2000 and 2005, are spotted on everyday women picking up prescriptions or walking their dogs, not at Fashion Week or street-style shoots. Fashion is full of novelty in 2026, but very little of it produces desire.

No part of his face was free from the tangle of lines; even his mouth was covered in the scars of time. It somehow made the old poet gentle-looking, like some ancient deity that had seen it all, and nothing could provoke him. His thin lips were curved into a half smile, as they always were. “What was it like, Pelezhin?” The young man sat across from him in the dark of his study, fiddling with his gray fedora.

The chicken at the Hotel Desiatka wasn’t great, last time I was there, now more than a decade ago. But at least it didn’t taste of cesium and wasn’t advertised as free-range. Because if there’s one place that should absolutely not embrace the locavore revolution, at least not for the next 30,000 years or so, it is the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, on the border of Ukraine and Belorussia.

The Russian subs were circling, Chinese spies lurking, European militaries mobilizing, stocks tumbling, gold surging, the dollar tanking. That was the situation this past January when my cab pulled up at the Hotel Hans Egede in Nuuk, the capital of Greenland. I had come to witness what the headlines had dubbed the “Battle on the Ice,” and to see firsthand how a country might be bought and sold. I was not alone.

On Sept. 5, 1866, a new synagogue was dedicated in Berlin. In attendance was an array of official dignitaries, including Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. The New Synagogue, as it was called, was an immediate sensation.

The Mouth open like a well where i could lay closed like a door when they killed on the street my lying mouth awaits aware that surely later it will tear me apart * mouth of stone open like a leaf atop the white tree screaming fire words shouting beware to the eye that unaware looks at you open like a leaf atop the white tree mouth of stone arriving from defunct times sea of salt dried river silent stone of leaf mouth of tree * when the mouth of the earth will open the shadows of your mothers...

On Christmas Eve, 2025, over 100 people filed into the Biblical Museum of Natural History in Beit Shemesh, Israel, dressed in smart attire. Guests were offered the chance to have their pictures taken with a Burmese python, a gorgeous 15-foot spotted, butter-yellow creature named Shayna, before locating their tables inside the museum’s solarium.

The word Paskha––Russian for “Passover” or “Easter”––appears at key moments throughout the stories of the Odessan Jewish writer Isaac Babel. For half of the appearances of the word, there has been no consensus among translators about which of the two holidays is implied in the text. As an editor and translator of Babel’s stories (The Essential Fictions), I have been embroiled in this paschal micro-war myself.