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Articles by Raz Greenberg
Israel vs. Iran on the Judo Mat
An early scene in the sports drama-thriller Tatami brings together protagonist Leila Hosseini (Arienne Mandi), an Iranian judoka, and her potential Israeli rival Shani Lavie (Lir Katz). They meet just before they are about to start competing at the World Judo Championship held in Georgia, where they will very likely face each other in an upcoming match.
Replaying the Survival Game
Despite regularly appearing on critics’ lists of Best Games You Never Played, the 1997 computer game The Last Express remains a hidden gem in designer Jordan Mechner’s career. The game’s protagonist, Robert Cath, is an American physician and a fugitive from British law, who accepts his friend’s invitation to join him on the Orient Express train ride to Constantinople. After boarding the train, Cath discovers his friend was brutally murdered.
Why Cemeteries Matter
What are graveyards for? As we approach America’s second biggest retail event of the year, our high spending on Halloween decorations and costumes would have you believe cemeteries are for thrill and amusement, fodder for Ghost City Tours or scary movie film sets you can visit. Often overgrown and neglected, if not vandalized, graveyards otherwise remain, for the most part, out of sight and out of mind. And perhaps that is because fewer and fewer Americans are in fact destined for burial.
Books: Batman - The Animated Series
By Raz Greenberg. Perhaps the most surprising thing about Joe Sutliff Sanders new book, Batman: The Animated Series, which analyzes the superhero show as part of Wayne State University Press’ TV Milestones brand, is that it took so long to happen. The show, which debuted in 1992, is indeed a milestone, not just in the development of American TV animation but also in that of superhero television shows in general.
New Report On Khashoggi Murder Is a Dud, Official Warns
On February 26, the Biden administration disclosed perhaps the worst-kept secret in Washington: The U.S. intelligence community blames Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince, Mohammed bin-Salman, for ordering the operation that ended in the killing of Jamal Khashoggi.
Anxiously Ep. 6 - Embracing Nature With ‘Outside’ Magazine’s Emily Pennington - Tablet Magazine
What is Passover? Passover marks the liberation of the Children of Israel, who were slaves in ancient Egypt, and recounts the story of their exodus to the Promised Land. Key things to remember: Moses, Ten Plagues, matzo, the parting of the Red Sea. When is Passover? Passover 2021 begins at sundown on Saturday, March 27—the night of the first Seder—and lasts eight days, ending at sundown on Sunday, April 4. What's it all about?
Platform News Dumbs Mediocrity Down
It’s been a strange thing to work in the media over the past several years. Writing for a living is at peak precariousness, an experience which is similar, I imagine, to what it would be like to live in a necrotic house where every few weeks another big thing breaks, and there’s nothing anyone can do to fix it.
The President (of the White House Correspondents’ Association) Speaks!
For most of its history the White House has been a nuclear reactor or an operating room; a contained and semi-occluded space in which processes of great power and mystery unfold. A tourist standing in Lafayette Park might squint at the pearly mansion behind the layers of high fence, which now threatens to become a permanent feature of the D.C. landscape, along with the standing army of National Guardsmen fanned across the federal district, and reasonably wonder: What do people even do in there?
Israeli Chef Erez Komarovsky Takes Middle Eastern Cooking Online
Online cooking classes are a pandemic hit. Hosted by Cozymeal, MasterClass, and, in recent months, a new video platform named YesChef, they feature culinary superstars from all over the world, transmitting their skills to a captive audience. Until recently, Israel and Israeli cuisine weren’t represented in this emerging niche—but that changed last fall, when YesChef premiered an online course with its first and only Israeli chef so far: Erez Komarovsky.
Telling the Facts of Life: Cosmology and the Epic of Evolution
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How Soviet Anti-Semitism Buried Jewish Scientists
The summer and fall university entrance exams were a rite of passage for Soviet high schoolers who dreamed of careers in the exact sciences. Of these, mathematics reigned with a shining prestige that enthralled the imaginations of the brightest young Soviet students. But for young Soviet Jews, a mathematical career provided more than intellectual esteem; it provided a haven of objective truth in the shadow of an anti-Semitic Soviet regime.
The Jewish Disney Family of Egypt
A new documentary traces the rise, fall, and amazing rediscovery of the world’s first Arab cartoon star February 25, 2020 • 12:00 AM Making documentary films about artists is always a tricky task, especially when it comes to finding the right balance between focusing on the artists and on the art. A successful example of such balance can be found in last year’s documentary Bukra fil Mish-Mish, directed by Tal Michael and currently showing in Israeli and global festivals.
In 2019, Israel Turned Japanese
The Jewish state’s affinity for anime dreamscapes comes alive in a new award-winning graphic novel January 7, 2020 • 12:00 AM My two most significant Israeli cultural experiences of 2019 came from a graphic novel and a music video. Both are highly reflective of the anxieties that shape 21st-century Israeli life, and both of them deal with these anxieties using the cultural vocabulary of a seemingly distant culture—Japan.
Bette Howland Steps Out of the Shadow of Saul Bellow
When I mentioned Bette Howland, who died in 2017 at age 80, her three books out of print, a writer friend who has read everything snapped “never heard of her.” To situate Howland, I began to talk about the most gossipy part of her story—the part I had gravitated to since I first read about her in the journal A Public Space in 2015— about her life changing when she met Saul Bellow at a writers’ conference in 1961. She was 24 and he was 49; she was unpublished and he belonged to literature.
Help! There Won't Be Any Kids at My Seder, But I Still Want to Rock Out to 'Mah Nishtana'
Thou Shalt is a Jewish advice column for anyone navigating a Jewish situation about which they are unsure. Which is understandable: For thousands of years, Judaism has been rolling through time and space, picking up everything in its path. Which is awesome and beautiful and great, but also means that we’ve inherited a tradition with a complicated and often confusing mix of rituals, identity markers, red lines, and ways to practice.
Help! My Mother Insists I Have a Kosher Wedding
Thou Shalt is a Jewish advice column for anyone navigating a Jewish situation about which they are unsure. Which is understandable: For thousands of years, Judaism has been rolling through time and space, picking up everything in its path. Which is awesome and beautiful and great, but also means that we’ve inherited a tradition with a complicated and often confusing mix of rituals, identity markers, red lines, and ways to practice.
Abbi Jacobson's 'Broad City' Breakup Road-Trip Book
As much as I have loved Broad City, Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer’s show about two funny, Jewish 20-somethings making it in New York, I was a bit off of season four last year. It wasn’t the fault of the show, which is a brilliant ethnographic expedition into millennial girls. It’s like an S. Ansky dive into the shtetl, but with laffs. One hilarious season four episode seemed emblematic of this problem. Ilana, unable to have an orgasm, goes to a sex therapist. She’s diagnosed. It’s Trump’s fault.
The Squirrel Hill Diaspora: Pittsburgh Jews Living Around the World Process the Synagogue Shooting in Their Hometown
Josh Kalla, a graduate student living in Berkeley, California, and a Pittsburgh native, got a call early Saturday morning from his father, and then his sister, telling him there had been a shooting in their family’s synagogue. Later that night, he stopped by a vigil being held near his West Coast apartment. Though he was moved by the support and the solidarity of the Berkeley community, he didn’t stay long. “It was too raw. I was both an insider and an outsider,” he explained.
Aline Kaminsky-Crumb: Jewish, Ugly, Weird, Oversexed, Gross
I wish I had discovered Aline Kominsky-Crumb when I was growing up alienated in WASPy Princeton, New Jersey in the 1970s and 1980s. Her violent, raunchy, expressionist-confessional comic strips, many published in underground magazines, might have consoled me, at least for a while. Those were, otherwise, largely depressing years, even today aggravated by my parents’ inability to consider my despair. “You were such a happy baby?” they say, apparently mystified when I even mention my teen-aged angst.
After 22 Years, Jenny Diski's First Short Story Collection, 'The Vanishing Princess,' is Published in America
She would protest or maybe just roll her eyes. But a year after her death at age 68 from cancer, the British writer Jenny Diski seems more Jewish than she did during her lifetime. Much in her prolific oeuvre—18 books, an LRB column and many occasional pieces—reads Sontagian, by which I mean attached to a certain kind of assimilated twentieth century Jewish female intellectual cool, an avuncular contrarian ferocity.
What a Family Heirloom Taught Me About My Sephardic Ancestors
Anointing challah with honey during the first year of marriage is a popular Jewish tradition—a way for newlyweds to mark the sweetness of their new life together. I confess, though, to preferring savory indulgences over sweet ones, in general. So, once the second year of my marriage was underway, I was not all that reluctant to return to salting my challah. It’s not just that I like the contrast between the crunchy salt crystals and the egg-washed, sesame-coated chewiness of challah.
The Lives of Barney Rosset, In a 'Disorienting' New Memoir
“The book is a metaphor for Barney himself,” said John Oakes, co-publisher of OR Books, which is putting out Barney Rosset’s memoir, My Life in Publishing and How I Fought Censorship, this week, 30 years after Rosset started it. That’s a long lead time for any book, even a “conflicted enterprise,” as Oakes called it. He added, “I admired the guy.
Manga’s Jewish Masterpieces - Tablet Magazine
The mammoth 928-page volume of The Osamu Tezuka Story: A Life in Manga and Anime (recently published in English by Stone Bridge Press), opens with a provocative question: How have manga—Japanese comics—become an integral part of Japanese society, read practically anywhere, by all age groups, and touching every imaginable subject and genre, when, despite their global fame, American comics never reached the same cultural magnitude even in their own country?
Karaites, the Jews History Forgot
On Oct. 3, as most synagogues around the world celebrate Rosh Hashanah, about 130 people will gather at a synagogue in Daly City, California, to celebrate Yom T’ruah, the biblical “Day of Shouting.” They will be just a few of the tens of thousands celebrating in congregations across Israel and Europe. The congregation will chant from a Torah scroll, recite their prayers in Hebrew, coddle bored children, and some might even—succumbing a bit to acculturation—dip apple slices in honey.
Israeli Sci-Fi Is a Reality
Anyone who was at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque during the Sukkot holiday of 2006 will remember the sight of the city’s quiet, highbrow arthouse cinema jam-packed with people, many of them teenagers in costumes (the term “cosplay” hadn’t made it to the local fan community yet) trying to catch a glimpse of the festival’s guest of honor, some (especially the teenage girls) screaming in excitement whenever he passed by.
Israeli Sci-Fi Is a Reality
Anyone who was at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque during the Sukkot holiday of 2006 will remember the sight of the city’s quiet, highbrow arthouse cinema jam-packed with people, many of them teenagers in costumes (the term “cosplay” hadn’t made it to the local fan community yet) trying to catch a glimpse of the festival’s guest of honor, some (especially the teenage girls) screaming in excitement whenever he passed by.
‘Game of Thrones’ Author George R.R. Martin Predicts Future of Jewish State
“Alas, the apt phrase is not ‘open city’ but ‘open sore.’ Jerusalem bleeds as it has for almost four decades. If this city is sacred, I should hate to visit one that was profane.” No, this sentence was not written in as a response to the current outbreak of violence between Israelis and Palestinians in Jerusalem. It actually appeared in print almost 30 years ago in a story that was part of Aces Abroad, the fourth volume of the successful Wild Cards series of science-fiction anthologies.
Yom Kippur Messages & Accepting Apologies
By the time I emailed Avner, I wasn’t even sure he would respond. We hadn’t spoken in over a year, since a disastrous weekend the summer before I started college that had finally ended our complicated, years long, on again/off again relationship. But Yom Kippur was looming, and he was at the top of my list. Tradition demanded I give it a try. By then I was a sophomore.
This Thanksgiving Try Some Jewish Ham, a Medieval Sephardic Staple
What is Passover? Passover marks the liberation of the Children of Israel, who were slaves in ancient Egypt, and recounts the story of their exodus to the Promised Land. Key things to remember: Moses, Ten Plagues, matzo, the parting of the Red Sea. When is Passover? Passover 2021 begins at sundown on Saturday, March 27—the night of the first Seder—and lasts eight days, ending at sundown on Sunday, April 4. What's it all about?
Millionaire Matchmaker Patti Stanger, an Icon for Our Times
Patti Stanger and contestants on Millionaire Matchmaker.(Collage: Tablet Magazine; Stanger: Angela Weiss/Getty Images for Pantages Theatre; couples: Isabella Vosmikova/Bravo and Nicole Wilder/Bravo) Patti Stanger, host of the polarizing Bravo Television reality show Millionaire Matchmaker, the woman called the “Simon Cowell of dating,” is not just a TV host.
Peter Bebergal's search for Dungeons, Dragons and God
For my family, being Jewish didn’t have anything to do with God at all. What I knew of Judaism consisted of Passover meals, my mother lighting Friday night candles, and delicatessens. The mystery of existence, if it was talked about at all, was for adults at funerals. Even then, God was left there to finish piling the dirt on the grave while the mourners went home. Somehow, though, the slight rituals of the Judaism I knew penetrated and I thought about God in my own way.
The Cryptogram - Tablet Magazine
David Mamet at the New School in New York last year.(Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images) A book jacket photo dated 1977, from around the time playwright David Mamet first began to hit it big, shows him holding a cigarette and glasses gingerly in one hand. His other hand slides into the front pocket of his tight jeans; he wears a leather bomber jacket with the collar rakishly turned up, and a black turtleneck.
The Good Jew - Tablet Magazine
Alan Cumming as Eli Gold on the Good Wife season finale.(Jeffrey Neira/CBS) From its pilot onward, the brilliant, much-talked about CBS show The Good Wife—which wrapped its second season last week—captured the zeitgeist of American politics, tracking the psychic damage of powerful men long before Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Arnold Schwarzenegger became best known as alleged sexual predators. Much praise has been heaped on the marvelous Julianna Margulies, who plays the title role.
Role Model - Tablet Magazine
Susan Sontag, 1979.(Sophie Bassouls/Sygma/Corbis) Two things you will not find in Sempre Susan, Sigrid Nunez’s slim, elegant memoir of Susan Sontag in the 1970s: -a predictable rehashing of the notorious writer’s political gaffes and personal foibles—her apparent insensitivity to the American victims of 9/11 and her refusal to talk openly about her sexual identity (she was gay) being two of the best-known, and -dish about Nunez’s two-year affair with Sontag’s son, David Rieff, the book’s...
Piece Plan - Tablet Magazine
Frieda Pinto in Julian Schnabel's Miral.(Jose Haro/The Weinstein Company) “The movie they tried to stop is coming to New York,” read an ad for Julian Schnabel’s Miral in last Sunday’s New York Times. Based on a memoir by Rula Jebreal, the gorgeous 37-year-old Palestinian journalist who is also the controversial artist’s current romantic partner, the film traces the stories of four Palestinian women from 1948 to the Oslo Accords of the early 1990s. But it is hardly as daring as the ad describes.
Ghost Puppeteer - Tablet Magazine
Mandy Patinkin in Compulsion.(Joan Marcus) Who is the audience for Rinne Groff’s play Compulsion, a meta-theatrical take on The Diary of Anne Frank? At first I thought the play, which stars Mandy Patinkin and in which Anne Frank is played by a marionette, was aimed at my demographic—Baby Boomers—or older, readers of Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer, Holocaust-worriers, identity-fretters, anti-Semitism seers. I thought it was pitched to people (like me) who had nightmares about the diary as a child.
Sign Language - Tablet Magazine
Rahm Emanuel's signs and signals.(Clockwise from top left: Scott Olson/Getty Images; John Gress/Getty Images; Scott Olson/Getty Images; Chris Sweda-Pool/Getty Images) The Chicago Code There’s less than a week until the election that will give Chicago its first new mayor in 22 years, and Rahm Emanuel is sitting pretty, leading in the polls by 30 points.
Storm Watch - Tablet Magazine
Rahm Emanuel helping shovel snow last week, in a photo released by his campaign.(Chicago for Rahm) To view all articles in this series about Rahm Emanuel’s Chicago mayoral campaign, click here. The first week of early voting in Chicago was also the first week since December that Rahm Emanuel campaigned without the residency debate hanging over his head, after the Illinois Supreme Court validated his status on January 27.
An Auteur is Born
Raz Greenberg looks back on Hayao Miyazaki’s feature animation debut thirty years ago and celebrates The Castle Of Cagliostro, the highly entertaining action adventure movie that remains one of the director’s most unique entries in his filmmaking career. 2009 saw the American release of Ponyo, the tenth feature film of Hayao Miyazaki, and this month also marks the 30th anniversary of the Japanese animation grand-master’s debut film, Lupin III: The Castle Of Cagliostro.
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