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Article 31
http://tabletmag.com/audio/podcast_feature227.mp3 From Hairspray to Garden State, Jackie Hoffman is often cast in character roles. But starting tonight, she is the star of the show. In Chanukah at...
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Article 30
It was 7:30 a.m. on a Sunday and I had already been on the phone with tech support for five hours trying to get wireless internet hooked up in my new apartment. Despairing that I would never again have...
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Article 29
With Hanukkah upon us, Nextbook picked three gift-worthy books for younger readers, and discussed them with Sophie Apple, a 12-year-old critic who lives in Brooklyn. Two of the novels Apple...
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Article 28
I. It’s simultaneously the first night of Chanukah, my Papa Irwin’s 98th birthday, and Christmas, the last week of 2005. I am home in L.A. for a visit, my first in a good long while. It’s a celebratory...
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Article 26
Illustration by India Amos Let me begin this Hanukkah story by saying that my parents endured a miserable marriage from day one, my father solacing himself over the years with increasingly strict...
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Article 25
For any self-respecting cynic, it’s de rigueur to despise Christmas music—primarily for its relentlessness, and the forced irony it creates in many, many otherwise joy-free environments (malls, car...
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Article 24
By all appearances, Hanukkah seems to have earned a seat at the winter holiday table. Chances are good that a storefront window festooned with tinsel, elves, and pine wreaths also boasts an electric...
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Article 23
A 2007 Yo La Tengo Hanukkah show The members of rock trio Yo La Tengo have long inspired an embarrassingly pretentious-seeming ardor in their devotees; but if you like them, it’s hard to resist using...
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Article 22
In time for this year’s holiday season, an Oregon-based artist with a degree from the Jewish Theological Seminary has created the Braidel—a rather oddly shaped dreidel whose lettering is written in...
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Article 21
WHAT IS HANUKKAH? Hanukkah, aka the Festival of Lights, celebrates the rededication of the Second Temple in the 2nd century BCE and the Maccabees’ uprising against the Greeks.Continue reading "" at...
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Article 20
Neil Diamond recently released a Christmas album—his third Christmas album, in fact. But a closer look at A Cherry Cherry Christmas’s track list reveals that after 13 holiday standards (“White...
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Article 18
Congratulations to John Heywood—spinning name: Jonny Hei-z (“Hei” as in Nun, Gimel, Hei, Shin)—who won the honor last weekend in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, despite the arguable disadvantage of not being...
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Article 17
God is hard; stuff is not. Throughout the vagaries of my connection to religion, I’ve never once had doubts about my connection to its material culture—the challah knives, washing cups, mezuzahs, etc.,...
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Article 16
Perhaps you’ve heard: We Jews love books. And we like to indoctrinate the little Jews. So, why not give a kid a picture book for Hanukkah? It comes early this year, which means my annual rundown of the...
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Article 15
For those of you who are faithful (or even semi-faithful) listeners of our weekly Vox Tablet podcast, this music ought to sound weirdly familiar. It is the Vox Tablet theme song, originally composed by...
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Article 14
Let’s look at the year’s best chapter books and graphic novels. Bear in mind that I’m not G’veret Newbery; I don’t require that books be “distinguished.” They just have to be good and enticing to young...
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Article 13
Click here for PDF version of album cover artwork. Brian Scott/BoondesignContinue reading "" at...
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Article 12
There’s no escaping the oil. But if the celebration of Hanukkah conjures up memories of soggy foods drizzled, drenched, and fried (as Gil Marks points out, the word latke means “little oily”), keep the...
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Article 11
Hanukkah starts tonight, and Major League Dreidel is offering something called a Spinagogue, which is sort of a stadium for dreidel-spinning. The Spinagogue encourages you to aim to make your dreidel...
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Article 10
When I was a child living in Springfield, Massachusetts, in the 1980s, Hanukkah was the Jewish Christmas. This was how I explained it to my friends in our vastly non-Jewish neighborhood, and they...
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Article 9
“You don’t know how long it has taken us in rehearsal to pretend to be disorganized,” Yo La Tengo frontman Ira Kaplan informed the tiny audience at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, New Jersey, last night. Kaplan...
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Article 8
The holiday of Hanukkah was approaching. At the time, I was the only Jew in the prison zone, but when I explained that Hanukkah was a holiday of national freedom, of returning to one’s own culture in...
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Article 7
On the last day of Hanukkah, Lev asked us to let him light the candles. The little guy had celebrated his fifth birthday a couple of days earlier and the whole business had gone to his head. “I’m 5...
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Hanukkah Gift Ideas: Great Jewish Books for Kids
A book opens more worlds than a toy, a piece of jewelry, a handheld-gaming device, or an iPod. (OK, maybe not an iPod.) So, here’s a list for all your kid-giving needs this Hanukkah, from the littlest...
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Bukharian Jewish Food Mixes the Flavors of Central Asia
It’s a brisk Tuesday morning in Rego Park, Queens, home to the country’s largest community of Jews from Central Asia, known as Bukharian Jews. Men and women hustle toward the subway on Queens...
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Agenda: Tablet’s Cultural Events Calendar
Agenda is Tablet Magazine’s weekly listing of upcoming cultural events. New York: Hanukkah is in the air at the Jewish Museum, where author and illustrator Maurice Sendak has curated a selection of 32...
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Joan Nathan Surveys Hanukkah Recipes From Chocolate Cake to Onion Rolls
Whenever my former editor, the venerable and recently retired Judith Jones, looks at a cookbook proposal, she asks herself whether the writer has anything new and worthwhile to contribute to the...
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Why No One Should Object to Intermarried Jews Having Christmas Trees
Now is the time of year when my wife and I renew our annual, uncomfortable conversation about why we will never have a Christmas tree in our home, despite her having grown up with one. I’m fairly...
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'A Dreamers Christmas,' From Subversive Musician John Zorn, Is...
On the fifth night of Hanukkah this year, John Zorn—one of the most compelling contemporary composers and reed players, a 2006 MacArthur fellow, and the producer of the Tzadik record label—will be...
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At a Preschool Hanukkah Celebration, an Atheistic Jew Wonders Where He Fits...
1. I stood at the back of the crowded room. Before me, like sunflowers ripened and swaying in the breeze, or like lighters at a rock concert when the slow song comes on, was a sea of raised hands, each...
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