Your email is not valid
Recipient's email is not valid
Submit Close

Your email has been sent.

Click here to send another

thescroll_header

The Critics List

Anthony Grafton, Elizabeth Wurtzel, Judith Miller, and Daphne Merkin Join Adam Kirsch, Joshua Cohen, and More

Print Email

We are happy to welcome our readers to Tablet’s new Arts and Culture section, in the hopes that you will be surprised and delighted as well as unsettled and pissed-off by the many changes that we have in store, starting now. Please bear with us while we re-plaster the ceilings, move the furniture around, and fiddle with the color of the paint on the walls. We apologize in advance for any valuable objects that get broken and to everyone who liked things exactly as they were before.

Some familiar features of Arts and Culture will be appearing in new guises, and others won’t. New critics will grace our section. Our goal is to frame what’s happening in literature, film, television, theater, painting, and other arts in a way that would make for a lively discussion at a good dinner party where the guests actually know what they are talking about. Instead of reviews of single books or films—aside from those unique and important enough to deserve it—we are encouraging our critics to write longer, more in-depth essays in which their skills, insights, and knowledge can shine.

Adam Kirsch, the author of Benjamin Disraeli, a biography in the Nextbook Press Jewish Encounters book series, will continue as Tablet’s main literary critic, writing one longer essay a month about contemporary Jewish literature and culture. He will also write a series of essays once a month over the next year that will look at postwar Jewish identity in America as a fictional construct created by great writers like Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and Cynthia Ozick.

Liel Leibovitz will write a weekly column called “The Arbiter” that will look at some of the touchstones of Jewish culture high and low, from Erica Jong to the Beastie Boys’ first album, and tell us whether they are actually any good.

The novelist and critic Joshua Cohen, a regular contributor to Harper’s and a contributing editor at Tablet, will write a monthly first-person essay about his adventures in Jewish culture.

Josh Lambert will write for us about obscenity and Jewish culture, making us the only publication in America with an obscenity critic. His weekly new books column will no longer appear.

We would like to welcome the following critics and writers whose work will be appearing regularly in Tablet:

Daphne Merkin—the author of Mrs. Freud, forthcoming from Nextbook Press—will be our film critic and Elizabeth Wurtzel will be our pop music critic, having each formerly served in those capacities for The New Yorker.

Judith Miller, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and daughter of the impresario Bill Miller, will be our theater critic.

Anthony T. Grafton, the Princeton historian and president of the American Historical Association, and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, will be our museum critic.

Donald Rosenfeld, executive producer of The Tree of Life, which won the 2011 Palme d’Or at Cannes, will be our occasional Hollywood correspondent.

Alana Newhouse, editor-in-chief of Tablet, will be our television critic.

David P. Goldman, author of the “Spengler” column in the Asia Times, will be our classical music critic.

Robin Cembalest, the executive editor of Art News, will be our gallerist, responsible for reviewing exhibitions of contemporary art.

Maya Benton, a curator at the International Center of Photography in New York, will be our photography critic.

Vardit Gross will cover the Israeli art scene from Tel Aviv.

Jeffrey Shandler, professor Jewish studies at Rutgers University and author of (among others) Jews, God, and Videotape: Religion and Media in America, will write a regular series of essays and observations about Jewish material culture.

David Meir Grossman will be our roving critic, writing regular short articles from the perspective of a smart, obnoxious 24-year old Jewish kid who just moved to Brooklyn.

There will be more exciting news to come in the following weeks and months. In the meantime, welcome home.

David Samuels and Matthew Fishbane

Print Email

I’m going to miss the weekly update on books. It was an important resource for those of us interested in Jewish books. I encourage you to find some other way to present that material. Otherwise people will miss out on many interesting new works, especially the scholarly and off-beat ones.

Why should anyone trust Judith Miller on anything after she helped send millions of Iraqis and thousands of Americans to their graves with fabrications about Weapons of Mass Destruction?

Shmatahari says:

Dear Funny ,you beat me to it. Took the words right off my keyboard! I am still reeling from seeing Miller’s name listed here. How did she get away with cleansing herself from the evil you correctly described? Have people already forgotten her treasonous role in outing a CIA agent? Maybe she’ll entertain us with a review of the movie “Fair Game” now that she has been demoted from journalist to art critic? And, what does it say about the people who publish Tablet? I can’t imagine what they could be thinking……is this magazine actually sympathetic to her history of yellow journalism? Her NY Times stories were complete lies leading us to deadly invasion aand occupation of a country that was no threat to our safety. I just cannot understand why any magazine would risk its reputation by printing anything she has to say – I wouldn’t take her advice if it was how to boil water.

smintheus says:

Judith Miller as theater critic. You couldn’t make this up.

Evelinsche says:

I too regret the loss of Josh Lambert’s column on new books. At least give us a list of the better books that come out. That was the first article I turned to. We are, after all, the people of the book. Sad.

Lorin Barber says:

How do I get my book,”The Secret Life of Copernicus H. Stringfellow” reviewed?

Thanks,

Its like you read my mind! You show up to uncover out so a lot about this, like you authored the e book in it or something. I think that you just could do with some pics to generate the message residence only a tiny bit, but other than that, that is awesome blog.

2000

Your comment may be no longer than 2,000 characters, approximately 400 words. HTML tags are not permitted, nor are more than two URLs per comment. We reserve the right to delete inappropriate comments.

Thank You!

Thank you for subscribing to the Tablet Magazine Daily Digest.
Please tell us about you.

The Critics List

Anthony Grafton, Elizabeth Wurtzel, Judith Miller, and Daphne Merkin Join Adam Kirsch, Joshua Cohen, and More

More on Tablet:

20140821B

By
http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/77043/ac-post-900
www.tabletmag.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2014-35
80741
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:WVK6RVYF5YY6SIPMTD2RF24RI6HR5SXR
<urn:uuid:7fae309d-5bec-42b9-930b-219b2c626dfa>
2014-08-21T16:05:56Z
199.83.128.8
sha1:2D3M5ANDGI2UMSMQXQVCW7YA5V3MU477
<urn:uuid:2f0d8df0-b090-4721-a883-d2516619f74e>
http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/77043/ac-post-900
length
response
<urn:uuid:f4a07893-de47-40ef-adab-673b2cb2e6ff>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-180-136-8.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2014-35
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for August 2014
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf