#tablet magazine

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Tablet Magazine - Julia Dufossé

[aqlstar]

I haven’t listened to this yet, but I immediately respect Jesse Eisenberg way more for being willing to actually engage with the wider Jewish community.

How to Be a Jew ... Like Jesse Eisenberg — Tablet Magazine

What does Jesse Eisenberg's film ‘A Real Pain’ teach us about remembering?

[arcticdementor]

Judaism Against the Robots - Tablet Magazine

AI makes us lazy by cheapening knowledge. Jewish life, with its practices of study and Shabbat observance, offers a path for preserving huma

Here’s the key point: Jewish practice (study, fixed commitments, community) protects the habits that make human judgment possible, such as thinking through hard issues, sticking to unpopular stands, and doing all that with and for other people—what we might simply call human agency. Agency is exactly what AI is likely to erode. AI is more likely to lead us astray through drift than through malice. With time, the machine gets better at producing reasonable answers, and we get lazier about doing the work that once made us reasonable people. Questions stop forming because answers arrive too fast. Effort seems wasteful because tools do the hard parts. Social interaction becomes optional because a simulation is cheaper than showing up. We can try to regulate potential dangers at the margins, but we can’t legislate the willingness to think, to follow through, to be serious, to be present. If those habits atrophy, nothing explodes; everything just thins. It looks as if it’s working—until it isn’t. Judaism’s answer to this kind of debilitating drift is neither alarm nor nostalgia. It’s discipline: a set of practices that add friction where it forms character, and remove it where it hinders participation. Start with Shabbat, the weekly refusal to optimize. One day a week, the signals we usually obey—pings, dashboards, convenience—are silenced. This is not a productivity hack; it’s an obligation. Obligations outlast convenience. By keeping them, we practice two scarce skills at once. First, we practice choosing where to put our attention. There’s no infinite scroll at the table; you pick what to notice and hold it there. Second, we practice being there. You eat, sing, talk, and walk without device props.

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If automation hollows out jobs, what will people do all day that feels meaningful? A recognizable Jewish answer has been around for a long time: strenuous study in the beit midrash as a vocation, bounded by daily and weekly commitments and tethered to other people—teachers above, students below, peers alongside. The work is hard and cumulative; the day is bounded by prayer and the week by Shabbat. In a world where many jobs turn into “manage the agent that does your job,” Judaism’s answer isn’t escapism, but sanity. The structure and the substance give you meaning, even if, or maybe precisely because, you’re not optimizing the usual things. Nonnegotiables—kashrut, fixed prayers, life-cycle duties—are scheduled repetitions of doing what you said you’d do even when you don’t feel like it. That’s how commitments beat preferences. Structured interdependence—minyan, shiva houses, and schools that function only if neighbors show up—means coordination is not a heroic improvisation but the default setting. And a class of goods sits outside the market by design: Torah and mitzvot are not for sale. That’s a boundary, not sentiment. The boundary protects the thing from the optimization pressure that dissolves it.

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We don’t need bans. We need friction in the right places. Make it easy to get to texts and people; make it impossible to leave with unearned certainty. Map sources, line up arguments, pose the right questions—excellent. Stamp answers? No—not beyond those that are well-established and noncontroversial and serve as the hard foundation for engagement and discussion. Make checking easier than trusting. Show real disagreement instead of compressing it into consensus. Build for two. This can sound like piety until you translate it into product choices. Giving AI users a tour of the relevant sources rather than a neat conclusion hints at what matters. A “think before you peek” delay is a way to reintroduce the pause that makes judgment possible. The metric for AI builders shouldn’t be time to answer; it should be time spent in conversation with texts and with a partner.

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Of course, there are easy ways to get this wrong; one is of immediate concern, while another is a bit more remote for now. The first is the faux-rabbi product, a pat answer dispenser. It grows quickly because closure sells. Communities that adopt it are liable to become overconfident and incurious. Within a generation, you train people who can cite but can’t reason. There’s another cost. Judaism is a mimetic tradition—passed down through lived practice, not just texts. Rabbis don’t just answer questions; they transmit subtle judgment, show how to adapt principles to circumstances, embody living tradition. Replace human mentors with AI, and you flatten tradition into homogenized certainty. I know these dangers well because my nonprofit, Dicta, built just such a rabbi-in-a-box; we’ve learned from the experience, and the second version will focus more on supplying and organizing primary sources and less on drawing conclusions. The second trap is the clever Shabbat hack—some technique that gets around Shabbat prohibitions to allow access to “indispensable” AI tools—preserving the surface while smuggling weekday pressures back in. You gain convenience but lose the only day of the week that trains you to resist convenience. Both temptations, the oracle that replaces engagement and the hack that defeats Shabbat, are understandable. But both sabotage the human capacities we’re trying to defend.

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The work is the point. Take the help of AI. Just keep the part that cannot be automated: human agency. When information gets cheap, human agency becomes the luxury good. Judaism makes that luxury good available to everyone. Our job is to keep it available while the machines make everything else free.

[likemonalisa]

Natasha Lyonne, Tablet Magazine, 2016

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

The "permission structures" to turn Jews anti-Israel - and how to turn it around

Blogging about Israel and the Arab world since, oh, forever.

Peter Beinart is releasing a book this month titled "Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning." The entire point of the book is permission structure to hate Israel as a Jew. Perhaps this permission structure can be seen in a tweet Beinart posted on January 1, "Our children will ask their children will ask their children what we did while Israel obliterated Gaza. From generation to generation to generation, l'dor v'dor."

My answer would be that Israel has tried to make peace with its Arab neighbors and with Palestinians since Zionism started. That the 1929 pogroms, the 1936-39 massacres, the 1947-1948 war, the 1967 war, the 1973 war, were not started by Israeli actions but by those who wanted to destroy Israel. That Israel tried to make peace with Palestinians during Oslo only to have the Palestinians respond with a horrific terror spree aimed at Jewish civilians. That things were getting better in Gaza in the years before 2023 when Hamas seemed to act as if calm was a good policy, but it was all a scam meant to set the stage for the largest massacre of Jews since Auschwitz. That even during the war Israel did more than any army in history to avoid civilian casualties and to bring aid into a war zone, while Hamas did everything possible to maximize civilian casualties and steal the aid. That even though Israel can say screw them all, we should act like they falsely claim we act - we never will. Because Jewish morality is not subject to the whims of popularity or social media or this year's new interpretation of international law, but on concepts that are timeless.

I would tell them that true bravery is to stand up for what is right when the entire world tells you you are wrong.

Moreover, I would tell my children and grandchildren that the Jewish people are a family, a tribe, a people and a nation. The top priority of every family is to defend themselves first, to save their own lives first. Everyone else's lives are important too - but not as important. Anyone who pretends that the lives of their family is no more important than the lives of those trying to kill them and those cheering on the murderers is either a liar or immensely immoral. 

And while families stick together, those who choose to betray the family are outcasts. They can claim to remain part of the family but they know, and the family knows, the truth. 

However, the family would welcome them back when they come to their senses and recognize that they made a grievous error. 

[hero-israel]

I’ve started following Tablet again this past year, even though they piss me off half the time and are really starting to flog that gross line of WE’RE THE REAL JEWS NOT LIKE THOSE BABY WHINING LIBERAL ONES WHO WANT TO DIVIDE US under the banner of, um, “””” unifying “”””” and protecting Jews. But every time I get mad, I think of you calling them “hydroxycurious” and laugh. That really helps. Thanks 😊

I still skim Tablet regularly, but I'm often reluctant to cite it in mixed company. You really have to be careful when linking to them, being absolutely sure there's no awkward snarling about wokeness or matter-of-fact assertion that the climate has always been changing so just get used to it you pussy.

But they do have some really top-notch thoughtful - usually disturbing - articles in their portfolio. The ones I come back to the most are below:

Matti Friedman reveals how the AP and other mainstream outlets hide Palestinian terrorism and cast Israel as the only real actor in the conflict.

When advertising for college "voluntourists," Palestinians admit they live normal and safe lives, and that so does everyone who doesn't physically attack a soldier.

The weakness and decline of American Jewish communal life will make it easier for mainstream politics to abandon us (written in 2019 and heartbreakingly prophetic).

The mass purge of Jews from the artistic, educational, and creative sectors.

[girlactionfigure]

 Tablet Magazine accused Fenzel of extreme pro-Palestinian bias which resulted in President Joe Biden issuing an excessive and unnecessary Executive Order based on misinformation and propaganda. Biden’s Executive Order sanctioned four “settlers” and prohibited Americans from doing business with these four Israeli individuals who perpetuated violence, but not murder, against Palestinians. Biden has not sanctioned any Palestinians for violence, even though Palestinians killed 30 Israelis in 2023 even before the October 7 massacre in which 1,200 Israelis were murdered and over 250 were kidnapped to Gaza. Biden hasn’t even sanctioned members of Hamas.

[celebratingwomen]

Natasha Lyonne for Tablet magazine, 2016