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Jane’s Heir
Howard Jacobson’s 1999 autobiographical novel The Mighty Walzer, about a teenage ping-pong whiz, won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for best comic novel of the year. His seventh novel, The...
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Rebel Yells
This spring, Naomi Alderman made a big splash in the U.K. with her prize-winning debut novel, Disobedience. It follows Ronit Krushka, the prodigal daughter of an esteemed rabbi who returns to London...
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The Solipsist
When we meet Maxie Glickman, a middle-aged cartoonist from Manchester, England, with a history of rotten romances, he’s busy tracking down an Orthodox friend from childhood who long ago gassed his...
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Why the Brits Elected Fascists
A horrifying manifestation of the rightward shift in European politics is the election to the European Parliament of two members of the fascist British National Party in Sunday’s elections. The BNP is...
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The Denial Twist, Part II
This is the second installment in a four-part series about Holocaust denial in America. Click here to see Part I. The Newport Beach offices of Mark Weber’s Institute for Historical Review are located...
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What Makes a Jew?
The British Jewish Chronicle asks four known Jews to weigh in on the ever-sticky question of identity. After clearing his throat with the obvious (“We are not just a religion.… Equally, though, Jews...
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Art Thou Contented, Jew?
Britain has a long and ignoble tradition of literary anti-Semitism, featuring such anti-heroes as Shylock, Fagin, and Svengali. When I first studied The Merchant of Venice in class, at the age of 12, I...
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Jacobson’s Novel Longlisted
The Man Booker Prize longlist is like the Oscar Best Picture nominees, except it has 13 names, it’s British, and it’s about books. But it is a big deal over there (for gambling purposes, among others),...
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Jacobson’s ‘Finkler’ Makes Man Booker Shortlist
Congratulations to novelist Howard Jacobson, who after several appearances on Britain’s prestigious Man Booker Prize longlist made his first appearance on the shortlist today, along with five other...
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Sundown: Much Talk, Little Peace
• They talked for more than two hours—longer than planned—today in Egypt, and are talking in Jerusalem tomorrow. But the settlement freeze predicament is still unresolved. [NYT] • A dispatch from the...
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Mirror Images
Earlier this year, Anthony Julius’ Trials of the Diaspora, an encyclopedic chronicle of English anti-Semitism, set off a debate about the alleged resurgence of that historic sickness in the form of...
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Today on Tablet
Today in Tablet Magazine, we continue our Web Wars! week with Michael Tanji’s extremely helpful explanation of what exactly Stuxnet, the computer worm thought to be slowing Iran’s nuclear development,...
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Jews Are Longshots To Win Nobel, Booker
See below for update. The Nobel Prize for Literature winner will be named from Stockholm Thursday morning, and, if the Ladbrokes odds are to be believed, no Member of the Tribe stands a particularly...
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The Plot Against England
The British Jewish writer Howard Jacobson’s eleventh novel, The Finkler Question, was awarded the Man Booker Prize today. On the eve of the announcement, Jacobson spoke to Tablet Magazine about English...
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Smash
Howard Jacobson was a ranked junior table tennis player in England. He is also the acclaimed author of, among other works, Kalooki Nights and The Finkler Question, which won the Man Booker Prize. His...
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The Ping-Pong Wizard
The Man Booker Prize will be awarded to one of six books tomorrow, and the tea leaves suggest that Tom McCarthy’s C will win. Tablet Magazine’s official nominee, however, remains Howard Jacobson’s The...
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Today on Tablet
Today in Tablet Magazine, singer-songwriter Clare Burson, who latest song cycle is inspired by her grandmother’s experience in pre-Holocaust Germany, is the Vox Tablet podcat guest. We talk to Man...
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Today on Tablet
Today in Tablet Magazine, books critic Adam Kirsch reviews Philip Roth’s new novel, Nemesis, while contributing editor Eryn Loeb uses the occasion as an excuse to devour Roth’s ouevre, which she had...
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Howard Jacobson Pulls Off Booker Upset
“I’m not the English Philip Roth, I’m the Jewish Jane Austen,” novelist Howard Jacobson told us a few days ago. Last night, Jacobson won the Man Booker Prize for his The Finkler Question. This was a...
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All The News That’s Fit To Print After the Fact
Today, the New York Times Arts section published a mini-profile of this year’s winner of the prestigious Man Booker Prize, who—in case you hadn’t heard—was Howard Jacobson, an English-Jewish author....
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Jacobson’s Politics and England’s Jews
One person who—unlike Tablet Magazine’s Adam Kirsch, the New York Times’s Janet Maslin, and the Man Booker Prize committee—did not particularly enjoy Howard Jacobson’s novel The Finkler Question was...
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Daybreak: Iranian Missiles Aren’t All That
• The long-range North Korean missiles that Iran obtained (according to WikiLeaks) may not be operational or all that effective. One could almost certainly not hit Western Europe from Tehran. [WP] •...
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The Unbearable Dumbness of Dreidel
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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Humorous? Yes. Tragic? Definitely.
Paul Holdengräber, who has the enviable job of interviewing extremely interesting people for the New York Public Library’s discussion series, wore a fedora and no tie Friday night, while his...
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Paddle Tale
Howard Jacobson has long been recognized in Britain as a great comic novelist, but it wasn’t until he won last year’s Man Booker Prize for The Finkler Question that word really started to spread on...
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Sundown: Palestine Can Be Vetoed
• No matter what the United Nations General Assembly does, an independent Palestine could not actually become a member state without Security Council approval—according to the General Assembly...
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Sundown: We Can Talk About It Now?
Tomorrow is the five-year anniversary of Gilad Shalit’s capture. “The United States condemns in the strongest possible terms his continued detention,” the White House statement reads, “and joins other...
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Canadian Jew Pick Scores Man Booker Longlist
The Man Booker Prize longlist dropped today, and, as with the 13 names we were offered around this time last year, it is pretty clear whom Tablet Magazine is backing. The young Canadian author Alison...
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Jews Again Long Shots for Lit Nobel
On “a Thursday in October,” the committee in Stockholm will announce the 2011 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. And if the bookmakers’ odds—not to mention recent history—are to be believed, it...
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Sundown: Unquiet on the Gazan Front
• Airstrikes in Gaza killed four Popular Resistance Committees members. [NYT] • A planned Pakistan-Iran natural gas pipeline would violate sanctions, but would the U.S. go up against its valuable ally...
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? Enough Already.
One of the most enjoyable parts of the Passover ceremony is the singing, invariably full-throated in my experience, of all 15 verses of “Dayenu”: Had he brought us out from Egypt, and not carried out...
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The Brazen Shlock Salesman Who Became London’s Greatest Modern Art Dealer
This is an excerpt from “The Swag Man,” by Howard Jacobson, an Amazon Kindle Single Tablet Magazine published this week. To buy the full story, visit Amazon. You do not need a Kindle to read the full...
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What Happens When the Myth of the Obedient, Docile Jewish Husband Gets Busted
In case you find yourself less drawn to British tabloid click bait than the rest of the planet (“Katie Holmes Seen With No Makeup!” “Gwyneth Paltrow Is Wearing Shoes and Also a Dress That Is a...
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The Best Little Jewish Publishing House in London
Last month, readers at London’s celebrated annual Jewish Book Week were introduced to a strikingly polished Holocaust memoir titled Motherland, written by Rita Goldberg, a professor of comparative...
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Wicked Sons: Benjamin Kerstein, Doron Rabinovici, and Norman Finkelstein
Every culture despises an apostate. But Judaism, in particular, has always made hostility to the traitor, the deserter, the child who grows up to turn on the community, into a central organizing...
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Joshua Ferris Shortlisted for Man Booker Prize
Novelists Joshua Ferris, an American, and Howard Jacobson, a Brit, are a step closer to Man Booker glory this morning. Along with four other writers, Ferris and Jacobson went from long list to short...
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Martin Amis and Howard Jacobson Get the Holocaust Backwards, From Different...
In his 1986 essay “Writing and the Holocaust,” Irving Howe observed that the real problem with books about the Holocaust is not that they cannot give us aesthetic pleasure, but that they can. “Can we...
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The Jewish Jane Austen, or England’s Jeremiah?
This is the first of a five-part series, A Polite Hatred. Sign Up for special curated mailings of the best longform content from Tablet Magazine. ***Continue reading "A Polite Hatred: Howard Jacobson...
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Shylock Is My Name
Shylock Is My Name, the new book by the great English novelist Howard Jacobson, is the second title in a series called “Hogarth Shakespeare,” in which contemporary writers reimagine Shakespeare plays....
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Howard Jacobson Congratulates David Grossman on Joining the Man Booker Club
We reached out to Howard Jacobson, winner of the 2010 Man Booker prize (The Finkler Question), for his thoughts on David Grossman winning the 2017 Man Booker International Prize for his novel, A Horse...
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The English Jew Who Read My Book
From his fidgetiness I took him to be one of those embryonic, not-quite characters—not quite a barrister, not quite a doctor. A law clerk maybe, or a pharmacist. Not quite married. We were by the pool...
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Donald Zec, Friend to the Stars
Last month I went to Donald Zec’s 100th birthday party. Who’s Donald Zec? Fair question: You need to be of a good age yourself to have heard of him. In the 1950s and ’60s he was Hollywood reporter for...
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Free Palestine
The Soho I live in today—not to be confused with the more chichi SoHo in Lower Manhattan—is not the Soho I came to 20 years ago. It’s still London’s most bohemian suburb, home to the satirical magazine...
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Writing Jewish
I’d best begin by owning up to a lie I have been responsible for spreading about myself when explaining why I was such a late starter. It’s true that I wanted to write like late Henry James—very late...
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Live a Little
“Words fail me,” the Princess tells her son. She isn’t sure which one. “Why, Mother, what’s happened?”Continue reading "Howard Jacobson's 'Live a Little'" at...
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BDS Biter Kamila Shamsie Gets Bit, Loses Prize
On Sept. 6 this year the German city of Dortmund awarded the Nelly Sachs Prize to the British Pakistani novelist Kamila Shamsie. The Nelly Sachs Prize, named after the visionary Jewish poet and...
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