Self-promotion is never pretty, but sometimes it lays claim to a nice personality. I’ll mention only once, then, that I’m the senior editor for the new-minted online publication Tablet Magazine, a new (and newsier) reincarnation of the Jewish literary journal Nextbook, now helmed by Alana Newhouse. It might be enough to say that Adam Kirsch is our resident critic (and we lead with his review of Gertrude Himmelfarb’s new volumen on George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda), and Seth Lipsky and Victor Navasky are our op-ed columnists. But I’ll allow Alana to have the last — and lengthiest — word about launching a media venture in the dark days of media:
[D]espite all this innovation, Tablet is closely tethered to the past. We seek inspiration and owe gratitude to sources as diverse as the pioneering magazines and “big idea books” of the 1960s and 70s, the robust Yiddish (and Ladino!) dailies of the Lower East Side at the turn of the last century, and, of course, the tablets themselves—the first medium of Western civilization, whose message remains deeply relevant to our lives today.
These are difficult times for journalism, uncertain times for the economy, and challenging times for Jews throughout the world.
Launching a new journalistic site devoted to Jewish life now is, in many ways, an act of audacity. It requires faith in the journalistic profession and a strong sense of mission, but most of all it requires the right people. I cannot fact-check this assertion, but I’ll make it anyway: no other editor in the history of American journalism has amassed a team like mine. From staffers and columnists to contributing editors and even outside consultants, every single person who works on Tablet has been essential to its creation.