Tablet Studios

We'll be recording live at the Manhattan JCC on Wednesday, January 24 at 7:30 p.m. with special guests comedian Judy Gold and Father James Martin! Buy tickets here. Our Jewish guest this week is writer Jordana Horn Gordon, who returns to discuss her Hanukkah gifting strategy as the mother of six children. Our gentile of the week is journalist and religion scholar Reza Aslan, who tells us about his...

This week we're coming to you live from Congregation Rodeph Sholom in New York City! Our next live show will take place on January 24 at JCC Manhattan, with Father James Martin and comedian Judy Gold. Get your tickets here! Our Jewish guest is food writer Mark Bittman, who just released the tenth anniversary edition of How To Cook Everything Vegetarian. He talked to us about the link between agric...

This week on Unorthodox: Beauty pageant diplomacy, Gal Gadot's Mossad mix-up, and so much more. Our gentile of the week is Noreen Malone, New York magazine features editor and DoubleX Gabfest panelist. She tells us about growing up Catholic in the heavily Jewish neighborhood of Shaker Heights, her powerful 2015 cover story on 35 of Bill Cosby's accusers, and asks whether it's ever okay to call som...

Our Jewish guest this week is Lani Santo, the executive director of Footsteps, a New York-based organization dedicated to helping formerly-Orthodox Jews establish new lives outside the insular communities in which they were raised. We discuss the new Netflix documentary ‘One of Us,’ which follows the lives of three Footsteps members. Our gentile of the week is Richard F. Thomas, Harvard Classics p...

This week on Unorthodox, we can't be tamed. Our Jewish guest is Eddy Portnoy, senior researcher and director of exhibitions at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, whose new book is Bad Rabbi: And Other Strange but True Stories from the Yiddish Press. He tells us how he stumbled upon these colorful, less-remembered characters and tales—so many of which seem to involve Jews rioting—and why it's...

This week on Unorthodox, we've got food on the brain. Our first guest is Kerry Brodie, founder of Emma's Torch, a cafe in Brooklyn that employs and trains refugees and political asylum seekers. She tells us about her unlikely transition from government work to culinary school, what she learned about refugees by working alongside them in the kitchen, and why she believes food is such a powerful uni...

This week on Unorthodox, we're totally bewitched. Our Jewish guest is novelist Alice Hoffman, whose new book is The Rules of Magic, a prequel to her bestselling 1995 novel Practical Magic, which was made into the 1998 film starring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman. She tells us how she re-immersed herself in the magical Owens family 20 years later, the ways in which her Jewish background influence...

This week, we're live from JCC Manhattan! Our Jewish guest is writer A.J. Jacobs—our first-ever guest back in 2015—whose latest book is It's All Relative: Adventures Up and Down the World's Family Tree. He tells us about his unlikely entry into the world of genealogy, the famous—and infamous—relatives he discovered, and, in a 'Maury'-style twist, reveals which hosts are related to him. Our gentile...

Our Jewish guest this week is David Litt, author of Thanks, Obama: My Hopey, Changey White House Years, a memoir about his time as a speechwriter in the Obama White House. He tells us about teaching President Obama to say 'chag sameach' for a Passover video, writing jokes for the White House Correspondent's Dinner, and the time his grandpa sent him a water pipeline proposal to show the president....

This week on Unorthodox, we're all about 5778. Our guest this week is Rabbi Shai Held, president and dean of the continuing education institute Mechon Hadar, and the author of The Heart of Torah, a new two-volume book of essays about each weekly Torah portion. He tells us why he dreaded tackling Leviticus but learned the most from it, explains why he's optimistic about the future of Judaism, and g...

This week, we're all about atonement. For our third annual apology episode, we're joined by University of Nebraska–Lincoln professor Ari Kohen, who explains what makes an apology truly bad (and why he stopped blogging about apologies). Mark Osler, a former federal prosecutor turned clemency advocate, tells us about the personal journey behind his career change. Vanessa Zoltan, host of the podcast...

This week on Unorthodox: We recap the Butnick-Cohen nuptials (mazel tov!), Liel has a big reveal, and our guests wrestle with complicated legacies—both personal and political. Our first Jewish guest is Annabelle Gurwitch, the author of Wherever You Go, There They Are, a funny, wise memoir about the families we’re born into—and the families we choose. She talks about growing up with a fabulist fath...

This episode is brought to you by the letter A, for ally. Our Jewish guest is Brooke Kroeger, author of The Suffragents: How Women Used Men to Get the Vote. She tells us about the men whose support helped women get the vote, and what those of us who want to be allies to marginalized communities today should learn from their efforts. Our gentile of the week is German-Danish historian Thorsten Wagne...

If you love listening to Unorthodox, please make a donation before our fundraising drive ends next week! This week: Everything you ever wanted to know about Jewish weddings. Author Anita Diamant tells us about The Jewish Wedding Now, her newly updated guide to planning a meaningful Jewish celebration. Roberta Grossman, director of the documentary Hava Nagila (The Movie) explains how the catchy Heb...

If you love listening to Unorthodox every week, please consider donating to keep us going for another hundred episodes. We put together a bunch of fun gifts, from tote bags to studio visits to an exclusive Sept. 6 cocktail party in New York City with Mark, Liel, and Stephanie. Our Jewish guest is linguist Sarah Bunin Benor, an expert in Jewish languages and the author of Becoming Frum: How Newcome...

If you love listening to Unorthodox every week, please consider making a donation to keep us going for another hundred episodes. We put together a bunch of fun gifts for donors, from tote bags to studio visits to a cocktail party with Mark, Liel, and Stephanie. We’re #blessed with three Jewish guests this week: Leah Gottfried, Jessica Schechter, and Danny Hoffman, the team behind the popular web s...

We’re celebrating two years—and 100 episodes!—of Unorthodox with a very unorthodox fundraising drive. We've put together a bunch of fun gifts, from tote bags to studio visits to a cocktail party with Mark, Liel, and Stephanie. If you love listening to Unorthodox every week, please consider making a donation to keep us going for another two years. This week, we turn the show over to Tablet contribu...

Episode description: This week, we’re coming at you live from JCC Manhattan, with some very special guests and other fun surprises. But first: If you're a fan of Unorthodox—and if you're reading this, you must be!—please consider making a donation to our fundraising drive so we can keep producing the podcast you love for another 99 episodes. We've put together a whole range of fun gifts to sweeten...

First things first: Don't forget to get tickets for our live show Tuesday, July 25 at 7:30 p.m. at JCC Manhattan! This week, we find out Mark isn't the only Oppenheimer who sneaks into movies without paying. And we've got two Jewish guests joining us: First, our favorite film critic Jordan Hoffman returns to tell us all about the summer's best movies, including the new film War For the Planet of t...

Hey J-Crew: Before you do literally anything else today, buy a ticket to our next live show in NYC on July 25! This week we talk Birthright, Hobby Lobby, and Jay-Z—oh my. Our Jewish guest is historian Jenna Weissman Joselit, whose latest book is Set in Stone: America's Embrace of the Ten Commandments. She tells us how the Ten Commandments, which have become so politicized, were actually once a uni...

Break out the bug juice—it’s summer camp week on Unorthodox! We’re talking campfires, Color War, and Mark’s traumatic summer at a nudist camp. Our first guest is Sandy Fox, a doctoral candidate studying language and everyday life in Zionist, Yiddishist, and denominational summer camps. She’s also the founder of Vaybertaytsh, a feminist podcast entirely in Yiddish. She explains how different Jewish...

Back in May, we interviewed L.A.-based comedian and writer H Alan Scott about converting to Judaism, surviving cancer, and his deep love of The Golden Girls. We recently caught up with H Alan by phone to discuss his first trip to Israel (for Tel Aviv Pride!) and his subsequent Newsweek article about "pinkwashing" and the BDS movement. We discussed LGBT politics, Zionism, and anti-Semitism—and of c...

Description: This week on Unorthodox, don’t even think about cutting Israel out of Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat. Our Jewish guest is journalist and Tablet columnist Jamie Kirchick, who returns to the show to discuss his new book, The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues and the Coming Dark Age. He tells us about the emboldening of extremes on both sides of the political spectrum, the dange...

This week, we recorded a special crossover episode with Lexicon Valley, the podcast hosted by linguist John McWhorter. John was a guest on our show in December 2016, and when we weren’t interrupting him, we were discussing things like the word ‘like’ and his latest book, Talking Back, Talking Black. We sat down with him again for an in-depth conversation about whether there’s such a thing as Jewis...

Our Jewish guest this week is Fred Kuhr, who hosts The Point, a Toronto-based talk show that brings gay and straight men together “to see what happens.” He explains the stereotypes gay men have about straight men, the difference between American and Canadian homophobia, and adjusting to Montreal bagels as a Brooklyn-born expat. Our Gentile of the Week is Jonathan Frakes, best known for his portray...