Tablet Studios

This week on Unorthodox, we’re still full from all that Shavuot cheesecake. Our Jewish guest is actor Stephen Tobolowsky, who plays Jack Barker on HBO’s Silicon Valley, and whose latest book is My Adventures with God. He tells us about getting recognized in shul (he started going to synagogue twice a day to say kaddish after his mother died), what it’s like to tackle something as intimate as faith...

This week, we break down Donald Trump’s Holy Land adventure. Our Jewish guest is Yascha Mounk, a lecturer at Harvard whose area of research—how to preserve liberal democracy in the face of populism—has made him extremely popular lately. He tells us how worried we should be about rising populist tides in Europe and the U.S., explains some of the difficulties currently facing multiethnic societies,...

Unorthodox host Mark Oppenheimer recently published an op-ed in The New York Times about our aversion to using the word 'Jew,' as opposed to 'Jewish.' Is 'Jew' still considered a slur? By many, yes. Should we reclaim it? Definitely, says Mark. He discussed his op-ed with On the Media's Brooke Gladstone a couple of weeks ago, and we're pleased to share their conversation with you here in full. (Don...

When Maya Jankelowitz and her husband Dean opened Jack’s Wife Freda in New York City in 2012, they mined their respective Israeli and South African upbringings for family recipes and traditional spices. The result was trendy downtown dining with a home-cooked vibe and a dash of nostalgia (the restaurant is named after Dean's grandparents). The pair now run two restaurants, identically named, and j...

This week's guest is comedian and writer H. Alan Scott, who was raised Mormon in St. Louis and converted to Judaism when he was 31. He’s preparing for his bar mitzvah by immersing himself in Jewish life and culture, and it’s all being chronicled in Latter Day Jew, a documentary by Aliza Rosen. H. Alan tells us about coming out to his Mormon family, how cancer jumpstarted his conversion to Judaism,...

This week on Unorthodox: chocolate sausage! Our Jewish guest is Tablet’s food columnist Joan Nathan. Her latest cookbook is King Solomon’s Table: a Culinary Exploration of Jewish Cooking from Around the World, which features recipes like schokoladenwurst, a dessert that made its way from Berlin to El Salvador in the 1920s (and doesn’t actually have any meat in it). She tells us about drawing inspi...

This week on Unorthodox, we speak to the author of Donald Trump’s favorite book. Our Jewish guest is Danya Shults, the founder of Arq, a website and community inspired by Jewish culture. She tells us how her own interfaith marriage inspired her to help people “connect with Jewish life and culture in a relevant, inclusive, and convenient way,” and explains where—if anywhere—actual religion fits int...

This week on Unorthodox, we’re still trying to find those Holocaust centers Sean Spicer was talking about. Our Jewish guest is filmmaker Ferne Pearlstein, whose latest documentary, The Last Laugh, asks comedians like Mel Brooks and Sarah Silverman whether or not we can joke about the Holocaust. She tells us why she decided to tackle such a taboo topic, how gallows humor can be a survival mechanism...

This week on Unorthodox, we’re filling up on chametz before Passover starts. We talk to bagel makers from Montreal to Australia (and Cleveland!), get the scoop on the bagel scene in Israel, and find out how bagels became the unofficial food of the Jews. Our guests span the globe, but have one thing in common: they love bagels. We talk to Ben Pigette, a lieutenant in the Royal Australian Navy who t...

This week on Unorthodox: a Jewish writer and an Episcopal priest walk into a podcast. Our Jewish guest is writer and essayist Daphne Merkin, whose latest book is This Close to Happy: A Reckoning With Depression. She tells us what it was like to write such a personal book—Tablet literary critic Adam Kirsch called it “a hybrid of memoir, case study, and confession”—and discusses the stigma that cont...

This week on Unorthodox, Mel Gibson gives tzedakah. Our Jewish guest is Ukrainian-born writer Sana Krasikov, whose latest novel, The Patriots, explores the effects of the Cold War on three generations of a Jewish-American family, from the 1930s to the present. Our Gentile of the Week is Republican strategist Patrick Ruffini, who tells us what the future of data and technology looks like for politi...

This week on Unorthodox, Mark ditches us for the Holy Land. It was snowing in New York, but we trudged to the studio and were graciously joined by Israeli filmmaker Shimon Dotan, whose latest film is The Settlers, a documentary about the controversial settler movement in Israel (you can read Tablet film critic J. Hoberman's review here). He tells us why he decided to take on such a contentious top...

This week on Unorthodox, Jewish baseball is having a moment. Our Jewish guest is Adam Irving, whose documentary Off the Rails tells the story of Darius McCollum, an obsessive transit buff with Aspberger’s syndrome who has been arrested 32 times for impersonating New York City subway conductors and bus drivers. Adam tells us how his life has changed since releasing the film (his first) to critical...

This week on Unorthodox, we check in with Jake Turx, the now-famous Orthodox White House reporter who asked Trump about anti-Semitism. Our guests this week are Leah Green and Freddy McConnell, co-hosts of The Guardian’s “Token” podcast. Leah is mixed-race—her mother is Jewish and her father Nigerian—and Freddy is transgender and gay, and on their show they discuss topics like sex, gender, and race...

This week on Unorthodox, we’ve got two Jewish guests. First up is Scott Feinberg, the awards columnist for The Hollywood Reporter and host of the Awards Chatter podcast, and one of the “most informed Oscarologists,” according to the New York Times. He tells us how he makes his Oscar predictions and where he'll be Sunday night as the winners are announced. Our next guest knows the way to our hearts...

This episode was recorded live at Temple Israel in West Palm Beach, Florida. Our Jewish guest is Igor Shteyrenberg, director of the Miami Jewish Film Festival, which in five years he grew from an annual event with 4,000 attendees to the third largest Jewish film festival in the U.S. He tells us his favorite new Jewish films, the most controversial film the festival has screened (hint: there were z...

This week on Unorthodox, we’re getting into the Valentine’s Day spirit. Or as we call it around here, Secular Tu B’Av. Our Jewish guest is Israeli-American novelist and essayist Ayelet Waldman, whose latest book, A Really Good Day chronicles her experience taking microdoses of LSD to treat her mood disorder. She explains what microdosing is and how it helped her and her marriage, and tells us what...

This week’s episode was recorded live at JCC Manhattan. Our first Jewish guest is Canadian transplant and longtime "This American Life" contributor Jonathan Goldstein, who now hosts the podcast Heavyweight. He tells us about mining his personal life for stories to tell on his show and gives us a definitive (if very Canadian) answer on Montreal bagels vs. New York bagels. Our Gentile of the Week is...

This week, in addition to our regular Thursday episode, we’re doing something a bit different. President Trump’s Executive Order on immigration struck us as so troubling, so decidedly antithetical to the Jewish values we hold dear—and such a disappointment given our own paths to this country—that we were moved to respond. On this mini-episode, Liel Leibovitz, Stephanie Butnick, and producer Elissa...

Our Jewish guest this week is actor David Duchovny, whose latest novel, Bucky F*cking Dent, follows a Red Sox-loving father and son during the 1978 World Series. He tells us how fox Mulder, the fictional FBI agent he played on The X-Files, would feel about James Comey right about now, his favorite X-Files meme, and his long-lost Yale Ph. D. thesis on magic and technology in 20th century fiction. O...

In anticipation of our Wednesday (1/25) live show at the Manhattan JCC (tickets available here), we thought we'd share the season finale of Jonathan Goldstein's Heavyweight podcast. Jonathan is a radio storytelling legend and he'll be one of our guests on Wednesday night, so if you're coming to the show, listen up, and if not, listen anyway. If you like us, we bet you'll like him too. In this epis...

This week on Unorthodox, Bernie Madoff's prison hot chocolate scheme. We've got two Jewish guests this week: our first is return visitor Rosie Gray, who covered the election for BuzzFeed and is now a staff writer at the Atlantic. Our second guest is Charlie Brotman, who has announced every inauguration parade from Eisenhower to Obama but was snubbed by the Trump inauguration committee. Sign up for...

This week on Unorthodox: We’ll always have Casablanca (except Mark). Our Jewish guest is writer and comedian Lynn Harris, founder of Comedy GOLD, which teaches girls and women how to empower themselves through comedy. Our Gentile of the Week is author and Bloggingheads founder Robert Wright, who was raised Southern Baptist but now practices Buddhism. Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get new ep...

This week on Unorthodox, Jared and Ivanka go shul shopping in Washington, D.C. Our Jewish guest is renowned biblical scholar Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, whose latest book examines the life of Moses, one of the most enigmatic biblical figures (you can read an excerpt here). She tells us about exploring the often overlooked aspects of Moses’s life—his speech impediment, for example–and why she believe...

This week we’re celebrating Christmas the only way we know how: Chinese food and a movie. Plus a bunch of amazing guests! We’re joined by New York Times reporter Marc Tracy, who tells us about the tradition of Jews eating Chinese food on Christmas, and the Jewish songwriters behind some of the most well-known Christmas songs. Jessica Grose, the editor of the email newsletter Lenny, tells us why it...