Vox Tablet

When a bullying incident makes the news, a flurry of collective hand-wringing generally follows. We call for schools to be stricter, punishment to be harsher, kids to be kinder. But what have we actually learned about the dynamic of bullying and, more important, the most effective ways to prevent it? Slate writer and editor Emily Bazelon tackles these questions in a new book, Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy. Bazelon has reported on bullying since 2009. In the book, she profiles three teens—two victims of bullying, and one who was accused of bullying—and then goes beyond to define what bullying is, and is not; what works, and what doesn’t, to interrupt a cycle of bullying; and what needs to be done to prevent a culture of bullying from taking hold in schools and online.

Bazelon speaks with Tablet Magazine’s Liel Leibovitz about

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If you’ve spent any time on the streets or subways of New York City in the past decade, you’ve probably encountered the ads for Manhattan Mini Storage. The company is famous for its no-holds-barred billboards and subway posters, which sometimes poke fun at New Yorkers’ over-crowded lives, and other times skewer those who don’t hold unapologotically liberal political views. As chief branding officer of Edison Properties, the parent company of Manhattan Mini Storage, Archie Gottesman is the brains and wit behind those ads. She’s third-generation in the real-estate business and was eager to find a way to make the job of selling storage space more fun.

Gottesman later found herself provoking and entertaining readers with a different marketing effort. Despairing over the take-it-or-leave-it attitude many of her Jewish friends and...

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Vladimir Vysotsky, Russia’s beloved balladeer, would have turned 75 this week. Though he died more than three decades ago, at the age of 42, he is still revered as a singer and poet who captured the mood, and the soul, of a dejected generation. But while Vysotsky’s music and persona clearly spoke to a particular time and place (the USSR in the post-Stalinist “Thaw” era), his songs have been adopted by social movements all over the world, including, most recently, Israel’s tent protesters during the summer of 2011.

Today, on Vox Tablet, Liel Leibovitz looks at the too-short life, and enduring afterlife, of this remarkable man and considers what it is that makes his ballads so resonant for so many. [Running time: 10:11.]

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Israeli voters go to the polls today to elect the next Knesset. Regardless of the outcome, undoubtedly the biggest story of the campaign season has been the rise of Naftali Bennett, a rookie politician who, against the odds, helped religious Zionism grow from a strong but discombobulated movement into an electoral powerhouse. This ideology, increasingly embraced by mainstream, secular Israelis, has its roots in the thinking of two influential rabbis: Abraham Isaac Kook and his son, Zvi Yehuda.

Tablet Magazine’s Liel Leibovitz speaks to Rabbi Shai Held, co-founder and dean of Mechon Hadar, an egalitarian yeshiva in New York, about the Kooks, the history of the religious Zionist movement, and why it is such a force in Israeli politics and culture today. [Running time:39:20.]

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When reporter Daniel Estrin first heard through the grapevine that Jerusalemites were planning on participating in the international 12th annual No Pants Subway Ride, he thought: This cannot go well.

For those who aren’t familiar, the No Pants Subway Ride invites participants to ride together without acknowledging one another or the fact that they are significantly underdressed. (Nudity is not allowed; participants must sport some form of underwear.) Since its inception, it has grown exponentially. Four thousand New Yorkers participated this past Sunday, along with thousands more across the United States and in 17 countries around the world.

But Jerusalem? A town where, in some quarters, visitors may be assaulted for “immodest dress” even when they are fully clothed? Estrin decided to tag along to see how the pantsless commuters fared. His...

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About a decade ago, novelist Emily Raboteau went to Jerusalem to visit a childhood friend who'd made aliyah. The trip provoked yearnings in Raboteau, the biracial daughter of an African-American father and white mother, for a place where she could feel at home, a Zion of her own. Six years later, that yearning led her to embark on a long journey to learn more about those who leave everything behind in search of a better life in a place they feel they belong. Following in the footsteps of others in the African diaspora, she traveled back to Israel to talk to Ethiopian Jews and African Hebrew Israelites; to Jamaica and Ethiopia to meet with Rastafarians; and to Ghana, home to expats from the United States and elsewhere who wanted to return to the place from which their ancestors were forcibly deported as slaves.

As she chronicles in her new book, Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora, Raboteau learned how difficult...

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Joel Meyerowitz has had many careers as a photographer over the past 50 years. He first made a name for himself at 24 as a New York City street photographer in the tradition of Robert Frank. A few years later he switched to color photography at a time when most art critics and gallerists dismissed it as too “commercial.” Later, Meyerowitz delved into landscape photography and portraits. Then, in the months after Sept. 11, 2001, he became the self-designated archivist of Ground Zero, persuading city authorities to grant him complete access to the site despite the fact that it had been designated a crime scene.

This month, Meyerowitz’s half-century of work is being honored with a two-part retrospective at the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York City and with the publication of a deluxe, two-volume limited-edition monograph of that work titled...

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