Staff Picks: Milan Kundera, ‘Stranger Than Fiction’ and Post-War Germany
What we’re reading—and watching—this week.
What we’re reading—and watching—this week.
Send your unmarked original newspaper clippings, curiosities and photographs to editor@momentmag.com.
What, if any, obligations do we have toward Israel?
Anita Diamant’s latest book, Period. End of Sentence, which “explores the cultural roots of menstrual injustice,” goes boldly where no writer has gone before. The New York Times bestselling author of The Red Tent is in conversation with Amy E. Schwartz, Moment’s Book and Opinion editor, about misogyny, her books—both fiction and nonfiction, her writing process, as well as her connection to Judaism that led to her founding the Mayyim Hayyim Living Waters Community Mikveh.
I don’t. It is not my place to nudge people to get or not to get vaccinated.
This program is part of the 2021 Moment Theater Festival.
In the Autumn of 1941, 18-year-old Brina Berman, a Jewish Polish young woman from Warsaw, finds herself alone in Kobe, Japan, having traveled halfway across the world following the Nazi invasion of her hometown and murder of her family. Thus unfolds a little-known true story of what happened to Jewish refugees when Japanese Diplomat Chiune Sugihara was stationed in Kovno, Lithuania and wrote transit visas to Japan, saving thousands of Jews who were running from the advancing German army. Seen through her many struggles in Kobe, Brina is surprised to find an established Jewish community and nurturing Japanese residents and organizations working to support the arriving Jewish refugees.
The cast, director, and playwright of Oh, I Remember the Black Birch discuss their new original play about a young Jewish woman struggling in a new country and finding community during the Holocaust. Playwright Velina Hasu Houston is also in conversation with producer and dramaturg Keren M. Goldberg about the journey of Oh, I Remember the Black Birch which is inspired by true events.
Democracy entails more than merely majority rule. It implies concern about minority rights.
What we’re reading—and watching—this week.
From Watergate, the assassination of Allende in Chile and the Yom Kippur War to the election of Menachem Begin, the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, the march for Soviet Jewry and the signing of the Oslo Accords, a lot happened in the world in 1973, 1977, 1989 and 1993. Join American Jewish historian, Deborah Dash Moore, editor-in-chief at The Posen Library for a discussion about these events and the impact they had on the Jewish community. Moore is in conversation with Robert Siegel, Moment special literary contributor and former senior host of NPR’s All Things Considered.
This program is a continuation of Moment’s time symposium where we explored the most important years in Jewish history and is cosponsored with The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization.
In their new book Pastels and Pedophiles, cybersecurity expert Dr. Mia Bloom and Dr. Sophia Moskalenko, a psychologist specializing in radicalization, show how much the recent QAnon movement owes to antisemitic tropes and, most notably, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Bloom and Moskalenko are in conversation with journalist Sarah Posner, author of UNHOLY: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump.
This program is part of Moment’s Antisemitism series supported by the Joyce and Irving Goldman Foundation.
Walter J. Podrazik and Harry Castleman, authors of All Together Now – the first complete Beatles discography 1961-1975, discuss Brian Epstein, the Jewish record store owner who discovered and managed the Beatles.
Moment editor-in-chief Nadine Epstein, author of RBG’s Brave & Brilliant Women: 33 Jewish Women to Inspire Everyone, is in conversation about the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her favorite female Jewish role models with Rabbi Lauren Holtzblatt, the Washington DC rabbi who was friends with Justice Ginsburg and officiated at her funeral.