06 Jul
2007 April-May, Israel

A Moment With Michael Oren

Author of Power, Faith and Fantasy: America in the Middle East 1776 to the Present Since the days of the Barbary pirates, the Middle East has loomed large in America’s imagination and foreign policy. In Power, Faith and Fantasy, historian Michael Oren traces America’s involvement in the region. While 18th-century Americans feared the Arabic-speaking pirates, they were thrilled by the Middle East’s opulence (as portrayed in One Thousand and One Nights), and awed that it was the land of the Bible. American presidents like John Adams dreamed of a “hundred thousand Israelites” marching victoriously into Palestine, re-creating the Jewish state and bringing about the Second Coming. Writers Mark Twain and Herman Melville, along with other American adventurers, journeyed to the sand-swept region for inspiration. A senior fellow at Jerusalem’s Shalem Center, Oren speaks with Moment’s assistant editor,...

Continue reading

13 Feb
2009 May-June, Food

The Mostly Sweet Tale of Jews and Chocolate

Convinced he would encounter Jewish traders on his 1492 journey, Christopher Columbus brought along a Jew as a Hebrew interpreter. Although he met no Jews in the New World, he did find oddly shaped “almonds” that were highly valued by the natives—cacao beans. It was conquistador Hernán Cortés who carried the art of making the Aztecs’ xocolatl, or “bitter water,” to Spain. Considered a sacred drink associated with fertility, chocolate was served cold and flavored with chilies. The Aztec emperor Montezuma was said to have downed many a golden goblet of the drink each day, especially before visiting his wives. The Spanish nobility swooned over the aphrodisiac and revitalizing qualities of chocolate, but disliked its bitterness. To appease European taste buds, it was loaded with sugar and later blended with hot milk. A delectable drink for the...

Continue reading

16 Jan
2008 November-December, Arts & Culture, Big Questions, Issues

Noble Books

Nine Nobel laureates reflect on their favorite classic and contemporary Jewish books “I do not believe that civilization will be wiped out in a war fought with the atomic bomb. Perhaps two-thirds of the people of the Earth might be killed, but enough men capable of thinking, and enough books, would be left to start again, and civilization could be restored,” Albert Einstein wrote in 1945, 24 years after he won the Nobel Prize in Physics. What books, in addition to the Torah and the Talmud, would we want to pass on to the future? We’ve asked Moment co-founder Elie Wiesel and eight of his fellow Nobel laureates—from fields as diverse as economics, physics and medicine—to reflect on their favorite Jewish books. Although most were born before World War II, their selections span the whole of...

Continue reading