Arts & Culture
Living, reading, watching and listening Jewishly—that’s the crux of Moment’s Arts & Culture section. Here you can find book reviews, poetry, fiction, art and music. Don’t miss our fantastic interviews with artists and musicians.
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The wedding scene in Fiddler on the Roof is one of my favorite Jewish moments on film. The scene is drenched in family, nostalgia and an aching foreknowledge of the Holocaust. ...
On a bright September day, an unlikely trio met for lunch to discuss art, politics and culture. Having published an unauthorized biography of Woody Allen last year, I couldn’t wait to have lunch with him for the first time. ...
Film icon Charlie Chaplin starred as the Jewish barber in The Great Dictator, a 1940 political satire that Chaplin wrote, produced and directed. The film, including Chaplin’s parody of Hitler, was a direct response to the Nazi Party’s false assertion that Chaplin was Jewish—and the banning of all of his ...
For pure cheesy pleasure, I’d go with The Ten Commandments, which frightened me so much as a child that I was actually taken out of the movie theater. I’m tougher now and, besides ever since taking my own kids on the Paramount Pictures tour that explained how the filmmakers used ...
In Barbra Streisand’s musical Yentl, Nehemiah Persoff, a World War II veteran originally from Jerusalem, plays Rebbe Mendel. Mendel secretly gives Talmud lessons to Yentl (Streisand), a young girl living in a late 19th century Polish shtetl at a time when women are barred from religious study. Yentl ultimately disguises ...
It’s not every day that an adult in her mid-80s can read a book meant for fifth-graders (ages 10-11) and be reduced to tears. ...
The day you left was the Ninth of Av, / a day of grief, the Temple destroyed. ...
The Kinsey Sicks, a dynamite Dragapella Beautyshop Quartet, explode on Theater J’s stage for a limited run of their new politically charged show Things You Shouldn’t Say, saying and singing anything they damn well please. ...
"Rabbis were telling me that if I have a gift like that, I shouldn’t sit on it. But I felt that rap was going to lead me away from my spirituality." ...
Blond and rather slender for its type, a pickle barrel stands by the takeout counter of the famous Washington, DC delicatessen Wagshal’s. Lined with plastic, it may satisfy a certain nostalgia but amounts to no more than a storage unit on the bulk-bin grocery aisle—a pale iteration of the big-bellied, ...
Although such comparisons remain rare, for Jews and non-Jews the golem serves as a concept uniquely suited to expressing the fears and insecurities of the modern era. As Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote in 1984, “The golem story appears less obsolete today than it seemed one hundred years ago. After all, ...
Israeli novelist Dorit Rabinyan was enjoying a peaceful afternoon at home on December 30, 2015, when a phone call from an old friend, Haaretz journalist Or Kashti, changed her life. “I have something to tell you,” he said. “It may be the biggest story I will ever break.” “Good for ...