Jewish Mexico: The Land of Chile and Honey
It’s good to be a Jew in Mexico City. Mexico’s tightly-knit Jewish community boasts the lowest rates of intermarriage in the world at six percent, two percent counting Jewish conversions upon marriage.
How Has Jewish Thought Influenced Science?
How has Jewish thinking influenced science? Moment poses the question to scientists and scholars Yehuda Bauer, Jonathan Ben-Dov, Edward Bormashenko, Jeremy Brown, Allison Coudert, Noah Efron, Shmuel Feiner, Gad Freudenthal, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Susan Greenfield, Menachem Kellner, Daniel Matt, Judea Pearl, Jonathan Sacks, Gerald Schroeder, Howard Smith, Hermona Soreq, Moshe Tendler and Yossi Vardi.
A Brief Literary Guide to the History of Gaza
There's more to the long-suffering region than meets the eye. From visual journalism to history to cookbooks, here are four books to deepen your understanding of the...
Modern Hebrew: The Epic Transformation of a Language
While teaching modern Hebrew in England and the United States, Norman Berdichevsky got a shock. Many of his students, he found, “were unable to utter...
What We’re Reading: Sala Levin
Each week, we'll share what Moment editors are reading and watching, from news to novels. First up is Moment staffer Sala Levin, who wrote about...
A Moment with “O, Africa!” author Andrew Lewis Conn
Andrew Lewis Conn’s second work of fiction, O, Africa!, follows Jewish twins Izzy and Micah Grand, two upcoming filmmakers in 1920s New York. Amidst the...
Talk of the Table // Paprika
Among the trendy ingredients today’s chefs are adding to their repertoires, paprika is the latest darling. Cooks either sprinkle the bright red spice—made of dried and ground red chili peppers—on top of their creations or swirl it with oil to add a crimson hue.
Book Review // A Bintel Brief
A heartfelt letter sent to a newspaper editor a century ago has long stayed with me. I happened upon it decades after it was written. With his soul in torment, a New York factory owner had turned to the editor for advice. He was not paying his workers— like him, Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe—nearly enough for them to make ends meet. He had a business to run, and there were limits to the wages he could afford. Still, the suffering of his employees and their families tore at his heart. What should he do?
Review: “Punk Jews” Chronicles Modern Misfits
Every strand of Judaism has its misfits: A collection of individuals who imagine themselves within a particular Jewish community while expressing themselves outside of its rules. Even amongst the insular, strictly structured Orthodox communities there are the hidden black sheep who get swallowed by louder hums. These are the Punk Jews.
Dutch Playwrights Reimagine Anne Frank Story
SORRENTO, ITALY–A new production at the Theater Amsterdam reimagines the world famous story of Anne Frank and her diary. Entitled simply “Anne,” it is a contemporary, multimedia theatrical production brought to life by internationally renowned Dutch Jewish husband and wife writing partners Leon de Winter and Jessica Durlacher.
Visual Moment // “Degenerate” Art
In July 1937 Germany’s National Socialist Party opened an exhibition in Munich it termed “Entartete Kunst,” or “Degenerate Art.” Intentionally housed in cramped, poorly lit conditions and awkwardly hung, the works on view were accompanied by inflammatory, denigrating labels. The exhibition was an open declaration of the Nazis’ state-run war on modern art and the effort to impose their officially sanctioned conception of art through propaganda and force.
Book Review // The Story of the Jews
The great Jewish historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, who died in 2009, famously declared that history was “the faith of fallen Jews.” Yerushalmi had trained under the preeminent 20th-century Jewish historian Salo Baron, whose epic (and unfinished) 18-volume A Social and Religious History of the Jews was celebrated for its paradigm-shifting rejection of the “lachrymose” view of Jewish history. Despite a life lived in the shadow of Jewish history’s most lachrymose moment—both his parents were murdered in the Holocaust—Baron insisted that Jewish history was defined not by dying but by living, by the astonishing creativity and vitality of an ever-changing Jewish culture.