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 title, Little Failure, is of course ironic. By now, after Gary Shteyngart’s three best-selling comic novels, many travel articles and dozens of interviews—in which he rarely gives a straight answer—his Russian Jewish immigrant parents must have forgiven him for not becoming the lawyer or accountant they envisioned. Or have ...
An investigation into the religious roots of the symbols for hugs & kisses. ...
When I was a teenager, there was a legend repeated in the Jewish schools of my hometown. If you somehow manage to get into godless Harvard, don’t go. But if, against your rosh yeshiva and rebbe’s advice, you actually go, whatever you do, don’t take biblical scholar James Kugel’s class. ...
Moment Magazine-Karma Foundation Fiction // July was Reva’s month to fall apart. She slept through the alarm and ignored her husband’s attempts to rouse her. She showered sporadically. She added bourbon to her morning coffee. She stopped answering email, her cell phone, the door. She arrived late to the summer ...
Richard Bernstein reviews two new works on anti-Semitism by Edmund Levin and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. ...

Life Beyond Portnoy By Alan Stone Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books Claudia Roth Pierpont Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2013,

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With the Winter Olympics set to open in Sochi, Russia, in February, Moment’s Josh Tapper talks to David Wallechinsky, author of The Complete Book of the Olympics and president of the International Society of Olympic Historians. ...

By Richard Michelson What shall I ask of this sixteen-year-old girl, born in the final years of the twentieth century, who

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By Sarina Roffé People often ask me to define the term “Sephardic Jew.” The answer is complicated. No, it does

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By Konstanty Gebert. Over the past few years, a series of books has brought to the attention of English-speaking readers the morally challenging, historically important and often overlooked or forgotten story of the Polish contribution to the Allied war effort in World War II, and of the terrible fate of ...

Joyce Carol Oates in Conversation with Alan Cheuse   On November 14, Moment fiction editor Alan Cheuse spoke with fellow

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