08 Aug
2011 January-February, Arts & Culture, Talk of the Table, World

Voila! French Jewish Food Arrives!

Joan Nathan, the queen of Jewish American and Israeli cookbooks, takes to the old continent in her new book, Quiches, Kugels and Couscous: My Search for Jewish Cooking in France. Nathan returns to the country where she spent several years of her youth and wends her way through cities and small villages, tasting treasured family recipes and collecting stories hitherto untold. Nathan talks with Moment’s Eileen Lavine about the little-known culinary world of French Jews. Did Jews influence French cooking? Through their travels, Jewish explorers, merchants and peddlers brought salted and dried fish, grains and spices to France. During the Inquisition, many Jews fled Spain to Bayonne in southwestern France, bringing with them coffee beans and a tradition for making chocolate. At first, chocolate was a liquid remedy for ailments, but it soon became a luxury food, and...

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13 May
2011 January-February, Issues, World

The Film that Launched a Thousand Court Cases

Few films have packed as much punch for American political culture as Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 The Ten Commandments. With the Cold War shifting into high gear and a fervent anti-communist patriotism sweeping the nation, the film burst onto the scene at a time when religion—Christianity in particular—became a central rallying point, pitting America’s “divine purpose” against “godless Communists.” Enter DeMille, a director with a penchant for the spectacular, who released the nearly four-hour remake of his 1923 silent film of the same name, this one starring Charlton Heston as Moses and Yul Brynner as Pharoah Ramses II, not to mention Anne Baxter, Edward G. Robinson, John Carradine, Vincent Price and many other top actors of the time. The Ten Commandments is “one of the most significant epic films ever made,” in part because it tapped...

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18 Jan
2011 January-February, Israel, Issues

The Man Who Stopped the Freeze

  Dani Dayan, head of Israel’s settler lobby, Yesha, has successfully kept another settlement freeze­—and peace talks—off the table. But can this mild-mannered former software tycoon stop the settler movement from imploding? On a clear day, Dani Dayan can look out the bedroom window of his two-story home and see the skyscrapers of Tel Aviv, just 20 miles away. But as we sit in his open and airy modern living room on a chilly winter day, with a eucalyptus tree swaying in the breeze and an ancient-looking wine press in the sprawling green yard, Tel Aviv seems a world away. The neighborhood’s serenity belies the fact that Dayan’s home is in the settlement of Maale Shomron in the northern West Bank, far beyond the separation barrier and deep in territory that may very well someday be part...

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