06 Dec
2013 November-December

Moment Magazine 2013 Guide to France

Narbonne: A Lost Medieval Jewish Kingdom by Nadine Epstein Jewish kings reigned from the 8th to 14th century in southern France. People are surprised when I mention that Narbonne, a small city in the Languedoc region of southern France just north of the Pyrenees and a few miles inland from the Mediterranean, was once home to a “Jewish kingdom” ruled by a dynasty that is said to be descended from King David. And why not? It’s not often one hears of Jewish kingdoms outside of ancient Israel. Located on a plain that connects Europe to the Iberian Peninsula, Narbonne was an important city in the early centuries of the Common Era, fought over and controlled at various times by Romans, Visigoths and, from 719 to 759, the Saracens—as the Christians of that era called Muslims. Jews lived there in relative...

Continue reading

02 Dec
2013 November-December, Arts & Culture

Book Review | Countrymen by Bo Lidegaard

Shortly after my bar mitzvah in 1943 at the Great Synagogue of Copenhagen, where my father had arrived from Czechoslovakia in 1934 to be the chief cantor, the roof caved in with all the uncertainties, terror and threats of annihilation. My family, along with some seven to eight thousand Danish Jews, were forced to flee their homes.

Continue reading

02 Dec
2013 November-December, Arts & Culture

Moment Magazine-Karma Foundation Fiction

Avi knew his sister would take the news badly. Seven years his junior, Avi’s sister was given to fits of feeling, storms of wild emotion. This evening, as Avi awaited his sister in his home, he adjusted the plates at the dining room table, wiped the insides of wine glasses with the bottom of his shirt and folded and re-folded the three maps he’d purchased that day—topographic, political, historical—and had fanned on the table’s end.

Continue reading

04 Nov
2013 November-December, Big Questions

Hate Speech Goes Viral

As the Internet has expanded the frontiers of 21st-century freedom of expression, it has given rise to new opportunities for hate speech. // But what constitutes hate speech, which broadly refers to language that incites prejudice against racial, religious and ethnic groups and is legislated and regulated by governments around the world? There is no one definition.

Continue reading

01 Nov
2013 November-December, Arts & Culture, Jewish Word

Jewish Word / Sechel

The (Jewish) Sixth Sense  By George E. Johnson In his autobiography, Songs My Mother Taught Me, Marlon Brando writes at length about the transformative role Jews played in his personal development in the 1940s. At the conclusion of his tribute to Jews and Judaism, Brando tries to reduce what is special about Jews to a single word: sechel. “There’s a Yiddish word, seychel , that provides a key explaining the most profound aspects of Jewish culture,” he says. “It means to pursue knowledge and to leave the world a better place than when you entered it… It must be this cultural tradition that accounts for their amazing success, along with Judaism, the one constant that survived while the Jews were dispersed around the world.” With these words, Brando tapped deep into the multi-layered meanings of the word sechel, a...

Continue reading

12