Ask the Rabbis
19 Nov
2014 January-February, Ask the Rabbis

Ask the Rabbis // Happiness

Should Jews strive to be happy? INDEPENDENT No. Jews should never strive to be happy. Happiness should not be something to strive for. It should be solidly entrenched deeply within us, born of a sense of mystery, a sense that defies reason and definition. We are here for the very purpose of not knowing why. And in the not knowing, we rejoice and laugh in the face of every imaginable fate. This is the audacity of Torah, which challenges us to dance on Simchat Torah with numbers etched into our arms, to dream tenaciously about Jerusalem in spite of 2,000 years of exile, to sing joyful melodies on Saturday even if we know a pogrom is pending on Sunday. We are a people that has been subjected to unimaginable tragedy, genocide, expulsion and conquest for longer periods and...

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31 Jul
2014 January-February, Arts & Culture, Big Questions, Jewish World

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.

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11 Feb
2014 January-February, Arts & Culture, Jewish World

Book Review // Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books

Life Beyond Portnoy By Alan Stone Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books Claudia Roth Pierpont Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2013, pp. 353, $27.00   Philip Roth’s pen has finally run dry, and he has announced his retirement. As if to commemorate that event, Claudia Roth Pierpont—no relation, but a good friend and a superb writer—has produced this brilliant literary biography, Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books. Her project, which began as an essay for The New Yorker, where she’s a staff writer, grew into this extraordinary, encompassing account as the dialogue between the two writers deepened into friendship and mutual admiration. Roth, as anyone who has met him can tell you, is an amazingly charming man. One can sense this on every page of Roth Unbound. That said, Pierpont’s literary judgments are exacting: One comes away from her book with the...

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06 Feb
2014 January-February, Jewish Word, Jewish World

Jewish Word // Philistine

How Philistine Became a Dirty Word by Caitlin Yoshiko Kandil It’s a story nearly everyone knows: The young shepherd boy uses nothing but his wits and a slingshot to take down a giant, sword-wielding warrior. As the First Book of Samuel describes, Goliath stood nearly 10-feet tall, wearing a bronze helmet and a coat of armor, carrying a javelin, spear and sword over his shoulders. Every morning he emerged from his camp to taunt the Israelites: “Give me a man and let us fight each other!” Throughout the story—in which David accepts the challenge—Goliath’s name is rarely used, and he is instead referred to by his tribal affiliation—Philistine. The Philistines are portrayed throughout the Bible as the archenemies of the Israelites: In Genesis, they are the ones who destroyed Abraham’s wells by filling them with dirt, and later, in...

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29 Jan
2014 January-February, Arts & Culture

Poem // Art Gallery: Summer Internship

By Richard Michelson What shall I ask of this sixteen-year-old girl, born in the final years of the twentieth century, who has tattooed her great-grandfather’s camp number onto her forearm?  No, she is not my neighbor, or grand niece, but only one more of too many applicants hoping to beef up their college résumé. Beauty, she explains, is her calling, why she was put on this earth. And at sixty I try to remember my teenage self, averting my eyes in the temple, or around the dinner table. Did art ever save anybody? I want to argue, even one of those children, younger than you, who drew such dazzling yet delicate butterflies at Terezin while their interned teachers extolled creativity? Still, we make art everywhere, anonymous or signed, and wonder why else our own fragile lives are worth living? And so I am looking beyond her at red flowers and blue sailboats, and even...

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28 Jan
2014 January-February, Jewish World

The Holocaust Through the Eyes of Women

For the first four decades after the Holocaust, most memoirs and historical studies viewed life in the camps through male eyes. But since the early 1980s, scholars in the emerging and controversial field of gender and Holocaust studies have encouraged female survivors to tell their stories. One early pioneer in the field, Myrna Goldenberg, professor emerita at Montgomery College, Maryland, has co-edited a new book entitled Different Horrors, Same Hell: Gender and the Holocaust. Moment’s senior editor Eileen Lavine speaks with Goldenberg about how including women's stories has altered our perception of the Holocaust. Why concentrate on female narratives? Examining what happened to women challenges some of the traditional assumptions and interpretations about the Holocaust. For example, why were the Nazis so preoccupied with sex, why were women subject to different and more humiliating types of treatment...

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27 Jan
2014 January-February, Arts & Culture, Jewish World

Book Review // Warsaw 1944: Hitler, Himmler, and the Warsaw Uprising

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 the Poles under German rule.

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21 Jan
2014 January-February, Arts & Culture

Moment Live // The Heart of Writing

Joyce Carol Oates in Conversation with Alan Cheuse   On November 14, Moment fiction editor Alan Cheuse spoke with fellow writer Joyce Carol Oates at the Moment Magazine-Karma Foundation Short Fiction Contest awards ceremony at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan. This interview is adapted from that conversation.   Cheuse: How did you begin writing? Oates: I was very interested in literature and was reading ever since I was eight or nine when I was given Alice in Wonderland. I had tablets that I drew pictures on a little bit like Lewis Carroll’s, and then I graduated to the typewriter about the time I was in ninth or tenth grade, when I was reading Hemingway and tried to write Hemingway-inspired stories. My grandmother gave me the typewriter, which at the time was an astonishing thing. I was sure I was the...

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