Book Review // The Golden Age Shtetl: A New History of Jewish Life in East Europe

The history of the Jews of Eastern Europe and Russia has a singular place in the Jewish imagination today. To some, it is a dead subject, poisoned by the Holocaust and the lethal anti-Semitism of the 19th and 20th centuries: Either we know everything we need to know about it or there is nothing worth knowing. To others, it is shrouded in the nostalgia-laden distance of the Old Country…

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Book Review // Rav Kook: Mystic in a Time of Revolution

Who was Rav Kook, the first chief rabbi of Jewish Palestine? Many have tried to understand this complex, charismatic scholar whose embrace of modernism existed side-by-side with strict traditionalism. How to explain his contradictory mixture of tolerance and orthodoxy, nationalism and universalism, mysticism and activism? Kook was a poet, religious jurist, philosopher and communal leader. Was he a Zionist?

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Slivovitz: A Plum (Brandy) Choice

For many Jews, slivovitz—the Eastern European plum brandy—is wrapped in nostalgia, evoking memories of irascible relatives downing fiery shots over Yiddish banter, or the mysterious bottle at the back of your grandmother’s pantry, revealed only during Passover seders. Over the years, slivovitz has become a distinctly Jewish beverage, one to rival Manischewitz wine, and a popular social lubricant to celebrate the good times and lament the bad.

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Visual Moment // Persian Jewish Art

 Illuminating the History of Iranian Jews By Diane M. Bolz Jews have lived in Persia, now Iran, for nearly three millennia. The first Jewish community dates back to the early 6th century BCE, when the Babylonians conquered the Kingdom of Judea and exiled many of its inhabitants. Fifty years later, King Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon and granted religious freedom to the Jews in his kingdom. Over the centuries, Persian Jews survived a succession of upheavals—the Arab-Muslim conquest in the 7th century CE, the Mongol invasion in the 13th century and the establishment of Shiite Islam as the state religion in the 16th century, resulting in restrictive laws and harsh conditions for Jews and other religious minorities. Along with these times of marginalization, exclusion and persecution, the Jews also experienced periods of coexistence and integration. Through it...

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Book Review // Little Failure: A memoir by Gary Shteyngart

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 they?

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James Kugel: Professor of Disbelief

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. If you do, you’ll walk into Introduction to the Bible, see that the professor is wearing a yarmulke and assume the course is kosher. And, the story goes, you’ll walk out a heretic.

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Ask the Rabbis // Contraception

INDEPENDENT Judaism does not restrict a woman in regard to her choices concerning pregnancy. She has a choice to bear children or not to bear children (Talmud Bav’li, Yevamot 65b; Mahar’shal in Yam Shel Shlomo 1:8). The injunction to “Be fruitful and multiply,” the ancient rabbis ruled, does not apply to women, because the Torah does not ask someone to do something that might endanger his or her life and health. On the other hand, a man who has not yet brought children into the world (ideally at least one of each gender) may not use contraception unless the woman he is with faces some sort of danger to her life or health. Coitus interruptus in the course of lovemaking, however, is permitted if its intent is incidental and not deliberately intended to prevent pregnancy (Tosefot...

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Fiction // The Nothing of History

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 school class she was teaching and dismissed the students early.

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Opinion | Who’s Afraid of Al Jazeera?

By Amy E. Schwartz An American offshoot of the Qatari network makes some watchdogs nervous. Media observers buzzed with consternation last August when Al Jazeera, the Qatari-owned network that played such a dramatic role broadcasting the Arab Spring, bought Al Gore’s cable network, Current TV, and launched Al Jazeera America. It hired seasoned American journalists, some of them Jewish, and promised to cover America for America. Dark predictions flew. Would Al Jazeera America fulfill the fears of Cliff Kincaid of the watchdog group Accuracy in Media, who in 2011 called for a congressional investigation into whether Al Jazeera English—the international service then available mostly on the Internet—was “playing a role” in homegrown American terror plots? Months later, fears continue to bubble. For many, it rankles that the network broadcasts some programs from prestigious rented studio space in Washington’s...

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