Moment Magazine-Karma Foundation Fiction: Lecha Dodi

Lecha Dodi // According to tradition, Mordechai led the way. When the day was expiring, he emerged from his house in white garments. The cares of the working week fell away, and he prepared with discreet joy for the Sabbath. His hair, just visible under his head covering, would be moist from immersion in the ritual bath.

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Book Review // The Talmud: A Biography Banned, Censored and Burned…The Book They Couldn’t Suppress

Full disclosure: I am not a biblical or Talmudic scholar. As a professor of literature, I have taught selections from the Bible in humanities courses. I think of myself as a secular humanist and an agnostic interested in understanding the role of religion in the lives of millions of people.

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Book Review // Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France

French anti-Semitism, c’est une vieille histoire. True, following the Revolution, les Juifs were liberated from their ghettos. True, the Jewish Leon Blum was elected prime minister of France during the late 1930s. And true, except for the United States and Israel, no other country contains so many Jews—some 600,000 according to the latest statistics.

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Book Review // An officer and a Spy

Be wary of historical fiction, especially if it’s good. It will forever mix up in your mind what actually happened, or what we can be fairly certain happened, with the inventions of playwrights and novelists, whose aim might be to draw a deeper meaning from events than mere facts can provide, but who do some violence to those puny facts.

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Book Review // Knish: In Search of the Jewish Soul Food

Knish: In Search of the Jewish Soul Food Laura Silver Brandeis University Press 2014, pp. 275, $24.95 by Gloria Levitas Reader alert: I am not now nor have I ever been a knish enthusiast. I find most knishes too doughy, too heavy and much too filling. So I approached this attractive volume warily. Why eat knishes when you can feast on similar delights like bourekas or blintzes or samosas? But like them or not, I was curious about knishes, remembering a long-ago encounter while driving through the English countryside. My husband and I stopped for a snack at a small roadside shop in Cornwall that offered a variety of local pastries neatly displayed in a glass case. I pointed to a dough-covered item. “You want a Cornish, Miss?” asked the clerk, pronouncing “Cornish” as “k’nish.” I glanced around in amazement: Was this a...

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Gaza: A History // A Long Look at a Small Place

Today, the Palestinian enclave of Gaza is known as a flashpoint for conflict that far eclipses its minuscule size. At 140 square miles—sharing an eight-mile frontier with Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and hugging Israel’s border for nearly 32 miles—the sliver of desert is only twice the area of the District of Columbia.

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