Born in Soviet Ukraine, Steven Volynets immigrated to the United States as a child. He turned to literature after several years as a journalist. Moment spoke with him about his new story, his childhood in Russia and his evolution as a writer.
Hanukkah was really only about one thing when I was growing up. It wasn’t the presents—they were generally small and unexciting…
In the story of Hanukkah—the cruel reign of Antiochus, the unlikely victory of Mattathias and his sons, the one cruse of sacred oil left in the plundered Temple that burned for eight days—there is no mention of money.
At the end of the 19th century, European liberals and Zionists developed diametrically opposite strategies for dealing with the menace posed by anti-Semitism…
Michael Chabon’s first published works, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and A Model World, were realist, lovely and a little dull with caution. Chabon himself describes his early work as “plotless and sparkling with epiphanic dew,”
I wanted to tell my father that the fish salad was shining, but he was asleep, calling my name in long somniloquous moans. I stood at his bedside, the shape of our room made visible by the scarce lights of the Marshal Zhukov Street. Slava! My name rose from his lungs…
What guidance, if any, does Judaism offer to transgender people?
From the years 1000 to 1400 CE, a kind of Jerusalem mania captivated much of the world. This fervor drew thousands of people from across the globe to the Holy City…
A lexicographic tour de force, the Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary, published this year by Indiana University Press, is an expedition through the layers of a language spoken by rebbes and poets, nurses and prostitutes, schoolchildren and soldiers…
Moment editors Look Back at Presidential Campaign Season 2016. There were an uncomfortable number of Jewish moments, some of which constituted outright anti-Semitism…
Amos Oz’s novel Habesorah Al Pi Yehudah (The Gospel According to Judas), translated by his longtime collaborator, Nicholas de Lange, under the title Judas, opens in the winter of 1959-60, when the life of Shmuel Ash, a graduate student at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, is turned upside down…
Turkey and Israel this summer formally ended a six-year-long deep freeze in relations, and Turkish-Israeli ties are again flourishing. But there is reason to worry that it won’t be like the good old days…
