19 Dec
2018 November-December, Arts & Culture

Book Review | The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary, 3 vols. by Robert Alter

The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary, 3 vols. by Robert Alter W. W. Norton 2018, 3500 pp, $125 When I first learned that Robert Alter had completed the task of singlehandedly translating the entire Bible, a project he commenced around 1995, my mind went to Lawrence of Arabia. In one scene of that spectacular movie, Peter O’Toole, playing T. E. Lawrence, enters British military headquarters in Cairo, dusty and exhausted from the long trek across the Sinai, and says to his commanding officer, “We’ve taken Aqaba.” The officer asserts, “It’s impossible,” to which Lawrence replies, “Yes, it is, I did it.” And so it is with Alter’s The Hebrew Bible: What had been thought to be impossible—a complete modern Bible translation with expert commentary, not by committee, but by a single individual—is indeed possible. Unlike Lawrence, though—who,...

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16 Dec
2018 November-December, Arts & Culture

Author Interview | Judea Pearl

Does the rooster’s crow cause the sunrise? The answer seems obvious, if you’re a human—but a machine can only understand that the rooster’s crow and the sunrise are related, not which causes the other. This problem is at the heart of The Book of Why, written by Israeli-born UCLA professor Judea Pearl, 82, and science writer Dana Mackenzie. Pearl is a renowned computer scientist and winner of the Turing Award, the highest honor in computer science, and his new book explores a revolutionary new way for scientists to explain cause and effect—and how computers should understand it. Pearl speaks with Moment about the importance of cause-and-effect relationships, why science has neglected them for so long and how they shape everything from elections to Jewish ethics. Why are cause-and-effect relationships so critical—and so misunderstood? They are misunderstood...

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16 Dec
2018 November-December, Arts & Culture

Book Review | Dear Zealots: Letters from a Divided Land by Amos Oz

Dear Zealots: Letters from a Divided Land by Amos Oz Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2018, 138 pp, $15.31 Amos Oz’s modest new book of nonfiction is a container for some somber thoughts and for scraps left over from earlier lectures and books—refined and re-sorted, though ultimately not completely resolved. The book is written with intimacy in the Israeli style, where much is left unsaid and there’s little need for formal transitions or explanations. The title, of course, suggests a letter, with emphasis on the word “dear.” And the epigraph, a poem by Yehuda Amichai, warns about the futility of winning a familial argument: “The place where we are right/is hard and trampled/like a yard.” Dear Zealots is actually composed of three essays pivoting around the subject of extremism. It includes observations about radical Islam, Europe and America, but mostly it concentrates...

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01 Dec
2018 November-December, Arts & Culture, Talk of the Table

Talk of the Table | Why Feminists Should Eat Dairy on Hanukkah

Hanukkah is associated with the bravery of the Maccabees, the group of heroic Jews who rebelled against the Greek-Syrian empire, defeated it against all odds and rededicated the Temple in Jerusalem. They lit a menorah with a little oil that lasted for eight days, sentencing us to centuries of eating fried food to excess. But there is an interesting feminist alternative to this male-dominated and oil-laden narrative. For some, Hanukkah is a time to celebrate the courage of a Jewish heroine, a woman who defeated, against all odds, a powerful enemy with her wit, daring—and some salty cheese. This is the story of Judith, a rich and beautiful widow who lived in the Judean town of Bethulia more than two and a half millennia ago. When the army of Assyrian King Nebuchadnezzar led by Holofernes invaded,...

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16 Nov
2018 November-December, Israel

Six Women Who Are Breaking Israel’s Glass Ceiling

Rivka Carmi In 2006, Rivka Carmi became the president of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU), making her the first woman to serve as the president of an Israeli university. Prior to this, Carmi, a pediatrician and geneticist, was the first woman dean of an Israeli medical school, also at BGU. She was also the first woman to chair Israel’s Committee of University Presidents. Carmi, now 70, chose to be a scientist after a high school teacher told her mother that Carmi could study either science or humanities, but that humanities would be much easier. Then and there, she decided to study science. In a class of 22 students, she was one of only two girls. After medical school, she completed a residency in pediatrics, a fellowship in neonatology and then an additional fellowship in medical genetics at...

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15 Nov
2018 November-December, Arts & Culture, Jewish Word, Jewish World

Jewish Word | Shamash

n the 1946 film The Big Sleep, based on the Raymond Chandler mystery of the same name, Carmen—the promiscuous, drug-addicted younger sister of Lauren Bacall’s character—sizes up Philip Marlowe, played by Humphrey Bogart, and asks him, “What are you, a prizefighter?” Bogart responds, “No, I’m a shamus.” “What’s a shamus?” she inquires. “It’s a private detective,” he answers. Yes, Bogart is using the Yiddish version—more popularly spelled “shammes”—of the Hebrew word, “shamash.”

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Hitler's American Friends
12 Nov
2018 November-December, Arts & Culture

Book Review | Hitler’s American Friends By Bradley W. Hart

Hitler’s American Friends: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States By Bradley W. Hart St. Martin’s/Thomas Dunne Books 2018, 304 pp, $28.99 Four days after Pearl Harbor and the U.S. declaration of war against Japan, Nazi Germany inexplicably declared war against the United States. John Kenneth Galbraith, then a New Deal economist in Washington, later called it “a totally irrational thing for to do...and I think it saved Europe.” But for Hitler’s gratuitous challenge to Washington, Galbraith was suggesting, it would have been possible to imagine a U.S. mobilization limited to a war against Japan, effectively giving a free pass to the Nazis in Europe. The Nazis’ declaration ended the long debate over U.S. entry into the war in Europe. Young men of the isolationist America First Committee enlisted, or were drafted, into the conflict they had enthusiastically...

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08 Nov
2018 November-December, Jewish World

Opinion | The Tough Task of Defining Anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of anti-Semitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities. In recent years, the “Working Definition of Antisemitism” adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)—an educational nonprofit with 31 member states—has become both a valued tool in the fight against rising anti-Semitism and a bone of contention. In the UK, opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn has spent much of 2018 fighting attempts by his Labor Party to adopt it as policy. But a host of NGOs and government institutions have already done so, finding it a helpful guideline for gathering data about serious and growing problems. In the U.S., Palestinian rights organizations, some academics, the ACLU and many...

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