Opinion | Would a President Pence Be Good for the Jews?
The vice president’s Indiana track record provides clues.
Opinion | Are Jews Historical Artifacts in Europe?
The future of Europe’s dwindling Jewish communities is bleak.
Opinion | A Good Deal Doesn’t Have to Be ‘Beautiful’
But can President Trump and his special Middle East envoys accept anything less?
From The Editor | July/August 2017
A few days after we finished Moment’s last issue, I got on a plane to China, a country I had never visited. There is so much to say about China. To begin with, it is no longer the shattered country I studied in college in the years following Mao’s death and the end of the Cultural Revolution.
Free eBook: Defining Moments in Israeli History: 1967–2017
Moment reached out to an eclectic group to ask: which event most defined the last half-century of the Israeli experience?
Interview | Yuval Harari
Born in Haifa to Eastern European immigrants, Harari now lives with his husband in a moshav outside Jerusalem. A vegan deeply distressed by the suffering of domesticated animals, Harari meditates daily (plus a 60-day silent retreat each year). He does this, he says, to understand more fully the nature of human consciousness and “human dissatisfaction.” Moment talks with Harari about the role of technology in politics and the rise of big data, as well as topics Harari does not usually discuss, such as Judaism and Israel.
Ask The Rabbis | What Should Jews Know About the Muslim Faith?
“I used to think I knew what Islam was about. Yet as I came to know more Muslims personally and learned more about their faith, I realized that much of what I knew was either flat-out wrong or grossly misguided.”
Book Review | The Origin of the Jews: The Quest for Roots in a Rootless Age by Steven Weitzman
As the subtitle of the book says, we live in a rootless age. People everywhere, not just Jews, seek their roots, their ancestry, their genetic makeup. We yearn to discover who we are; alas, our tools are not always up to the task. But there is pleasure in the pursuit, and we should be grateful to Weitzman for being a reliable guide.
Book Review | The Six-Day War: The Breaking of the Middle East by Guy Laron
Guy Laron’s challenging new book, The Six-Day War: The Breaking of the Middle East, is well worth reading even though Laron, a lecturer in international relations at Hebrew University, focuses too much on the war’s international context and, at times, relies too heavily upon unsubstantiated speculation
Palestinian Haute Cuisine Heats Up
“To this day, most Israeli Jews think of Arab food as cheap ‘hummus-chips (french fries)-salad-kebab’—all said as a single word. But it isn’t really Arab food at all.”
Book Review | The Shadow Land by Elizabeth Kostova
Bulgaria. How little thought I had ever given to Bulgaria, but here it is in the vivid, fast-paced, fascinating new novel The Shadow Land by Elizabeth Kostova. Author of the best-selling novel The Historian, Kostova is a writer who knows how to keep you in suspense, to frighten and amaze you, all while building characters whose fate will matter to you more and more as she reveals a whole country, its history, its tragedy, its politics, its scenery and its sad beauty.