The Secret History of X & O
An investigation into the religious roots of the symbols for hugs & kisses.
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.
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...
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.
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...
Opinion | Why Democracy in Egypt Still Matters
By Tamara Cofman Wittes
The United States needs to accept that the days of one-man rule are gone forever.
Three years after the hopeful scenes of the Arab...
Opinion | Israel’s Unresolved Democracy Problem
By Marshall Breger
How can the Palestinians recognize a Jewish state if Israelis don’t know what that means?
In 1958, David Ben-Gurion wrote to 47 leading Jewish...
Opinion | Do We Still Need an Arbiter of Anti-Semitism?
By Sarah Posner
The time has passed when one person can speak for the entire community.
When Abraham Foxman, the longtime national director of the Anti-Defamation League,...
Book Review: A Child of Christian Blood, The Devil That Never Dies
Richard Bernstein reviews two new works on anti-Semitism by Edmund Levin and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen.
Book Review // Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books
Life Beyond Portnoy
By Alan Stone
Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books
Claudia Roth Pierpont
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
2013, pp. 353, $27.00
Philip Roth’s pen has finally run dry, and...
Jewish Word // Philistine
How Philistine Became a Dirty Word
by Caitlin Yoshiko Kandil
It’s a story nearly everyone knows: The young shepherd boy uses nothing but his wits and a slingshot...
Sports Moment // Wrestling with the Ghosts of Olympics Past
With the Winter Olympics set to open in Sochi, Russia, in February, Moment’s Josh Tapper talks to David Wallechinsky, author of The Complete Book of the Olympics and president of the International Society of Olympic Historians.