Eetta Prince-Gibson: The Trouble with Drafting the Ultra-Orthodox
Conscripting Haredi men hurts women, the military and Israeli democracy...
Issues
Naomi Ragen: An Orthodox Woman on the Bima
Our columnist leaves her comfort zone and accepts an aliyah for the first time....
Book Review // The Lawgiver
The Greatest Story Ever Retold The Lawgiver Herman Wouk Simon & Schuster 2012, $25.99, pp. 232 The Lawgiver, a new novel by the 97-year-old, Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Herman Wouk, is about a new novel that fails to get written by a 97-year-old, Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist named Herman Wouk. It is honest,...
Book Review // The Invention of the Land of Israel: From Holy Land to Homeland
Pillars of Sand The Invention of the Land of Israel: From Holy Land to Homeland Shlomo Sand Verso Books 2012, $26.95, pp. 304 Shlomo Sand’s latest critique of Jewish identity focuses on the land of Israel. Just as his last book sought to uncover the Invention of the Jewish People,...
Book Review // City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York
The Big (Jewish) Apple City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York Edited by Deborah Dash Moore NYU Press 2012, $99.00, pp. 1108 (3 volumes) Brownsville, where I grew up in the 1950s, was an Americanized shtetl. Nobody feared pogroms, but the wounds of the war in Europe...
2012 Emerging Writers
Meet Johanna Adorján and Adam Schwartz, winners of Moment's annual Emerging Writer awards celebrating up-and-coming literary voices. Fiction winner Adam Schwartz Adam Schwartz is a senior lecturer of creative writing at Wellesley College whose fiction has appeared in The New Yorker. A Stranger on the Planet follows the life of...
Poem // 3AM Nign
3AM Nign she sang as if looking through the magnifying glass lullaby’s every heave, a thesis on slowing down, peeling – each note, a pit assessing its fullness lullaby’s underside, hymn to darkness (sleep no longer a goal but a side-effect) of the dream’s reaffirmed primacy two silences on each side of her amplifying the...
Jewish Word // Dybbuk
A Ghost from Our Past by Sala Levin Fans of the film-making, Minnesota-bred brothers Joel and Ethan Coen were transported back to the old country in the opening scene of the 2009 film A Serious Man. A couple—clad in full shtetl garb—is visited by a man believed...
From the Editor
Is satire educational or does it lead to a shallow understanding of current affairs? Does it weaken the power of news or replace it? Has the state of American politics become so dire that we can only laugh (despairingly) about it? ...
Letty Cottin Pogrebin: Does Birth Control Trump Israel?
Republicans have made Israel their wedge issue. Democrats should make women's rights theirs....