Jewish World Archives - Page 40 of 44

04 Mar

2014 March/April, Ask the Rabbis, Jewish World

Ask the Rabbis // Contraception

July 25, 2019
By Amy E. Schwartz
0 comments

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 (Talmud Bav’li, Yevamot 65b; Mahar’shal in Yam Shel Shlomo 1:8). The injunction to “Be fruitful and multiply,” the ancient rabbis ruled, does not apply to women, because the Torah does not ask someone to do something that might endanger his or her life and health. On the other hand, a man who has not yet brought children into the world (ideally at least one of each gender) may not use contraception unless the woman he is with faces some sort of danger to her life or health. Coitus interruptus in the course of lovemaking, however, is permitted if its intent is incidental and not deliberately intended to prevent pregnancy (Tosefot...

03 Mar

2014 March/April, Jewish World

Opinion | Do We Still Need an Arbiter of Anti-Semitism?

May 30, 2017
By Sarah Posner
1 comment

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, announced he would retire in 2015, the inevitable speculation about who might succeed him quickly yielded to consensus: Foxman, who has served the ADL for 50 years, more than half of them as national director, is irreplaceable. That conclusion is spot-on, and not just because Foxman is a one-of-a-kind personality, one who cemented the ADL’s reputation as a leader fighting for civil rights and religious tolerance and against bigotry and hate. The ADL shouldn’t try to replace Foxman because the role he created for himself has failed to keep up with fundamental changes in American Jewish attitudes, particularly with increasingly diverse views on what it means to be “pro-Israel.” Foxman has long been...

11 Feb

2014 January-February, Arts & Culture, Jewish World

Book Review // Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books

May 30, 2017
By Alan A. Stone
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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 he has announced his retirement. As if to commemorate that event, Claudia Roth Pierpont—no relation, but a good friend and a superb writer—has produced this brilliant literary biography, Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books. Her project, which began as an essay for The New Yorker, where she’s a staff writer, grew into this extraordinary, encompassing account as the dialogue between the two writers deepened into friendship and mutual admiration. Roth, as anyone who has met him can tell you, is an amazingly charming man. One can sense this on every page of Roth Unbound. That said, Pierpont’s literary judgments are exacting: One comes away from her book with the...

06 Feb

2014 January-February, Jewish Word, Jewish World

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 to take down a giant, sword-wielding warrior. As the First Book of Samuel describes, Goliath stood nearly 10-feet tall, wearing a bronze helmet and a coat of armor, carrying a javelin, spear and sword over his shoulders. Every morning he emerged from his camp to taunt the Israelites: “Give me a man and let us fight each other!” Throughout the story—in which David accepts the challenge—Goliath’s name is rarely used, and he is instead referred to by his tribal affiliation—Philistine. The Philistines are portrayed throughout the Bible as the archenemies of the Israelites: In Genesis, they are the ones who destroyed Abraham’s wells by filling them with dirt, and later, in...

30 Jan

2014 January-February, Arts & Culture, Jewish World

Sports Moment // Wrestling with the Ghosts of Olympics Past

July 30, 2021
By Josh Tapper
2 comments

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.

28 Jan

2014 January-February, Jewish World

The Holocaust Through the Eyes of Women

May 30, 2017
By Eileen Lavine
1 comment

For the first four decades after the Holocaust, most memoirs and historical studies viewed life in the camps through male eyes. But since the early 1980s, scholars in the emerging and controversial field of gender and Holocaust studies have encouraged female survivors to tell their stories. One early pioneer in the field, Myrna Goldenberg, professor emerita at Montgomery College, Maryland, has co-edited a new book entitled Different Horrors, Same Hell: Gender and the Holocaust. Moment’s senior editor Eileen Lavine speaks with Goldenberg about how including women's stories has altered our perception of the Holocaust. Why concentrate on female narratives? Examining what happened to women challenges some of the traditional assumptions and interpretations about the Holocaust. For example, why were the Nazis so preoccupied with sex, why were women subject to different and more humiliating types of treatment...

27 Jan

2014 January-February, Arts & Culture, Jewish World

Book Review // Warsaw 1944: Hitler, Himmler, and the Warsaw Uprising

May 30, 2017
By Konstanty Gebert
4 comments

By Konstanty Gebert. Over the past few years, a series of books has brought to the attention of English-speaking readers the morally challenging, historically important and often overlooked or forgotten story of the Polish contribution to the Allied war effort in World War II, and of the terrible fate of the Poles under German rule.