31 Dec
2014 January-February, Arts & Culture, Jewish World

Opinion // The Politics and Ethics of Street Tzedakah

By Letty Cottin Pogrebin There are many reasons not to give to the homeless, but we should do it anyway.   When I was young, it was axiomatic among radical leftists that one should resist the humanitarian impulse to give to beggars because handouts “postpone the Revolution.” Only when the poor become utterly hopeless and destitute will they rise up and rebel. I haven't encountered that reasoning for awhile—nowadays, political arguments against giving to the poor are more likely to come from Paul Ryan and his cheerleaders in the House and Senate. But I've heard plenty of excuses for not giving money to homeless people on the streets: · “I can’t give to everyone, can I? There are just too many of them.” · “How do I know they won’t blow the money on drink and drugs?” · “I prefer to give...

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31 Dec
2014 January-February, Arts & Culture, Jewish World

Moment in Music // Michael Bloomfield

By Josh Tapper On February 15, 1981, Michael Bloomfield’s body was discovered in a parked car on a San Francisco side street. The 37-year-old Jewish blues guitar player, one of the most influential of the 1960s, was dead of a drug overdose. The body lay, unrecognized, in the morgue for days. In his heyday, Bloomfield, who would have turned 70 this year and is the subject of a new documentary, Sweet Blues, was the king guitarist of American blues, emulated by Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix and Jerry Garcia, idolized by Carlos Santana and lauded by Bob Dylan, who once called him “the best guitarist I ever heard.” In June 1965, Dylan recruited him for the famously shambolic sessions that produced Like A Rolling Stone—arguably the greatest rock song of all time—and he played with the folk singer during...

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02 Jul
2011 July-August, Arts & Culture, Jewish World

Travels with Pnin

In college, I made the ill-advised decision to join the cross-country ski team. Slow, given to daydreams, and so lacking any sense of direction that my friends had taken to using me as a sort of reverse compass, I wound my way through the woods, miles behind, dreaming of another dreamer: Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin. Growing up in a family of Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union, I first knew Nabokov not as the author of the controversial novel Lolita, but rather as that rare Russian butterfly, the Friend of the Jews. I heard stories about how he ended friendships over anti-Semitic remarks, shopped in Nazi-boycotted Jewish stores, spoke up for Israel and against anti-Semitism. Nabokov had been born into an aristocratic Russian family with a tradition of fighting for Jewish rights. He fled the Bolsheviks for...

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20 Jun
2013 May-June, Arts & Culture, Jewish World

Heart to Heart with Elie Wiesel

Not long ago, I sat down with Holocaust survivor, Nobel Peace Prize winner and Moment co-founder Elie Wiesel for a heart-to-heart talk. In 2011, he underwent emergency open-heart surgery, and in the following year, even the walk from his desk to the couch seemed to tire him. His already soft-spoken voice had become a little too quiet. I hadn’t seen him for a few months and was delighted to see that he once again exuded energy and his eyes had his slightly mischievous sparkle. Back to himself, he was ready to talk about his recent brush with death—which he writes about in his new book, Open Heart.—Nadine Epstein ______________________________________________   "There I wasn’t alone... Here, I was alone in this condition. I knew I could die. I had, of course, as I say, lived in death over there. But...

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11 Jun
2008 November-December, Arts & Culture, Jewish World

Will the Real Shrek Please Stand Up?

Children love Shrek, the sweet green ogre and beloved cartoon character who starred, thanks to DreamWorks, in “his” first flick in 2001. What most don’t know—nor do their parents—is that the word shrek is Yiddish for terror or fear. Why would they? The word isn’t to be found in Leo Rosten’s 1971 classic, Joys of Yiddish, or any of its sequels and is rarely mentioned in other Yiddish-English compendiums. Still, it’s common Yiddish, entering the language from German. In Yiddish it is most frequently used as an adjective, shreklekh, as in shreklekh zach (a terrible thing) or shreklekh imgick (something horrible). Shrek foygl is a scarecrow. The chasm between the word’s actual meaning and today’s charming ogre can be traced to a 1990 children’s book, titled Shrek! by William Steig. Steig, who died in 2003, had...

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20 May
2013 May-June, Arts & Culture, Jewish Word, Jewish World

Jewish Word | Ghetto

Venice, Harlem and Beyond   There are few words that so acutely symbolize discrimination as “ghetto.” It was coined in Venice in 1516 to refer to a segregated, enclosed area of a city where Jews were forced to live. It then came to signify any place where Jews were concentrated and from there an urban minority slum perpetuated by social and economic reasons rather than legal fiat.  In between, the Nazis adopted the term to denote their horrific provisional way stations on the road to extermination. Ghetto’s etymology is uncertain, according to The Oxford English Dictionary. Some scholars claim that it comes from the Italian word gheto or ghet, slag or waste in Venetian dialect. Some argue it originates from gettare, meaning pouring or casting metal, and refers to a foundry where slag was stored on the Venetian...

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20 May
2011 September-October, Arts & Culture, Jewish World

Jews and the San Francisco Gold Rush

In the early 1850s, Adolph Sutro, a cocky young man with a thick walrus moustache, headed west to make his fortune. Originally from Prussia, Sutro had managed his family’s textile factory and immigrated to America in the wake of the 1848 revolutions, which had stirred up fears of renewed anti-Semitism. A born adventurer obsessed with books, machines and outer space, Sutro was unimpressed with Baltimore, where his mother and numerous siblings had settled. Lured by news that gold had been discovered in the American River in California in 1848, Sutro boarded a steamer to Central America, trekked through the jungle to the Pacific, and caught another a ship up the coast. He disembarked in San Francisco, alone and penniless, in 1850. Around the same time, another Prussian-born Jew—Abraham Abrahamsohn—made his way to New York. He arrived...

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09 May
2013 May-June, Arts & Culture, Jewish World

Jewish Routes | Washington, DC

In Celebration of Jewish American Heritage Month Jews have had a major presence in Washington, DC, ever since young land speculator Isaac Polock arrived in 1795 and built six stately homes along present-day Pennsylvania Avenue in Foggy Bottom. These buildings would later house celebrated Americans such as President James Madison and Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of state, William Seward. Jewish merchants, many from Germany, soon followed, selling goods from small establishments along 7th Street to meet the needs of the residents of the nation’s new capital on the Potomac. At first the trickle was slow. In 1843, there weren’t even 10 men to make a minyan at the funeral of the infant son of Captain Alfred Mordechai, the commander of the Washington Arsenal. But by 1852, Jews were plentiful enough to found the city’s first synagogue, the Orthodox...

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