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...
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 // 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.
The Holocaust Through the Eyes of Women
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...
Book Review // Warsaw 1944: Hitler, Himmler, and the Warsaw Uprising
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.
Opinion // Jews Aren’t the Only Ones Marrying Out
By Mark Oppenheimer // Fewer and fewer American religious groups practice endogamy today.
Opinion // Rip-Off Rabbis and Sacred Scammers
By Naomi Ragen // Several high-profile Israeli rabbis have come under fire for less-than-holy schemes.