02 Jan
2013 January-February, Arts & Culture, Jewish World, Talk of the Table

Notable Cookbooks

From Brooklyn to Jerusalem to the Greek isles, a new batch of Jewish cookbooks takes you on a whirlwind tour of Jewish gastronomy. The Mile End Cookbook by Noah and Rae Bernamoff Hipster deli: Maybe the two words seem incongruous. But the Bernamoffs of Brooklyn’s Montreal-inspired Mile End Deli bring them together. Noah’s scruffy beard, Rae’s cat-eye glasses and the couple’s do-it-yourself approach to traditional Jewish foods establish their hipster cred; their smoked meat sandwiches, pickled beets and whitefish salad take care of the deli part. Their Mile End Cookbook brings retro back. With essays contributed from leaders of the nouveau deli movement, the book takes a philosophical approach: “Without tradition you’ll never be able to innovate, and without innovation you’ll never really be able to revive your traditions.”   Jewish Cookery Book by Esther Levy Everything old is new again: The...

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02 Jan
2013 January-February, Ask the Rabbis, Jewish World

Ask the Rabbis: Does Jewish anxiety have a theological basis?

INDEPENDENT Anxiety is a universal human malady that strikes when we find ourselves at the crossroads of choice-making, equipped with several hefty wagonloads of relativities and barely a handful of absolutes.  It was not into the light of clarity that Moses journeyed for his encounter with God, but into the Great Cloud of Obscurity.  There he received two chunks of rock etched with divine absolutes. But by the time he returned to camp, the batteries had worn out, and the divine absolutes became an endless stream of possible interpretations and applications that continue to perplex us to this day. We live in the misty chasm of the most oft-repeated word in the Torah: “And.” It is in the struggle with the “and” that we grow; in grappling with the faded boundaries between clear and unclear, we...

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31 Dec
2008 January-February, Arts & Culture, Jewish World

Uncle Xenon: The Elemental Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks opens the door of his lower Manhattan apartment himself because his assistant, Kate Edgar, is in the emergency room with a twisted ankle. He looks somewhat befuddled, although he is expecting us. He is neither tall nor short, slightly round in the middle and wearing a button-down shirt, one middle button undone. His shyness, which is legendary, is evident from the moment he greets us, as he steps back awkwardly to make room for us to come inside. My 15-year-old son Noah is with me, skipping school for the opportunity to meet the writer behind The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, An Anthropologist on Mars, the new Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain and other volumes. Using the old-fashioned but powerful technique of medical narrative, with patients as heroes, Sacks’s work has bridged the...

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28 Dec
2014 January-February, Jewish World

Summer Programs 2014 Guide

Camp Airy and camp Louise Situated in the rolling hills of Western Maryland, Camp Airy for boys and Camp Louise for girls provide overnight camping for Jewish children. Together, we are the only brother-sister Jewish overnight camps in the country. With grade levels spanning 2nd-12th, we make sure to provide new opportunities that challenge campers to reach new heights. Our dynamic program includes: extreme sports, skate boarding, go karts, paintball, arts and crafts, drama, dance, music, outdoor living, swimming, etc. Rookie camp now available for campers entering grades 2 or 3. Call 410-466- 9010, email airlou@airylouise.org, or visit airylouise.org to learn more. Camp Pembroke, A Cohen Camp For Girls The only all-girls, trans-denominational Jewish camp in New England, Camp Pembroke is a unique sisterhood and spirited community.  Located near Cape Cod, Pembroke offers a classic summer of fun, sun, arts,...

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28 Dec
2013 January-February, Arts & Culture, Jewish World

Book Review | Black Jews in Africa and the Americas

How to Be Black and Jewish Tudor Parfitt Harvard University Press 2013,  $29.95, pp. 232 Tudor Parfitt’s last book, Search for the Lost Ark, was a scholarly romp through history and linguistics—an adventure story that ended where his latest book begins: the remarkable discovery that male members of a black African tribe, the Lemba, carried the genes of the priestly caste of ancient Jews, the Cohanim. Currently living in Zimbabwe, far from their Middle Eastern origin, the Lemba practice a number of customs that resemble those of ancient Hebrews. But it was their claim to have an “ark” that caught Parfitt’s attention and led him to wonder if they might actually be descendants of an early Jewish community—a belief later confirmed by DNA studies. Whether Lemba customs (including wearing yarmulkes) were simply local developments—what anthropologists call “independent...

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28 Jul
2012 July-August, Issues, Jewish World

Genia Brin’s Double Parkinson’s Mutation

Eugenia Brin was 48 when she first noticed that her left leg was dragging. It took two years for doctors finally to diagnose her with early onset Parkinson’s disease, because she didn’t have tremors or other easily identifiable symptoms. The diminutive Brin, trained as an applied mathematician in the Soviet Union and then working as a meteorological analyst at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, knew there was no cure for the degenerative disorder of the central nervous system, which affects about one in every 250 people over 40 and more than one in 100 in people over 65. All she could do was work with her physicians to find the right combination of drugs and dosages to help relieve the symptoms—at least temporarily. In 2008, she was tested through 23andMe, a start-up launched by...

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28 Jul
2012 July-August, Issues, Jewish World

From the Managing Editor

I was nervous when I answered the phone call from Bennett Greenspan, president and CEO of the genetic testing company Family Tree DNA. As part of this special issue dedicated to genes and religion, a few of us at Moment swabbed our cheeks and sent off our DNA samples to ascertain our family origins. I already felt secure in my historical roots, a lineage that places me as a ninth-generation descendant of the Baal Shem Tov with Rashi and King David as ancestors. But still, I didn’t know what to expect, or what this testing would tell me specifically about my family tree. Going over the results with Greenspan, I learned that our opinion editor Amy Schwartz’s ancestral line is one of the oldest, thought to go back about 60,000 years and originating in Africa before...

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05 Dec
2011 March-April, Arts & Culture, Jewish World

From the Editor

Nearly three years ago, I met a 90-year-old woman from Cleveland named Eva Rosenberg who told me her story—and that of her late husband Milton Rosenberg. In 1950, one month after Julius Rosenberg was arrested for spying for the Soviet Union, Eva’s husband and his colleague, Sidney Rosenberg—neither of whom were communists or had any association with Julius Rosenberg—were both dismissed from their engineering jobs at the U.S. Army Signal Corps at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. These were innocent men—with the wrong name at the wrong time in the wrong place—who had to fight to redeem their reputations—and their jobs. They eventually got their positions back, but neither spoke publicly about what had happened. Eva Rosenberg remains afraid—even after all these years—that bringing this story to light might lead the federal government to revoke her...

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