Comic | Learning to Dance with AI
For the past seven years, I’ve been writing and drawing a book about Artificial Intelligence, specifically about a large language model built from a family archive.
Literary Moment | Traveling the Land, Book in Hand
It is very difficult to come up with a catalog of books for a literary tour of Israel. No matter how long the list, there will always be disagreements and arguments about the canon, what is included and what is left out.
On Poetry | Nelly Sachs and the Poetry of Flight
Sachs dropped the masks that had let her speak through the murdered Jews of Europe and wrote from her own position in the world.
The Stars of David that Aren’t
Violins decorated with mother-of-pearl six-pointed stars have gained popularity and value with claims of Jewish or Holocaust origins. What do the experts say?
Visual Moment | Sacred Art from an Italian Ghetto
In the middle of the 18th century in the city of Ancona on the Adriatic coast of central Italy, a young Jewish girl, about age 15, produced a stunning work of embroidery.
Italian Jews: Rome, the Renaissance and Beyond
A new museum in the medieval city of Ferrara illuminates more than two millennia of history. But it has yet to directly grapple with the Holocaust.
Author Interview | Biographer Zachary Leader on Saul Bellow
With publication of the second and final volume of his monumental biography of Saul Bellow, Zachary Leader, a professor of English literature at the University of Roehampton in London, has completed a decade-long immersion in Bellow’s life and letters.
Book Review | In Search of Israel: The History of an Idea by Michael Brenner
Brenner’s In Search of Israel: The History of an Idea chronicles the competing ambitions to preserve and nourish Jews and Judaism in safety, embraced by an array of Jewish thinkers and leaders from the late 19th century into the present. Would it be by assimilating into the dominant culture, as the Jewish German foreign minister Walther Rathenau argued?
Interview: Steven Volynets
Born in Soviet Ukraine, Steven Volynets immigrated to the United States as a child. He turned to literature after several years as a journalist. Moment spoke with him about his new story, his childhood in Russia and his evolution as a writer.
Jewish Word // Glitch
Technology inexplicably fails us often enough to need a word for the occasion, and glitch has slipped in to fill the void. Newspaper headlines routinely illustrate the word’s versatility and popularity. When thousands of travelers find themselves stranded: “Computer glitch cancels East Coast flights.” When a much-anticipated website launch screeches to a halt: “HealthCare.gov’s glitches prompt…
Author Interview // Jennifer Weiner
What makes great literature? Do Jeffrey Eugenides and Stephen King write beach reads or books worthy of the canon—or both? And where do women writers fit in? One of the biggest advocates for breaking down barriers between popular and critically revered books is a writer whose trademark is creating quirky Jewish women who worry about their weight and eventually find true love—and themselves in the process.
