31 Mar
2012 May/June, From the Editor, Issues, Opinion, Topics

From the Editor

By Nadine Epstein Hannah Brown of Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, loves Moment but has a complaint: Too few women are included in Moment symposiums such as the one in January/February that asked, “What Does It Mean to Be Pro-Israel Today?” Brown is absolutely right. After doing the math, we found that in 2011, only 27 percent of our symposium participants were women. How’s that possible? You can’t chalk it up to the “old boys’ club.” After all, I am one of the few women editors of a thought-leader magazine, Jewish or not. There are a few others—including The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel and Tina Brown of Newsweek— but if you don’t believe me, check out the mastheads of The New Republic, The Weekly Standard, Commentary, Tikkun or The Atlantic. Yet despite Moment’s strong roster of female editors, we still include fewer women’s voices than we would...

Continue reading

05 Mar
2012 March-April, Israel, Issues, Opinion, Topics, U.S. Politics

Nathan Guttman: Is the American Right too Right for Israel?

By Nathan Guttman This election cycle has officially ended the decades-long debate over whether Israel should be an American campaign issue. For better or worse, it is. We’ve grown used to hearing Israel mentioned in every televised debate and every stump speech, whether to a Jewish crowd in Florida or an evangelical audience in South Carolina. We’ve heard Republican candidates slamming President Obama for what they see as mistreatment of Israel, or, as Mitt Romney has said, “throwing Israel under the bus.” It’s always great to be the center of attention. But in truth, Israel has nothing to gain from this debate. Republican claims and Democratic counter-claims both put Israel and its leaders in awkward positions. For instance, the entire Israeli leadership, including President Shimon Peres, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, is now...

Continue reading

05 Mar
2012 March-April, Israel, Issues, Opinion, Religion, Topics

Naomi Ragen: The Ultra-Orthodox’ PR Problem

By Naomi Ragen The cultural divide in Israel between Haredi and secular Jews has reached new extremes. In December, Haredi men spat upon a terrified eight-year-old girl, Naama Margolese, as she made her way to a Haredi-opposed national religious girls school in Beit Shemesh—a school the Haredim claimed was purposely and provocatively zoned on land in their neighborhood. A few days later, a female soldier riding up front in a bus in Ramat Eshkol was verbally attacked by a Haredi father of ten who called her a “whore.” She replied that she was protecting him. He responded that his Torah learning was protecting her. Police were eventually called in, and the man found himself behind bars. More recently, a female employee of Israel’s lottery putting up posters in Beit Shemesh found herself stoned, her car windshield smashed,...

Continue reading

05 Mar
2012 March-April, Culture, Issues, Opinion, Topics

Clifford D. May: Are We Too Fair-minded to Take Our Own Side?

By Clifford D. May In the 20th century, a war was waged against the Jews of Europe. It culminated in the Holocaust. In the 21st century, a war is being waged against the Jews of the Middle East. How that turns out will depend in large measure on whether people in the Middle East, Europe and America stand up to resurgent anti-Semitism. At the moment, there’s little basis for confidence. In Iran, Egypt, the West Bank, Gaza and other corners of the Middle East, what is now routinely said and written about Jews is indistinguishable from what the Nazis said and wrote about Jews in the 1930s. Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, recently called Israel “a cancerous tumor,” adding, “And it will be removed.” In Europe, anti-Semites are generally more sophisticated. They don’t call for the Jewish...

Continue reading

05 Mar
2012 March-April, From the Editor, Issues, Opinion, Topics

From The Editor

By Nadine Epstein Welcome to our Messiah Issue! The specter of a messiah is alive and well in the 21st century. We may not think of it in these terms, but many of us are wishing for someone to swoop in and fix America’s economy, secure Israel’s future, eradicate suffering and make the world a better place. Not surprisingly, then, the Messiah is a daily presence in politics. How many people do you know who have expressed disappointment in President Barack Obama because he hasn’t met their expectations to transform the American political system in his first term? I am sure you know at least one, probably many more. They are engaging in messianic thinking by projecting their hopes onto one man (females don’t seem to be taken seriously as messianic figures) who they hope will bring about...

Continue reading

05 Jan
2012 January-February, Issues, Opinion, Religion, U.S. Politics

Jeffrey Rosen: High Stakes for Church and State Separation

By Jeffrey Rosen Of all the issues that could be significant in the 2012 presidential election, the future of church-state separation hasn’t gotten much attention. It should however, because in the Republican primaries so far, it’s striking how vigorously nearly all of the candidates—and not just those favored by the Tea Party—have questioned the constitutional basis of the separation of church and state. From Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry to Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney, the leading candidates have endorsed a Tea Party vision of religious supremacy, which holds that the Supreme Court in the 1960s was wrong to prevent the government from sponsoring sectarian prayers in school and other open endorsements of religion over secularism. Since the next president could appoint a Supreme Court justice who might tilt the Court further to the right on matters...

Continue reading

07 Oct
2010 July-August, Israel, Opinion, Religion

Israel’s Women Are Forced to the Back of the Bus

Back in 2003 I took a bus from downtown Jerusalem to my home in the northern suburb of Ramot, a mixed secular and modern Orthodox neighborhood. One stop into the ride, a large, sweating haredi man hung over me threateningly, demanding that I move to the back of the bus. My astonished refusal was met with a fusillade of disgusting verbal abuse almost the entire ride. Soon after, I described my experience in a Jerusalem Post article, including the disrespectful and dismissive response of the Egged bus company, which sent me a form letter insisting no such buses existed and that all seating on public buses was “voluntary.” I called it “Egged and the Taliban.” From then on, I took taxis. Fortunately, about four years later, I received an e-mail from Orly Erez-Likhovski, an attorney with Israel...

Continue reading

Pages: 1 2
04 Oct
2010 January-February, Opinion, U.S. Politics

Marshall Breger: Gay Activists vs. the First Amendment

Whatever the ultimate success of the movement for same sex marriage, one would hope that its adherents would be sensitive to the political and religious rights of their opponents. This does not seem to be the case. Proposition 8, a successful voter-initiated California constitutional amendment that recognized only marriages between “one man and one woman,” has prompted a great deal of intolerant behavior on the part of same sex marriage advocates. The proposition’s opponents created a “California Against Hate” website that “outed” contributors to the “anti” campaign, using a state election law that requires political campaigns to list their donors. The result was that some donors were forced out of their jobs. The website eightmaps.com—whose organizers tellingly remain anonymous—went as far as providing aerial views of the donors’ homes. Many of those listed found their homes...

Continue reading

Pages: 1 2
«‹161718