In this time of corrective unnamings—to remove traces of admiration or gratitude for the morally reevaluated—the names of unrepentant slaveholders, Confederate generals, contemporary sexual predators and other assorted wrongdoers have been erased or proposed for erasure from college dorms, military bases, city streets and more.
How did the Satmar Hasidim come to dominate the Brooklyn neighborhood known as Williamsburg?
At the Museum at Eldridge Street’s Egg Rolls, Egg Creams and Empanadas street festival—a celebration of Ashkenazi Jewish, Chinese and Puerto Rican communities held each summer (pre-pandemic) on New York’s Lower East Side—groups of Chinese Americans and American Jewish women play mahjong side by side, sometimes pausing to teach younger festivalgoers how to play.
Even those familiar with the prolific English novelist and essayist Jenny Diski (1947-2016) don’t think of her as primarily a “Jewish” writer.
In March, Franklin Graham, the culture warrior evangelist and vociferous defender of former President Donald Trump, urged Christians to get the COVID-19 vaccine.
Not as an abstract principle, true any time, but I approve of the tax and spending program proposed by President Biden, and I’m prepared to defend it on moral grounds.
Paul Barrett’s practical concerns about applying the First Amendment online are well-taken, but constitutional law demands this result in certain cases.
Modern Hebrew, especially military and political jargon, tends to reflect the state of the nation.
A glutton for punishment, I recently slogged my way through all 316 online comments attached to a New York Times piece in which two Howard University officials, Brandon Hogan and Jacoby Adeshei Carter, defended themselves against the accusation by Cornel West and Jeremy Tate in The Washington Post that their decision to eliminate Howard University’s classics department to save money was a “spiritual catastrophe.”
Back to normal can be a blessing—as it is for a vaccinated public after COVID-19.
In the years between World War I and World War II, American society became increasingly xenophobic and prejudiced against minorities; these years also are considered the apogee of American antisemitism. One man, perhaps more than any other, played an outsized role in disseminating it. His name was Henry Ford.
In 1942 the Nazis came close to conquering the Middle East during World War II. Gershom Gorenberg , an award-winning journalist and author, spent years researching and piecing together the truth about Rommel’s army and just how close it was to Cairo and Tel Aviv. He will discuss his new book, War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East, and share the journey that took him around the world to learn more about this fascinating story of espionage and intrigue. Gershom will be in conversation with former CBS News correspondent and Moment contributor Dan Raviv.
