The Great Hanukkah Clanging
Hanukkah was really only about one thing when I was growing up. It wasn’t the presents—they were generally small and unexciting…
Gelt-y Pleasures for All Ages
In the story of Hanukkah—the cruel reign of Antiochus, the unlikely victory of Mattathias and his sons, the one cruse of sacred oil left in the plundered Temple that burned for eight days—there is no mention of money.
Book Review // Anti-Judaism, Antisemitism and Delegitimizing Israel
At the end of the 19th century, European liberals and Zionists developed diametrically opposite strategies for dealing with the menace posed by anti-Semitism…
Book Review // Moonglow
Michael Chabon’s first published works, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and A Model World, were realist, lovely and a little dull with caution. Chabon himself describes his early work as “plotless and sparkling with epiphanic dew,”
Fiction // Turboatom
I wanted to tell my father that the fish salad was shining, but he was asleep, calling my name in long somniloquous moans. I stood at his bedside, the shape of our room made visible by the scarce lights of the Marshal Zhukov Street. Slava! My name rose from his lungs…
Jewish Word // Blitspost (Email), tekstl (text), zikhele (selfie) & more
A lexicographic tour de force, the Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary, published this year by Indiana University Press, is an expedition through the layers of a language spoken by rebbes and poets, nurses and prostitutes, schoolchildren and soldiers…
Opening a Pandora’s Box of Hate
Moment editors Look Back at Presidential Campaign Season 2016. There were an uncomfortable number of Jewish moments, some of which constituted outright anti-Semitism…
Book Review // Judas
Amos Oz’s novel Habesorah Al Pi Yehudah (The Gospel According to Judas), translated by his longtime collaborator, Nicholas de Lange, under the title Judas, opens in the winter of 1959-60, when the life of Shmuel Ash, a graduate student at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, is turned upside down…
Opinion // A Match Made for Divorce
Turkey and Israel this summer formally ended a six-year-long deep freeze in relations, and Turkish-Israeli ties are again flourishing. But there is reason to worry that it won’t be like the good old days…
Opinion // The Western Wall: A Grand Distraction
This fall, the issue of who can worship in what way at the Western Wall returned to the Israeli Supreme Court. In January, the Cabinet had approved a compromise: The area for prayer at the sacred site would be expanded southward…
Opinion // A Prescription for Group Therapy
I’m a groupie. Not the kind who stalks rock stars but the kind who, when intensely interested in an issue, feels compelled either to join a group or to start one. It strikes me, in the wake of this bruising political year, as a felicitous habit…
Book Review // Anti-Judaism, Antisemitism and Delegitimizing Israel
At the end of the 19th century, European liberals and Zionists developed diametrically opposite strategies for dealing with the menace posed by anti-Semitism. Committed to the full integration of the Jews into the diverse societies in which they lived, the liberals tried to combat Jew-hatred through education and political action…