This summer we lost Elie Wiesel, a great and kind man who was an inspiration to me. Moment has now lost both of its founders, and I, two friends. Without Elie and Leibel—Leonard Fein—it is more important than ever that Moment continue its work and carry on their legacies.
Many will be familiar with Mark Podwal’s black and white drawings for the New York Times Op-Ed page and his Jewish-themed illustrations for books by authors such as Elie Wiesel.
When biblical scholar Elsie Stern lectures about the ancient world at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, the first thing she does is hold up a Bible and tell her students, “For most of the first 3,000 years that these words were around, if you said ‘Bible,’ no one would have any idea what you were talking about.”
On occasion, tectonic shifts occur that break apart continents of political thought and reshape them into new ones
Religious seekers are as old as religion itself. But it wasn’t until mid-20th-century America that there was a full-fledged, organized movement of Jews who moved from less observant to more observant—and a name for them. Behold, the birth of the baal teshuvah.
In the early 20th century, Jews continued to use “goy” when speaking among themselves, but “gentile” became the word of choice in public discourse.
The recent English-language publication of Yitzhak Gormezano Goren’s Alexandrian Summer, writes Juliana Maio, attests to the fact that the story of the Jews of the Arab world, long neglected, is ready to be heard.
