08 Aug
2011 January-February, Arts & Culture, Talk of the Table, World

Voila! French Jewish Food Arrives!

Joan Nathan, the queen of Jewish American and Israeli cookbooks, takes to the old continent in her new book, Quiches, Kugels and Couscous: My Search for Jewish Cooking in France. Nathan returns to the country where she spent several years of her youth and wends her way through cities and small villages, tasting treasured family recipes and collecting stories hitherto untold. Nathan talks with Moment’s Eileen Lavine about the little-known culinary world of French Jews. Did Jews influence French cooking? Through their travels, Jewish explorers, merchants and peddlers brought salted and dried fish, grains and spices to France. During the Inquisition, many Jews fled Spain to Bayonne in southwestern France, bringing with them coffee beans and a tradition for making chocolate. At first, chocolate was a liquid remedy for ailments, but it soon became a luxury food, and...

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13 May
2011 January-February, Issues, World

The Film that Launched a Thousand Court Cases

Few films have packed as much punch for American political culture as Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 The Ten Commandments. With the Cold War shifting into high gear and a fervent anti-communist patriotism sweeping the nation, the film burst onto the scene at a time when religion—Christianity in particular—became a central rallying point, pitting America’s “divine purpose” against “godless Communists.” Enter DeMille, a director with a penchant for the spectacular, who released the nearly four-hour remake of his 1923 silent film of the same name, this one starring Charlton Heston as Moses and Yul Brynner as Pharoah Ramses II, not to mention Anne Baxter, Edward G. Robinson, John Carradine, Vincent Price and many other top actors of the time. The Ten Commandments is “one of the most significant epic films ever made,” in part because it tapped...

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03 Jan
2013 January-February, World

Inside Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood

Two years after the dawn of the Arab Spring and six months after Mohamed Morsi was elected president, democracy is still a work in progress in Egypt. Moment’s Daphna Berman talks with Eric Trager of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.   What is the origin of the Muslim Brotherhood? It was founded in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna, a schoolteacher. The goal was to create a vanguard that could Islamize all its members, then society and the state and from there, pursue a regional Islamic order. The Brotherhood has two streams of thought: One is called Duat la Qudat, which means preachers, not judges. These are people who want to focus on social services, outreach and preaching, not politics. The second stream is called the Qutbists, named for Sayyid Qutb, who believed the Brotherhood should be a...

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16 Nov
2011 March-April, World

Anti-Muslim Discrimination in Post 9/11 America

Muslims have replaced Jews as targets of discrimination During the 1940s and 1950s, some Jewish scientists were stripped of their security clearances, causing them to lose their jobs or be downgraded to lower-security projects. One of the most famous cases was that of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, known as the “father of the atom bomb,” who lost his clearance in 1954 because he had belonged to a group that also included communist members. “I think it is desirable that the U.S. population, especially its younger members, be reminded of that historical hysteria,” says Edward Gerjuoy, emeritus professor of physics at University of Pittsburgh and a former chair of the American Physical Society Committee on the International Freedom of Scientists. Today, Muslims are more likely than Jews to lose security clearances, says Sheldon Cohen, a security clearance lawyer...

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Roma Girl
17 Jul
2011 July-August, Arts & Culture, World

Invisible Roma

Tied together through Romani, their mother tongue, and loosely organized in insular tribes, the Roma have traditionally served as craftsmen, musicians or seasonal hired hands, and have a reputation throughout Europe as thieves and swindlers. In an era when Europe’s birth rates have fallen to record lows, their numbers are exploding.

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