“I love how Moment expresses the tumult of Jewish thought.”—Elie Wiesel
History
Moment was cofounded in 1975 by Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Elie Wiesel and writer and activist Leonard Fein. They named it in memory of the Yiddish-language daily Der Moment, which was published in Warsaw and read widely in Eastern Europe between 1910 and 1939. “It “lived until it was murdered together with Polish Jewry,” said Wiesel. Read more about Der Moment’s history here. Der Moment is available on microfilm at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
A teacher, activist and author of 57 books, Elie Wiesel is best known for his first, Night, a searing autobiographical account of the horrors he witnessed and endured as a teenager in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Throughout his life, he fought to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive and spoke out against atrocities and genocides around the world. In 1986, the Nobel committee recognized his work by awarding him the Nobel Peace Prize. He passed away in 2016, and to help preserve his memory, MomentBooks created Elie Wiesel: An Extraordinary Life and Legacy. “I love how Moment expresses the tumult of Jewish thought,” he told Moment Editor-in-Chief Nadine Epstein years after he stepped down as the magazine’s founding literary editor.
Leonard Fein was Moment’s founding editor from 1975 to 1986. His editor’s column came alive with his passions—social justice and ending racism and poverty, Judaism, Israel and the American Jewish community. He also founded Mazon: A Jewish Response to Hunger and the National Jewish Coalition for Literacy. He died in 2014 and to help preserve his memory, MomentBooks published a collection of his writings in Leonard Fein: Vision and Passion.
Between 1986 and 2004, lawyer and biblical archeologist Hershel Shanks was Moment’s editor and publisher. Although no women held the top editorship until 2004, women such as Carol Kur and Suzanne Singer shaped Moment throughout the decades.
Nadine Epstein is Moment’s editor-in-chief and CEO and executive director of the Washington, DC-based Center for Creative Change. A long-time journalist, she came to Moment in 2003 and took over the leadership of magazine in 2004. Epstein speaks and leads conversations internationally about women’s rights and voices, gender equity, antisemitism and prejudice, the Black-Jewish relationship, listening and community-building, leadership, Jewish genealogy and genetics, history, the arts, and other topics. She’s been interviewed by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, All Things Considered and Al-Jazeera, among other media outlets. Her writing spans an eclectic range of topics and includes books such as RBG’s Brave and Brilliant Women: 33 Jewish Women to Inspire Everyone and Elie Wiesel: An Extraordinary Life and Legacy. Her articles, essays and op-eds on a multitude of subjects have been published in a wide range of publications including The Washington Post, Smithsonian, Newsweek and The New York Times. A recipient of a Knight-Wallace Fellowship at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, she has taught journalism and creative writing and holds degrees in international relations from the University of Pennsylvania and was a university fellow in the political science doctoral program at Columbia University. She is also an artist and the creator of the iShadow Project. Read more about her here.
Sarah Breger is Moment’s editor, having started as a Rabbi Harold S. White Fellow in 2009. She is also the director of the Daniel Pearl Investigative Journalism Initiative. While at Moment she has won numerous awards, including first place for Religion Reporting of the Year from the Religion News Association and first place for Best In-Depth Newswriting on Religion from the American Academy of Religion. She is a graduate of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and the University of Pennsylvania. Read her writing here.