In Genesis, God granted humans dominion over animals. In modern times, that dominion has spawned one of the planet’s biggest threats: a livestock industry that spews greenhouse gases, guzzles resources and renders the lives of billions of animals brutish and short. Last August, vexed by the problem, a Dutch physiologist named Mark Post came up with a solution: a burger no cow had to die for. He called it the “test-tube burger.”
Did you ever wonder about the origin of the distinctive round thermostat that regulates the temperature in your home? Or how about the pink Princess phone every teenage girl once coveted or those eye-catching images that promoted such films as The Man with the Golden Arm, Anatomy of a Murder or Exodus? All these items, it turns out, are evidence of the vital role that Jewish architects, designers and patrons played in the development and dissemination of modernism in America.
Not so long ago, American Jewish children learned from their parents to love the State of Israel. Even secular, assimilated American Jews gave their kids charity boxes to collect nickels and dimes to plant trees there, as the parents do in Woody Allen’s 1987 film Radio Days. But that was a time when Jews remembered the tragedy of the ship St. Louis, with its hundreds of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazis and not a single country willing to take them in.
Since last October, more than 57,000 unaccompanied children—twice as many as the previous year—have crossed our borders illegally. Unsurprisingly, the flood has raised conflicting attitudes among Americans.
This summer and fall, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is highlighting the little-known Pre-Raphaelites in the exhibit, “The Pre-Raphaelite Legacy: British Art and Design” (through October 26).
It has been almost two weeks of unrest since the shooting death of Michael Brown by a police officer in
Creating art from the events of the Holocaust remains as daunting as ever. Soon, those awful events will move beyond the reach of living memory while the need for testimony grows more pressing, not less. But the responsibilities of art are different from those of history: Theodor Adorno’s much-misrepresented dictum that “it is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz” can simply be used as a lazy shorthand for refusing to engage with difficult and challenging creations.
by Avihu Zakai Edward Said (1935-2003), Palestinian-American scholar, activist, and for many years Professor of English and Comparative Literature at
Each week, we’ll share what Moment editors are reading and watching, from news to novels. Here, Moment senior editor Dina Gold,
How has Jewish thinking influenced science? Moment poses the question to scientists and scholars Yehuda Bauer, Jonathan Ben-Dov, Edward Bormashenko, Jeremy Brown, Allison Coudert, Noah Efron, Shmuel Feiner, Gad Freudenthal, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Susan Greenfield, Menachem Kellner, Daniel Matt, Judea Pearl, Jonathan Sacks, Gerald Schroeder, Howard Smith, Hermona Soreq, Moshe Tendler and Yossi Vardi.
“Qatar does not support Hamas, Qatar supports the Palestinians,” Qatari Foreign Minister Dr. Khalid Al Attiyah declared in a CNN interview that aired
While teaching modern Hebrew in England and the United States, Norman Berdichevsky got a shock. Many of his students, he
