Tom Gjelten
In the 1930s, America failed to stand up to Nazi actions against the Jews. Will history repeat itself with the Uyghur minority in China’s Xinjiang region?
Calvin Trillin, an incomparable reporter, brought his wry, Midwestern Jewish perspective to coverage of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, first for Time magazine and then for The New Yorker. He once observed, tongue in cheek, that it must have been awfully crowded in the South back then “behind the scenes.”
Moment
Nazi hunter and international lawyer Allan Gerson, who represented victim’s families after the Lockerbie bombing, didn’t know his real name until he was 12 years old. Born at the end of World War II, Allan and his family, out of desperation, eventually entered the United States under assumed names. Daniela Gerson, assistant professor of journalism at California State University, Northridge, discusses her father’s book Lies that Matter and what it was like learning about her family’s past secrets. Daniela is in conversation with Robert Siegel, Moment special literary contributor and former senior host of NPR’s All Things Considered.
“Wherever she sat and led the discussion, there was the head of the table.” Thus observed an early associate of Henrietta Szold’s in Hadassah, the powerhouse American women’s Zionist organization that she founded in 1912.
For liberal supporters of Israel, the unresolved status of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza presents a dilemma: a choice between a single state with so many Arab citizens as to inevitably dilute the Jewish character of the country, or the insistence of control over but denial of equal rights to millions of Palestinians, diluting if not destroying Israel’s democratic character.
In the sumptuous catalogue for the New York Jewish Museum’s late summer exhibition, Afterlives: Recovering the Lost Stories of Looted Art, on view through January 9, 2022, a cropped image of French artist Pierre Bonnard’s color-diffused painting Still Life with Guelder Roses appears alongside an army photograph of the salt mine in Altaussee, Austria, where the Nazis secreted looted art and other treasures.
Following the tradition of speaking to Jewish communal leaders on the eve of the High Holidays, President Joe Biden made his first such call last Thursday.
Moment
Explore the exciting connections between art and architecture, ancient and modern, spiritual and utilitarian. Artist and film documentarian Simonida Perica Uth; artist and director emeritus of The Kreeger Museum Judy A. Greenberg; and Georgetown University’s Ori Z. Soltes, author of Tradition and Transformation: Three Millenia of Jewish Art and Architecture will be in conversation with The Moment Gallery founders, Robin Strongin and Nadine Epstein.
As the author of five highly regarded novels, ranging from the award-winning In the Image (2002) to the memorably time-shifting Eternal Life (2018), Dara Horn is recognized as an accomplished fiction writer and as a storyteller who draws inspiration from centuries of Jewish history.
Moment
Everyone wants to be right—in the right way. What’s the line between striving for moral perfection and being a jerk?
What makes a place holy? And who gets to decide? Such abstract questions become concrete and emotional when we talk about Jerusalem.
Naomi Ragen
After 50-something years, and to the astonishment of our children and grandchildren, at the end of June my husband and I packed up our things and left Jerusalem, moving halfway across the country to settle in Zichron Yaakov, a quaint, hilltop village overlooking the sea.
