Jewish Word | Maven
“Maven” is a relatively new transplant into American English. Written references to the word begin to increase in the mid-1960s and continued to rise through the early 2000s, according to Google Ngrams, which charts words’ popularity in books over time.
Morocco: Echoes From the Jewish Quarter
Signs of that Jewish community, once the largest in the Arab world, are everywhere—if you know where to look.
What is The Meaning of God Today?
Moment asks a diverse group of philosophers, scientists, writers, artists & clergy the age-old question that never gets old.
Ask The Rabbis | Should Jews at the Seder Ask God to Smite Our Enemies?
Why I’m Inviting an Asylum Seeker to My Seder
At every Passover seder of my childhood, my father Gershon Glausiusz would break the middle matzah, as the Haggadah instructed, place one half in an embroidered bag, and fling the bag over his shoulder, saying, “This is how we carried our possessions when we went into exile.” He was talking of his own deportation…
Benjamin Franklin’s Midrash
Like fanfic authors today, Franklin extended a beloved text in a direction that fulfilled his vision of it, that satisfied his questions and fired his imagination. In other words, he wrote midrash.
Fifty Years Later, the Battle That Never Ended
The core idea behind that operation, and many others to follow, was the belief that we Israelis can solve our dispute with the Palestinians by first vanquishing them in the battlefield. If only we’ll be stronger militarily—if not morally—the problem will somehow solve itself. Of course, it never did.
Ten Sephardic Films to Watch Today
As the 2018 edition of the festival wound to a close last week, we asked Sara Nodjoumi, the festival’s artistic director and producer of The Iran Job, among other films, to tell us about her favorite Sephardic films.
The Epic Battle In Hollywood Over The Holy Land
In The City Where Myths Are Made, The Israeli And Palestinian Storyline Is Always In Rewrite.
Book Review | Mapping the Bones by Jane Yolen
Although a work of fiction, Mapping the Bones has enough of a historical basis to make it read like a convincing survivor’s account, one that does the essential work of bearing witness to a tattered and bloody past.
Book Review | In Search of Israel: The History of an Idea by Michael Brenner
Brenner’s In Search of Israel: The History of an Idea chronicles the competing ambitions to preserve and nourish Jews and Judaism in safety, embraced by an array of Jewish thinkers and leaders from the late 19th century into the present. Would it be by assimilating into the dominant culture, as the Jewish German foreign minister Walther Rathenau argued?