When Charlotte (called Lotte by her family) was eight years old, her mother died. At the time she was told the cause was influenza—the truth was kept a carefully guarded secret.
The epigram, “They tried to kill us. We survived. Let’s eat!” sometimes serves as a tongue-in-cheek synopsis of Jewish holidays: Passover, for example, recounts the original Jewish survival story in an extended banquet punctuated by four cups of wine.
No reporter likes to be sucked into a story she’s covering. But when a Washington Post article late last year quoted two law clerks by name who said that Judge Alex Kozinski of the Ninth Federal Circuit Court of Appeals had shown them pornography in his chambers, while four other unnamed women described other inappropriate behavior by the judge, Dahlia Lithwick decided to speak up.
Moment
Elliot Burg
I decided to to seek out and capture images of the place in Eastern Europe where my Jewish grandfather and namesake Eli (pronounced “Ellie”) had come from.
Zionism has always been a fiercely ideological movement. Socialist Labor Zionism gave rise to Israel’s Labor Party and to many of Israel’s best-known leaders, such as David Ben-Gurion, Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin.
Dara Horn’s new novel, Eternal Life, imagines two characters who have made a sacred pact that consigns them to lives that will never end. Tethered to wearying and repetitive perpetuity, they cannot encounter the crossover from purpose to purposelessness that my mother-in-law experienced.
Diane Cole
“I have these vocal cords. Two,” the singer Art Garfunkel writes near the start of his intriguing book of impressionistic musings about his life, “They have vibrated with the love of sound since I was five and began to sing with the sense of God’s gift running through me.”
President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and direct the State Department to begin moving the U.S. embassy there has given rise to a slew of commentary.
What is the role of Jewish law in the life of a Jewish state? The question might seem abstract, but the Knesset has been debating it heatedly for months, often in discussions that deteriorate into shouting matches.
Misogyny has deeply shaped me, and nearly stifled me. From growing up in a Jewish world where boys were golden, to pursuing an academic and journalism career rife with outright gender discrimination, to taking over the old boys’ club that was Moment in 2004, I found that men around me too often treated me as if I were a child or their lover.
