01 Dec
2014 November/December, Jewish Culture and Traditions - Moment Magazine

Book Review // The Talmud: A Biography Banned, Censored and Burned…The Book They Couldn’t Suppress

Full disclosure: I am not a biblical or Talmudic scholar. As a professor of literature, I have taught selections from the Bible in humanities courses. I think of myself as a secular humanist and an agnostic interested in understanding the role of religion in the lives of millions of people.

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01 Dec
2014 November/December, Jewish Culture and Traditions - Moment Magazine, World

Book Review // Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France

French anti-Semitism, c’est une vieille histoire. True, following the Revolution, les Juifs were liberated from their ghettos. True, the Jewish Leon Blum was elected prime minister of France during the late 1930s. And true, except for the United States and Israel, no other country contains so many Jews—some 600,000 according to the latest statistics.

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01 Dec
2014 November/December, Jewish Culture and Traditions - Moment Magazine, World

Book Review // An officer and a Spy

Be wary of historical fiction, especially if it’s good. It will forever mix up in your mind what actually happened, or what we can be fairly certain happened, with the inventions of playwrights and novelists, whose aim might be to draw a deeper meaning from events than mere facts can provide, but who do some violence to those puny facts.

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10 Nov
2014 November/December, Jewish Culture and Traditions - Moment Magazine, World

Gaza: A History // A Long Look at a Small Place

Today, the Palestinian enclave of Gaza is known as a flashpoint for conflict that far eclipses its minuscule size. At 140 square miles—sharing an eight-mile frontier with Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and hugging Israel’s border for nearly 32 miles—the sliver of desert is only twice the area of the District of Columbia.

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