40th Anniversary Symposium: Wisdom for the Next Generation
with Robert Aumann, Theodore Bikel, Leon Fleisher, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Jerome Groopman, Ruth Gruber, Fanya Heller, Madeleine Kunin, Walter Laqueur,
Book Review // A Replacement Life
For Slava Gelman, Fishman’s main character, finding a balance between his Russian and American selves proves difficult.
Celebrating 40 Years of Moment
JEWISH AMERICAN HERITAGE MONTH 2015 // Leonard Fein, who passed away in 2014, and Elie Wiesel—both writers deeply concerned about Judaism and Jews—founded Moment to be an independent voice in the Jewish American community.
Book Review // Khirbet Khizeh
On 1979, an Israeli censorship committee chaired by the justice minister deleted five evocative paragraphs from Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s memoir: his first-person account of the expulsion of Arab residents from the towns of Lydda and Ramle during Israel’s War of Independence in 1947-49. The description contradicted the heroic official line, which pictured Arabs as fleeing the fighting, not being deliberately forced out by Israeli forces.
Book Review // Suspended Sentences
On October 9th, 2014, when the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to the French writer Patrick Modiano, it seemed to his loving readers as if their long quest on his behalf had finally been fulfilled. Not that this shy and modest man ever considered fame or awards, but that he never even considered that writing novels was a career.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: “The Notorious RBG”
Appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1993, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was the second woman to join the Supreme Court, after Sandra Day O’Connor, and the first Jewish woman.
Editing the Editor
The Education of an Interloper by Jack Miles t was as a student at the Hebrew University during the 1966-1967 academic
Curating a New Jewish Canon
When Jack Miles approached me with the proposition to edit the Judaism volume of the projected Norton Anthology of World Religions, I was naturally flattered but also confounded. There are, of course, many anthologies of Judaism in different formats. But the Norton anthologies are different.
Talk of the Table | Kosher Cheese Comes of Age
When Brent Delman was growing up in Cleveland, his culturally Jewish family, like their Eastern European forebears, ate lots of soft, fresh cheese—cream cheese, sour cream, cottage cheese—without worrying much about whether it was kosher. After all, cheese is just curdled milk, and as long as it’s not eaten with meat, what could be treif about it?
Anita Diamant & Dara Horn: In Conversation
We live in the era of Jewish historical fiction. Hundreds of novels set at some point in the long Jewish past have been published in recent years, some based on biblical stories or Jewish folk tales, others built around major historical figures. The phenomenon shows no sign of slowing, with readers continuing to greedily devour historical fiction, and writers delighted to feed their addiction.
From the Editor // March/April 2015
The ground is lurching beneath the feet of European Jews, with anti-Semitism rising up around them. We American Jews are rightly concerned at this alarming turn of events. We fear the spread of this new, especially virulent form of anti-Semitism to our own shores. We feel disgusted but helpless. What can we do?
Opinion // Fania Oz-Salzberger
Regardless of the outcome of Israel’s general elections on March 17, the campaign for the 20th Knesset will be remembered for its verbal brutality, rhetoric shallowness and viral viciousness. Never has an Israeli election been so devoid of serious debate on the core issues. Whether Netanyahu or Herzog and Livni win at the polls, the main loser is already known: rational debate and communal ethos.