Book Review | The Book of Separation by Tova Mirvis
One Shabbat, toward the end of the morning service, Tova Mirvis was stricken by a debilitating headache, in which “the pain concentrated along the line where my hat met my head.”
One Shabbat, toward the end of the morning service, Tova Mirvis was stricken by a debilitating headache, in which “the pain concentrated along the line where my hat met my head.”
On August 12, David Duke stood on a picnic bench in a Charlottesville park and addressed white supremacists gathered there for the far right’s biggest rally in years.
A potentially transformative current is running just beneath the surface of evangelical Christian life in North America—one that may have troubling implications for Israel.
They weren’t just Jews but Jewish athletes, going about their professional lives in a strange city, as the Israelis had been doing a day earlier.
I’m not surprised that it took Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a full three days until he said anything about the events in Charlottesville. Or that, after three full days, he said, basically, nothing.
Moment spoke with Leon Wieseltier about the events in Charlottesville, Jewish obligations in the face of prejudice and how to respond to the darker aspects of our collective past.
Spotlight: Czech Republic. Temperature: 70 degrees.
The alt-right and the “alt-lite” are new movements, with ideologies and boundaries still forming. This blurs the line between the two, pitting overt hate against a more discrete kind of hate that is nonetheless laced with misogyny, racism, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism.
Iosef’s version of a “safe space” is a filthy, unheated Jewish dorm where students occasionally die of tuberculosis, or a lecture on a random topic in a hall where he can duck in and hide while running from his attackers—for a full five minutes, until they find him and drag him out. As Iosef puts it one afternoon, “I received two punches during today’s lectures and I took eight pages of notes. Good value, for two punches.” Microaggressions, indeed.
The wedding scene in Fiddler on the Roof is one of my favorite Jewish moments on film. The scene is drenched in family, nostalgia and an aching foreknowledge of the Holocaust.
For pure cheesy pleasure, I’d go with The Ten Commandments, which frightened me so much as a child that I was actually taken out of the movie theater. I’m tougher now and, besides ever since taking my own kids on the Paramount Pictures tour that explained how the filmmakers used pre-CGI techniques to part the Red Sea, I’ve wanted to watch the thing through properly with lots of use of the pause button.
Once again, our city has been taken over by jealousy. Once again, it has been reduced to little more than a humiliated pawn in the hands of politicians who, in their attempts to own this city, are willing, quite literally, to let her die.