Moment’s 2022 Benefit & Awards Gala
Moment 2022 Gala honoring Ambassadors Lipstadt and Markarova, Mindy Weisel, Max Weinberg, Emily Bazelon, Cynthia Ozick, and Connie Krupin
Book Review | The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary, 3 vols. by Robert Alter
The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary, 3 vols.
by Robert Alter
W. W. Norton
2018, 3500 pp, $125
When I first learned that Robert Alter had completed the...
Author Interview | Judea Pearl
Does the rooster’s crow cause the sunrise? The answer seems obvious, if you’re a human—but a machine can only understand that the rooster’s crow and...
Book Review | Dear Zealots: Letters from a Divided Land by Amos Oz
Dear Zealots: Letters from a Divided Land
by Amos Oz
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
2018, 138 pp, $15.31
Amos Oz’s modest new book of nonfiction is a container for some...
Jewish Word | Shamash
n the 1946 film The Big Sleep, based on the Raymond Chandler mystery of the same name, Carmen—the promiscuous, drug-addicted younger sister of Lauren Bacall’s character—sizes up Philip Marlowe, played by Humphrey Bogart, and asks him, “What are you, a prizefighter?” Bogart responds, “No, I’m a shamus.” “What’s a shamus?” she inquires. “It’s a private detective,” he answers. Yes, Bogart is using the Yiddish version—more popularly spelled “shammes”—of the Hebrew word, “shamash.”
Book Review | The First Book of Jewish Jokes edited by Elliott Oring
The First Book of Jewish Jokes
Edited by Elliott Oring
Translated by Michaela Lang
Indiana University Press
2018, 176 pp, $65
It’s the inherent vice of joke books that their...
The Not-So Lost Cause of Moses Ezekiel
The Jewish Sculptor’s Confederate Statues Have Become a Beacon for White Supremacists.
Moment’s Guide to Film Festivals
Films You Shouldn’t Miss
By Isaac Zablocki
A notable theme that emerged from the film festival lineups was movies about the Orthodox community. This includes Red...
Author Interview | Alfred Moses
When Alfred Moses, an attorney and prominent national Jewish leader, traveled behind the Iron Curtain to Romania in 1976, the impoverished country was under the thumb of the ruthless and corrupt dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. The trip changed Moses’s life, inspiring him to fight for the freedom of Romania’s Jews.
Poem: The State of Things
On the day after Yom Kippur, I ride my bike along the waterfront.
Pious men build their sukkah before sunset.
Will they invite me to be their...
Talk of the Table | The Power of Couscous
Throughout the Maghreb, couscous was traditionally prepared by groups of women, family and friends, who helped each other pass the long hours it took to make. First, they spread semolina wheat, bought by the men and freshly ground, onto a large round platter, sprinkling it with salted water and sometimes flour.
Book Review | Kafka’s Last Trial by Ruby Namdar
Few literary figures have stirred readers’ imaginations as much as Kafka, his tormented life and early death. Indeed, he is viewed as a mythical figure as much as a renowned author. But above all, the bizarre story of how Kafka’s work survived and entered the canon has become a staple of literary legend.