When the Comedy Album Was a Jewish Art Form
For roughly a decade, from the late 1950s into the late 1960s, the long-playing comedy album was one of the most vital popular art forms in America, and arguably the most Jewish.
Gilbert Stuart’s Brush with Early American Jews
Among the many patrons who commissioned portraits from Gilbert Stuart were a number of prominent Jewish Americans.
Sunrise in Re’im: The Nova Festival Exhibition Comes to DC
We will dance again.
It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s a Jewish Guy Playing Superman!
He is made up of Jewish influences and he is a metaphor for the Jewish experience.
The Muses of October 7
A new exhibit at the ANU Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv, seeks to explore creativity in the midst of tragedy and war.
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.