In practice it requires women to maintain the peace by bending to the will of the males around them. Although my mother was a feminist for her time, she still subconsciously bought into the notion that shalom bayit was the duty of women and girls.
When I was in second grade my mother told me to read upside down. “You’re reading too fast,” she said, “it’s upsetting the teacher.” She had been instructed to do this as a child, and it was only natural for her to pass this wisdom on to me. Even now, I occasionally flip the book over in order to savor the story.
On my way to the gleaming airport named after him, I wondered what David Ben-Gurion and his fellow pioneers—Israel’s greatest generation—would think of their country today.
My mother, Ruth Epstein, was a dynamic leader. She stayed home like many suburban moms of her era but was also the president of a number of women’s organizations and a leader of local causes.
Misogyny has deeply shaped me, and nearly stifled me. From growing up in a Jewish world where boys were golden, to pursuing an academic and journalism career rife with outright gender discrimination, to taking over the old boys’ club that was Moment in 2004, I found that men around me too often treated me as if I were a child or their lover.
Dipping into the hate within us can give us an intense buzz that may make us feel more alive, but hating is also an easy way to dismiss, diminish and dehumanize the other. Love can also make us feel alive—without the negative effects,
By the time you read this, the neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville will likely be old news. Although news cycles now fly by fast and furious, blurring and short-circuiting our memories, I still want to talk about these young white supremacists.
A few days after we finished Moment’s last issue, I got on a plane to China, a country I had never visited. There is so much to say about China. To begin with, it is no longer the shattered country I studied in college in the years following Mao’s death and the end of the Cultural Revolution.
Read as a whole, Moment will make you think. We do our work in the hope that some sentence, some new wave of understanding, will break upon your shore.
When I started at Moment more than six years ago, I quickly gravitated toward the magazine’s books section. It wasn’t long before every review copy of a new book that arrived at the office landed on my desk.
Not long ago, I visited dear old friends for dinner and, over dessert, fell into a conversation with their daughter, whom I have known since she was born. She recently graduated from college and is an artist and activist who participated in the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Missouri, after the death of Michael Brown.
