From the Editor | January/February 2013

Anxiety is not exclusively a Jewish trait, although as a people long subject to persecution, we continue to pass it on to our children. ranitidine 150 mg Zantac 150 Mg Buy Zantac 150 Mg Online When I was 18, I left home to spend a year in Tel Aviv. There, thousands of miles from the Jersey shore, I traveled to Jerusalem to meet my father’s cousin. My first impression was of a wild-haired man, an intense artist, so different from my methodical scientist father. Yaakov Kirschen is a cartoonist, the creator of Dry Bones and a fervent Zionist who had left his native Brooklyn behind. My father’s small family was wracked by petty arguments, suspicion and unspoken suffering, and I’d never met Yaakov before. Fortunately, my trip to Israel somehow trumped all that, and I was given...

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From the Managing Editor

I was nervous when I answered the phone call from Bennett Greenspan, president and CEO of the genetic testing company Family Tree DNA. As part of this special issue dedicated to genes and religion, a few of us at Moment swabbed our cheeks and sent off our DNA samples to ascertain our family origins. I already felt secure in my historical roots, a lineage that places me as a ninth-generation descendant of the Baal Shem Tov with Rashi and King David as ancestors. But still, I didn’t know what to expect, or what this testing would tell me specifically about my family tree. Going over the results with Greenspan, I learned that our opinion editor Amy Schwartz’s ancestral line is one of the oldest, thought to go back about 60,000 years and originating in Africa before...

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From the Editor

My mother, Ruth Epstein, now nearly 87, worked her way up from volunteer to executive director at our Jewish Community Center in Deal, New Jersey. A brilliant, intuitive woman with four children and two degrees, she founded the youth employment program, ran the older adult group, managed the senior center and pretty much everything else before being appointed assistant executive director. She remained in that position for years as men were brought in from the outside for the top job. Fifteen years after she arrived, the board finally put her in charge. She was an amazing role model for her children in an era of stay-at-home moms. A natural leader, she shone at the podium with impossibly clear diction and polished delivery. As far back as I can remember, she was running programs and study groups...

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From the Editor

Nearly three years ago, I met a 90-year-old woman from Cleveland named Eva Rosenberg who told me her story—and that of her late husband Milton Rosenberg. In 1950, one month after Julius Rosenberg was arrested for spying for the Soviet Union, Eva’s husband and his colleague, Sidney Rosenberg—neither of whom were communists or had any association with Julius Rosenberg—were both dismissed from their engineering jobs at the U.S. Army Signal Corps at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. These were innocent men—with the wrong name at the wrong time in the wrong place—who had to fight to redeem their reputations—and their jobs. They eventually got their positions back, but neither spoke publicly about what had happened. Eva Rosenberg remains afraid—even after all these years—that bringing this story to light might lead the federal government to revoke her...

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