21 Nov
2006 July-August, Arts & Culture

A Jewish Life

Talking Jewish With Deborah Tannen   It was Thanksgiving 1978 in Berkeley. Some guests brought cranberry sauce, some brought sweet potato pie; Deborah Tannen—who was analyzing conversations for her doctoral dissertation in linguistics—brought her tape recorder. Over a turkey dinner that lasted two and a half hours, three Jews and three Gentiles, ages 29 to 35, discussed 38 topics that included New York geography, relationships, Quonset huts, piano hands and—of course—food. When Tannen later listened to the tape of the lively discourse, it struck her: unlike the three Gentiles (whom she calls Sally, David and Chad), she and the other two Jews (Steve and Peter)—all of whom had grown up in New York City and were of Eastern European descent—spoke dramatically and rapidly and pursued a variety of topics simultaneously. In fact, so many distinctions between the two...

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28 Jul
2012 July-August, Issues, Jewish World

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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05 Jan
2012 January-February, Arts & Culture, Issues

Letty Cottin Pogrebin: Two Bat Mitzvahs, 60 Years Apart

Not long ago, my eldest granddaughter celebrated her bat mitzvah—two months shy of 60 years after I celebrated mine. I was one of the first girls in Conservative Judaism permitted the “privilege” of the supposed equivalent of the male coming-of-age ritual. Besides being overwhelmed with emotion at witnessing Maya become an adult member of the Jewish people, I marveled at how much has changed since my bat mitzvah on a Friday night in 1952, presided over by Rabbi S. Gershon Levi in his high, crown-shaped black satin yarmulke and long black robe. Maya’s bat mitzvah was held on a Saturday. The rabbi, Yael Buecher, was a recent graduate of the Jewish Theological Seminary. She has been Maya’s teacher for the past three years. Rabbi Buecher took a Torah scroll from the ark in the sanctuary at Hebrew...

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27 Jun
Culture

The Jewish National Pastime

By Aarian Marshall Some people collect stamps, others baseball cards—Neil Keller collects famous Jews. He speaks quickly, with a slight lisp, and with his red polo and faded jean shorts, looks like he took a wrong turn on the way to a suburban Little League game, though it’s unclear whether he belongs with the throng of eager parents in the stands, or with the overexcited kids in the diamond. Before him is a tableful of binders, each nearly five inches thick. They are color-coded, their titles neatly typed and affixed to their fronts. And Neil Keller is grinning, in a way one rarely sees among men in their thirties. His website boasts that Neil is the “Expert On Who Is Jewish,” and that his collection of Jewish memorabilia, which includes over 15,000 items, is one of the...

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23 Jun
Culture, Religion

Hannah Senesh, Golda Meir, and now Kate Bornstein

By Bonnie Rosenbaum My introduction to Jewish heroes can be traced back to one amazing Barbie doll. It was 1986, I was in 7th grade, and my Sunday school class at Temple Sinai had started a unit on “Great Jews.” Carrie Horrowitz marched to the front of the classroom, launched the blond statuette into the air, and began her oral report: “Hannah Senesh was a brave woman who parachuted into Yugoslavia to save the Jews during the Holocaust.” Barbie quickly crashed to the floor and my classmates and I tried to stifle our laughs. Thus began our lesson on Jewish heroes. As a 12-year-old girl who spent her lunch hour playing football with the boys, Hannah defined awesomeness through her parachute alone. Only years later did I learn the full story of her life, her poetry, her defiance. When it...

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16 Jan
History, Latest

Jewish Ghosts of Budapest

By Merav Levkowitz On the last evening of 2010, a Friday, about 35-40 (mostly) young adults, gathered in a non-descript apartment in the center of Budapest’s—actually on the Pest side of the Danube river—Jewish quarter. This is Budapest’s branch of Moishe House, an organization that maintains 33 houses around the world in which young Jews can gather for Shabbat, holidays, and activities. I spent the last Shabbat of the year at Budapest’s Moishe House, which had become my brother’s Jewish community during his semester abroad. Hungary’s Jewish community has a unique, but tumultuous history. Jews have resided in the Austro-Hungarian empire and in Buda, Obuda, and Pest—the three towns that came together as Hungary’s capital, Budapest, in 1873—since medieval times. As in other European countries, Jews in the region experienced waves of safety and success interspersed with...

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29 Oct
Culture, Latest, Religion

What’s In a Name?

By Gabriel Weinstein For hundreds of years, Ethiopian Jews dreamed of strolling through Jerusalem’s supposed golden streets and celebrating the Sigd festival in its hills. By the late 1970’s, Ethiopians decided that dreaming of Israel no longer sufficed, and embarked on foot to the Promised Land. Scores of Ethiopian Jews fulfilled their dream of reaching Israel through Operation Moses in 1984 after trekking through deserts, skirting Ethiopian border authorities and toiling in unsanitary Sudanese refugee camps. But Ethiopians never dreamed that in Israel, their utopia, they would abandon their Amharic names. Journalist Ruth Mason explores how Ethiopian immigrants traded their Amharic names, and ultimately a sense of identity, for new Israeli-sounding Hebrew names in her documentary These Are My Names.  The film, which premiered last week at the Jewish Eye World Film Festival in Ashkelon, Israel, expresses...

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15 Dec
Arts & Culture, Latest, Religion

Holocaust Not A Part of Young Diaspora Jews' Identity, Survey Finds

By Benjamin Schuman-Stoler JTA reported today that a 12 year survey, conducted among 60,000 Jews aged 15-17 in 20 countries outside Israel, indicates that few young diaspora Jews consider the Holocaust or anti-Semitism a part of their identity. Only 21 percent of the youth indicated that they are Jewish in relation to the Holocaust. A series of other determining factors was more prominent in determining their Jewish identity, such as family, 96 percent; birth, 90 percent; religion, 72 percent; and culture, 67 percent. Hmmm. Is this a bad thing? Seems like a an era without an ingrained focus on terror would constitute a positive era in Jewish history. Or does it just signal a new generation of naiveté? What do you think? Do you consider the Holocaust a part of your Jewish identity? Let us know in the comments...

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