As we come to the end of this challenging year, Moment takes a look back at the stories that shaped the American Jewish conversation in 2023. From our coverage of Israeli democracy to American politics to the E-Street Band, here are Moment’s most-read stories 2023.
“If you want to talk to me, talk to me about the future, about what is next.”
Sources inside the IDF Spotters Unit and Intelligence’s Unit 8200 shed light on the catastrophic failures that led to October 7.
The crisis in the agricultural sector is acute, but inside the avocado trees, my head swims with green, with the bounty of this fruit.
“This is our lifeline. Israel is the only place for Jews to live and if we don’t keep it up and running we don’t have anywhere to go.”
The West Bank is such a crazy-quilt of settlements that Palestinian sovereignty there would require evicting tens of thousands of Jews.
Anne Frank conspiracy theory projected on museum in Amsterdam. Teen in Nazi armband tries to blow up school in Brazil. Man dubbed the “L Train Nazi” tags subway cars in New York City. Read more in this week’s Antisemitism Monitor Newsletter.
The work doesn’t stop, even on Thanksgiving, for President Biden, who stayed in close communication with Middle Eastern leaders over the holiday concerning the release of hostages from Hamas.
We have been reminded of all these things in the most horrible and heartbreaking way possible. October 7 was the most difficult and poisonous chemotherapy, but it has removed the cancer that was destroying us from within.
“Most people don’t think in those terms,” says Goldman; what is more powerful is “a sense that God has chosen the Jews, that God has made promises to the Jews, that those promises still hold and God is still delivering.”
On the sixteenth day of the war, I found hope in an underground parking garage.
“I’ve been to four marches on the National Mall,” said David Krieger of Florida. “A 1973 Vietnam War protest, the 1987 March for Soviet Jewry, during the Second Intifada in 2002 and today.”
