love Archives - Moment Magazine

03 Sep

Beshert | Crushing on Leonard Nimoy

January 20, 2023
By Michael Krause
6 comments

It was 1970 and “Star Trek” had just ended on TV. Leonard Nimoy, who played Mr. Spock, the hybrid human-alien, had a young fan in the freshman girl who was a year behind me at our Chicago high school. Mr. Nimoy was tall and thin. At 5’10”, so was I. He had a certain Eastern European countenance. My face displayed my Eastern European heritage. He had a Vulcan haircut. My dark hair was longish. At school, I was in a theater group that rehearsed in the auditorium and band room. One day that spring, the freshman girl walked into the band room (she played French horn and percussion in the school’s concert band) and noticed the boy at the piano who, to her, bore a striking resemblance to Leonard Nimoy. She thought, “I need to find out...

25 Jun

Beshert, Latest

Beshert | Finding My Own Kind

April 7, 2021
By B.J. Epstein
1 comment

My Grandma Phyllis always told me to “Stick to your own kind” when it came to dating. But to her disappointment, I’d never dated another Jew. I had, however, dated other women. I figured that was a good way to follow Grandma’s advice – weren’t women my kind, too? In 2010, after finishing my Ph.D., I moved to Norwich, England, where I knew almost no one, for work. That’s when my long-distance girlfriend suddenly dumped me. Bereft, shocked and alone, I just stayed in my flat or went to work. I did a lot of crying. Then I went to lunch with a male friend, thinking I should get out of the house. I’d heard there was an afternoon tea party for lesbian and bisexual women later that day. My friend told me to go, to cheer...

28 May

Beshert, Latest

Beshert | A Face in the Crowd Led Me Home

April 12, 2021
By Martha Levine
1 comment

At 26, I was coming off a traumatic divorce that led me to distrust everything I knew to be true in this world. Desperate to figure out who I was and what I could believe in, I jumped when a friend invited me to go to a huge protest in Washington, DC, the 1979 No Nukes rally. I thought, now there’s something I could believe: Nuclear war = Bad. Start with the simple things, right? Tikkun olam. This wasn’t the sort of thing I used to do. Although I was kind of a hippie, I was also shy and not one to make big statements. Plus, I don’t like crowds—or Port-o-Potties. But milling among 125,000 souls like-minded on nuclear energy, energized me. As the crowd chanted, “Hell no, we won’t glow,” and “Two, four, six, eight,...

26 Mar

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Beshert | My Two Bundles of Meant-To-Be

April 16, 2021
By Wendy Berkowitz
0 comments

I always wanted to be somebody’s mother. Since I was six, I would fantasize about holding my baby, dressing her and loving her. I shared so much love and laughter with my own mother, Helen Ruset, that I wanted to have that with my baby. My dream baby was always a girl. We would have matching outfits, me and mini-me. So when I found myself divorced at 40 with no children, all I could think was, “This is not my plan.” I began my quest for Mr Right. I looked online, went on singles trips, and allowed myself to be fixed up. I never found him. Clearly, the universe had him going in a different direction. After six years of looking for him, I decided to adopt a baby. I had a successful home-based business and a four-bedroom house....

13 Feb

Beshert, Latest

Beshert | The Song of Our Lives

April 17, 2022
By Steven Moffic
1 comment

Then I saw her. Across the crowded room. Dancing alone in a red dress. It wasn’t just her beauty. It was a spirit emanating from her being. I approached her and we talked a bit. I found out her name was Rusti. Enchanting. But she was swarmed by other boys—she was beautiful, talented and smart.

Nevertheless, when I returned to my fraternity house that night, I told my brothers that I would marry her. It was love at first sight.

06 Feb

Beshert, Latest

Beshert | Once Upon a Time in Montevideo…

February 28, 2020
By Lisa Delafontaine
0 comments

I met my husband in a hotel lobby in Montevideo, Uruguay on my 27th birthday. We were browsing the lobby stores because the hotel’s only elevator was broken. We hailed from different continents and were both on delayed business trips, which made meeting on yet another continent beshert. He thought I was a local girl from Uruguay and I thought he, a European businessman, was attractive with an accent. By the time they fixed the elevator, we had invited each other for dinner. Work friends were taking me out for my birthday; when they picked me up, they were surprised at my speed in rounding out the dinner party. At a restaurant on the Rio Plata, bordering Argentina, we spoke a mix of languages made fluent by champagne. He claimed he spoke English and that my Spanish...

09 Jan

Beshert, Latest

Beshert | Really Glad We Didn’t Skip That Party

February 28, 2020
By Jim Ostroff
3 comments

That we met on February 22, my Grandma Clara’s birthday, my parents’ wedding day and my Bar Mitzvah day on my mom’s and dad’s 22nd anniversary, must be pure coincidence, right? We chose our wedding day, June 10th, randomly; it turned out to be my grandparents’ wedding day nearly 70 years earlier. Another coincidence… unless one accepts that beshert operates in strange and mysterious ways.

26 Dec

Beshert, Latest

Beshert | The Eight Months Of (Well, After) Hanukkah

March 31, 2022
By Larry Lesser
1 comment

I met Laurie at a Hanukkah party in Fort Collins, Colorado, a small town that had almost no other single Jews my age. Our mutual friend hosting the party later confessed that she’d set us up but didn’t tell us; at the time, we were clueless. Our first conversation led to our first date—on snowshoes! We got engaged eight months later. Laurie suggested the hike on snowshoes. It was the first time for both of us, which in hindsight made it a perfect first date because we were both trying something new on multiple levels and stumbling around (snowshoeing is harder than it looks), making it easier to bypass any pressure to maintain facades. We had both been through a lot: cross-country moves, stressful job situations, failed previous relationships, and the struggle to reconcile childhood challenges. But...

19 Dec

Beshert, Latest

Beshert | A Real ‘Fun Run’

February 28, 2020
By Loren Schragger-Paeglis
1 comment

I moved from Cleveland to the woods of Connecticut in 1981 to start a new job as an engineer for Uniroyal. It was February and freezing, there were very few women engineers, and while the people in my department were nice, most of them were 20+ years older than me. All good reasons to have a single goal—focusing on my career. As I settled into my first week of routine, I noticed a handsome, sleek strawberry blonde man with a runner’s build looking my way. He almost walked into a rubber tree. I gazed around to see what distracted him. Me. The next day he stopped by my desk to deliver a flyer about a “Fun Run.” His name was Arnis. Somewhere in my archives today, I have pictures of us both in our red, black and...

05 Dec

Beshert, Latest

Beshert | Open Book Finds Editor

February 28, 2020
By Julie Gray
4 comments

The truth is, we are an odd couple, Gidon and I. He is from the Czech Republic, I am from California, I like cats, him not so much, I like Asian-fusion food, he loves potatoes and gravy, he likes romantic books, I mostly read nonfiction, he’s into football, I never got sports, I am 55 and he is 84. But we have a lot in common, too, like our mutual love of camping, bingeing on Netflix, making soups in the winter, swimming together in the summer, reading books quietly in the evening and playing “rotten egg” at bedtime. We also like to sing duets together and our repertoire includes everything from “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean” to a rousing rendition of “Shalom Aleichem.” We met in a café in Israel in 2017, to discuss a...

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