Poem // 3AM Nign

3AM Nign she sang as if looking through the magnifying glass lullaby’s every heave, a thesis on slowing down, peeling – each note, a pit assessing its fullness lullaby’s underside, hymn to darkness (sleep no longer a goal but a side-effect) of the dream’s reaffirmed primacy two silences on each side of her amplifying the song’s timing – family of three,  thickening liquid poured in and out of the bedroom’s cup Jake Marmer’s first poetry collection Jazz Talmud was published in 2012.

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Al Franken Gets Serious

by David Paul Kuhn Al Franken leans over the scattered papers atop his desk. He puffs out his pasty cheeks. His round brown glasses seem slightly too small for his face. His brown eyebrows arch up and he grins like Jack Nicholson’s Joker in Batman. “I gotta tell you,” Franken says to me in his midtown Manhattan office, “I’ve been to Israel, and I didn’t enjoy it.” He chuckles. He knows he’s telling this to a Jewish magazine. “I hate to say that,” he continues. “I support Israel. But when I was there, in 1984, it was very high-pressured. It felt very”—he pauses to find the right word—“tense.” Al Franken is a caricature of himself, which allows him to talk about serious issues without ever appearing to take himself too seriously. He can shuttle from the solemn...

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November/December Issue of Moment

It's on newsstands now! The election is over. Take a deep breath. Now, curl up at home with the new issue of Moment. First you'll meet Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz, aka Jon Stewart. Even with an anglicized name, the Daily Show host is still the quintessential Jewish boy from Jersey. He may also be the perfect Jewish ambassador for our times—smart but not arrogant, extremely funny but not mean—a valedictorian, most popular, best-looking and class clown all wrapped into one. In this exclusive cover story, discover Stewart’s Jewish background and beliefs, and hear from family members, teachers and friends. In the spirit of Jewish Book Month, we asked co-founder Elie Wiesel and other Nobel laureates Eric Kandel, Avram Hershko, Martin Perl, Robert Solow, Robert Aumann, Eric Maskin, Sidney Altman and Roger Myerson to reflect on their favorites. Our book...

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Inthemoment has another URL

Hi there, Moment readers. We hope you're enjoying the blog so far. We wanted to let you know that we've updated the address of our site, so it can now be reached at momentmagblog.com. It's easier to remember: All you have to do is add "blog" to our main magazine site's URL, momentmag.com. Of course, the old URL will still work just fine. If you'd like to be notified every time the blog updates, subscribe to our RSS by clicking here. Thanks so much! —Benjamin Schuman-Stoler

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Seder plate

The Google Seder

The e-mail invitation came at the last minute. Not that Google didn’t know Passover was on its way, but apparently it would have been un-Google-like to plan too far in advance. So the message arrived just a few days ahead of the special evening: “I would like to formally announce this year’s Google seder, affectionately known as Koogle@Google 2008.” “Google? seder? Google seder?” you might ask. Not many companies (I can’t think of any others) have an official corporate seder. We’re not talking a Hanukkah or Christmas party but a full-fledged Exodus commemorative night at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California, a few miles south of Palo Alto, in the heart of Silicon Valley. It was my first visit to the sprawling campus of the Internet search giant, founded in 1998 in a Menlo Park garage by...

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