Vietnam
30 Mar
Latest, Zoominars

A Jewish Vietnam Veteran Looks Back 50 years on the Moral Journey that Changed His Life with George Johnson

From 1968 to 1969, Moment Senior Editor George Johnson served as an Army intelligence advisor in the CIA’s Phoenix Program in South Vietnam.  Based on his memoir When One’s Duty and the Right Thing are not the Same, Johnson discusses his assignment to this once-secret intelligence program and the Army’s program for “pacification” of Vietnamese villages. He also discusses how his reservations about the war caused him, upon return from Vietnam and to civilian life, to call for an accounting for the war and to re-orient his life toward Judaism and Jewish social action. This program is in honor of National Vietnam War Veterans Day.

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20 Aug
Beshert, Latest

Beshert | The Brother Who Opened My Path—and My World

My big brother, Jerry Rose, was my beshert, He was eleven years older than me. I adored him. He was my idol and my mentor. Jerry was a writer and an artist. Today, so am I—because of him. When I was little, he read poetry to me, classics like Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabel Lee” and John Keats’ “Ode to a Grecian Urn.” As I grew up, he gave me reading lists and critiqued my writing. He taught me to use strong and authentic imagery and avoid clichés. When I went to college, I wrote asking Jerry’s advice about everything—from books and writing to love and sex. When I wrote that I was starting to keep kosher, he didn’t approve. He responded that Jewish dietary laws were really about health and no longer relevant in today’s world. I...

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30 Apr
Latest

When One’s Duty and the Right Thing are not the Same

A Jewish Vietnam Veteran looks back 50 years on the moral journey that changed his life. Like a distant thunderstorm, at first unseen and unheard, the sounds of a Southeast Asia war were only faintly in the background at first. That started to change with the commitment of American combat troops in the Fall of 1965. By then I was one year into law school at Columbia and was sharing an apartment with Bruce, a fraternity brother at Cornell, who, like myself, had graduated with an ROTC commission. We were second lieutenants. Sitting in the small living room of our West 119th Street apartment just north of the law school, the nightly TV newscast told a story we did not want to hear. Each night, it seemed, Lyndon Johnson was committing more and more combat troops...

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02 May
000 JPVP, Culture

A Vietnamese Yom Kippur

by Kelley Kidd A Yom Kippur spent fasting on the beautiful island paradise of Phu Quoc, in Vietnam, is not my typical Day of Atonement. But somehow that's where I found myself, fasting after a seaside dinner in a bungalow. I stayed up late that night gazing into the sea reflecting, and wondering at its vastness. The next day, an early morning moto ride led us to a waterfall in a secluded jungle, where I splashed in the water and lost a flip flop, but where I also took the time to sit on a tree branch with water rushing across my legs and meditate. I considered my resolutions for the coming year, considered what I had noticed in my life that I wanted to change and to improve, and what to keep. I focused on...

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