The Moment Time Capsule

THE YEAR WAS 1975.

The season, early spring. The fall of Saigon and the end of the war in Vietnam were nigh, as was the reopening of the Suez Canal. Margaret Thatcher had just become the first woman to lead Britain’s Conservative Party, and the Altair 8800—the first commercially successful personal computer—was being sold by mail order through ads in Popular Mechanics.

1975 was also the year Moment was born, delivered by Elie Wiesel and Leonard Fein in Boston, MA, and dedicated, in Fein’s words, to “no single ideological position, save of course, for a commitment to Jewish life.” The first issue was the May/June.

For our 50th year, we’re revisiting the magazine’s archives, starting with that first Moment. Back in 1975, the Jewish world was still reeling from the Yom Kippur War, and Israel’s future was on many minds, as was the role of Jewish women in the United States. The Jewish Catalog, published in 1973, was bringing DIY Judaism to many younger liberal American Jews, while a Jewish political conservatism was also making itself heard. Here we offer a retrospective of some of the content readers encountered in that first issue. In some ways, it acts as a snapshot, in others an echo or even a mirror. A moment in time; Moment, then and now. Our very own time capsule.

Read the original articles at momentmag.com/moment50.

A PUGNACIOUS FIGHTER COMES OUT SWINGING 

Fein on Percy
by Leonard Fein

Although a deep thinker in the Jewish arena, Moment cofounder Leonard Fein (1934-2014) was more pugilistic than rabbinic—a contender, proud of all the rhetorical punches he’d absorbed.

There may be no finer example of the fight in Fein than his column from Moment’s first issue on Senator Charles Percy of Illinois (1919-2011), a patrician Republican moderate whose political type is virtually extinct nowadays.

The bare facts Fein reports are these: At a Washington, DC, reporters’ breakfast in late January 1975, Percy had recounted his recent trip to the Middle East and described Fatah founder and PLO chieftain Yasser Arafat (1929-2004) as a “relative moderate.” Reporters seized on his words as a sign of diminishing American support for Israel. The Chicago Daily News headline from that very afternoon was “Percy Tells Israel: Don’t Count on U.S.”

Before long, Percy had a brouhaha on his hands. Enter Leonard Fein. A staunch defender of Israel, Fein was also known in Jewish-intellectual circles as a “fierce peacenik”—words The New York Times used to describe him in his 2014 obituary. As outrage against Percy festered in Jewish circles, Fein arranged an interview with Percy himself. “Fein on Percy” summarized the good, bad and ugly of Percy’s navigation through the tides of Jewish condemnation.

Sure, Fein conceded, Percy’s words were ill-chosen. But they didn’t represent an out-and-out reversal of his previous support for Israel, and American Jews need not whack him like some kind of anti-Israel piñata.

At a Washington, DC, reporters’ breakfast in late January 1975, Percy had recounted his recent trip to the Middle East and described Fatah founder and PLO chieftain Yasser Arafat as a “relative moderate.”

Percy had received 15,000 letters, most of them written in anger. A few conveyed “ugly invective,” as Fein put it. But in Fein’s interview, Percy declined to walk back any of his words. Rather, he doubled down on the need for the PLO and Israel to talk, stating that “there has never been a better time…to move towards peace in the Middle East.”

Remember, this was 1975. Arafat had yet to reinvent himself as a peacemaker eschewing armed struggle in favor of a negotiated settlement; Fatah, the PLO and its many combatant branches were indeed terrorists whose fingerprints were on every outrage, from the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics to the 1975 attack on the Savoy Hotel in Tel Aviv. The Savoy incident, coming a few months after Percy’ reporter-breakfast debacle, prompted Fein to seek out the Illinois senator.

And yet, in his Moment column, Fein’s chief target is neither Percy nor Arafat. The figures in Fein’s crosshairs are American Jews who see anything but “Israel right or wrong” as a potentially existential threat to the Jewish state.

Fein wonders about the price American supporters of Israel might pay if they turn their backs on powerful friends such as Percy. He is asking, in essence: Who remains in our corner if we judge our allies by this strident brand of political orthodoxy?

“If any deviation from pro-Israel orthodoxy elicits so sharp a response, do we not insure that the objects of the response will become exactly what we say they are?” Fein asks, noting Percy’s musing that he had “lost the Jews” for good.

In some ways, Fein’s column is frozen in time, a fossilized insect encased in amber. His purpose was not to be a soothsayer on the best path forward for peace in the Middle East. But the fact remains that Arafat did (after many false starts and journeys down rat holes) become a “relative moderate,” at least by today’s standards. In 1988 he publicly embraced UN Resolution 242, affirming Israel’s right to exist in peace.

Five years after that, prompted by President Bill Clinton, Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shook hands at the White House (an event this author witnessed as a Washington correspondent for Hearst Newspapers).

Arafat, Rabin and Rabin’s successor as prime minister, Shimon Peres (1923-2016), were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994. The Oslo Accords established the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. But Rabin died in 1995 from bullets fired by an Israeli right-wing extremist. The once-promising peace process never gained sufficient altitude after that.

It would be tempting to conclude that “the rest is history.” Hamas and Hezbollah have replaced the PLO and Fatah as Israel’s enemies-in-chief. Peace in the Middle East has never seemed to be farther beyond the horizon. And it’s too soon to know what the impact (if any) will be of Donald Trump’s second term. But Fein’s words in this journalistic maiden voyage for Moment may yet prove prophetic.

“How do we look and how do we feel when we insist that our friends and beneficiaries of our support not know…that reasonable people differ in their assessment of how peace may be brought to the Middle East?” Fein asks, answering that if American Jews alienate friends who have varying approaches to the subject, “we are ensured a lonely (and) friendless future.”—Dan Freedman

Read “Fein on Percy”

 

HISTORY REPEATS

Can Israel Win Another War?
by Drew Middleton

When Drew Middleton, a longtime New York Times foreign correspondent and bureau chief serving in London, Paris and Brussels, wrote this piece for Moment’s first issue, he was the Times’s military correspondent. After recapping the events of the disastrous Yom Kippur attack from Egypt and Syria on October 6, 1973, that killed more than 2,000 Israelis and wounded many more, he plunged into an analysis of the then military strengths and weaknesses of Israel and its foes. His takeaway? The chances of another war between Israel and its neighbors were high.

Middleton also discussed the roles of the Soviet Union and the United States, both of which were at the time providing armaments to their respective clients. Interestingly, Russia and the United States continue to pursue similar policies today, although the countries they support have changed. Back in 1975 Iran was still under the Shah (the revolution occurred in 1979), and Lebanon, until then a peaceful multicultural country, was consumed by a civil war between its mainly Christian militia and Palestinian insurgents, including the PLO. And as it still does or at least attempts to do, the United States was playing peacemaker. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was traveling to the Middle East trying to mediate agreements with Syria, Egypt and Israel.

Middleton suggested that the chances of another war between Israel and its neighbors were high.

In posing the question of whether Israel could win another war, Middleton posited that there could easily be another confrontation between Egypt and Israel that could lead to an “Armageddon” between the United States and the U.S.S.R. He didn’t consider the possibility of a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, which was signed four years after this article was published.

There has been some progress, but reading Middleton’s article today, I feel sadness that Israel, the country I love, has suffered so many wars in its 77 years. This is an enormous burden for the people of Israel to carry. I am also struck by the hubris of Israel’s military commanders 52 years ago who were unwilling to believe that Israel’s enemies could mount a significant attack. It is deeply dismaying that 50 years and a day later, this same hubris led Israel to make the same mistake, and Hamas launched a surprise attack from Gaza, slaughtering 1,200 people and taking more than 250 hostage.—Laurence Wolff

Read “Can Israel Win Another War?”

 

DOUBLE MAZAL TOV

Catalog: Mazal Tov?
by Sharon and Michael Strassfeld
The Last Word on the Jewish Catalog
by William Novak

The Jewish Catalog—the countercultural “do-it-yourself kit” for practicing Judaism (following in the footsteps of the Whole Earth Catalog)—was so popular in 1975 that it shows up twice in Moment’s inaugural issue. First, in a fun illustrated spread written by two Jewish Catalog editors themselves, the then-married Sharon and Michael Strassfeld, called “Catalog: Mazal Tov?” and later in a book review, written by Moment associate editor William (“Bill”) Novak.

I can’t overstate what a big deal The Jewish Catalog, published in 1973, was at the time. Truth be told, this Moment senior editor remembers building a sukkah in her backyard in Northern Virginia with the help of her newly formed havurah, using plans straight out of The Jewish Catalog. “We maintained that it was possible to be both part of contemporary America and engaged in Judaism,” Michael Strassfeld recalls today. “It was the right book at the right moment and helped shift the American Jewish community to more deeply and personally engage in Judaism.”

The Strassfelds’ initial contribution (there would be more) to Moment explored the phrase “mazal tov” and four other Yiddish and Hebrew expressions of congratulations. Mazal tov, they explained, is an abbreviation for “let this happen under a good sign of the zodiac,” and was originally used to convey good wishes for a future event as opposed to congratulations for one that had already occurred. (The editors noted that it could also be used sarcastically, “for example, when a reckless taxi driver finally gets you home.”) To signal good wishes for the future, they suggested “b’sha’ah tovah” (“in a good hour”), “used chiefly to express congratulations for the inception of a project whose completion is yet to come—as, for example, upon learning of a pregnancy, or of plans for a new magazine.” Mazal tov, Moment! The Strassfelds also shed light on the terms B’siman tov, Yasher koach and Biz hundert un tzvantik.

Novak offered plenty of mazal tovs in his book review, “The Last Word on The Jewish Catalog.” “This magazine (may it live to be a hundred and twenty!) will probably never again have occasion to review a Jewish work of nonfiction which has enjoyed [such] phenomenal success,” he wrote, describing the catalog as the “largest adult education program that American Jewry has ever experienced” and a true grassroots effort. “The forty writers form a genuinely rare community of the printed page.”

The name of one of those writers will surely catch readers’ eyes today: former Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, who would have been in her mid-20s when The Jewish Catalog was published. “I was impressed most of all by Debby [sic] Lipstadt’s section on traveling in the Soviet Union,” Novak wrote, calling her suggestions “disarmingly simple…and yet portentously indicative of the whole tragic situation of Soviet Jewry.” He cited Lipstadt’s recommendation to take plenty of flash bulbs since Soviet Jews “may well prefer to be photographed indoors” along with this tip: “To avoid hidden microphones and the writing of notes, it is a good idea to bring a child’s slate which can be repeatedly written on and immediately erased.”

In 2024 Michael Strassfeld, one of the three original Jewish Catalog editors, traveled the United States to discuss his new book, Judaism Disrupted: A Spiritual Manifesto for the 21st Century. Strassfeld was rabbi of Manhattan’s Congregation Ansche Chesed from 1991-2001 and then at the Society for the Advancement of Judaism before retiring in 2015. “Everywhere I went, people would come up to me at the end of the program and thank me for writing The Jewish Catalog,” he says, adding that many told him it was still their go-to source for living a Jewish life. “It felt like an affirmation of the work that I, along with Richard Siegel z”l and Sharon Strassfeld had done fifty years ago.” The impetus for the catalog was their desire to share their experience of the Jewish counterculture of the late 1960s and to offer a critique of what they saw as the passivity of much of then-contemporary Jewish life.

“Then we hoped to make Judaism accessible to Jews who grew up without a deep Jewish background,” says Strassfeld. “Now it’s time [to ask a] new question: ‘Why bother?’ Judaism is not about being a good Jew. It’s about living a life of purpose and caring—a life infused by the teachings and practices of Judaism, for…reconstructing Jewish life for us as individuals, as a people, as Americans, as inhabitants of this planet. Now it’s time for new Jewish catalogs to be written that address questions of meaning and purpose for this century.”

“After all,” Strassfeld concludes, “this magazine is called Moment. And this is the moment.”—Francie Weinman Schwartz

Read “Catalog: Mazal Tov?” and “The Last Word on the Jewish Catalog”

 

EXPECTING A PUNCH

The New Jewish Right
by Harold Schulweis

“The ideals of civil libertarianism, the concern for the freedom of speech, for the protection of minorities, the separation of church and state, the general belief that somehow it is necessary for the public sector of society to intervene on behalf of the disadvantaged, the sick and the poor and the minorities—all these are seen as no longer, if they were ever, in the true interest of Jews.”

So goes the opening salvo (emphasis mine) in Harold Schulweis’s essay “The New Jewish Right,” which ran in the very first issue of this magazine. It was a warning not to write off as fad a “new mood, a new ethic, a new vocabulary” of Jewish conservatism he saw emerging in the United States.

Schulweis, who died in 2014, was a progressive rabbi dedicated to inclusion and social justice. As head rabbi at a Conservative Jewish congregation in Oakland, CA, in the 1950s and 1960s, he instituted changes to include women in minyanim and added bat mitzvah ceremonies for girls. Later, as the longtime spiritual leader at Valley Beth Shalom in Encino, CA, he welcomed gay members. (Bit of trivia: He was an adviser for a 1991 episode of The Simpsons where Krusty the Clown reveals he’s Jewish.)

The Jewish right Schulweis writes about in 1975 was one he saw as having support from influential Jewish leaders, theologians, universities and in the pages of magazines and journals such as Commentary and another called Ideas: A Journal of Contemporary Jewish Thought.

Editors at Ideas, for example, had argued that the Watergate scandal was overblown and that American Jews should oppose efforts to impeach President Richard Nixon or to encourage him to resign. Their support went beyond Nixon’s “benevolent posture towards the State of Israel,” Schulweis writes. “The editors admire(d?) Mr. Nixon for his emphasis on Law and Order, and found Mayor [Richard] Daley’s order to shoot or cripple looters in Chicago praiseworthy. They supported Mr. Nixon’s escalation of the bombings in North Vietnam, his policies calling for the invasion of Cambodia, his opposition to the granting of amnesty.”

Some American Jews thought it plausible they’d be blamed for Vietnam or otherwise for long lines at gas stations brought about by the 1973-1974 oil embargo that had been imposed by OPEC over U.S. military support for Israel.

Schulweis lays out the ways the Jewish right was elevating Jewish self-interest and characterizes a diverse convergence of those rallying around that flag: “lower-middle-class Jews, blue-collar, working-class Jews, disillusioned ex-Marxists, Lubavitchers, JDL’ers, and celebrators of ethnic particularism.” An instinct for self-preservation linked to the trauma of the Holocaust was key, something the new Jewish right was tapping into.

“Jews are great healers,” Schulweis writes in referring to the “huge gaping hole” left in the Jewish psyche by the Shoah. “But the unrelieved assaults upon the body of Israel have over and over again ripped off the healing scab, exposing the raw nerve of Jewish genocidal fears.” Schulweis adds that this ripping was not only coming from enemies but also from the “callous inattention from our friends…a mood of suspicion hangs over Jews and extends over three tenses. Jews were betrayed, Jews are being betrayed, Jews will be betrayed again.”
“Jews,” he writes, “live with an expectation of the undelivered punch.”

As an example of this expectation, Schulweis points to the neoconservative sociologist Nathan Glazer’s prediction in 1971 that Jews would be scapegoated for the 300,000 Americans killed or maimed in Vietnam. That Glazer, who died in 2019, was wrong was beside the point; what mattered was that some American Jews thought it plausible they’d be blamed for Vietnam or otherwise for long lines at gas stations brought about by the 1973-1974 oil embargo that had been imposed by OPEC over U.S. military support for Israel.

If this fear of forever being the scapegoat was moving Jews politically rightward in 1975, one wonders if Schulweis would say that it survived in the decades following—and if the rise in antisemitism today accounts for an increase (albeit modest) in Jewish Americans voting Republican.

“The issue is not whether Jews should act out of self-interest,” Schulweis says. Pointing to the moral principle of reciprocity, he states: “It is perfectly proper to ask: ‘Is this good for Jews?’ but only after we are clear—or at least more clear—as to what Judaism means by goodness.”—Jennifer Bardi

Read “The New Jewish Right”

 

SCI-FI VS. MIDRASH

Jews and the Science Fiction Problem
by Arthur Waskow

By 1975 Arthur Waskow had stopped reading science fiction. Once an avid consumer of the genre, he had been “hit by lightning” by Judaism and lost interest in sci-fi after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. But when asked to write a review of two sci-fi books published in 1974 for the first issue of Moment, he said yes anyway. Who could say no to an assignment for a brand-new American Jewish magazine founded by two icons: Leonard Fein and Elie Wiesel?

Waskow was not yet a rabbi nor the icon of progressive Judaism that he is today. At the time he was a 41-year-old peace and social justice warrior armed with a PhD in history and living in what was then one of the few integrated neighborhoods in Washington, DC. A former congressional aide, he’d helped Marcus Raskin (Congressman Jamie Raskin’s late father) establish the liberal Institute for Policy Studies.

Waskow’s claim to fame was his Freedom Seder, the groundbreaking 1969 Haggadah linking the ancient Israelites’ struggle against the Pharaoh with that of Black Americans for freedom. This seems like a no-brainer now, but it was revolutionary at the time.

Waskow’s review of Barry N. Malzberg’s The Destruction of the Temple and Jack Dann’s Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction was titled “Jews and the Science Fiction Problem.” “It might as well have been called ‘Science Fiction and the Jewish Problem,’” quipped Waskow, when we spoke via Zoom a few months ago. He was 91 at the time, recently retired from his perch as activist rabbi at his Shalom Center in Philadelphia, and had no problem recalling the details of something he wrote 50 years ago.

Waskow praised Malzberg’s novel, which paints a dystopian future in which a director in 2016 attempts to stage a mass reenactment of the 1963 Kennedy assassination with a cast composed of the inhabitants of great American cities, which have been walled off into concentration camps. Although The Destruction of the Temple doesn’t proclaim itself as such, Waskow argued in his review that the novel is deeply Jewish because it grapples with the question of whether history matters. In addition, he wrote, Malzberg “treats the events of the 1960s as though they were the destruction of our Temple, the shattering of America’s world view, to be compulsively reviewed like Tisha B’Av.” This made the book even more Jewish, he observed, because the Jewish capacity for change grew out of the destruction of the Temple. The word “temple” in the title is key because, as Waskow revealed, “the destruction of the temple turns out to be a pun” on human temples that have been penetrated by bullets, such as those of Kennedy, King and Malcolm X.

Waskow was disappointed by Dann’s more overtly Jewish sci-fi anthology. Most of the stories in Wandering Stars, he told me, didn’t “do the basic job of science fiction,” which is to be “antennae-of-the-present,” identifying something in current time that will open a portal to a different future and asking, “What are the implications of that difference?” Rather than foreshadow anything of importance, Waskow tells me, some of the stories ponder whether non-human species such as Martians or Bulbas, characters in one story described as resembling walking potatoes, can be considered Jewish through the technicalities of halachic law. The list of authors includes bright stars of the era such as Harlan Ellison (who asks, can an intelligent butterfly be counted in a minyan?) and Robert Silverberg (who depicts the conversion of a six-limbed green-furred “Kunivara”). Waskow finds little new in a future where Jews are basically doing the same thing that they’ve been doing for thousands of years, quibbling over who is a Jew.

Blessed with hindsight, he wonders why a smart Jewish sci-fi writer in the mid-1970s living through the second wave of feminism didn’t think to imagine what a difference it would make if more than half of all rabbis were women—“with the power and energy and the ability to shape the future of the Jewish world.” Or take a hint from his Freedom Seder to envision that “there would be a whole new generation of antiracist activist Jews, an entire movement, not just some rabbis—or that there would be Black Jews.” And why didn’t anyone write a story in which Israel played an important role in the world? Waskow asks, adding, however, that no one could have been expected to predict “the State of Israel doing massacres in Gaza and the emergence of an independent Jewish movement intensely critical of the Israeli government.”

But none of this is what Waskow really wants to talk about. There was a reason that by 1975 he had made a conscious decision to stop reading science fiction. He wanted, instead, to “create science fiction” and to “find change in profound ways.” What he wanted to change profoundly was Judaism. In this, he succeeded. In addition to his Haggadah and many other books, he has spent his life at the forefront of Jewish progressivism and the Jewish Renewal movement.

Waskow’s last book, published in 2020, is Dancing in God’s Earthquake: The Coming Transformation of Religion, and I ask him how an ancient religion dances with change. He has two answers. The first echoes his high expectations of sci-fi writers. Judaism changes by “paying attention to the society you are living in and seeing if that society has ways of living that are life-giving.” That’s how women became a powerful force in the Jewish clergy over the past 50 years, he says. “People looked around and saw women changing society for the better and incorporating their own vision and ideals into American life.”

 

His second answer is midrash. Waskow stumbled upon this Jewish tradition after writing the Freedom Seder. When he showed it to friends, he says that half of them said, “‘Waskow, that’s wonderful.’ The other half said, ‘Waskow, what are you talking about? There already is a Haggadah and no one can write a new one.’” So Waskow called Rabbi Harold S. White (who, in the small world of things, joined Moment’s advisory board many years later) and explained that he was writing a Haggadah with the Black community. “I don’t know if it’s crazy or useful, what is your opinion?” He then mailed it to White, who called him back a few days later. “I love it,” he told Waskow. “It’s an activist midrash on the Haggadah! You have picked up on one of the ancient teachings of the rabbis, that we can take a text and read it in new ways.”

The discovery of midrash, a language of transformation through renewal, says Waskow, “was a crucial moment in my life.”

So what’s the difference between midrash and sci-fi? “Midrash means you can change the world” and “good science fiction may be midrash,” he says. We agree that some science fiction has indeed changed the world, such as Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1969 The Left Hand of Darkness, with its tender exploration of gender fluidity that helped pave the way for the trans movement. I mention another beloved book, Marge Piercy’s 1991 He, She and It. “It’s brilliant,” he says, “it’s fiction for the world we are living in where corporations rule practically everything.” (It turns out women make damn good sci-fi writers as well as rabbis.) Before we sign off, Waskow tells me that I too could have been the stuff of good 1975 science fiction: Imagine, a woman as Moment’s editor-in-chief!—Nadine Epstein

Read “Jews and the Science Fiction Problem”

 

FIRST FICTION

A Classical Rebirth
by David Stern

Among the many articles and other items in the inaugural issue of Moment was a work of fiction, “A Classical Rebirth” by David Stern. Mostly set at Columbia University during the tumultuous Vietnam War years, it reverberates today, despite the distance of a half century, given the protests on campuses, especially Columbia’s, in the wake of October 7 and Israel’s subsequent military campaign in Gaza.

Something of a picaresque, “A Classical Rebirth” traces the long and eventful life of Leo Kastnerr, a scholar of ancient Greek literature whose biography encapsulates Jewish academic life in the 20th century. The story begins on a jarring note: Kastnerr, we are told in the very first sentence, has been mugged the night before. Nonetheless, as a man of strict habits, Kastnerr goes about his usual morning routine, including conjugating Greek verbs as he washes himself, and then sets out to his Columbia campus office on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The story then veers back in time to Kastnerr’s youth. The only son of a rigid Orthodox German rabbi, the young Kastnerr finds himself attracted to “the forbidden wisdom of the Greeks,” an attraction that causes Kastnerr the father to expel from his house Kastnerr the son.

That break is just the first of many in Kastnerr’s life. Soon after his expulsion from his father’s home, Kastnerr stops observing the commandments. A bigger break comes in 1933, after the rise of Hitler; Kastnerr and his Jewish colleagues are removed from their positions at a research institute. Kastnerr takes a train to Paris, on a Saturday no less, where he immediately meets “a saucy redhead” named Ariane.

The reader can be excused for assuming that Ariane is meant to be thought of as Aryan. Kastnerr and Ariane immediately find a hotel, “where the two fornicated the remainder of the Sabbath afternoon.” After those exertions, the pair go out to dinner and share a plate of—quite unkosher—clams; they then retire to their hotel room and copulate some more. To underscore Kastnerr’s total break from traditional Judaism, the pair take a drunken, post-midnight stroll into a Jewish cemetery, where Kastnerr urinates on a grave while exclaiming, “Papa! Papa!”

Events take a darker turn when Kastnerr is rounded up with other Jews in a football stadium, but he finds his detention tedious and simply leaves and makes his way to Spain and then to the United States, eventually gaining tenure as a professor of classics at Columbia. The bulk of “A Classical Rebirth” is set during the roiling late 1960s, with Kastnerr experiencing the kinds of things we now associate with the New York of that time: a hellish visit to strip-joint-filled Times Square, getting mugged and getting trapped by a crowd of antiwar student protesters who have taken over a campus building. Readers interested in how the rest of the story unfolds can read it at Moment online. Suffice it to say the climax involves Kastnerr’s IBM Selectric (remember those?), which he has fitted with a specially made typeball (remember those?) covered with Greek letters.

Not surprisingly, David Stern himself attended Columbia College in the era of “A Classical Rebirth,” graduating in 1972 with a B.A. in English.

He wrote the story during a writing fellowship that followed, a period when he also wrote book reviews for The New York Times and published in such magazines as Commentary, The New Republic and Response. The latter came out of the “havurah” milieu and was edited by William Novak. In 1975 a friend connected Stern to Leonard Fein, who was just starting Moment and was looking for material.

The same year the story was published, Stern went on to Harvard. He came out reborn as a scholar of classical and medieval rabbinic literature, writing his PhD dissertation under the direction of the intimidating Jewish studies professor and Hasidic rabbi Isadore Twersky (1930-1997) on parables in midrash. Stern has had a distinguished academic career, first at the University of Pennsylvania, then Harvard, writing books that include Parables in Midrash: Narrative and Exegesis in Rabbinic Literature and The Jewish Bible: A Material History.

“A Classical Rebirth,” as it happens, was the last piece of fiction Stern ever published. “Although,” he quips 50 years later, “a lot of people think my scholarship is fiction.”—Steven Feldman

Read “A Classical Rebirth”

Ads reveal so much about an era. Here are a few from Moment’s first year that we couldn’t resist reprinting.

 

THE TOKEN WOMAN 

A Song for Women in Five Questions
by Susan Dworkin

For a visceral sense of how much can happen in 50 years, you can’t do better than Susan Dworkin’s meditation, in Moment’s first issue, on the then-nascent phenomenon of Jewish feminism. “A Song for Women in Five Questions” is a dizzying time machine, returning the reader to a Jewish world that, as Dworkin paints it, looked like this on the eve of an early feminist gathering:

“The rabbinic establishment—all male.
“The intellectual establishment—incredibly, virtually all still male. (Norman Podhoretz, in [his autobiography] Making It, records that there was a women’s slot in the elite which belonged to Mary McCarthy and was inherited by Susan Sontag…)
“The Zionist organizational establishment is mostly male, punctuated by the power of a few women and operated almost entirely by a female rank and file…
“The Israeli Establishment, with two, maybe three, exceptions, is mostly male, and what’s worse, macho.”

Dworkin captures the anger and frustration driving Jewish women in 1975, and also some of the special obstacles that set off Jewish women’s issues from those of the larger feminist movement. “The Jewish woman operates under several cosmic political disadvantages,” she writes.

“She is made to feel that she must shelter the frail machismo of the men in her life—a machismo retarded in the first place by the aggressiveness of an antisemitic, anti-intellectual world. And if she fails in this well-nigh impossible task, she is blamed for the original emasculation.” Jewish women, she writes, had long been conditioned to believe they were lucky not to need feminism: Jewish men were seen as good and considerate husbands. (“Whatever problems we have,” she quotes feminist leader Cheryl Moch, “we’re not afflicted by a race of jocks.”) And Jewish women had “the fabulous apologetics girding the ‘woman of valor’ role,” a strong, active figure who, in traditional families, is blessed and praised by her husband every week at the Shabbat table.

This role, Jewish feminists had come to realize, came with tremendous obligations but no political power in the community. Such a woman, Dworkin writes, “often feels herself to be a blocked force, a powerful wheel spinning in place.” Further complexities arose in the philosophical split between women who wanted to be free of halacha, traditional Jewish law and practice, and those who sought to stay within it and change the parts that kept women out of ritual leadership: “As long as a woman cannot be included in the minyan, she may daven until her soul grows hoarse and she still counts for zero in shul.”

It took years of dogged activism and revisionist theology, but much (not all) of this toxic weave of messages has gradually been unwoven. Dworkin herself, an early activist, went on to a career as a feminist writer of books and plays. Writing in 1975, at the dawn of the movement, she mapped the challenge as an agenda for women in five parts: 1. The question of equal access to God; 2. The question of equal opportunity for joy; 3. The question of equal treatment by history; 4. The question of equal access to power; and 5. The question of respect. It makes a handy checklist, or at least a general sketch, for the present-day reader, who otherwise may find the experience of revisiting 1975 in this way overwhelming. It’s staggering to contemplate the degree to which the determined women discussed and quoted in this piece actually achieved what must have seemed at the time like messianic goals. With the exception of Orthodoxy—whose stubborn refusal to revisit many halachic restrictions on women to this day lends credence to Dworkin’s skepticism at the strategy pursued by her more halachically faithful colleagues—the rabbinate is now filled with women, and indeed, even parts of Modern Orthodoxy now welcome female clergy in a range of quasi-rabbinic roles.

 

Overall, it’s been a slow and painful slog: The law committee for the Conservative movement at the Jewish Theological Seminary waited until 1983 to admit women for rabbinic ordination, and it’s only in the last decade, even in the liberal denominations, that women have finally attained senior rabbi positions at major congregations. Angela Buchdahl at Central Synagogue in New York (Reform) and Lauren Holtzblatt at Adas Israel in Washington, DC (Conservative) come to mind. Female cantors, once barred by halacha and custom, are likewise ubiquitous.

Braided through this sense of distance traveled is a contrasting theme of just how small the community and the conversation on these issues has been. The young idealists mentioned in this story are for the most part still around and still central to Jewish life, having won many of their battles. (Some, like Rabbi Irving “Yitz” Greenberg, whose wife Blu Greenberg helped spark the movement for Orthodox female clergy, are affiliated with Moment.) Nearly every woman quoted in the piece remains active. From young, aspiring reformers, they’ve become lifelong rabbis, matriarchs or, to use a less gendered image, pillars of the community—figures such as Sandy Eisenberg Sasso, who was the first female Reconstructionist rabbi, and pivotal scholars such as Rachel Adler and Judith Hauptman.

I heard a brilliant congregational lecture just a few months ago from Hauptman, described by Dworkin in 1975 as “the first and for many years the only woman to teach Talmud at the Jewish Theological Seminary.” Already prominent at the time of Dworkin’s piece, and a key theorist of the movement, Hauptman went on to a long and eminent career and wrote many books; she now chairs JTS’s Department of Rabbinics and Talmud. It’s striking to encounter her in the anecdote Dworkin tells to end the piece, under the heading “The question of respect”: “In announcing her engagement from the pulpit [in 1974], a rabbi who is often thought of as a liberal said, ‘Baruch hashem, Judy Hauptman is finally getting married.’”

I was a pre-teen in 1975, and I remember this era all too well—indeed, that very year I was sitting with my parents in the office of the then-reform-minded young Orthodox Rabbi Steven Riskin (later Shlomo), mentioned approvingly in Dworkin’s piece as a liberal on women’s issues (which he was, comparatively speaking), arguing with him over whether I could have a bat mitzvah. It’s both disorienting and heartening to be returned even briefly to this era. After an initial skim of Dworkin’s piece, I fired an email to my colleague: “Yikes! Have you read it??” And, reaching for a locution I’d considered offensive for decades, added, “We’ve come a long way, baby.” —Amy E. Schwartz

Read “A Song for Women in Five Questions”

 

SATIRICAL MOMENT 

Jacob Schiff and My Uncle Ben Daynovsky
by Calvin Trillin

“Jacob Schiff and My Uncle Ben Daynovsky,” which ran in Moment’s inaugural issue, is a delightful missive written in characteristic Trillinesque. The perfectly inflected first sentence reads: “And who is Jacob Schiff that he should be embarrassed by my Uncle Ben Daynovsky?” Trillin recounts his midlife discovery of the real reason his “tired and poor and huddled” immigrant family entered the United States in 1908 through the port of Galveston, TX, rather than through Ellis Island like most East European Jews. “I always considered the Galveston passage to be one of those eccentricities of ancestral history,” Trillin writes. “It never occurred to me, though, to explain it all by assuming that Jacob Schiff found my family not only tired and poor and huddled but also embarrassing.”

For those of you who don’t remember Schiff, he was the silk-hatted Jewish German-born American banker who helped finance the expansion of American railroads as well as Japan’s struggle against Tsarist Russia in the Russo-Japanese War. From his grand mansion on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, Schiff presided over the American Jewish community from 1880 to 1920, grappling with all the major Jewish issues of the day including antisemitism, the rise of Zionism and the care of needy Jewish immigrants. Trillin was inspired to write about his family’s connection to Schiff after reading a single sentence in Eli N. Evans’s 1973 book, The Provincials: A History of Jews in the South. In it, Evans described how Schiff, mortified by the conditions of Jewish immigrants on New York’s Lower East Side, pledged half a million dollars in 1906 to the Galveston Project, which then helped direct more than ten thousand Eastern European migrants through Galveston into the South and Southeast.

The result? A case of family lore—or rather the lack of it—filled in by history and stocked with plenty of (invented?) dialogue with Trillin’s beloved wife Alice, who would die in 2001.

In 2020, on the occasion of our 45th anniversary, Moment reprinted “Jacob Schiff and My Uncle Ben Daynovsky,” so you can read it on our website. That same year, Trillin received Moment’s first Mitchel and Gloria Levitas Literary Journalism Award. Trillin is 89 now, and when I saw him in New York last year he was the same congenial guy, still capable of making me laugh.—Nadine Epstein

Read “Jacob Schiff and My Uncle Ben Daynovsky”

 

A SCHOLARLY CHAT

Pride & Paradox: An Exchange of Letters
from Robert Alter & Shlomo Avineri

The inaugural issue quickly proved Moment to be a place where ideas were embraced and given time and space to develop. The most obvious example of this is “Pride and Paradox,” a 10,000-word exchange of letters between biblical translator Robert Alter (who, in fact, is still writing for Moment) in the United States and Polish-born political scientist Shlomo Avineri in Israel. Beginning in July 1974, the three-month correspondence touched on Jewish peoplehood, the meaning of Zionism and Israel’s future trajectory. (A few months later Avineri, who died in 2023, would be appointed director general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the government of Yitzhak Rabin.) The impetus for this dialogue was the 1973 Yom Kippur war and its continuing aftershocks. Both Alter and Avineri point out the despair and lingering panic over the surprise attack and initial losses and connect them to the euphoria and impenetrableness Israelis felt after 1967.

“Wasn’t Yom Kippur such a shock because it affected our pride—or our hubris, to be a little more exact?” Avineri wonders. It’s hard not to read this through the lens of the October 7 attack and its aftermath and think that no matter how much has changed, much has stayed the same. As Avineri notes: “It seems that only now are many people beginning…to see that the naive belief that the establishment of a Jewish state would solve the Jewish problem was a little too simple-minded. Nor was the founding of Israel the end of the Zionist endeavor; in a way it was only the beginning.” Here is a small taste of that long exchange, which can be read in full at momentmag.com.—Sarah Breger

Read “Pride & Paradox: An Exchange of Letters”

July 8, 1974
Professor Shlomo Avineri
Department of Political
Science
Hebrew University Jerusalem
Dear Shlomo:

Writing to you now, I can’t help feeling a certain eerie sense of almost unreal change since our meeting here in Berkeley a year and a half ago. I recall sitting in the Northside Cafe with you and talking about what everyone concerned with Israel was talking about then: the future of the territories and what hanging on to them indefinitely might mean for Israel. You were saying, if I remember correctly, that whatever the political unwisdom of the stand-pat policy on the territories, critics on the Israeli left tended to exaggerate the deleterious social and political effects on Israel of keeping the territories. That placid conversation now seems as historically removed from present events as though it had taken place sometime early in the Mandate period, and especially because I have not been back to Israel myself since before the beginning of the October war, there are a couple of central issues in the present troubling situation which I would like to explore with you.

Perhaps the best place to begin would be the deep depression of national morale in Israel (or does the picture look exaggerated from this distance?) and what one is to make of it. Late last fall, all my Israeli friends were writing me in the blackest despair; by now, the only detectable improvement is that some of them say you get used to living with the blackest despair after a while. The editorial columns of the Israeli press are full of exhortations to calm and quiet determination. (A Ha’aretz piece, for example, a couple of weeks after the Ma’alot massacre, entreated Israeli citizens to “come down off the rooftops.”) Responsible columnists try to remind their readers that Israel—and the yishuv before it—has undergone crises just as grim without panicking. Now, one might at least infer from all this that there is widespread incipient hysteria in Israel, something like a national “failure of nerve” since the traumatic surprise of the concerted attack last October.

Such a state of mind, of course, would be repeatedly reinforced by the general disarray of Israeli political leadership, the diplomatic encirclement, the new wave of terrorism, runaway inflation and so forth.

Israelis, I notice, like to observe of themselves that they are a people of extremes, unreasonably euphoric after 1967, unreasonably downcast after 1973. but I myself am suspicious of “national character” as a way of explaining public response to this sort of critical historical moment.

I would like to know what, in fact, is the Israeli mood as far as you can gauge it from up close. If indeed there is widespread and abiding depression about Israel’s prospects for the future, is it of a sort that might have a damaging effect on Israeli political judgment—in a period when some hard decisions will have to be made—or (to risk a melodramatic note) on Israel’s resolution to face continuing threats to its survival? One side of this picture, of course, is the much-discussed public opinion surveys a few months ago that showed surprisingly substantial percentages of Israelis, especially among the young, who would seri­ously contemplate emigration. Another side is an apocalyptic sense of “Let my soul perish with the Philistines” which one hears some Israelis express—if the Arabs, with the direct backing of Russia and perhaps now the indirect complicity of the United States, are irrevocably determined to destroy Israel, then let Israel be prepared to use whatever cataclysmic means it can to bring down its enemies with it, and perhaps through that to begin a world conflagration.

These are, admittedly, very dire thoughts, and while I don’t know whether they really reflect any foreseeable political realities, they are troubling enough simply in reflecting a perceptible frame of mind in some Israelis, and so I am particularly anxious to know how you assess this frame of mind. Perhaps I should say frames of mind, since responses to the new situation seem to vary from apocalyptic fierceness to moralistic orgies of self-recrimination, with the only common denominator being what looks from here like an edge of panic…
All best,
Bob Alter

July 26, 1974
Professor Robert Alter
Department of Comparative Literature
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720 U.S.A.
Dear Bob:

Shall we talk about moods? Or about politics? And how does one gauge moods? Whatever expertise I may have, it is certainly not about moods. So what I am going to say is as impressionistic and imprecise (and probably containing my own “mood”) as that of anyone else around here. So don’t take it too seriously.

Clearly, the Yom Kippur war was a shock. It created and continues to create serious problems of morale, and people are “moody.” But there seems to be a paradox here: People who before Yom Kippur did not share in the general post-1967 euphoria, or were a little bit skeptical about it (myself, for example), were probably less affected by Yom Kippur than those who after 1967 were sure that “the Arabs understand only force,” that “the Suez Canal is the best anti-tank ditch in the world” (Ezer Weizman) or, that if there is going to be another war, “we’ll be in Cairo within 48 hours on the way to Algiers” (Arik Sharon, who is a first-rate general but an imbecile when it comes to politics and political understanding).

For too many years we have been talking about pride—Arab pride, how it is important to them, how it affects their judgment, how hung up they are about it. What about Israeli pride, and Jewish pride in general? Wasn’t Yom Kippur such a shock because it affected our pride—or our hubris, to be a little more exact? For in purely military terms, despite the catastrophic opening of the war, the Israeli ability to reverse initial Arab gains made this into the greatest Israeli victory. We all mourn our casualties, and 2,800 is a terrible number for a nation of 3,000,000. But in the War of Independence we lost more than 6,000 lives out of a population of 650,000—and there was no “hysteria”; the “mood,” if anything, was messianic. In 1973, the expectations were unrealistic, and hence the despondency. We were thrown down from a very steep hill into a deep pit—migiva rama el burn amikta.

I remember that immediately after the war, when the first 5-point agreement was reached with Egypt, I appeared as a commentator on Israeli TV and tried to assess as coolly and realistically as possible what the prospects are and what our cards show for any future negotiations, vis-a-vis the Arab countries as well as the United States. And as you know, I am not a congenital optimist. The next day I received dozens of phone calls from people who told me how encouraged they were, and how much I consoled them. N’chamah g’dolah—a great conso­lation—one caller branded what I considered to be a rather chilling, realistic assessment of our difficulties. And only then did it dawn on me that all those who were sure that we were a mini-empire must now be thinking that we are going down the drain. I agree with you about not generalizing about national character, but the fact is that since 1967 so many Israelis were so totally unrealistic in their world perception that if anything, anything went wrong, they thought that their whole world was collapsing around them, while what was really collapsing were only their wild dreams.

What many Israelis—and Jews abroad (I’ll come to that in a moment)—forgot after 1967 was that the basic equation in Middle Eastern politics did not change even though we inflicted a phenomenal blow to the Arab armies. We are David, and they are Goliath. Many thought that we had become, over six nights in 1967, Goliath, and no mistake could be more catastrophic to national morale…
Yours sincerely,
Shlomo Avineri

 

COVER STORY

 

Moment was conceived in a house on Buckminster Road in Brookline, MA, where Leibel Fein lived with his first wife and three daughters. Bernie and Sue Pucker, who owned the Pucker/Safrai art gallery in Boston, lived a block away. As neighbors, the Puckers and the Feins became friends. “Two of the Feins’ daughters attended the same Jewish day school as our children,” says Bernie Pucker. “So our families were connected in terms of proximity, but also in terms of Jewish interest.”

It was therefore both natural and expedient for Leibel to turn to his art-dealer neighbors when it came time to select art for a cover for the inaugural May/June 1975 issue. “At first Leibel was sort of flying by the seat of his pants,” says Pucker, “but he was remarkably, incredibly bright.” The image Leibel Fein chose was a painting by Israeli artist and theater designer David Sharir titled Sabbath Queen. Sharir, whose parents had emigrated to Israel from Russia, was noted at the time for lively, colorful works that celebrated life.

Over the next twelve or so years, the gallery would continue to be an art source for Moment covers. “Sometimes Leibel just told me the subjects and I would supply an image,” says Pucker. “This was before the internet, so I would send him four-by-five transparencies and he would have them color separated for publication.” In featuring works of art on Moment’s covers, Pucker notes, “Leibel was somewhat carrying on the tradition of the Menorah Journal,” a Jewish-American magazine published in New York City from 1915 to 1960 that featured both contemporary and traditional Jewish art.

One of the artists whose art made multiple appearances on Moment covers was Lithuanian-American artist Samuel Bak, a Holocaust survivor whose work is an intriguing blend of realism, Cubism and surrealism. At 91, Bak is still actively painting and exhibiting his work. In fact, the Pucker Gallery—located at 240 Newbury Street in Boston—will be mounting a show of his art next October. —Diane M. Bolz