It was a rainy day in Arad, one of the driest places on earth. I was on my first trip to Israel since becoming editor of Moment. It was February of 2008. A friend insisted I needed to meet Amos Oz (1960-2018). Amos was the soul of Israel, he said.
In 2014, four people were shot to death at the Jewish Museum in Brussels, Belgium, two years after the killings of four Jews, including three children, at the Ozar Hatorah School in Toulouse in the south of France. These tragedies and others like them made it clear that anti-Semitism, that pernicious prejudice, was alive and well.
People living in a weak democracy know too well that dangerous rhetoric leads to dangerous consequences.
In practice it requires women to maintain the peace by bending to the will of the males around them. Although my mother was a feminist for her time, she still subconsciously bought into the notion that shalom bayit was the duty of women and girls.
In 1985, I was a cub reporter at the City News Bureau of Chicago. I was sometimes assigned to cover the Nation of Islam, which was headquartered a neighborhood or so away from my South Side apartment.
On my way to the gleaming airport named after him, I wondered what David Ben-Gurion and his fellow pioneers—Israel’s greatest generation—would think of their country today.
My mother, Ruth Epstein, was a dynamic leader. She stayed home like many suburban moms of her era but was also the president of a number of women’s organizations and a leader of local causes.
Moment tests the DNA of 15 notable American Jews—including Joshua Bell, Mayim Bialik, David Brooks, Alan Dershowitz, A.J. Jacobs, Robert Siegel and Tovah Feldshuh—to see if and how they are related. Surprise, surprise, they are! And how!
