Art, Culture & Music

Living, reading, watching and listening Jewishly—that’s the crux of Moment’s Arts & Culture section. Here you can find book reviews, poetry, fiction, art and music. Don’t miss our fantastic interviews with artists and musicians.

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Fiction // Lecha Dodi

Lecha Dodi // According to tradition, Mordechai led the way. When the day was expiring, he emerged from his house in white garments. The cares of the working week fell away, and he prepared with discreet joy for the Sabbath. His hair, just visible under his head covering, would be ...

6 Questions for Comedian-Slash-Scientist Adam Ruben

Longtime science lover Adam Ruben spends his days in a lab coat, peering down a microscope in search for a

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Ask the Rabbis

Ask the Rabbis // Arrogance

Are there aspects of Judaism that encourage arrogance—or that help guard against it? ...

Book Review // The Talmud: A Biography Banned, Censored and Burned…The Book They Couldn’t Suppress

Full disclosure: I am not a biblical or Talmudic scholar. As a professor of literature, I have taught selections from the Bible in humanities courses. I think of myself as a secular humanist and an agnostic interested in understanding the role of religion in the lives of millions of people. ...

Book Review // Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France

French anti-Semitism, c’est une vieille histoire. True, following the Revolution, les Juifs were liberated from their ghettos. True, the Jewish Leon Blum was elected prime minister of France during the late 1930s. And true, except for the United States and Israel, no other country contains so many Jews—some 600,000 according ...

Book Review // An officer and a Spy

Be wary of historical fiction, especially if it’s good. It will forever mix up in your mind what actually happened, or what we can be fairly certain happened, with the inventions of playwrights and novelists, whose aim might be to draw a deeper meaning from events than mere facts can ...

Book Review // Knish: In Search of the Jewish Soul Food

Knish: In Search of the Jewish Soul Food Laura Silver Brandeis University Press 2014, pp. 275, $24.95 by Gloria Levitas Reader alert:

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Theodore Bikel

90th Birthday Tribute to the Legendary Theodore Bikel

Thanks to all who joined us for a spectacular night of festivities and feting in honor of musical and acting

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The Precursor to “Gentleman’s Agreement”

  by Rachel Gordan By 1948 it would seem like only one writer had successfully pulled off a popular novel

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Gaza: A History // A Long Look at a Small Place

Today, the Palestinian enclave of Gaza is known as a flashpoint for conflict that far eclipses its minuscule size. At 140 square miles—sharing an eight-mile frontier with Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and hugging Israel’s border for nearly 32 miles—the sliver of desert is only twice the area of the District of ...

Film Watch // Three Minutes in Poland

A teenager with a big smile grins at the camera. Another waves his hand and keeps moving to stay in the picture. A bearded man is helped down the stairs of a building as groups of young and old crowd the streets of a small town, all anxious to be ...

Rabbi Joachim Prinz: The Jewish Leader Who Bridged Two Journeys, From Slavery to Freedom

Rabbi Joachim Prinz’s moment at the podium represented the fulfillment of both the prophetic Jewish role in history and of his life’s journey. ...