Book Review // Trieste
Creating art from the events of the Holocaust remains as daunting as ever. Soon, those awful events will move beyond the reach of living memory while the need for testimony grows more pressing, not less. But the responsibilities of art are different from those of history: Theodor Adorno’s much-misrepresented dictum that “it is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz” can simply be used as a lazy shorthand for refusing to engage with difficult and challenging creations.
Book Review // The Ambiguity of Virtue: Gertrude van Tijn and the Fate of the Dutch Jews
At the very beginning of his probing, disturbing account of the Nazis’ destruction of Dutch Jewry, Bernard Wasserstein asks what is no doubt the most terrible question that can be posed about Jewish behavior during the Holocaust: “Confronting the absolute evil of Nazism, was there any middle road between outright resistance and abject submission?”
Professor of Exile: Edward Said’s Misreading of Erich Auerbach
by Avihu Zakai
Edward Said (1935-2003), Palestinian-American scholar, activist, and for many years Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, had a deep interest...
Visual Moment // Chagall’s Orphée
“Marc loved the small-town feeling of Georgetown,” Evelyn wrote. “He liked being able to greet our neighbors and walking to Woolworths to buy postcards and an art-supply store to buy more brushes.” One day he told her that he wanted to “do something for the house,” but later, he said, “No, the house is perfect; I’ll make a mosaic for the garden.”
A Vegetarian’s Take On Kosher Barbecue
by Jennifer Cole
It’s 12:30 p.m. on a Monday afternoon. Still tired and weary-eyed from the weekend, hungry business people stumble out of the office and...
What We’re Reading: Dina Gold
Each week, we’ll share what Moment editors are reading and watching, from news to novels. Here, Moment senior editor Dina Gold, originally from London, tells us...
Jewish Mexico: The Land of Chile and Honey
It’s good to be a Jew in Mexico City. Mexico’s tightly-knit Jewish community boasts the lowest rates of intermarriage in the world at six percent, two percent counting Jewish conversions upon marriage.
How Has Jewish Thought Influenced Science?
How has Jewish thinking influenced science? Moment poses the question to scientists and scholars Yehuda Bauer, Jonathan Ben-Dov, Edward Bormashenko, Jeremy Brown, Allison Coudert, Noah Efron, Shmuel Feiner, Gad Freudenthal, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Susan Greenfield, Menachem Kellner, Daniel Matt, Judea Pearl, Jonathan Sacks, Gerald Schroeder, Howard Smith, Hermona Soreq, Moshe Tendler and Yossi Vardi.
A Brief Literary Guide to the History of Gaza
There's more to the long-suffering region than meets the eye. From visual journalism to history to cookbooks, here are four books to deepen your understanding of the...
Simon Henderson Q&A: Qatar’s Outsized Role in the Middle East
"Qatar does not support Hamas, Qatar supports the Palestinians,” Qatari Foreign Minister Dr. Khalid Al Attiyah declared in a CNN interview that aired this week. Yet some questions...
Modern Hebrew: The Epic Transformation of a Language
While teaching modern Hebrew in England and the United States, Norman Berdichevsky got a shock. Many of his students, he found, “were unable to utter...
Will the Real Bagel Please Roll Over?
by Ellen Sue Spicer-Jacobson
One of my fondest childhood memories is going with my father and siblings to Kramer’s Bakery in Trenton, NJ on a Saturday...