Anti-Semitism: Where Does It Come From? Why Does It Persist?
In our March/April issue, we examine two big questions with deep contemporary resonance: Where does anti-Semitism come from? Why does it persist? Here we highlight...
My Last Soviet Summer
by Maxim D. Shrayer
By summer of 1986, my parents and I had been refuseniks for 8 years. A 19-year-old university student, I took part in...
A Symposium on Anti-Semitism: Where does it come from and why does it persist?
// A symposium with: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Michael Barkun, David Berger, Bent Blüdnikow, Robert Chazan, Phyllis Chesler, Jeremy Cohen, Irwin Cotler, Mohammed S. Dajani Daoudi,...
Moment-Magazine Karma Foundation Short Fiction Contest Winners Update
We recently caught up with Ruchama King Feuerman, whose story “A Beggar’s Place” was our 2011 second-place winner. Since then, her novel, In the Courtyard...
Book Review // The Golden Age Shtetl: A New History of Jewish Life in East Europe
The history of the Jews of Eastern Europe and Russia has a singular place in the Jewish imagination today. To some, it is a dead subject, poisoned by the Holocaust and the lethal anti-Semitism of the 19th and 20th centuries: Either we know everything we need to know about it or there is nothing worth knowing. To others, it is shrouded in the nostalgia-laden distance of the Old Country...
Book Review // Rav Kook: Mystic in a Time of Revolution
Who was Rav Kook, the first chief rabbi of Jewish Palestine? Many have tried to understand this complex, charismatic scholar whose embrace of modernism existed side-by-side with strict traditionalism. How to explain his contradictory mixture of tolerance and orthodoxy, nationalism and universalism, mysticism and activism? Kook was a poet, religious jurist, philosopher and communal leader. Was he a Zionist?
Aaron David Miller on the Middle East’s “Angry, Dysfunctional” Future
by Wesley G. Pippert
Aaron David Miller, an adviser on the Middle East for six secretaries of state, believes that the next few years in the...
Slivovitz: A Plum (Brandy) Choice
For many Jews, slivovitz—the Eastern European plum brandy—is wrapped in nostalgia, evoking memories of irascible relatives downing fiery shots over Yiddish banter, or the mysterious bottle at the back of your grandmother’s pantry, revealed only during Passover seders. Over the years, slivovitz has become a distinctly Jewish beverage, one to rival Manischewitz wine, and a popular social lubricant to celebrate the good times and lament the bad.
Seeing the Face of Our Neighbor
by Alfred Munzer
This January, I was invited to speak at Scotland’s observance of Holocaust Remembrance Day. I was born in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, and over...
Visual Moment // Persian Jewish Art
Illuminating the History of Iranian Jews
By Diane M. Bolz
Jews have lived in Persia, now Iran, for nearly three millennia. The first Jewish community dates back...
Q&A: Glenn Dynner on Yankel’s Tavern: Jews, Liquor, and Life in the Kingdom of Poland
By Josh Tapper
The history of Jews in 18th- and 19th-century Poland is often a history of anti-Semitism, of social and economic isolation at the hands...
Kosovars and Jews Share History–and Hope
by Enver Hoxhaj
While much of the world would rather forget, one country commemorates the Holocaust regularly.
That country? One of the world’s newest nations--the predominantly Muslim...