King David’s Genes
Some prominent Jewish families believe they are descended from Israel's greatest monarch. Can DNA testing prove what their family trees have long shown?
Food: Our Connection to Torah and Today
Nigel Savage on the Jewish Food Movement
By Lucille Marshall
In the past ten years, the Jewish community experienced an expansion of Jewish farms, Jewish CSA’s, and...
Book Review // Little Failure: A memoir by Gary Shteyngart
The title, Little Failure, is of course ironic. By now, after Gary Shteyngart’s three best-selling comic novels, many travel articles and dozens of interviews—in which he rarely gives a straight answer—his Russian Jewish immigrant parents must have forgiven him for not becoming the lawyer or accountant they envisioned. Or have they?
The Secret History of X & O
An investigation into the religious roots of the symbols for hugs & kisses.
James Kugel: Professor of Disbelief
When I was a teenager, there was a legend repeated in the Jewish schools of my hometown. If you somehow manage to get into godless Harvard, don’t go. But if, against your rosh yeshiva and rebbe’s advice, you actually go, whatever you do, don’t take biblical scholar James Kugel’s class. If you do, you’ll walk into Introduction to the Bible, see that the professor is wearing a yarmulke and assume the course is kosher. And, the story goes, you’ll walk out a heretic.
Ask the Rabbis // Contraception
INDEPENDENT
Judaism does not restrict a woman in regard to her choices concerning pregnancy. She has a choice to bear children or not to bear children...
Fiction // The Nothing of History
Moment Magazine-Karma Foundation Fiction // July was Reva’s month to fall apart. She slept through the alarm and ignored her husband’s attempts to rouse her. She showered sporadically. She added bourbon to her morning coffee. She stopped answering email, her cell phone, the door. She arrived late to the summer school class she was teaching and dismissed the students early.
Opinion | Who’s Afraid of Al Jazeera?
By Amy E. Schwartz
An American offshoot of the Qatari network makes some watchdogs nervous.
Media observers buzzed with consternation last August when Al Jazeera, the Qatari-owned...
Opinion | Why Democracy in Egypt Still Matters
By Tamara Cofman Wittes
The United States needs to accept that the days of one-man rule are gone forever.
Three years after the hopeful scenes of the Arab...
Opinion | Israel’s Unresolved Democracy Problem
By Marshall Breger
How can the Palestinians recognize a Jewish state if Israelis don’t know what that means?
In 1958, David Ben-Gurion wrote to 47 leading Jewish...
Opinion | Do We Still Need an Arbiter of Anti-Semitism?
By Sarah Posner
The time has passed when one person can speak for the entire community.
When Abraham Foxman, the longtime national director of the Anti-Defamation League,...
Week in Review: Vassar’s “Open Hillel,” Torah Scrolls Discovered in Russia, Sid Caesar and much more!
The Vassar Jewish Union announced this week that it would become an “Open Hillel,” making it the second student group to break with Hillel International’s...