Welcome to Our Summer Books Issue
When I was in second grade my mother told me to read upside down. “You’re reading too fast,” she said, “it’s upsetting the teacher.” She had been instructed to do this as a child, and it was only natural for her to pass this wisdom on to me. Even now, I occasionally flip the book over in order to savor the story.
Poem | Of All the Peoples by Nathan Alterman
When under the gallows our children cried
We did not hear the world’s wrath.
For of all the peoples you selected us
For us you loved and sanctified.
For...
Book Review | A Rich Brew: How Cafés Created Modern Jewish Culture by Shachar Pinsker
Since their origin in the early 1500s in Yemen and elsewhere in the Arab world, coffee houses have provided an important social meeting place for people from all walks of life, especially creative, political and business types.
Book Review | Harvey Milk by Lillian Faderman
Last April, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted to name the main terminal at San Francisco International Airport after Harvey Milk, the gay rights martyr who was assassinated 40 years ago. The decision further (and literally) cements Milk’s legacy as the best-known LGBT activist in American history.
Book Review | Gateway To The Moon by Mary Morris
Entrada de la Luna, New Mexico, is a small town with a big mystery. Why do its Spanish Catholic families light candles on Friday night? Why doesn’t anyone eat pork? The answers, it turns out, lie half a millennium ago, in 15th-century Spain.
Talk of the Table | Seven Dishes for Seven Decades
The long tradition of Jewish food, wrote culinary historian Gil Marks, has always been one of “transforming and transferring,” and Israeli food is no exception....
Seven Decades of Israeli Art
To mark the 70th anniversary of Israel’s independence, Moment asks curators from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and Ben-Gurion University to choose outstanding works of art from each decade.
Fiction | The Mark
This story is the second-place winner of the 2017 Moment Magazine-Karma Foundation Short Fiction Contest. Founded in 2000, the contest was created to recognize authors...
Visual Moment | The Ringelblum Archive
Even before the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto (1940-1943) knew of the “Final Solution,” they understood that their story needed to be preserved. Under the...
Jewish Word | Maven
“Maven” is a relatively new transplant into American English. Written references to the word begin to increase in the mid-1960s and continued to rise through the early 2000s, according to Google Ngrams, which charts words’ popularity in books over time.
The Epic Battle In Hollywood Over The Holy Land
In The City Where Myths Are Made, The Israeli And Palestinian Storyline Is Always In Rewrite.
Book Review | Mapping the Bones by Jane Yolen
Although a work of fiction, Mapping the Bones has enough of a historical basis to make it read like a convincing survivor’s account, one that does the essential work of bearing witness to a tattered and bloody past.