04 Sep
2014 September/October, Arts & Culture, Jewish World

2014 Spotlight on Poland

PREVIEW OF THE CORE EXHIBITION OF THE MUSEUM OF THE HISTORY OF POLISH JEWS
My personal journey to Jewish identity has taken place by way of the past. Like many immigrants from Eastern Europe, my grandparents and great-grandparents rarely spoke of the Old Country, leaving me to spend years trying to piece together the clues. This longing to know more about my family’s origins led me to genealogical research and DNA testing, to towns and shtetls in Ukraine, and to Moment.

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Prime Minister Viktor Orban
03 Sep
2014 September/October, World

Hungary at the Turning Point

It’s a few days before the May 25 European Parliament elections, and the streets of Budapest are awash with colorful campaign posters urging Hungarians to vote for delegates to represent their country in Brussels. It would be a shining display of democracy in action, a comforting reminder of Hungary’s ten-year membership in the European Union after decades of repressive communist rule, if not for the fact that…

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Trieste by Daša Drndić
11 Aug
2014 July/August, Arts & Culture, World

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.

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The Ambiguity of Virtue by Bernard Wasserstein
11 Aug
2014 July/August, Arts & Culture

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?”

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German Chancellor Angela Merkel with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
10 Jun
2014 May/June, Israel, World

Inside the Germany/Israel Relationship

In the wake of the Holocaust, Konrad Adenauer and David Ben-Gurion forged an unlikely partnership. More than 60 years later, Germany continues to be one of Israel’s staunchest defenders and most dependable allies. But can the relationship withstand the rising tide of anti-Israel sentiment in Europe and the fading memories of a new generation?

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20 Mar
2014 March/April, Arts & Culture, Jewish World

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…

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04 Mar
2014 March/April, Arts & Culture, Jewish World

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?

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