Book Review // The Story of the Jews
The great Jewish historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, who died in 2009, famously declared that history was “the faith of fallen Jews.” Yerushalmi had trained under the preeminent 20th-century Jewish historian Salo Baron, whose epic (and unfinished) 18-volume A Social and Religious History of the Jews was celebrated for its paradigm-shifting rejection of the “lachrymose” view of Jewish history. Despite a life lived in the shadow of Jewish history’s most lachrymose moment—both his parents were murdered in the Holocaust—Baron insisted that Jewish history was defined not by dying but by living, by the astonishing creativity and vitality of an ever-changing Jewish culture.
Jewish Routes // Arizona
Defying stereotypes, early Jewish pioneers in Arizona were not just storeowners and bankers, but cowboys, lawmen, ranchers and entertainers. The first known Jewish settler was the German-born Nathan Benjamin Appel, who headed west in 1856 from New York to St. Louis, then followed the Santa Fe Trail to the territory’s new capital, Tucson. Appel went on to lead a colorful life in the Wild West: He married a Catholic woman (there were no Jewish women in the territory), had ten children, and was a sheriff, saloon owner, wagon train leader and merchant. Loyal to his heritage, upon his death in 1901, Appel had a Jewish funeral led by a rabbi.
Opinion // “I Want To Serve, But…”
Naomi Ragen
Fear of ostracism—not lack of conviction—prevents some haredi men from enlisting.
A day before the haredi “million man march” called to protest the new drafting...
Can Religious Pluralism and an Official Rabbinate Coexist in Israel?
Moment asks a wide range of scholars, activists and religious leaders to suggest if and how religious pluralism and the chief rabbinate can coexist
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...
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...
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,...
Book Review // Warsaw 1944: Hitler, Himmler, and the Warsaw Uprising
By Konstanty Gebert. Over the past few years, a series of books has brought to the attention of English-speaking readers the morally challenging, historically important and often overlooked or forgotten story of the Polish contribution to the Allied war effort in World War II, and of the terrible fate of the Poles under German rule.
Opinion // Jews Aren’t the Only Ones Marrying Out
By Mark Oppenheimer // Fewer and fewer American religious groups practice endogamy today.