From the Editor

Nadine Epstein

Living in Washington, DC, it is impossible not to get swept up in the excitement of the presidential race. Sadly, it’s also easy to slip into cynicism, thanks to the negative campaigning and horse-race media coverage. Moment, a proud home of passionate political commentary across the spectrum, strives to cover important issues that don’t get the attention they merit—and to transcend snarkiness. With these thoughts in mind, we deliver an election issue that is a political junkie’s dream.

In our expanded opinion section, long-time Moment columnist Letty Cottin Pogrebin, one of the founding editors of Ms. Magazine, advises Jews to vote for Barack Obama, and novelist and conservative commentator Naomi Ragen makes the case for John McCain. David Frum derides Jewish conspiracy theories and Jews who contribute to them. Nathan Guttman questions why presidential campaigns continue to wrongly assume American Jews are one-issue voters when it comes to Israel.

One of the most significant tasks that will fall to our next president is the nomination of one or more new justices to the Supreme Court. These lifetime appointees may render decisions on everything from the death penalty to school prayer and yes, abortion and gun control.

Since 2006, and for the first time in history, there has been a majority of non-Protestant justices on the Supreme Court: Five Catholics, two Protestants and two Jews serve on the bench. Religious diversity on the Court is surely a sign of progress, but it also got us thinking: What role, if any, does personal faith have on the legal decisions justices make? To help us answer these questions, we have assembled a distinguished group of Supreme Court watchers, from CNN’s senior legal correspondent and New Yorker writer Jeffrey Toobin to UCLA Law Professor Eugene Volokh, who founded the popular law blog Volokh Conspiracy. Our experts offer a fascinating and sometimes surprising look at the ways that the religion of Supreme Court justices might have—and might not have—influenced their jurisprudence throughout the Court’s history.

We are grateful to the hundreds of you who participated in our online presidential poll and told us about the issues—the Supreme Court, Israeli security, the war in Iraq, the economy, the health care crisis—that matter most to you and the candidates who best represent your views. To top off our election extravaganza, we’ve dug through 33 years of Moment archives to bring you excerpts from our past election coverage. As you’ll see, in some ways not much has changed. Then again, it wasn’t long ago that America’s presidential candidates never would have dreamed of supporting the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Be it John F. Kennedy’s win in 1960 or Ronald Reagan’s in 1980, some elections become watershed moments in the nation’s history. In our personal lives, we are also sometimes able to point back to an event or a conversation that was truly transformative. For actor Kirk Douglas, star of Spartacus, Paths of Glory, The Devil’s Disciple and numerous other films, that event came in the form of a helicopter crash. In a conversation with David Wolpe, his rabbi at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, the nonagenarian talks about his conflicting feelings toward Judaism as a youth and how the crash renewed his faith.

For Ariel Sabar, the birth of his son prompted him to delve into his family’s past. In a moving essay, Sabar recounts the journey that he and his father—Yona Sabar, a respected professor of Semitic languages at UCLA—took to the heart of what was once Jewish Kurdistan during the turmoil of the current Iraq war. Together, father and son discover what little remains of the Jewish community in the land to which the Israelites were exiled after the destruction of the First Temple.

As you stash away your beach reads, we have a bulging book section to get your fall reading jumpstarted. For fans of the legendary Maus creator Art Spiegelman, Steven Heller reviews Breakdowns, a new edition of the anthology of his autobiographical comics, which includes a painful rendering of his Holocaust survivor mother’s suicide. Sidney Offit lauds a memoir/biography/linguistic study of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the Samuel Johnson of the Hebrew dictionary. For those who need more in the way of a political fix, Milton Viorst critiques A Path Out of the Desert, the latest book from the influential Middle East scholar Kenneth M. Pollack, and Clyde Haberman reviews The Hebrew Republic: How Secular Democracy and Global Enterprise Will Bring Israel Peace at Last.

In our popular “Jewish Word” section, we raise a glass to your health as we explore the origins and meaning of the ubiquitous cheer, l’chaim. Enjoy this issue, and be sure to continue the conversation online at momentmag.com. Add your comments to our blog (momentmagblog.com) or participate in our poll by telling us your favorite Jewish book of all time. You can also find the deadlines for our Publish-a-Kid Contest, You Can Save the World Contest for highschoolers and the Moment Magazine-Karma Foundation Short Fiction Contest.

L’shana tova!