When we interviewed a group of thinkers on the years that altered human history, we were floored by their thoughtful responses. While we had to condense their answers for the print issue, we have curated additional selections from their interviews, which we are so pleased to publish here.
For centuries, the Jewish calendar has unified the Jewish people. The dates of Jewish holidays have set common temporal landmarks for Jews, wherever they may live.
Moment has its origins in Eastern Europe. Leonard Fein and Elie Wiesel named Moment for the influential independent Yiddish-language Der Moment, founded in 1910 in Warsaw, Poland.
Thirty thinkers tell us which years altered the course of Jewish history
Thirty thinkers tell us which years altered the course of Jewish history
In his editor’s note in the May 1975 inaugural issue of Moment, Fein set out the magazine’s mandate “that Moment will help raise the sense of Jewish possibility, hence also raise Jewish aspirations.”
Humans have been trying to make sense of time since, well, the beginning of time—at least human time.
A tree now grows in the arid soil of Kibbutz Ketura in southern Israel. A subspecies extinct for nearly a thousand years, this Judean date palm was resurrected from a tiny 2,000-year-old seed found in an ancient clay jar unearthed in 1963 by archaeologists excavating around Herod the Great’s palace at the ancient fortress of Masada.
In a bare room adjoining the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art, Chief Curator Massumeh Farhad places a virtual reality headset over her eyes.
We Jews are obsessed with history. From ancient to modern times, from the Flood to the Exodus to the destruction of the Temples and the exiles, from the Middle Ages to the Inquisition and the pogroms to the Holocaust to the establishment of the State of Israel, we recall and retell our history.
When she was growing up in England, Moment senior editor Dina Gold used to listen to her grandmother’s stories about her glamorous life in 1920s Berlin and of her dreams of one day recovering the building which, she claimed, had been stolen from the family by the Nazis, Dina talks about her search to unearth the details of her long-dead grandmother’s claims and the legal case she launched to recover the property.
A year later, we speak every day, staying close during this pandemic. Helena, soon to turn 96, is quarantined alone inside her apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. It’s a home filled with memories. Photographs, books and artwork, much of it from her travels, cover walls and shelves. But her kitchen calendar, once abrim with engagements—lunches, dinners, concerts, plays—is now blank.
