Illuminating the History of Iranian Jews By Diane M. Bolz [dropcap]J[/dropcap]ews have lived in Persia, now Iran, for nearly three millennia. The first Jewish community dates back to the early 6th century BCE, when the Babylonians conquered the Kingdom of Judea and exiled many of its inhabitants....
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...
An Investigation Into the Religious Roots of the Symbols for Hugs & Kisses // I grew up in a family wary of anything overtly Christian. My father transformed the expression “cross your fingers” into “star your fingers” because, as he used to explain, crosses are...
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...
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 (Talmud Bav’li, Yevamot 65b; Mahar’shal in Yam Shel Shlomo 1:8). The injunction to “Be fruitful and multiply,” the ancient rabbis...
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, announced he would retire in 2015, the inevitable speculation about who might succeed him quickly yielded to consensus: Foxman, who...
Life Beyond Portnoy By Alan Stone Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books Claudia Roth Pierpont Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2013, pp. 353, $27.00 [dropcap]P[/dropcap]hilip Roth’s pen has finally run dry, and he has announced his retirement. As if to commemorate that event, Claudia Roth Pierpont—no relation, but a good friend and...
How Philistine Became a Dirty Word by Caitlin Yoshiko Kandil [dropcap]I[/dropcap]t’s a story nearly everyone knows: The young shepherd boy uses nothing but his wits and a slingshot to take down a giant, sword-wielding warrior. As the First Book of Samuel describes, Goliath stood nearly 10-feet tall, wearing...
With the Winter Olympics set to open in Sochi, Russia, in February, Moment’s Josh Tapper talks to David Wallechinsky, author of The Complete Book of the Olympics and president of the International Society of Olympic Historians....
For the first four decades after the Holocaust, most memoirs and historical studies viewed life in the camps through male eyes. But since the early 1980s, scholars in the emerging and controversial field of gender and Holocaust studies have encouraged female survivors to tell their...