Jewish Ethics: Hillel and Shammai Weigh in on Gun Rights
“A Jew dare not live with absolute certainty, not only because certainty is the hallmark of the fanatic...
Saturday, September 22, 2018
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From the Editor
One could argue that Israel is the country where non-Orthodox Jews have the least religious freedom: They can’t marry, divorce or convert according to their own religious preferences. Welcome to Moment’s religious freedom issue. I’d like to be able to report that religious freedom in the...
Jewish Word | Moser
The Jewish Snitch by Sala Levin Earlier this year, Nechemya Weberman, a member of the Hasidic Satmar community in New York, was sentenced to 103 years in prison for sexually abusing a young girl over the course of three years, beginning when she was 12. The case,...
Book Review | jews and words
Stefan Kanfer reviews jews and words by Amos Oz and Fania Oz-Salzberger....
The Most Notorious Anti-Jewish Official in American History
Kaskel’s Chutzpah By Gary Stein “Your people must leave all the villages,” the government official barked. “The district must be emptied. I have an order here!” With that command begins the expulsion of the Jews from the town of Anatefka in The Fiddler on the Roof. This...
Ask the Rabbis // Are Tattoos and Body Piercings Taboo?
Independent The Torah’s proscriptions of tattoos applied to imitating religio-cultic ways of peoples who don’t exist anymore, such as Hittites and Yevusites, and later to any peoples with antithetical ways. However, they do not include socio-cultural customs. The late ultra-Orthodox halachic authority Rav Moshe Feinstein made...
The Mostly Sweet Tale of Jews and Chocolate
Convinced he would encounter Jewish traders on his 1492 journey, Christopher Columbus brought along a Jew as a Hebrew interpreter. Although he met no Jews in the New World, he did find oddly shaped “almonds” that were highly valued by the natives—cacao beans. It was conquistador...
Rabbis in Movies Quiz
With the Oscars less than two weeks away, take Moment's quiz to test your knowledge of holy men (and women) in Hollywood. _____ stars as Rabbi Tuckman in the 1993 parody, Robin Hood: Men in Tights. In the 1998 psychological thriller, Pi, _____ appears as Rabbi Cohen. Edward...
Ask the Rabbis // How Should Jews Treat Their Arab Neighbors?
Independent Although we need to take every precaution against fanatical Muslim Arab terrorism in and outside our homeland, we need to cease forcibly displacing peaceful Arabs like Bedouins, destroying their homes (even their mosques!) for the crime of not filling out forms. We were told that...
Film Review: “The Jews and the Longest Kiss in History”
MOMENT’S FILM REVIEW: “The Jews and the Longest Kiss in History” By Samuel Warshaw Frederique Cifuentes Morgan, a London-based, Parisian-born filmmaker, in Sudan to make a film about the history of its cinematic industry, was wandering around some familiar haunts in downtown Khartoum one day, when suddenly...