By Sala Levin Moment Presents Ten Messianic Flicks Superman (1978) In Richard Donner’s adaptation of the comic-book classic, Jor-El (Marlon Brando) launches his son Kal-El (Hebrew for “voice of God”) into space before the planet Krypton blows up. After crash-landing in the Midwest, Kal-El-turned-Superman (Christopher Reeve) stops Lex...
“A Jew dare not live with absolute certainty, not only because certainty is the hallmark of the fanatic...
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...
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,...
Stefan Kanfer reviews jews and words by Amos Oz and Fania Oz-Salzberger....
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...