In writing about the unspeakable mass atrocities targeting the Uighurs and other Turkic Muslims in the Xinjiang region of China, I’m reminded of the words of Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and conscience of humanity, that “silence in the face of evil is complicity with evil itself”—and that, as he would remind us again and again, “Indifference always means coming down on the side of the victimizer, never on the side of the victim.”
By the curb in front of the three-story yellow house at Salzburger Vorstadt 15, in the picturesque town of Braunau am Inn in northern Austria, stands a memorial stone taken from the quarries of the Mauthausen concentration camp.
The demolition of a statue, the withdrawal of public adulation for the erstwhile hero the statue commemorates, has echoes of a fundamental Jewish principle: the injunction against graven images.
The past few years have suggested that the free speech values enshrined in the First Amendment are running out of steam.
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.
Max Brooks, author of World War Z and the newly released Devolution, discusses his books, what you can do to be prepared for times when reality resembles fiction and how his unconventional way of thinking has led to a partnership with the military. In addition, Max reminisces about the late Carl Reiner and the friendship he had with his dad, Mel Brooks and what it was like growing up Jewish. Max also shares how he became a writer, despite having dyslexia and how his mother, the late Anne Bancroft, was always his biggest advocate. Max is joined in conversation with Moment editor-in-chief Nadine Epstein.
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.
There are many ways to explain the Holocaust. But not many historians have proffered a different theory with each published book.
Zero Hour, the anti-climate-change group that Jamie S. Margolin founded two years ago when she was 16, calls itself “a movement of unstoppable youth.”
Like a first-rate burglar breaking into every apartment in a condominium, the COVID-19 pandemic has breached almost every country in the world, catching each one in its own incidental moment of current affairs.
