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1 week ago | 
momentmag.com | Nadine Epstein |Amy E. Schwartz |Jennifer Bardi |Sarah Breger
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Jan 21, 2025 | 
momentmag.com | Amy E. Schwartz
I want a hero: an uncommon want,When every year and month sends forth a new one,Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,The age discovers he is not the true one… That’s Lord Byron kicking off his book-length poem Don Juan, a satiric epic about a philanderer, in 1819.
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Dec 26, 2024 | 
momentmag.com | Amy E. Schwartz
Should you give books as holiday presents? Of course you should! Still, it’s natural to hesitate. Giving someone a book is a gesture with many layers: You’re not just giving a gift, you’re starting a conversation, or continuing one. Any of these books published in 2024 are conversation-starters, whether they transport you to Napoleon’s Egypt, mid-twentieth-century Florida, the Mizrahi ghettos of 1950s Israel, or to Hamburg, Algiers or even your own backyard.
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Nov 25, 2024 | 
momentmag.com | Amy E. Schwartz
any years ago, as a young reporter, I had the arresting experience of watching in real time as a random group of people spontaneously enforced the American taboo against antisemitism. It was 1996. I’d gone with a friend to Lisner Auditorium in Washington, DC, to hear a famous English baritone sing a concert of lieder, or art songs. Most of the pieces were in French or German, but one was a cycle of English folk songs, in a musical setting by the composer Benjamin Britten.
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Sep 18, 2024 | 
momentmag.com | Amy E. Schwartz
A Fox News commentator in August, citing sketchy poll results, suggested that Jews in New York might split 50-50 in the presidential election. Whether or not that happens, in this presidential campaign season the Jewish community feels polarized to a degree not recently seen—whether on Israel or on domestic politics. Does this polarization, if it’s real, have fundamental implications for American Jews’ ability to function as a community?
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Sep 18, 2024 | 
momentmag.com | Amy E. Schwartz
At a brunch during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, California assembly member Rebecca Bauer-Kahan was wearing a hat with two Stars of David flanking the slogan “Jews for Momala.” “It’s important for the world to know that Jews know Kamala supports them,” she told me.
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Jul 25, 2024 | 
momentmag.com | Amy E. Schwartz
The Possibilitiesby Yael Goldstein-LoveRandom House, 304 pp. Mother Dollby Katya ApekinaOverlook Press, 320 pp. Orange World and Other Storiesby Karen RussellVintage Contemporaries, 288 pp. I Cannot Control Everything Forever: A Memoir of Motherhood, Science and Artby Emily C. BloomSt. Martin’s Press, 352 pp. Zhenia, a Los Angeles-based aspiring actress who’s the protagonist of Katya Apekina’s Mother Doll, is having a rough pregnancy.
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Jul 15, 2024 | 
momentmag.com | Amy E. Schwartz
Sometime around July, the annual Torah reading cycle in synagogues reaches a portion called Balak that has a scene with a talking donkey. It’s never taught in Hebrew school, and it always struck me as the quintessential summer reading: The setting is familiar, but there’s a little extra room for the unexpected to happen.
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Apr 16, 2024 | 
momentmag.com | Amy E. Schwartz
Qohelet: Searching for a Life Worth LivingIlluminations and Commentaryby Debra BandPhilosophical Commentary by Menachem FischBaylor University Press, 208 pp. The first time I found myself in synagogue for the chanting of the Book of Kohelet, or Ecclesiastes—typically read by Ashkenazi Jews during the Shabbat of Sukkot, the fall harvest festival—my first astonished thought was that I’d wandered into the wrong room, or at least picked up the wrong book.
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Apr 11, 2024 | 
momentmag.com | Amy E. Schwartz
The new book Find Me the Votes: A Hard-Charging Georgia Prosecutor, a Rogue President, and the Plot to Steal an American Election by investigative journalists Daniel Klaidman and Michael Isikoff tells the colorful story of one of the more blatant and hair-raising attempts to overturn the 2020 election: Donald Trump’s phone call to the Georgia secretary of state demanding that he “find” 11,780 votes.
