Moment

Proust had his madeleine, the buttery, tea-moistened crumbs that brought back a torrent of childhood memories for the narrator of In Search of Lost Time. German poet Heinrich Heine, known for his complicated relationship with Judaism, had cholent,...

My mother, Ruth Epstein, now nearly 87, worked her way up from volunteer to executive director at our Jewish Community Center in Deal, New Jersey. A brilliant, intuitive woman with four children and two degrees, she founded the youth employment program,...

One bill in the Knesset is aimed at keeping human rights groups from filing suit before Israel's Supreme Court. Another would bar mosques from using loud-speakers for the call to prayer; the supposed ban on noise pollution says nothing of church bells,...

Elections are in the air--and not just in the United States. In December, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called for early primaries in his Likud Party, a likely indicator that he may dissolve the Knesset sometime in 2012 and call a general...

Muscular. Courageous. Bronzed. The stereotype of the sun-kissed sabra is Ari ben Canaan, as played by actor Paul Newman in the 1960 movie Exodus. The word sabra stems from the name of the prickly pear cactus--tzabar in Hebrew and sabr in Arabic--whose...

The triple-level, double penthouse on Park Avenue in Manhattan has been on the market for two years, with a price tag of $5.5 million. "Have you come for the open house?" the butler asks when I arrive, and looks disappointed when I shake my head. The...

A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age Steven Nadler Princeton University Press 2011, $29.95, pp. 304 As citizens of a liberal democracy, we take for granted that priests and rabbis cannot...

Not long ago, my eldest granddaughter celebrated her bat mitzvah--two months shy of 60 years after I celebrated mine. I was one of the first girls in Conservative Judaism permitted the "privilege" of the supposed equivalent of the male coming-of-age...

DAVID K. SHIPLER It seems obvious to say that being pro-Israel means supporting Israel's survival, security and well-being as a just and prosperous society. Nobody would disagree. Where people part company is over how best to achieve those goals:...

ACROSS 1 Call from the crib 5 Challah ingredient 8 " __ boom bah!" 11 Exist 14 Non-PC buy 15 See 7-Down 17 Cause of an immune reponse 19 Canadian-born comic actor who starred in "The Green Hornet" 21 Former "60 Minutes" regular...