The September/October Issue of Moment

It’s on its way!  Here’s a preview of our cover:

Sarah Silverman On Your Voice Mail!

If you’re already in the market for a really spectacular Hanukkah gift, look no further.  For the next 12 days, Moment will be auctioning off spectacular vacations, rare books, and, yes, even Sarah Silverman’s voice for your voice mail or answering machine.

Click here to bid!

May/June issue of Moment is Out!

By Benjamin Schuman-Stoler

May/June 2009 Issue

The May/June issue of Moment is out! Some highlights:

• Publish-a-kid contest winners
• New column by Eric Alterman
• A new shot at reforming Israel’s electoral system
• And more!

Al Franken… Gets Serious

Moment readers might remember a cover story in our December 2005 issue on Al Franken. Considering how his intense and close Senate race (the most recent count has him losing by all of 204 votes) is all over the news, we decided to post it here for further enjoyment.

So, enjoy!

By David Paul Kuhn

Al Franken leans over the scattered papers atop his desk. He puffs out his pasty cheeks. His round brown glasses seem slightly too small for his face. His brown eyebrows arch up and he grins like Jack Nicholson’s Joker in Batman. “I gotta tell you,” Franken says to me in his midtown Manhattan office, “I’ve been to Israel, and I didn’t enjoy it.” He chuckles. He knows he’s telling this to a Jewish magazine. “I hate to say that,” he continues. “I support Israel. But when I was there, in 1984, it was very high-pressured. It felt very”—he pauses to find the right word—“tense.”

Al Franken is a caricature of himself, which allows him to talk about serious issues without ever appearing to take himself too seriously. He can shuttle from the solemn to the sardonic as the straight man, often in droll monotone. You may dislike him or think of him as an ideologue—the mirror image of his adversaries, Rush Limbaugh and Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly. The title of a recent book by conservative Bernard Goldberg calls him out: 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America (And Al Franken is #37).

Or you may think he’s a hero. With his 1996 book, Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations, the Saturday Night Live alumnus found a new calling: doing unto conservatives as they have done unto others. Until Franken’s foray into Beltway bombast,

November/December Issue of Moment

It’s on newsstands now!

The election is over. Take a deep breath. Now, curl up at home with the new issue of Moment.

First you’ll meet Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz, aka Jon Stewart. Even with an anglicized name, the Daily Show host is still the quintessential Jewish boy from Jersey. He may also be the perfect Jewish ambassador for our times—smart but not arrogant, extremely funny but not mean—a valedictorian, most popular, best-looking and class clown all wrapped into one. In this exclusive cover story, discover Stewart’s Jewish background and beliefs, and hear from family members, teachers and friends.

In the spirit of Jewish Book Month, we asked co-founder Elie Wiesel and other Nobel laureates Eric Kandel, Avram Hershko, Martin Perl, Robert Solow, Robert Aumann, Eric Maskin, Sidney Altman and Roger Myerson to reflect on their favorites. Our book section, edited by Mike Levitas, former editor of The New York Times Sunday Book Review and op-ed page, includes renowned cookbook author Joan Nathan’s take on Maria Balinska’s history of The Bagel. And don’t miss Allan Nadler’s review of Joel Kraemer’s Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization’s Greatest Minds. Plus, we present the winners of our fiction contest.

Happy reading!

Inthemoment has another URL

Hi there, Moment readers. We hope you’re enjoying the blog so far.

We wanted to let you know that we’ve updated the address of our site, so it can now be reached at momentmagblog.com. It’s easier to remember: All you have to do is add “blog” to our main magazine site’s URL, momentmag.com.

Of course, the old URL will still work just fine.

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Thanks so much!

—Benjamin Schuman-Stoler

The Google Seder

By Nadine Epstein

The e-mail invitation came at the last minute. Not that Google didn’t know Passover was on its way, but apparently it would have been un-Google-like to plan too far in advance. So the message arrived just a few days ahead of the special evening: “I would like to formally announce this year’s Google seder, affectionately known as Koogle@Google 2008.”

“Google? seder? Google seder?” you might ask. Not many companies (I can’t think of any others) have an official corporate seder. We’re not talking a Hanukkah or Christmas party but a full-fledged Exodus commemorative night at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California, a few miles south of Palo Alto, in the heart of Silicon Valley.