Moment Magazine

Warning of the challenges current journalists face, Robert Siegel, Moment ’s special literary contributor and the former NPR cohost of All Things Considered said reporters have to, “once again, do their basic job of sorting out fact from fiction, in a strange age when we have a president, or will soon have one, who really doesn’t care.” Siegel spoke to a crowd of 300 as he accepted the Inspirational Journalism Award at Moment ’s 2024 benefit and awards dinner.

Calling it “Unmistakable, raw antisemitism,” CNN’s chief political correspondent Dana Bash spoke Sunday night of the harassment she has faced online and in person in the wake of her reporting on the Middle East since October 7.

Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland’s 8th Congressional District and Eleanor Holmes Norton, DC’s delegate to Congress, made impassioned pleas for DC statehood as Raskin introduced Norton as the 2024 recipient of Moment ’s Ruth Bader Ginsburg Human Rights Award at its annual benefit and awards dinner on Sunday night.

Moment ’s 2024 benefit and awards dinner celebrates trailblazers in journalism and democracy.

Taboos have always been part of human society, but they are never set in stone. You can grow new taboos, but you can’t force them.

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All of the sources generally cited as making cremation off limits ( Shulchan Aruch, Yorah De’ah 348:3 and 362:1) assume burial in the earth. Our bodies are ours to take care of, the Torah tells us, and not ours to in any way defile ( Leviticus 19:28 and Deuteronomy 14:1 ). This is why we have for thousands of years honored the body with burial in the earth, to accommodate its return to the elements at the most organic and natural pace possible. So yes, burial—along with all of its accompanying rituals of honoring the dead—is preferable.

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I t all began when two friends were chatting over a drink in the lobby of a Paris hotel. It was the fall of 2018, and American photographer Ralph Gibson and investment manager Martin Cohen, who share an interest in music and photography, were in the city to attend an international photo fair. Cohen, who is a longtime member of the Board of Governors of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion and has made numerous trips to Israel, asked Gibson if he had ever been there. Gibson had not but said he would love to visit. Knowing Ralph’s work, says Cohen, “it came to me that a view of Israel through his unique lens would capture the people and land in a fresh, moving, artistic and informative manner. So I said, ‘Let me take you there. I think there might be something for you to photograph.’”

Over the weekend, Jewish and Israeli media reported on the tragic disappearance, and now confirmed death, of Rabbi Zvi Kogan, a Chabad emissary in Abu Dhabi. While the story is still in development, the suspected perpetrators, three Uzbek men in the employ of Iran, were captured in Turkey and extradited to the Emirates