Nadine  Epstein

  • Nadine Epstein is an award-winning journalist, essayist, author, social entrepreneur and speaker. She is editor-in-chief and CEO of Moment Magazine (momentmag.com) and is co-founder of Moment Institute Middle East Fellows (MIMEF.org). Her books include RBG's Brave & Brilliant Women: 33 Jewish Women to Inspire Everyone, a collaboration with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg; Elie Wiesel, An Extraordinary Life and Legacy: Writings, Photographs and Reflections (foreword by Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks and afterword by Ted Koppel); Spiritual Bathing: Healing Rituals and Traditions from Around the World; Rainforest Home Remedies: The Maya Way To Heal Your Body and Replenish Your Soul and Sastun: My Apprenticeship with a Mayan Healer. She has contributed to anthologies including The Late Great Mexican Border and Racing in the Street: The Bruce Springsteen Reader. Her work has been published in Moment, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Smithsonian and Newsweek and other publications. She is a mixed media artist and creator of the iShadow Project. More at NadineEpstein.com.

CEO & Editor-in-Chief

Nadine Epstein is the editor-in-chief and CEO of Moment Magazine, leading its editorial team and its growth as a multi-media community with print and an array of digital platforms. Moment, an independent Jewish magazine, was founded in 1975 by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel, and writer Leonard Fein, and is now under the auspices of the Washington, DC-based Center for Creative Change (CCC), which Nadine founded in 2001. The CCC, which took over Moment in 2004, is also home to journalism and democracy-strengthening efforts such as the Moment Institute Middle East Fellows, the Daniel Pearl Investigative Journalism Initiative, MomentLive! public affairs programming as well as cultural programs such as the Moment-Karma Foundation Short Fiction Contest.

Under Nadine’s leadership, Moment Magazine has become a highly respected multi-media hub of journalism and innovative projects. From the magazine’s dynamic award-winning website to a strong lineup of e-newsletters, webcasts, online classes, live events, extensive social media, contests (humor, fiction, others), archives and partnerships, Moment’s reaches nearly two million people each year. Moment covers the U.S. and the world from the Jewish perspective with the goal of bringing people together rather than pushing them apart, and curates a wide array of opinions to provide a balanced, nuanced and deep view of issues. The consistently high quality and breadth and depth of Moment’s work attracts top journalists, leaders, thinkers, writers and artists. Moment is an independent publication in the Washington, DC non-profit Center for Creative Change, which Nadine founded in 2001. Moment is funded by donations and grants as well as business revenue.  

Journalist

Nadine’s journalism encompasses her passion for deepening understanding between people, and spans wide-ranging interests such as religion, foreign affairs, gender equity, the arts, science, health, the body-mind relationship and the Maya world. Her articles and op-eds have been published in major publications including Moment, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Smithsonian, The Christian Science Monitor, The Chicago Tribune, Ms. and Newsweek. Her first fulltime journalism job was as a general assignment and police reporter for the City News Bureau of Chicago where she also covered the broadcast desk and was night city editor. After publishing her first magazine story in The New York Times Magazine, she then worked as a full-time stringer for the Times’s Chicago Bureau, reporting and writing for the National, Real Estate and Living sections. Later, while living in Nogales, Arizona, she covered the U.S.-Mexico border and while based in Washington, DC, rural America. Nadine has returned again and again to the topic of political, social, and religious movements from the German and U.S. Green parties to Operation Push and the Nation of Islam to right-wing militias. In 2000, she was founding editor of the start-up publication, Inner Space, launched to educate consumers about counseling and therapy options. She has served as a judge for various panels of the National Magazine Awards, and on other awards panels.

Author

In 2021, published RBG’s Brave and Brilliant Women: 33 Jewish Women to Inspire Everyone (Random House), which she wrote in collaboration with the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Earlier books include Elie Wiesel: An Extraordinary Life and Legacy (MomentBooks/Mandel Vilar Press with a foreword by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks and afterword by Ted Koppel)—one of MVP’s bestselling books on the Holocaust; Sastun: My Apprenticeship with a Maya Healer (HarperCollins), for which she also co-wrote the short documentary of the same title; Rainforest Home Remedies: The Maya Way to Heal Your Body and Replenish Your Soul (HarperCollins), and Spiritual Bathing: Healing Rituals and Traditions from Around the World (Ten Speed Press), now republished as Spiritual Bathing: The Illustrated Guide to Spiritual Water Rituals (Echo Point Books). She has contributed to anthology collections including Racing in the Streets: The Bruce Springsteen Reader (Penguin) and The Late, Great Mexican Border: Reports from a Disappearing Line (Cinco Punto Press). As founder and editor of MomentBooks, she has acquired and edited titles such as Have I Got a Cartoon for You: The Moment Book of Jewish Cartoons, edited by Bob Mankoff with a foreword by Roz Chast, and Can Robots Be Jewish?, edited by Amy E. Schwartz. Nadine is currently at work on a novel.

Speaker & Conversation Convener

Nadine is a frequent speaker on topics such as antisemitism, international affairs, women’s issues, genetics, artificial intelligence, democracy, polarization and the American Jewish community. She speaks and keynotes for conferences, philanthropic organizations, women’s groups, faith groups, museums, schools and universities both in the U.S. and abroad, and she has been interviewed by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, All Things Considered and Al-Jazeera, among other media outlets. She has been interviewed for documentaries such as Soros by Jesse Dylan.

Nadine’s eclectic background inspires her to convene and curate meaningful conversations, both in person and through MomentLive! virtual public affairs programs. Throughout her career, she has interviewed global leaders, U.S. politicians and presidential candidates, artists, writers, scientists, and visionaries in the political, diplomatic, cultural and intellectual realms. Moment’s Big Question Project, which she launched, is based on the ancient saying from Ethics of our Father, “Who is Wise? One who learns from everyone.” The project presents a spectrum of voices on issues crucial to democracy and to public discourse—from politics to culture to religion to the arts. She cohosts The Wide River Project (TWRP) with Eric K. Ward of Race Forward. TWRP conversations explore the eddies and channels of the American Black and Jewish relationship. Nadine has designed, curated  and produced events such as “A Great Civil Rights Partnership: A Celebration in Honor of the Struggle for Racial Equality, Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Voting Rights Act,“ a “Live Photo Exhibition” marking the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, with guests that included Julian Bond, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Barney Frank as well as Rep. John Lewis and Susannah Heschel, held at the Knight Auditorium of the Newseum.

Social Entrepreneurship & Public Service

In the 1980s, Nadine cofounded and helped run Los Comadres, a small non-profit grassroots group providing public health education for women and children living in border shantytowns in Nogales, Mexico. As founder of the Washington, DC-based Center for Creative Change, Nadine has launched a broad range of projects such as The Wide River Project, The Moment Institute Middle East Fellows (mimef.org), The Daniel Pearl Investigative Journalism Initiative, The Big Question Project, and others, as well as numerous journalism, newsletter and multi-media projects. In addition to the projects above, Nadine’s work on behalf of Washington, DC public school students led to her appointment as co-chair of the advocacy group Parents United for DC Public Schools. In the 1990s she was cofounder and co-chair of Friends of Marie Reed Pool, a community organization in the Adams-Morgan area of Washington DC, dedicated to saving, improving, and increasing community involvement with Marie Reed Community Learning Center’s swimming pool.

Artist

Nadine has kept drawing journals for much of her life, working in ink, markers and other mixed media. In 2008 she created The iShadow Project, a fine art photography and collage exploration of shadow self-portraits taken around the world. Work from her drawing journals and The iShadow Project has been displayed in museums and galleries. For a few years, she was an editorial illustrator, contributing to The Christian Science Monitor and many magazines and newspapers. She provides art direction for Moment and has curated art shows and live photo exhibitions, and cofounded the Moment Gallery, which showcased the work of women artists in Washington, DC. Nadine’s work has been supported by the Washington DC Commission on the Arts.

Consulting

Nadine has been a strategic, public affairs, programmng and communications consultant with clients such as the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the University of Michigan; Western Public Radio; the University of Arizona, Lifecounselors.com, Shandwick International and WNET-TV. She also consults on writing and book development, organizational strategy and fundraising, and has been a philanthropic advisor, creativity and non-profit leadership coach.

Teaching

As an educator, Nadine designed and taught science and feature writing courses for the Master’s Program in Journalism in the Communications Department of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and continues to offer workshops in magazine and first person essay/memoir writing. She has also designed and led creative workshops for elementary school children as well as creative learning and parenting for parents in two Washington, DC public schools.  She has led intensive creative writing residencies for middle school students and creative nonfiction seminars for adults. She also works one-on-one with adults on book development and writing.

Honors and Distinctions

As a young woman, Nadine was chosen to participate in Atlantik-Brucke/Carl Duesberg Society/International Press Institute and Robert Bosch Foundation programs in West and East Germany, and as a Kellogg Fellow for Public Service in Journalism, part of the Knight Wallace Fellows program at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Over the years her research and writing has been supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism, the Littauer Foundation, the Washington DC Commission on the Arts, The PJ Library and other organizations. She has received awards for work such as “The Other Rosenbergs”; for her 2011 investigation  into discrimination against Jews who worked for the U.S. Army Signal Corps at Fort Monmouth, NJ in the wake of Julius Rosenberg’s arrest (funded by the Center for Investigative Journalism); for her profiles “Uncle Xenon: The Elemental Oliver Sacks”; “Evolution of a Moderate on Mohammed Dajani”; “Brian Epstein: The Man Behind the Beatles” (cowritten with Walter Podrazik); for commentary,  “The Dark Side of Shalom Bayi; for writing about Black-Jewish Relations, “In the Shadow of the Lynching Memorial”; and for food writing, “The Great Hanukkah Clanging” and “The Horseradish Chronicles”. Her 2018 investigation, "Sheldon Adelson: Playing to Win" written with Wesley G. Pippert, published in Moment and by Slate was a finalist in the Best Single Article/Story for the Mirror Awards of the Newhouse School at Syracuse University. 

Education

Nadine holds a BA and MA in international relations from the University of Pennsylvania and studied Middle Eastern affairs at Tel Aviv University. As a research associate for Swarthmore College, she researched the distribution of food in aid in Kenya and Egypt for a project supported by USAID and the Rockefeller Foundation. Later, she was a University Fellow in the political science doctoral program at Columbia University. Still, Nadine’s exposure to the world’s complexities came not only from formal education but from childhood summers working on the Asbury Park, NJ boardwalk, many different kinds of jobs and extensive travels, including a solo hitchhiking journey through Eastern Europe before the fall of the Iron Curtain, and another, with her guitar, throughout Central America. As a Kellogg Fellow for Public Service in Journalism, a fellowship of the Knight Wallace Fellowship program at the University of Michigan, she explored the mind-body relationship.