Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
Congratulations, Judaism! Reality TV has chosen you to teach the most spoiled, hostile, and disrespectful teenagers a lesson. According to a recent article in Haaretz, BBC’s “The World’s Strictest Parents” recently filmed an episode in the Orthodox-only Israeli village of Nof Ayalon to see whether two teenage high school dropouts, Jack Travers and Gemma Lyons,…
I have found that I lack the necessary Arabic words to adequately describe the concept of “keeping kosher.†While the notion of vegetarianism may be generally accepted in Amman, for my home-stay mother, Madame Basma, such a lifestyle remains as foreign… as the American Jew living in her house. I had barely walked through the…
On a Hillel-sponsored trip to Israel three and a half years ago I sat in a crowd of 45 students listening to Mark Regev, an Israeli government spokesman, speak about the challenges facing the PR operation of the Jewish State. After detailing strategy, obstacles and key issues Regev dismissed concerns, saying, “A Cadillac sells itself:…
If your family is anything like mine, you already have Judaism on demand. Kugel recipes; memories of the Lower East Side; updates on the Brandeis art museum – I have it all push of a button: speed-dial to my 98-year-old great aunt, Jay, in Pompano Beach. But for folks without an on-call source for Jewish…
I had never expected Amman to be such a windy city. Back home, as I packed my single duffle bag for my seven-week trip, I fretted over how I would balance modest dressing amid the inevitable, unbearable heat. I was headed to Amman to study Modern Standard Arabic (Fus-ha) and colloquial Jordanian dialect (Aamiah) through…
This year, for better or worse, marks the 10th anniversary of the publishing of Kosher Sex, a book by self-billed “America’s Rabbi” Shmuley Boteach, who also happens to be Michael Jackson’s ex-spiritual advisor. Be that as it may, the book became a bestseller and its title represents at least half of the fantasy of the…
I find that I’m often struggling to find a way to best answer a question that comes up so often now that I’m a college student: Why are colleges so liberal? Curious myself, I picked up a book titled One Party Classroom by David Horowitz. Horowitz argues that professors in the most prestigious and high-ranked…
Not to be a promoter of stereotypes, but Jews are good at worrying. I suppose that centuries of persecution have that effect. As a community, we have our usual concerns, many of which we’ve been worrying about for generations: anti-Semitism, assimilation, the future of the Jewish people, and, of course, Israel. With a history that…
Summer brings with it a lot of dead air. Â From beach traffic to bathroom lines at the ballpark, awkward silences lurk everywhere. Â But fear not: just as you can arm yourself against sunburn and mosquitoes, you can prepare for lapses in conversation. Â Enter Ray Kurzweil — Jewish super-intellect; unabashed Futurist; conversational lighter fluid. Kurzweil is…
In honor of my first blog post, I’m going to steer clear of all issues pertaining to elected Israeli officials, elected (maybe?) Iranian officials, and Holocaust museums. As important as these things are, I’ll wait to discuss the more controversial ideas bouncing around on this blog until I feel a little more comfortable. But in…
A few days ago, Daniel Temkin wrote optimistically about the potential for progress towards peace under Netanyahu and Obama, comparing the political climate to that of 1977 under Begin and Carter, when the Camp David Accords created a lasting peace between Israel and Egypt. At the end of his post, Daniel mentioned the expectation that…
In a blog post from earlier this week, Ben Sales suggested that the tension between supporters and opponents of Israeli settlements in the West Bank is nothing new. I would argue that the current tension between Washington and Jerusalem is a new and alarming development, one which should concern all supporters of Israel. But it…
 My friend Ari Roskies made the case on this blog two days ago that President Obama should have criticized oppresive Islamist regimes for requiring women to wear hijabs, or traditional head-coverings, in addition to defending what should be the right of women to do so in western countries. Ari added that by not opposing the hijab’s enforcement, Obama…
A great tragedy in D.C. yesterday, as a neo-Nazi murdered an African-American security guard at the Holocaust Memorial Museum. The neo-Nazi was 88, the numerology of which will not be lost on white supremacists. As we mourn Stephen Tyrone Johns, a thought. There’s been much attention given to a few lines written in an online…