Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
Following up on our post on Monday, the “Ahmadinedinner” (as friend of New Voices and editor-in-chief of The Current David Fine called tonight’s student dinner with the grand poobah of Iran in an op-ed in the Columbia Spectator) will go forward tonight, albeit with a change in the cast. The student organization originally reported to be…
When it comes to Jewish rappers, there aren’t that many names–MC Serch, the Beastie Boyz, Shyne. The biggest one out right now is Kosha Dillz, an Israeli-American from New Jersey who raps everything from grimy battle raps to hasbara (staunchly pro-Israel messages). He plays festivals from Summer Jam in his home state of New Jersey to South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, Texas.
He’s a hustler. Before I even heard his music, I saw him on twitter, hitting up Israeli celebrities to promote his music. When I saw him at the Middle East nightclub in Cambidge, Mass. Back in June, he was in the crowd a half hour before his set, passing out bumper stickers and pins.
I called him up a few days ago to talk hip-hop, business and politics. A lot of politics.
Anyone accepting Columbia International Relations Council and Association’s invitation to sit down for an intimate dinner with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad next week should take a look at a photo taken at a public square in Iran, and distributed by the Associated Press on July 23, 2005. The image depicts two blindfolded boys, around 16 years of age, with nooses being affixed to their necks moments before they were publicly hanged by Ahmadinejad’s regime because they were accused of “raping boys,” or, as we call it, being gay.
I recall this photo not because it shocks–though it does–or because it will tell you anything new about the man who approved those hangings–it won’t. I bring it up because the moral burden of our Columbia University education and human dignity require us to examine whether it is right for us to sit down to dinner with a man who facilitates, even encourages, such executions.
After a controversial speech at Columbia University in 2007, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may have linked up with the New York school again to discuss his policies. And every news outlet from the Upper West Side to Israel has put their two cents in. According to a Sept. 10 article in the Columbia Daily Spectator,…
The back cover of Joshua Cohen’s novel Witz is enticing, but misleading. It depicts an alternate history where all the Jews in the world die at the start of the 21st century, resulting in a Judaism pop-culture craze as the goyim try to preserve, imitate and commercialize Jewish culture. I read this synopsis and thought “either this…
Today in New Voices, we have American University correspondent Zach C. Cohen’s story about the new Martin Luther King, Jr. monument on the National Mall. Gaze upon the beauty that is the photo above. I’ve been harping on the national correspondents about getting great photos to go with their stories. I’ve told them that I…
To their friends and neighbors, they’re a standard Orthodox Jewish couple, a man and a woman married for five years, two children in tow. Their marriage is a product of convenience rather than love, but that’s not unusual. Yet the particular reason for their union is unique: the man is gay, and the woman is…
When you first walk through the Mountain of Despair that marks the entrance of the new memorial to Martin Luther King, Jr. on the National Mall, the vision of two massive walls of water about to collapse is inescapable. As visitors pass through and see King’s likeness etched into the part of the monument known as the Stone of Hope, it is almost as if King is getting ready to part the Tidal Basin for his people’s long-awaited escape to freedom.
“It’s gorgeous,” Rachel Silvert, a senior at American University, said. “It’s a beautiful monument.”
The intimidating mural of stylized heads and arbitrary brushstrokes in the lounge of my dorm quotes the Talking Heads: “And you may ask yourself ‘Well, how did I get here?’” The most honest answer I can give: I have no idea. I’m living in a time warp, watching my seventeenth year fly by on fast-forward….
For Apple, that was indeed the question. After protests from Jewish activists, the software giant removed from their App Store a French program called “Juif ou pas Juif,” or “Jew or not Jew.” For $1.08, users could find out if their favorite stars qualified as members of the Tribe. The app’s creator, Johann Lévy, is…
It’s tempting to call freshman Penina Yaffa Kessler a rookie reporter. But that would be misleading. We first met her back in May at our Jewish Student Journalism Conference. This was right after we had moved into our new office, inside the offices of the Forward. Penina told us that she was a rising freshman…
When Hurricane Irene blew through the Eastern Seaboard last month, the coordinators of Wesleyan University’s annual pre-orientation Jewish camping trip were faced with dropping enrollment. They scrambled to find a new location after the campsite they planned to hold the program at closed ahead of the storm.
The camping trip, a Wesleyan tradition over the past five years that is entirely organized by students involved with the Jewish community–though not all of them are Jewish–has established itself as an integral part of the Jewish community’s outreach to incoming freshmen and a way of strengthening existing ties. So when Irene threatened its continuation, its leaders fought for its survival.
Full Name: Haley Jennifer Joy Pessin Bio: Haley Pessin is a junior at Williams College in MA majoring in French and History. She thoroughly enjoys reading books, attending the theatre and classical music concerts, and consuming gelato. You identify as a “JewMaican.” Would you explain what led you to identify this way? Well, my father…
College is supposed to challenge your assumptions, but right now I’m experiencing the most annoying challenge possible. As planned, I went down a couple of days ago to talk to the rabbi—ordained Reconstructionist, though he insists that the congregation is “unaffiliated”—about my options for converting. He told me, of course, that I and my patrilineal…
In 586 B.C.E., the Babylonians, under King Nebuchadnezzar, decimated the Temple in Jerusalem, forever ending ancient Israelite culture. With the Temple destroyed and most of its worshipers exiled to Babylon, it seemed that God had left His “Chosen People.” Yet, after defeating the Babylonians in 539 B.C.E., King Cyrus the Great of the Persian Achaemendid…