Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
I have a propensity for contracting illnesses in inconvenient situations. I’ve had tonsillitis in Prague, influenza in Florida, and most recently, pneumonia in Middletown. The last was by far the least opportune time to be seriously ill – amidst four exams, three papers, and various other odds and ends that had seemed to all converge…
It’s been a while since there has been a good bit of controversy about Jewish assimilation, but thankfully American Jews and Israeli politics are out of sync just enough to justify talking about it again. The latest blip, I think, challenges American Jews much more than any other public effort since the spread of the…
Network television shows have long played upon various Jewish stereotypes. Several of these conventions were alive and well in prominent 1990s television situation comedies, or “sitcoms,” such as Will and Grace and The Nanny. Both shows frequently invoked stereotypes about Jewish women in relation to culture and religion. Characters rarely accessed their Jewish heritage outside…
Updated, 2:20 p.m., 12/9/11: I added a bit about Failed Messiah’s piece on the story. On Wednesday, New Voices broke the news that the YU Beacon, a student newspaper at Yeshiva University was in hot water over an anonymous article about a sexual encounter. Then The Jewish Daily Forward‘s Sisterhood blog had a short post about…
Yet again, someone trying in good faith to take their seat at the Jewish communal table has had their chair pulled out from under them.
At a Nov. 16 meeting of the Jewish Student Union at the University of California, Berkeley, the students of the union’s general board voted to reject the Berkeley chapter of J Street U’s application for membership. The union, considered the official voice of the Jewish community at Berkeley, is an umbrella organization funded partially by Berkeley Hillel and partially by the student government. Though Jewish groups can seek funding and recognition directly from Hillel, as J Street U does, many also choose to join the union, which gives additional funding to its 15 member organizations.
The YU Beacon, an all-online newspaper published by the students of Yeshiva University, has attracted non-stop controversy since its inception about a year ago. The Beacon was founded by Simi Lampert, Ilana Hostyk and Tali Adler — a trio of students at YU’s Stern College for Women who had run out of patience with the status quo at an existing YU newspaper.
A few months into its existence, the Beacon became an official YU publication. “People had a lot of doubts that we could go on without being censored,” Lampert told New Voices over the phone today. But the staff quickly agreed that if YU ever tried to censor the Beacon, “we would pull out from being funded by YU.”
Their resolve on that point was tested this week. An anonymous piece was published in the Beacon, written from the point of view of a female YU student told the story of the narrator’s sexual encounter with her male lover in a hotel room. Thousands of hits and hundreds of comments later, they were asked to remove the article.
The situation came to a head last night when Lampert and Toviah Moldwin, the current co-editors-in-chief of the Beacon, met with administrators and student leaders. Lampert and Moldwin decided it was time for YU and Beacon to part ways.
The classroom is filled with energy despite the hour. It’s 9:40 a.m. and students work to unscramble the Hebrew word on the board as their classmates trail in. At 10:10 the class is immersed in Israel, travelling to Tiberius and the Dead Sea. By the time the entire class has arrived, students are sitting in a close-knit circle, taking turns reading the Shema with a greater fluency than the week before.
Staffed by energetic undergraduate students, the Boston-area Jewish Education Program has transformed the way kids and parents are thinking about Hebrew school. Based on the campus of Brandeis University, the program allows college students to tackle the classroom from a different angle as educators at the start of each week, teaching Hebrew school to elementary school aged kids.
As we first reported earlier today, the editors-in-chief of the YU Beacon, the most daring of Yeshiva University’s three (!) student newspapers met at 5 p.m. with a group of YU administrators. The administrators were threatening to cut off the Beacon’s funding in response to an article about a…
Updated at 3:42 p.m. — New Voices has now re-published the censored article in its entirety. At 5:00 p.m. today, Simi Lampert and Toviah Moldwin, co-founders and co-editors-in-chief of the YU Beacon will sit down with four Yeshiva University administrators who they fear will threaten to pull the Beacon’s funding. The meeting was called in response to an…
This anonymously written article was originally published in the “Written Word” section of the YU Beacon, Yeshiva University’s co-ed student newspaper. Under pressure from administrators at YU, the editors of the beacon pulled the article down last night and replaced it with a note explaining their actions. They plan to put the article back, but until they do, New Voices will host a copy of the article, which you can read below.
Last week, we published an article about acclaimed (by the sort of people who acclaim such things) Holocaust denier Arthur R. Butz, a professor of electrical engineering at Northwestern University. Yesterday, I put together a blog post featuring some of the emails I received in response to that article, all of them from members of…
Here’s Noam Chomsky on the enormously changed landscape on US campuses over the past twenty years surrounding the US/Israel-Palestine conflict. Among the issues discussed is the growing influence of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) groups and the petty isolation of pro-Israel groups on campuses. The following is a raw excerpt from dialogues with prominent…
I was surprised by the volume of emails I received in response to last week’s article by Gabi P. Remz about Arthur R. Butz. Butz is a professor of electrical engineering at Northwestern University in Chicago. Tenured decades ago, he’s now more well known for his work as a Holocaust denier than his academic areas of expertise, which,…
With one day left of school now, I feel I must reflect. What they say about this school is true, you know — people really do sleep in the library, and it is hard to make friends. Really, two of my only friends here include the rabbi and the Catholic priest. It’s kind of interesting. They…
One of the foremost experts on the Second Temple Period, Shaye J. D. Cohen, the Nathan Littauer Professor of Hebrew Literature and Philosophy at Harvard University, writes, “In the eyes of the ancients, the essence of religion was neither faith nor dogma, but action” (51). Though counterintuitive, this statement seems absolutely correct. If one searches the…