Beware of the Thought Police on Campus

By Holly Bicerano December 31, 2014

    Recent occurrences on campuses have greatly undermined freedom of expression and should serve as a forewarning of what will happen in the future. While the hardliners of any ideological camp will seldom admit it, the perpetrators and victims have been people on both the left and right; both Zionists and anti-Zionists. In a…

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Distance Running With Praying Feet

By Derek M. Kwait December 30, 2014

“I felt my feet were praying.” – Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel on his experience in the third Selma to Montgomery march for civil rights. I was marching through a display of Christmas trees with a group of Jews screaming for the rights of people of color when I was first struck by the question of…

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My Jewish Masculinity is not Disposable

By Amram Altzman December 29, 2014

My egalitarianism started out as a compromise: it gave me most of the traditional liturgy and observance I’d grown up around, while also giving me the modernity and progressive attitudes I’d been surrounded by for most of my life. It allowed me to cling to the tradition of my childhood and the feminism and liberalism…

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Be the Light

By Miriam Roochvarg December 25, 2014

As I got ready to light the menorah for the last time this year, I could not help but think about the meaning of the shemash, or head candle, amid all the other candles. Each night a new candle is added to the menorah and the light spreads. Come the end of Chanukah, you have…

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Menorah Tears from a Teenage Mother

By Michele Amira December 23, 2014

סְבִיבוֹן סוֹב סוֹב סוֹב Sevivon Sov Sov Sov… This is what my Safta used to sing to me, safe on a kibbutz somewhere in Israel, breathing in the desert air, the palm trees and the smell of olive oil illuminated my hair. It was my Mecca when I met a very handsome IDF soldier then…

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In Defense of Hanukkah

By Amram Altzman December 22, 2014

Hanukkah gets a bad rap. It is seen as the most Americanized of the Jewish holidays and as the Jewish pinnacle of consumerism and indulgence. On top of that, when looking closer at the Hanukkah story, we see a radical, anti-assimilationist militant group that, in reality, ended up embracing the Hellenism they had worked so…

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Interview with Open Hillel Defector Holly Bicerano

By Derek M. Kwait December 18, 2014

Holly Bicerano, a student at Boston University and the former Campus Outreach Co-Coordinator for Open Hillel, made waves in the Jewish world after publishing an op-ed in the Times of Israel called “Standing athwart lies,” explaining why she decided to leave the organization. Chief among her complaints are that, far from promoting true open dialogue…

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Remembering Korach, or On The Danger of Open Hillel

By Evan Goldstein December 17, 2014

Eric Fingerhut, you take too much upon yourself. The CEO of Hillel International could not resist taking a swipe at the ever-growing Open Hillel movement in his speech to the Hillel General Assembly, comparing us to Korach and his band of rebels. Korach, and by implication, Open Hillel, initiated a dispute that was not for…

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Brunch With Progressive MK Merav Michaeli and the American Jewish Left

By Derek M. Kwait December 16, 2014

Merav Michaeli, the Israeli journalist and women’s rights activist-turned-Knesset member for the Labor Party, is a sign of hope for a progressive future in Israel. Last Tuesday, she tried to convince an exclusive crowd of worried Jewish leftists gathered in an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side that there was hope for the upcoming elections…

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5 Ways to Make Jewish Life Less ‘Clichéd’ from an Actual Millennial

By Amram Altzman December 15, 2014

  I am a Millennial. I say this proudly. I dance around Jewish tradition, modernity, and practice in a way that Millennials do. I whole-heartedly enjoy my status as a Generation Y’er. At the same time, however, I really don’t like how much of the conversation about how to engage my peers is fundamentally had…

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When Will the Federations Let Millennials Speak for Themselves?

By Madeline Winard December 11, 2014

I came to the Jewish Federations of North America’s General Assembly (JFNAGA) for two reasons: I love the Jewish community, and I am a Zionist who firmly believes in a Jewish and democratic state of Israel with internationally recognized borders living alongside a Palestinian state. I was excited to attend this conference featuring some of…

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Mourning Far From Home: A Jew in the Motherland

By Jonathan Katz December 9, 2014

My father (z”l) died quite suddenly last month. He was young, 57, and had appeared so happy and so healthy. During his final hours, I got the call to come home. I went back to the States for the funeral and shiva. It’s been tough. I was really close with my father – he was…

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This Week, I Have Nothing to Say

By Amram Altzman December 8, 2014

  This past week has left me, and many others, searching for answers to questions I only recently realized I had. What follows is a series of thoughts that I had over the last ten days. Privilege, at perhaps its most basic and functional iteration, is the ability to wake up in the morning and…

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How I Can Still Hope for the Future, in America and in Israel

By Derek M. Kwait December 4, 2014

This was a bad week for people who believe in human progress. Whether you imagined America was on its way towards becoming a post-racial society or that residents of the Levant could maybe learn to live peacefully side-by-side someday soon, the better dirt of our nature has again graffitied and burned down our delusions. What…

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The Quest for Some Jewish Eggs

By Nicole Zelniker December 3, 2014

Judy Weiss, RNC had been in nursing for most of her life. She had a stable job, a good salary, and a predictable routine. All of that changed when Weiss founded A Jewish Blessing in 2005 after helping a friend find an egg donor. “I was working at a job that I loved. I was…

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