Hannah Bernstein

Outside Hillel, Northeastern Jewish Students Struggle After Rabbi Leaves

By Hannah Bernstein December 18, 2018

This is part 3 in a series about politics, identity, and Jewish community on college campuses. Click here to view part 1, and here for part 2. Ben Novak came to Northeastern University in 2016 from a Catholic high school in Kingston, Massachusetts. His father was raised Jewish, and his mother converted to Judaism before…

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Hillels and Israel, Part II: A Widening Divide at Northeastern

By Hannah Bernstein November 6, 2018

This is part 2 in a 3-part series about politics, identity and Jewish community on college campuses. Click here to view part 1, and here to view part 3. When Lindsey Bressler got the first text, it was Nov. 8, 2016 — Election Day. She was watching the news with her peers at Northeastern University,…

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Hillels and Israel: How Campus Jewish Communities Are Grappling with Polarizing Politics

By Hannah Bernstein October 25, 2018

This is part 1 in a 3-part series about politics, identity, and Jewish community on college campuses. Click here to view part 2, and here to view part 3. On the eve of Rosh Hashanah in 2015, a new wave of violence arose in Israel. Often referred to as the “stabbing intifada,” it led to…

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Student Divers Study Torah and Ocean Conservation

By Hannah Bernstein April 23, 2018

There’s an old Jewish joke about a righteous man who kept all the mitzvot. Every day, he prayed to God to win the lottery, and every day, he did not win. After the man died, he entered heaven and found himself at the foot of the Lord. In anger, he asked: “Why did you never…

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Mizrahi Students Talk: Are Campus Communities Ashkenormative?

By Hannah Bernstein March 12, 2018

Rebecca Wahba’s family had been in Egypt since at least the Spanish Inquisition. But in 1939, when Hitler’s book “Mein Kampf” became a bestseller in Cairo, her great-grandfather left, landing in India by 1945 just as the war was ending. “All the news was coming out about what was happening to the Jews. He was…

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Want Free Kosher Food? UCLA Has an App

By Hannah Bernstein January 23, 2018

Jewish students at the University of California Los Angeles recently launched an app to bring awareness to an important issue in their Jewish community – free, kosher food on campus. When members of UCLA’s Ha’am Jewish Newsmagazine developed an app to increase engagement with their articles, fourth-year computer science student Joey Levin thought of an…

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Do Jewish Students Feel Left Out of the Left?

By Hannah Bernstein November 28, 2017

When Jonathan Taubes was in high school, he read a lot of Noam Chomsky – so much so that Taubes and his friends jokingly refer to him as the Rebbe, or teacher. Chomsky, an American historian and social critic, writes about a diverse array of topics: Zionism, anti-Zionism, socialism and every other –ism imaginable. As…

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Students Start Cooking Club to Help Chabad Make Shabbat Dinner

By Hannah Bernstein July 25, 2017

Every Friday at 7:30 p.m., University of Minnesota students pile into the Steiner family’s Chabad House for dinner. As usual, there is homemade challah and matzo ball soup, but there’s also something special – the dinner was made by the students themselves.  That’s because of the Kosher Cooking Club, or KCC. Every Thursday, students get…

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