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The group’s complexion changes every few minutes. It starts with a girl from Korea, a Panamanian Jew and a redhead dragging around a large acoustic bass. But moments later, that same group has transformed into an African-American bobbing his head and listening to his headphones and a tall white guy in a kippa. This group, though, shares little more in common than the fact that all these people go to Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. And they all are waiting in line to eat kosher food at Northwestern’s Allison Dining Hall.

Israel is largely a nation of immigrants. However, as many African refugees discover, some foreigners are less welcome than others.

First-time visitors to Tel Aviv are often greeted by an unexpected sight. In Levinsky Park, immediately outside the city’s Central Bus Station, dozens of young African men hang around at almost all hours. They are not simply loitering; most are refugees from war-torn North African nations with nowhere else to go. They endured terrible hardship before arriving in Israel, but found little sympathy or support when they arrived here.

Their problems are also far from over.

Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, had a sobering message for Monmouth University’s mid-year graduates: Life after college isn’t going to be easy.


“Your dreams, for sure, should never be abandoned. But they may have to be, for a while, delayed,” Oren told the 650 graduates on Jan. 13 in Monmouth’s Multipurpose Activity Center in West Long Branch, N.J.


Oren started with a grim picture of the American economy, saying college graduates will inevitably enter the workforce slowly and only after a lot of effort.


But there’s hope, Oren said, because people like his parents, members of “the Greatest Generation,” were able to weather the Great Depression and defeat Germany and Japan in World War II.


“If my parents, your grandparents, could overcome such obstacles and persevere at all odds, just think about what you could do,” Oren said.


Oren strove to connect the United States to Israel. No surprise there: He moved there from New Jersey (“Exit 145” to be precise) in 1979. He later served in the Israeli Defense Forces and won a gold medal in the Maccabiah Games.

We’ve all heard the joke: A synagogue is trying to get rid of a field mouse that won’t leave the building. So they give it a bar mitzvah.


Aiming to put an end to that punchline, the Union for Reform Judaism launched a new initiative called the Campaign for Youth Engagement at the Reform movement’s biennial convention, held near Washington, D.C. on Dec. 14-18.


“I think it’s going to be fantastic,” Ryan Leszner, a senior at York University, told New Voices. “It doesn’t immediately speak for college campus needs … but you have to start somewhere.”

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.

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.

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.

Students don’t have too many nice things to say about Arthur R. Butz. He is a professor of electrical engineering at Northwestern University, and according to his students, he is boring, his handwriting is too small to make out on the board and he leaves all the real teaching to the teaching assistants. While their words about Butz are harsh, students tend to keep their silence when it comes to a darker part of his work, one that extends far outside the realm of electrical engineering. Butz is a prominent Holocaust denier, but many students walk into his classes without knowing it.

Around a table of ice-cold of beer and steaming pizza, one of Judaism’s oldest traditions thrives in a weekly session of raucous Torah study.


It’s called Torah on Tap. This guided discussion of Jewish topics meets every Thursday night on the back patio of Leonardo’s by the Slice in Gainesville, Fla. Leonardo’s is a Gainesville staple and has seen many businesses around it come and go since it opened in 1973. But for the last 10 years, Leonardo’s has also been home to Torah on Tap. Because of Hillel and Leonardo’s, hundreds of students have sat and discussed timeless Jewish concepts over pizza and beer.

“‘Pi’ me in the face! Save a child’s heart!” It’s a typical shout on the quad from brothers in the local chapter of historically Jewish fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi during their biannual AEPi-in-the-Face fundraiser. Passersby pay for the privilege of pushing plates full of whipped cream into brothers’ faces to raise money for Save a Child’s Heart, an organization that provides life-saving services to underprivileged children. The sight is what one would expect from a fraternity: an image of a bunch of fun-loving guys, flirting with female students and laughing along with — or at — their dessert-covered comrades. But beneath the surface, the chapter of this historically Jewish frat is exactly that: Jew-ish.

In the third and final part of this series about non-Jews in Bloomington, Ind. who have become deeply involved with the Jewish community, Jun Chen interviews non-Jewish members of a Hooshir, a Jewish student a cappella group.

Hebrew is everywhere on the campus of Brandeis University. It’s heard conversationally in the fast-paced exchanges of Israeli students with thick accents and in ritual form at Hillel. It’s found on posters in the campus center and on the clothes of students sporting Brandeis apparel. It’s embedded in the Brandeis seal — which features the word emet, Hebrew for truth — and takes an academic role inside the classroom. But faced with the increasing financial challenges of the ongoing economic crisis, Brandeis announced in 2010 the termination of the Hebrew Language and Literature Major, beginning with the students of the class of 2015, who began school this semester.

In Part II of this three-part series about non-Jews in Bloomington, Ind. who have become deeply involved with the Jewish community, Jun Chen interviews two non-Jewish women whose children attend a Jewish preschool.

New uses of the word “occupy” abound. The latest is Occupy the Occupiers, a new campaign led by the Young, Jewish and Proud (YJP) division of the Jewish Voice for Peace, a far-left Jewish activist group. At a Birthright Israel NEXT event last night, YJP members interrupted speaker and author Steven L. Pease, using an Occupy Wall Street-style “mic check,” also know as the “human microphone,” to call attention to their Occupy the Occupiers initiative. The protesters were all escorted out by security, but continued their chanting on the sidewalk outside the room on 13th Street in Manhattan, where the NEXT event was being held.