Maccabee Games
“The reason that I went was that everything was paid for,” she said, adding, “It was so clear that there was an agenda, but I didn’t ask who funded it. I didn’t really want to look a gift horse in the mouth.”
Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
“The reason that I went was that everything was paid for,” she said, adding, “It was so clear that there was an agenda, but I didn’t ask who funded it. I didn’t really want to look a gift horse in the mouth.”
After the service, everyone exits the sanctuary to return to the Hillel House where an oneg awaits. Lawson’s wife Susan presents her homemade vegan challah for the rabbi to bless and the students to nourish themselves with. Despite many requests, neither Susan nor the rabbi will give up the secret recipe.
Judaism On Our Own Terms (JOOOT), a network of college students attempting to build Jewish communities without major donor-fueled organizations like Hillel and the Jewish Federations, has only existed since last April. The weekend of September 16th, they held their second-ever national conference on the campus of Brown University. According to one attendee, a former…
Though JOOOT-affiliated independent groups lack the financial resources and name recognition of Hillel International, they offer students a powerful invitation: create the Judaism you want to be a part of. Kahn believes that JOOOT’s impact will extend far beyond the campus. “We’re giving people a taste of what the potential of radically inclusive Judaism can be,” he says.
J Street recently announced the launch of a new free trip that will take American Jewish students to Israel-Palestine this upcoming July. The trip will include meetings with Israeli and Palestinian leaders and stops in both Palestinian cities and Israeli settlements in the West Bank. According to J Street U President and Stanford senior Eva…
Before 23-year-old Aleah Gabbard began her conversion to Judaism four years ago, she grew up around deeply-rooted anti-Semitism in Owensboro, Kentucky. Owensboro made national news this past Halloween when a resident wore a Nazi soldier costume and dressed his young son as Hitler. This incident reflects the environment that Gabbard experienced in public schools in…
Sitting at the dinner table over winter break with her parents, holding her very own three-person Shabbat service, Adrienne Sugarman got the distinct sense that home was not quite the place it used to be. Sugarman, a Middlebury College sophomore, was intent on recreating the Shabbat services that she attends every week on campus. Needless…
Kosher haggis was everything I hoped it would be — oaty, savory, and smooth. I scooped spoonfuls alongside fellow UK Jewish students at the Edinburgh Jewish Society’s annual Burns Ball. The night was a fusion of Scottish and Jewish cultures, and the kosher food — delivered from Glasgow — was well worth the wait. Until that night, I’d…
We’ve come a long way since the days when a matchmaker was the main way for a young Jewish person to find romantic connection. Now, in the middle of a milieu of anxieties about assimilation, continuity, and online dating, young Jews no longer have such a clear guide to finding love. For many millennial Jews,…
Several weeks ago, 11 people were gunned down while attending Shabbat morning services at a synagogue in Pittsburgh. Throughout the United States, people mourned with the Jewish community after the worst act of violent anti-Semitism in our country’s history while candidates campaigning for the upcoming midterm election promised to make sure nothing like this ever…
My parents are too young to be historical artifacts. But they’ve seen and lived through a lot. My mother came to America in 1993 under the Jackson-Vanik amendment, a provision that put pressure on the Soviet Union to allow freedom of emigration to Jews and other groups trying to flee. My father, born in Los…
The first time I got Jew-outed in Spain, I stood in a group of my fellow American exchange students outside our medieval Christian art class. It was the beginning of my semester abroad, back when I could only understand 40% of any given lecture and I spent my days struggling alongside Spaniards who had been…
Being a Jewish student at Western Kentucky University (WKU) feels like attending college in a ghost town. There are no hallmarks of Jewish collegiate life here. No Hillel, no Jewish student group, not even a synagogue in Bowling Green, the town surrounding campus. It’s an experience of alienation, but ironically also the basis for connection….