Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
Growing up was weird. I always had fish salad for lunch. My parents were overly concerned with my math grades. My grandparents had funny accents. We didn’t speak English at home. I grew up believing that, for all intents and purposes, I was Russian, despite the fact that I was born and had grown up…
With years of mainstream journalism under his belt, former New York Times columnist Mark Oppenheimer decided to use his voice in a more personal way in 2016. He collaborated with Tablet Magazine’s Stephanie Butnick and Liel Leibovitz to create Unorthodox, a weekly podcast that discusses all things Jewish and Jew-ish. The best part –…
Eva Watler, age 41, has been dealing with Nazis in Tennessee since she was 13 years old when she was jumped by a pack of skinheads in Dragon Park in Nashville. “They were looking for Jews to beat up,” she said. “I was 13 and I didn’t know how to fight. It was shocking.” As…
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…
Young Jews are increasingly disaffiliated from mainstream Jewish institutions and those institutions are panicking. But many young Jews aren’t lost at all. They’re just expressing their Jewishness elsewhere – Facebook. In fact, they’ve built their own institution of sorts: Jewbook, a term referring to a community of Jewish Facebook groups. “I think there are several…
I’m no stranger to issues of mental health. Depression set in shortly after the beginning of the second semester of my sophomore year. I cried incessantly for no apparent reason, I had difficulty getting out of bed in the morning, I loathed running into an ex for fear that he would trigger a panic attack….
Rabbi Steven Wernick knows that he is abandoning Conservative Jews on college campuses. As CEO of the United Synagogue for Conservative Judaism since 2009, Wernick saw KOACH, the campus wing of the Conservative Movement, shut down on his watch in 2013, drawing ire from many Conservative leaders and students. Almost five years later, I caught…
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…
Jewish high school students want to celebrate Shabbat by protesting gun violence, and their Jewish communities are stepping up to help. Rabbi Steven Wernick, CEO of the United Synagogue for Conservative Judaism, recently announced that USY (United Synagogue Youth) would support students wishing to attend the Washington D.C. March For Our Lives, a rally to…
The University of Southern Florida student government passed a resolution last month entitled “New Hope,” critiquing President Trump’s decision to move the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. But what makes this bill different from all other controversial student government bills? Drafters and campus Jews worked on it together. The resolution came out…
A new piece of right-wing Polish legislation, which criminalizes accusing Poland of complicity in the Holocaust, sparked international condemnation, hitting a particularly raw nerve with Jews in America and Israel. But for European Jewry – and Jewish students – this nerve has been exposed for years. The amendment to the Act on the Institute of…
Since this article was published, Hillel International released the following statement. Hillel International recently landed itself in a controversy among its constituents by endorsing President Trump’s civil rights nominee for the Department of Education, Kenneth Marcus. A little background: Marcus is the founder and president of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under…
Standing in the middle of New York’s Penn Station on her way home after her mother’s memorial service, Julia Brody, University of Delaware ’17, found a place to plug her phone in, with thoughts and memories of her mother still heavy in her head. A man using using the same outlet struck up a conversation…
When Khadra Hasan Ali Salami goes to work every morning, she has to pass through Israeli military checkpoints, an often dangerous prospect for someone driving a car with Palestinian license plates. Salami, an oncologist, is one of about 700 doctors from Palestine that have permission to cross into Israel every day for work. On Jan….
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…