Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
“Rare and based” according to random twitter cats. How many times can I say “hipster” without looking lame? Part one at Simi Lampert’s YU Beacon (opening acts): After Yellow Red Sky, Max Jared takes the stage. Jared bears an uncanny resemblance to Goldstein from the Harold and Kumar movies, and his music kind of sounds…
Today, in New Voices Magazine, Carly Silver writes about Sephardic student life, or lack thereof, at Columbia University. Though the picture is mostly bleak, one group mentioned in the article stands out, New Yachad City. Part of Columbia University Hillel, New Yachad City tries to create services that are more reflective of the diversity of world Jewry….
Several New Voices writers, including me, wrote a group of brief essays last week about Occupy Wall Street. Some of them were also published in the Forward (in print in the picture scan above). When the essays initially came Jane Eisner, the editor of the Forward, and I were surprised by how negative they were…
I’m waiting for a bus near the Central Bus Station in Tel Aviv to get back home to Jaffa. A woman with a baby in a stroller hails a cab. The cab driver comes out to help her. She has difficulty trying to fold the stroller with one arm, while holding the baby in the…
I was pretty surprised about the interest people showed when I finally let my Haunted Minyan idea out of the box. Haunted Minyan, for those of you who don’t know, is what happens when you have Kabbalat Shabbat services outside on the lawn of your haunted campus, preferably next to the campus graveyard. Sadly, the…
Harold Camping, President of Family Stations, Inc., predicted that Judgment Day would occur on Friday, October 21, 2011. Needless to say, the day passed without any readily apparent existential threats. While many would call Camping crazy or insane, his belief is no less plausible than Moses’ splitting the Red Sea, Jesus’ walking on water or…
The Torah commands us to love our neighbor and treat them compassionately. But it also condemns the act of “man [lying] with man as with a woman.” How do we reconcile Judaism with LGBT issues? Also, what about women “lying” with women? – LB, Florida, U.S. There’s a lot to unpack in this question: what…
It’s always enlightening to realize how much I don’t know. I’ve spent my entire life ensconced in the Jewish Orthodox world, and in spite of that– or perhaps because of it– I hardly know anything. I mean, I know what brachah to say and when. I can even tell you what order to put your…
To get to the Beit Zait Moshav located just outside of Jerusalem, where I spent my Rosh Hashana Holidays this weekend past, it took an hour and a half on three different buses to get there. Each and every bus–the one from Holit to Eshkol and the one from Eshkol to Ashkelon and the one…
Today in New Voices Magazine Max Elstein Keisler recounts the tale of terror and woe that was his brief time living with the anti-Semitic roommate from hell. On top of that, the video above is Max’s rap about the same incident.
On Saturday I went on a holy pilgrimage to New York Comic-Con – the ultimate East Coast nerd gathering. Comic-Con is a convention where comic book publishers, video game companies, anime and manga makers, and local collectible stores gather to sell colorful character themed crap to people paying at least $45 for admission. It is…
On October 3 it was announced that Alan van Capelle – a well-established activist within the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender civil rights movement – has been appointed president of the recently merged Progressive Jewish Alliance and Jewish Funds for Justice (JFSJ). According to an article posted by the Jewish Daily Forward, van Cappelle will…
Students for Justice in Palestine is currently holding its first national conference at Columbia University from October 14 to 16. The keynote address — the only part of the conference open to the press — featured academic luminaries Mahmood Mamdani, an professor of government at Columbia, and Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh, an anthropologist who has taught…
It’s pre-frosh season again. I remember it like it was yesterday: the spam from colleges imploring me to apply, waived application fees to universities I’d never heard of, and the constant feeling of dread inspired by the Common Application website bookmark on my browser, an ever-present reminder that I would have to spend hundreds of…
Whenever I attempt to explain to someone what I am doing in Israel, their first question is always, “What’s a kibbutz?” A kibbutz is a kind of gated community. It’s a collective community based on a high level of social and economical sharing, equality, direct democracy and tight social relations. A member of a kibbutz…