Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
At least one member of the New Voices editorial board sat in a meeting of their Hillel board this week at which a discussion of security spontaneously took its place on top of the agenda. We assure you it was not the first such discussion in a Jewish organization this week, nor the first on…
We’ve all heard the story: Chanukah, the festival of lights, celebrates the miraculous event that occurred a couple thousand years back, where the Maccabees and their friends only had enough oil to kindle their menorah for one day, but it somehow lasted for eight days and nights. We’ve also heard this story: Chanukah is an…
There is a long history of anti-Semitism at Harvard University, though it is essentially gone today. There is also a long history of subtle — and not so subtle — grandiose acts of satire at Harvard. Last Friday morning, students who live in Harvard University’s nine River Houses awoke to find that the intersection of those two…
In a stunning twist, a national organization just invested a great deal of time and effort into researching the nature of Israel’s reputation on college campuses. The American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, a non-profit established to spread knowledge of “the values our nations share” (America and Israel), has produced the latest report on anti-Israel and anti-Semitic sentiment…
Anat Hoffman does good work for the Jewish community. As the head of the Israel Religious Action Center, she directs an organization that is helping to build the civil society devoted to liberal democracy that Israel desperately needs. Yet many in the Jewish world have never heard of her. She doesn’t even pass the does-she-have-a-Wikipedia-article…
For American high school seniors, October means one thing: College applications are right around the corner. It’s almost so obvious it doesn’t need saying, but in the Gaza Strip, there is no season when the minds of a generation automatically turn toward college applications. Here in America, tis the season for prospective students to roll…
Reinstate Daniel Libenson as Hillel director \xe2\x80″ and let him continue his history of innovation and engagement.
The actions of University of California President Mark Yudof following a string of disturbing events are commendable, and should be an example to the rest of us.
Too often, Israeli Apartheid Week degenerates into an argument over its own name.
It’s all rhetoric. If you believe that the situation in Israel and the Occupied Territories today is analogous to apartheid, so be it. And if you believe that it’s a poor analogy, that’s fine too. Either way, it’s all rhetoric. And either way, choosing your place within the intense campus debate (by which we mean shouting match) about Israel-Palestine based solely upon your beliefs about the use of a single word is irresponsible, simplistic and narrow-minded. No real debate can come from wordplay.
We thought the days of spying on students went out with the likes of J. Edgar Hoover. And yet, we’ve been reading stories all week about the New York Police Department practice of spying on Muslim students for no other reason than their affiliation with Muslim student organizations.
The AP reported in October that undercover agents were active on eight New York college campuses, but a new report says that they went far beyond that, spying on students on more far-flung campuses, such as Yale and Princeton.
Usually, when the letters B, D and S are strung together within spitting distance of a college campus, you can expect the Jewish community to mobilize the shock troops, whip local Jewish students into a frenzy and escalate the situation from crummy to nuclear.
That is, until now. The Jewish community’s reaction to an entire BDS conference at the University of Pennsylvania on the weekend of Feb. 5 was a model of restraint.
The stories have circulated for years. Stories of students being slapped and others called “Nazi” or “gay.” They are shared between alumni, passed on to prospective students and discussed between parents. They’re recounted in debates at high school and college lunch tables. They have inspired their own blog, the Rav Bina Abuse Blog.
They are stories about Rav Aharon Bina, rosh hayeshiva (head of the yeshiva) at Netiv Aryeh — an all-male yeshiva in the Old City of Jerusalem and a popular destination among American Orthodox high school graduates spending a gap year in Israel before returning to America for college.
And most recently, an article published last week by The Jewish Week has ignited a debate over Rav Bina’s questionable teaching methods, for which he has become infamous.
The last U.S. troops may have left Iraq on Dec. 18, but this generation’s involvement with that country is far from over — whether they realize it or not.
Thousands of American private security contractors (read: mercenaries) remain on the Pentagon’s payroll — otherwise known as the taxpayers’ payroll. Tax dollars are still flowing, and Iraq’s stability is far from assured. For recent college graduates and those who will graduate in the new year and in coming years, the domestic financial aftermath of the war matters as much as the global security issues. The $1 trillion spent in Iraq means $1 trillion not spent at home — money that could have been used to benefit current and future students by forgiving college debt or providing low-interest student loans.
The editorial that originally appeared in this space has been retracted. It relied on a Dec. 16 article in Tablet Magazine that alleged that Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion had received an offer from Willy Stern to endow a chair for a politically conservative professor.
Tablet issued a correction on the article on Jan. 3:
“This article originally stated that the rumored funder was Willy Stern, an adjunct law professor at Vanderbilt University and occasional contributor to the Weekly Standard. Stern, who originally declined to be interviewed for the story, has since informed us that he did not make this offer.”
It is in light of this that New Voices has retracted this editorial.