Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
Two and a half years ago, I read a piece that changed my life. NPR’s Leah Donnella penned a deeply personal essay about being both Jewish and Black…I felt like she was speaking directly to my own experiences.
Four women sit around a table. Playing cards are laid out in front of each player and tiles are shuffled. Laughter and friendly chit-chat fill the air. The game begins; phrases that might seem foreign to bystanders replace the chit-chat, and off they go. Four Crak! Two Bam! Three Dot! Around the table it goes…
הִנֵּה מַה טוב ומַה נָעִים שֶבֶת אַחִים גַם יָחַד Hineh Mah tov umah na’im shevet achim gam yachad. Here! What good! What sweetness! Siblings, friends and comrades sitting together! When we embrace ritual, we stand in the threshold between community and isolation, sacred and profane, this moment and our history. Ritual is not just a…
On April 17th, the brand-new student organization Nice Jewish Queers at the University of Southern California was getting ready to host one of their biggest events of the year: the Passover drag show, which intended to celebrate the queer Jewish community on campus. Within a day, however, student leader Ariella Amit was sending in her…
Hillel has a long way to go if it wants to live up to its stated values of inclusion and belonging. I arrived on the campus of the University of Southern California (USC) yearning for a Jewish space where I, as a queer Jew, could feel celebrated for all of my identities. I quickly became…
Lift your head from the haggadah. Where is Pharaoh’s army today? This inquiry motivated Rabbi Arthur Waskow to create the first Freedom Seder. After Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s April 1968 assassination, Waskow saw the police occupation of black neighborhoods in DC and other cities nationwide as an uncanny parallel to the Passover story. The…
Controversy erupted at Middlebury last week after a question from a chemistry midterm came to light that invoked the Holocaust. The question identified Hydrogen Cyanide as “a poisonous gas that Nazi Germany used to horrific ends in the gas chambers during the Holocaust,” and then asked students to calculate a lethal dose of the substance…
This article was originally published in the Middlebury Campus on April 8th, 2019. A question posed on a chemistry midterm last month asked students to calculate “a lethal dose” of the gas “Nazi Germany used to horrific ends in the gas chambers during The Holocaust.” The test question was brought to public attention last Friday…
In July of 2014, sirens pierced the Jerusalem air, warning of rockets coming from Gaza. Nathan Young, then a 22-year-old junior studying abroad, leaped off the bus heading toward his dorm room at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and hurried into a gas station store-turned-bomb-shelter, feeling numb. Young recalls being on the phone with a…
This essay originally appeared in ZAMAN, an arts & media collective dedicated to the remembrance, preservation, and re-evaluation of Mizrahi cultural consciousness. Last year, my friends and I invited one of our visiting lecturers, a Tibetan Buddhist monk, to a Tu B’Shvat seder in the Charedi-turned-hippie neighborhood of Nachlaot. The event’s Facebook page asked guests to bring…
As I pack the last box and turn out the lights to the apartment, I feel the tears begin to come. They are tears of anger, and of sadness, and of grief. They are the tears of a young woman who has had to make decisions that no 25-year-old should have to make. At the…
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…
In my hollowest moments I wish my mother named me after a breathing thing a name with a voice to choke it over I pray for RachelRebeccaLeah, nice Jewish girl names that never die bonded to a land we bulldozed to make our own, but a man calls me the new Josephus curses me…
It’s off-season for the Jewish summer camp world. But the conversation about including Palestinian perspectives in Israel education, started by IfNotNow earlier this year with their #YouNeverToldMe campaign, will continue to haunt institutions like Camp Ramah, the Conservative movement’s camping arm. As any camper, counselor, or camp professional knows, last summer defines what next summer…
Though 150 journalists and bloggers from 30 countries had gathered in Jerusalem for the Israeli Press Office-sponsored Jewish New Media Summit in late November, American Jewry was very nearly the only subject of conversation when discussing the strained relationship between Israel and the Jewish Diaspora. Over the course of the three and a half day…