Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
“The arch of history bends like a twisty straw. Nothing is inevitable, and the future may be hard, and sometimes rage and grief are necessary. The hope I’m describing is a leap-of-faith conviction that a better future is possible, and worth fighting for.”
On the eve of Rosh Hashanah, a University of Michigan undergraduate reflects on the sense of possibility unleashed by the grad student strike.
Ariel Wexler gives an on-the-ground report on the Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality in Washington D.C. throughout the historic summer of 2020.
“As an American in Israel, I can talk to English-speaking immigrants to Israel, and use a shared vocabulary to explain why I believe the annexation would lead to the creation of an apartheid state. And unlike my Israeli friends, I can stand up for Palestinian rights without fear of societal backlash.”
Media representation of Gaza usually falls into one of two categories. There are programs covering the facts and figures: KALW’s “Gaza Corner” comes to mind, a weekly news program reported by foreign correspondents. The second category is the generalizing documentary project: think Ai Weiwei’s Human Flow, which employs Gaza as a metaphor in a more…
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…
Originally published in the Fall 2016 edition of The Current. Since the famed student uprising of 1968, many generations of Columbia students have felt an obligation to perpetuate the legacy of the late 60s by creating a myriad of activist clubs and organizations here on campus. And not uncommonly, Jewish students have occupied prominent lay…
We, the American Jewish community, have an Israel problem, and we need to talk about it. It’s not the fact that Israel exists. It’s not the fact that it’s a politically fraught topic to discuss — although that’s certainly part of it. It’s the mere fact that Israel and Zionism as abstract concepts are…
In 1939, the United States denied entry to the MS St. Louis, a ship filled with Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution. Half of the passengers subsequently perished in the Holocaust. In 2015, the now iconic image of a drowned Syrian child illustrated the human cost of the Syrian Civil War and the consequences of closed…
I was hoping that in 2016, the Jewish community would find better ways to reach out to millennials. I guess they have, if co-opting social justice, intersectionality, and related ideas counts as outreach. It started with an op by David Bernstein, the current CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, published Jan. 4 in…
In 1954, the American Jewish Committee supported the NAACP during the historic Brown v. Board of Education case. In 1965, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marched to Selma with Dr. Martin Luther King. And a month ago, I heard a college-aged white Jew equate his family’s historical experience in Europe to the struggle that people of…
When the documentary “The J Street Challenge” was released in 2014, one of its main arguments was that while certain Israel advocacy groups who claim to be bipartisan are acceptable political advocates, left-wing political groups, like J Street, should be condemned as beyond the pale of acceptable conversation about Israel for disagreeing with the Israeli…
Perhaps nothing characterizes the divisions I see in American and world Jewry better than the list of opening and closing keynote speakers at HaaretzQ, a conference on Israel hosted by Haaretz and the New Israel Fund in New York Sunday. The day kicked off with speeches from Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, MK Tzipi Livni of…
This Sunday, thousands of people will arrive in Washington, D.C. for the General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America. Just outside the GA, they’ll be joined by the Jewish People’s Assembly, a protest that its organizers from Open Hillel expect to draw around 100 attendees. The protest, according to its website, has three…
Every morning for the last two weeks, like many other people, I’ve woken up hoping that the wave of violence between Israelis and Palestinians has ended overnight. Every morning for the last two weeks, I’ve been upset, frustrated, and saddened to realize that, no, the violence hasn’t ended. It often seems that I and…