Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
On January 9th, 2018, Blaze Bernstein’s corpse was discovered in a shallow grave in Lake Forest, California. Bernstein’s murder came in the wake of the year that had, according to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the largest single-year increase of anti-Semitic incidents on record. Bernstein was a 19-year-old gay, Jewish man. His alleged killer is 21-year-old…
H. meets me in the Menarah at around 4:30; I am late, and she, in the tradition of everyone I have met here, is beyond gracious. We walk down Rukab Street towards Rukab Ice Cream. It’s the oldest ice cream shop in Ramallah and so notoriously good that the street is named after the shop…
The first time I got Jew-outed in Spain, I stood in a group of my fellow American exchange students outside our medieval Christian art class. It was the beginning of my semester abroad, back when I could only understand 40% of any given lecture and I spent my days struggling alongside Spaniards who had been…
Last month, my Senator, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, reintroduced an updated version of a 2016 bill known as the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act (ASAA). On its face, this legislation purports to protect Jewish college students like me. In fact, the ASAA establishes an official definition of anti-Semitism that includes criticism of Israel. If passed, this bill will…
In the days following the results of the 2016 American presidential election, I actively searched for places to express my frustration as a young American socialist living abroad who was frankly devastated by the election results. I was overjoyed to find one Facebook group made up of Bernie Sanders supporters who wanted a place to…
A green text bubble flashed across my phone. “You should write about the Farrakhan, Women’s March, anti-Semitism, intersectionality thing.” I turned my screen dark. I’d been avoiding this. I know. I’m a Jewish feminist writer. I drink my morning coffee out of an Emma Goldman mug and my phone auto-predicts the term “intersectional feminism.” I…
“Oh Allah, liberate the Al Aqsa Mosque from the filth of the Jews… Oh Allah, count them one by one and annihilate them down to the very last one.” In July, Imam Ammar Shahin said these words in a sermon to his congregation at the Islamic Center of Davis. The sermon was delivered shortly after…
Originally published in The Forward. On Monday, December 11th, the Khan Liberal Arts Institute at Smith College will be hosting a panel discussion featuring Valerie Plame Wilson. After her initial invitation, consisting of a talk about her time as a CIA operations officer, was received and accepted, the news broke that Plame had retweeted an…
This column was originally published in The Cornell Daily Sun on October 27, 2017. Read more at cornellsun.com. Last week my Judaism became suddenly quite visible. When anti-Semitism was plastered across campus, Jewish went from being a private piece of self to the subject of public discussion, in classrooms, on social media and with peers. Yet…
When I was a student at Wesleyan University, the Jewish community was my home. It was a safe space to question, to deepen and nuance my connection to Israel/Palestine, and to learn to articulate my own beliefs about Judaism through hearing a variety of others’. Essentially, it was a place where discomfort was valued as…
Originally published at Red Alert Politics. At the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference, I passed by prominent white supremacist Richard Spencer, who beforehand said, “Effectively, any policy, idea, or belief that is markedly right-wing and traditional — that evokes identity, power, hierarchy, and dominance — must be regulated by the possibility that it could potentially lead…
The bar for President Trump is now set so low that he can clear it just by admitting that the Holocaust and anti-Semitism are bad. Praising Trump’s April 25 keynote speech at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s annual Day of Remembrance, Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said, “It deeply matters that President Trump used the power…
There are anti-Semites in the White House. They rank among the president’s closest advisors. Still, when I tell student activists that I feel unsafe in Trump’s America, I’m met with blank stares. I may be Jewish, sure, and everyone knows Jews have been persecuted. But in today’s student activist circles, Jews don’t count as a…
On Purim, Jews celebrate a story of resistance. On Sunday, March 19, hundreds of Jews and Muslims, as well as young adults and students from Boston’s variety of faith and cultural communities, will do the same at #ProjectPurim: Resilience in Unity. Participants plan to flood the Harvard Science Center Plaza to protest racism and xenophobia….
In The Wall Street Journal a couple weeks ago, former Harvard Professor Ruth Wisse wrote about how we need to fight anti-Semitism through the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act, which requires the Department of Education to take the broad State Department definition of anti-Semitism into account when determining if an act can be deemed anti-Semitic in accordance with Title…