Not your average Brooklyn hipster: Meet Meir Kalmanson

By Samara Abramson May 2, 2016

  At first glance, you might think Meir Kalmanson is just another 25-year-old hipster filmmaker from Brooklyn. But if you take a closer look, you’ll find that he’s far from typical. Kalmanson was born into the Chabad Lubavitch movement, which is a sect of ultra-Orthodox Hasidism — and the largest and fastest-growing Jewish organization in…

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Max Kessler: Adam Sandler character, or doppelgänger?

By Samara Abramson April 27, 2016

  Max Kessler looks exactly like Adam Sandler. The name of Adam Sandler’s character in his new movie is Max Kessler. This is wild. And it’s already gone viral on Reddit. Meet the one, the only, The Real Max Kessler.   Samara Abramson is a graduate student at Columbia University.

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Why This Religious Jew Wants a Non-Jewish Roommate

By Avidan Halivni March 4, 2015

Around winter break, during the peak of Israel’s “Birthright season,” I received an invitation from the Columbia/Barnard Hillel to attend a meet-up in Jerusalem for gap-year students in Israel. It was the first time the thought of college had even crossed my mind – I had been doing a pretty good job of focusing on…

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The Myth of the Cultural Jew

By Avidan Halivni February 3, 2015

In high school, my friends and I dubbed our childhood neighborhood “The Shtetl.” Though we didn’t boast Yiddish names or a pushy matchmaker, like in the shtetls our grandparents grew up in, our shtetl, with its disproportionately high concentration of Jews, nevertheless rivaled its prior European counterparts in its sense of community and strong commitment…

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The Black and White Necessity for Grey Zone Judaism

By Deborah Pollack April 1, 2014

This academic year I am a part of the Peoplehood Project: a UJA sponsored program that brings together students from Columbia/Barnard Hillel, Oranim College in northern Israel, and ZWST, a German Jewish organization. Each cohort spends time learning in their respective home countries, then, over winter break, all three groups spend time traveling and learning…

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Dear Jay Michaelson: We Can’t Afford To Leave Hillel

By Amram Altzman March 24, 2014

In his recent article in the Forward, Jay Michaelson argues that students who feel marginalized by the increasing tendency of right-leaning major Jewish organizations to air only those views which toe their institutional lines should vote with their feet and leave. This works well in theory for institutions like the Jewish Museum, which recanted its…

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Challenging “The J Street Challenge” (or, Why I Didn’t Go To AIPAC This Year)

By Amram Altzman March 17, 2014

I am an American. I am neither an Israeli, nor am I a Palestinian. However, I am a Jew, and a pro-Israel American, who lives in a country which has strong, positive relations with Israel. As a Zionist, I see it as my job to defend Israel as a Jewish State, and that means protecting…

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Romancing the Sephardi

By Max Daniel February 25, 2014

There’s been a bit of news about Sephardim lately. Although the  attempt began a few years ago, the Spanish government recently announced a more concerned effort at paving the way for Sephardim – ancestors of those Jews expelled in the Inquisition of the 15th century – to acquire Spanish citizenship. The ways of determining who…

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Yoav Schaefer Turns Tragedy into Empowerment at Avi Schaefer Fund Symposium

By Derek M. Kwait February 13, 2014

An all-star panel of influential Jewish thinkers, writers, and community leaders addressed the questions of Jews and power Sunday at the Inaugural North American Symposium in Memory of Avi Schaefer at Columbia/Barnard Hillel, sponsored by The Avi Schaefer Fund and Mechon Hadar. The event was organized in large part by the Avi Schaefer Fund’s executive…

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On Non-Binary Jewish Identities and the Future of Traditional Judaism

By Amram Altzman January 6, 2014

I have a hard time answering the question, “So how do you identify? Like, Jewish-ly?” On the one hand, I grew up in a Modern Orthodox home and attended Modern Orthodox schools since kindergarten, but, for most of my life so far, was part of a haredi community in southern Brooklyn. On the other hand,…

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Why I Can’t Support an Academic Boycott of Israel

By Amram Altzman December 30, 2013

I am very openly willing to criticize the Israeli government. Two of my recent blog posts for New Voices have been criticisms of Israel’s Housing Ministry for announcing the constructions of new settlements at a crucial point in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and Israel’s Prime Minister in condemning the announcement of negotiations between the United States and…

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Queering the Liturgy: To Adjust or to Search?

By Jonathan Katz December 12, 2013

It is a problem that I and many other queer Jewish students face: as religious folk, we want to pray. But how do we – gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans*, queer, and other identities across the “rainbow ” – connect with a liturgy that is often seen as heteronormative, cis-normative, and well, “straight”? Some say, “the…

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Missing the Forest for the (Yiddish) Trees

By Max Daniel December 10, 2013

A few weeks ago, Dani Plung wrote a compelling piece here at New Voices about why she studies Yiddish. It is a remarkably fascinating way to connect with her past and rich cultural heritage. It is a unique way to explore her personal identity, both Jewish and not. Among the great wealth of Yiddish literature, she…

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“Real” Rape

By Meggie O'Dell October 14, 2013

When my roommate at USC, a film student with a pink streak in her hair, edited a documentary on rape, I remember the ambivalence I felt. This issue, I thought, was a closed book: a mandatory assembly on rape and consent, massive turnout for Take Back the Night demonstrations, “yes means yes and no means…

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My 21st Birthday was on Yom Kippur

By Max Daniel October 3, 2013

My 21st birthday was on Yom Kippur. No, this isn’t the set-up of some Woody Allen-esque joke, but my real life (which often takes its cues from Annie Hall and Manhattan). When I mention this to people who ask me about my birthday plans, I always joke about it – how I could have a break-fast…

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