Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
Although my favorite holiday, Tu B’Shevat, passed in February, Jewish tree lovers like me can still find joy in another holiday celebrating the beauty of earth’s many bountiful blessings: Earth Day and the week-long Broccoli City Festival. Starting in Washington, D.C. on April 25 and finishing up in Los Angeles May 3, the Broccoli City Festival…
I, your faithful correspondent from the Colonial Motherland, just spent six days in the other motherland – Lithuania, the place from which most of my ancestors came. Other than a return in the 1990’s by my Holocaust-survivor maternal grandmother, and a similarly timed visit by my paternal grandparents, none of my “nearby” extended family…
We here at New Voices seem no strangers to the question of whether or not the Jews are white. Yet the wider American Jewish community tends to go back and forth on the issue, especially now that racial tensions in this country have reached a boiling point. Despite the advancements made in the national…
Keeping kosher in college is not easy; keeping kosher for Passover is even harder. Pizza, bread, eggs, fruits, veggies, and desserts are my go-to dorm foods. While mentally preparing for Passover, I realized many of the main staples of my already restricted diet were no longer options, and that was daunting. No more opening the…
In 2013, I went through an educational experience in Poland courtesy of Heritage Seminars. The name of the program says it all. Not only did we visit the places where Jewish life in Europe vanished, but also the sites where the notion of Jewish community flourished. The latter needs be examined more in today’s society…
In Matthew Vaughn’s 2011 movie X-Men: First Class, Professor Charles Xavier tries to stop his friend Magneto—controller of all things metal—from killing American and Soviet navy servicemen during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis by telling him the sailors were just “following orders.” Magneto then delivers arguably the best line of the film: “I’ve…
Seventy years ago, on April 15, 1945, the British Army liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and its 60,000 mostly Jewish, starved, and diseased prisoners. Among these prisoners was my maternal grandmother – who had survived several deportations, from Kovno (Kaunas) to Vaivara to Bergen-Belsen – and had lost her first child, first husband, and most…
Most Jews have at least heard of the World Zionist Congress. They know that it had something to do with Theodore Herzl and played a critical role in creating the State of Israel. What many don’t know is that the World Zionist Congress still makes very important decisions affecting Israel and the Jewish community around…
As I sat in Sixth & I Historic Synagogue the night before the start of Passover, I was surrounded by a sea of hipsters swagging SovJew, or Soviet Jewish. They were clamoring around, speaking in fast- paced Russian, to hear the self-proclaimed “ethno-chaos” of the Ukrainian folk fusion band DahkaBrahka. All around me, I heard…
My first experience with anti-Semitism was at 6 years old. Someone painted a swastika on the front gate of my school and I remember asking my dad why it upset him so much. I had a limited understanding of Nazism at that age, but I knew enough to understand when he told me simply that…
The last time someone named Noah’s actions were so globally significant, animals boarded a boat in pairs, it rained for forty days and the world flooded. This week, it was the Twitterverse that flooded over because of comedian Trevor Noah’s: a) appointment to the highest throne in the comedic news world as the replacement for…
Evan Goldstein’s recent contributions to New Voices have featured fascinating and insightful meditations on the cultural location of Jewishness in our world. They are a welcome move toward a critical conversation around the hybrid forms of modern Jewish identity, a project that requires a historical understanding of whiteness. Sharona Bat-Ephraim, the subject of Goldstein’s critique…
After reading my coverage of last week’s J Street Conference, a campus Hillel director reached out to me to confess their thoughts on Eric Fingerhut’s withdrawal from the conference and what the new Israeli government means for Hillel and its standards of partnership. To protect themselves and their Hillel, they would only let me publish…
Just over a month ago, students Deah Shaddy Barakat, Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, and Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha were shot outside their home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. “Tragedies touch everyone in a community, especially in a [small] community … like Chapel Hill,” said University of North Carolina Chapel Hill sophomore and North Carolina native Leah Johnson….
Being gay in a fraternity has not been the easiest experience. I joined Alpha Epsilon Pi as a wandering, socially inept freshman. I was at lunch at Hillel and one of the brothers of the fraternity, a fellow psychology major, took an interest in me. He brought me out to a party, and after meeting…