Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
Eric Fingerhut, you take too much upon yourself. The CEO of Hillel International could not resist taking a swipe at the ever-growing Open Hillel movement in his speech to the Hillel General Assembly, comparing us to Korach and his band of rebels. Korach, and by implication, Open Hillel, initiated a dispute that was not for…
Merav Michaeli, the Israeli journalist and women’s rights activist-turned-Knesset member for the Labor Party, is a sign of hope for a progressive future in Israel. Last Tuesday, she tried to convince an exclusive crowd of worried Jewish leftists gathered in an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side that there was hope for the upcoming elections…
I am a Millennial. I say this proudly. I dance around Jewish tradition, modernity, and practice in a way that Millennials do. I whole-heartedly enjoy my status as a Generation Y’er. At the same time, however, I really don’t like how much of the conversation about how to engage my peers is fundamentally had…
I came to the Jewish Federations of North America’s General Assembly (JFNAGA) for two reasons: I love the Jewish community, and I am a Zionist who firmly believes in a Jewish and democratic state of Israel with internationally recognized borders living alongside a Palestinian state. I was excited to attend this conference featuring some of…
My father (z”l) died quite suddenly last month. He was young, 57, and had appeared so happy and so healthy. During his final hours, I got the call to come home. I went back to the States for the funeral and shiva. It’s been tough. I was really close with my father – he was…
This past week has left me, and many others, searching for answers to questions I only recently realized I had. What follows is a series of thoughts that I had over the last ten days. Privilege, at perhaps its most basic and functional iteration, is the ability to wake up in the morning and…
This was a bad week for people who believe in human progress. Whether you imagined America was on its way towards becoming a post-racial society or that residents of the Levant could maybe learn to live peacefully side-by-side someday soon, the better dirt of our nature has again graffitied and burned down our delusions. What…
Judy Weiss, RNC had been in nursing for most of her life. She had a stable job, a good salary, and a predictable routine. All of that changed when Weiss founded A Jewish Blessing in 2005 after helping a friend find an egg donor. “I was working at a job that I loved. I was…
It’s 2009 in Tel Aviv, and the playgrounds in certain areas of the city are empty. The parents of these children do not allow the children to go out and play, for fear they will be deported. The children have become prisoners in their own homes. Every day, the Israeli government deports the children of…
Life Sentences, the award winning Israeli film, premiered in America the week of November 6 as part of the Other Israel Film Festival. Winner of the Van Leer Group Foundation Award for Best Documentary Film at the Jerusalem Film Festival in 2013, and directed by Nurit Kedar and Yaron Shani, the documentary explores the life…
Last week was New Voices’ #GenderWeek, and many of us (including yours truly) chose to write about the gendering of Jewish ritual, as well as the need to de-gender — or create a new paradigm for— ritual and gender performances. At the same time, however, part of what draws me to rituals seen as traditionally…
Last week, two Palestinian cousins, armed with a meat cleaver and a gun, attacked worshipers at Kehilat B’nei Torah synagogue in Har Nof, Jerusalem, killing four Israelis. This is the most devastating attack Jerusalem has seen since 2008 and it is now, more than ever, imperative that people start thinking about the religious and cultural…
Tupac, Anne Frank, & Hannah Szenes – Poetic Justice Of Beshert In this shtetl known as life, I wonder if I will see a brighter tomorrow when everyday seems darker than night. I wonder if heaven has a shtetl, and if I will go there tonight to escape another hate filled day for a brighter…
This semester, I read C. J. Pascoe’s Dude, You’re A Fag, an ethnography of a typical American public high school. To summarize some of Pascoe’s “findings” (I put “findings” in quotes because to most teenaged American boys, what follows may come as no surprise), high school boys become men in a two-part process: 1) embracing…
“The African newscaster asked the Jewish rabbi why there were no female rabbis, and the rabbi was very clever – he asked why there were no female chiefs!” I am not sure if it was the self-congratulatory racism, rehash and ignorance of colonial dynamics, or the justification of sexism that irritated me more. There I…