“Yadet Miad?”: Recollections of Jewish Life in Iran

By Sophie Levy May 8, 2019

This series of graphite illustrations on paper combines images and text from a wide range of sources to pose and address the question: “what does it feel like to remember a place you have never been?”

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Song of Descents

By Adina Singer May 2, 2019

Nurit arranges a tomato rose surrounded by green pepper spirals on a small glass plate of tuna salad. She admires her masterpiece and sets it down next to the box of spelt crackers on the table set for one.

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At USC, Controversy Over a Drag Show Alienates LGBT Jews

By Sophie Hurwitz April 30, 2019

On April 17th, the brand-new student organization Nice Jewish Queers at the University of Southern California was getting ready to host one of their biggest events of the year: the Passover drag show, which intended to celebrate the queer Jewish community on campus. Within a day, however, student leader Ariella Amit was sending in her…

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Why I Resigned From Hillel

By Ariella Amit April 25, 2019

Hillel has a long way to go if it wants to live up to its stated values of inclusion and belonging. I arrived on the campus of the University of Southern California (USC) yearning for a Jewish space where I, as a queer Jew, could feel celebrated for all of my identities. I quickly became…

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Campus Freedom Seders: Freedom For Who, Exactly?

By Jess Schwalb April 23, 2019

Lift your head from the haggadah. Where is Pharaoh’s army today? This inquiry motivated Rabbi Arthur Waskow to create the first Freedom Seder. After Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s April 1968 assassination, Waskow saw the police occupation of black neighborhoods in DC and other cities nationwide as an uncanny parallel to the Passover story. The…

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Beyond the Headline: A Student Reporter Reflects on a Story that Hit Home

By Sarah Asch April 18, 2019

Controversy erupted at Middlebury last week after a question from a chemistry midterm came to light that invoked the Holocaust. The question identified Hydrogen Cyanide as “a poisonous gas that Nazi Germany used to horrific ends in the gas chambers during the Holocaust,” and then asked students to calculate a lethal dose of the substance…

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Boycott Birthright – Unconditionally

By Molly Tunis, Parker Breza April 16, 2019

Last month, J Street U announced that they will offer a “Let Our People Know” trip to Israel as an alternative to Birthright. As part of their campaign, J Street is asking their members to “only participate in trips that include meetings with both Israelis and Palestinians and that show participants how the occupation impacts…

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Chemistry Exam Question Invokes Nazi Gas Chambers, Causes Controversy at Middlebury

By Sarah Asch April 11, 2019

This article was originally published in the Middlebury Campus on April 8th, 2019. A question posed on a chemistry midterm last month asked students to calculate “a lethal dose” of the gas “Nazi Germany used to horrific ends in the gas chambers during The Holocaust.” The test question was brought to public attention last Friday…

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There and Back Again: Tracing an Activist’s Unusual Journey

By Kayla Lichtman April 9, 2019

In July of 2014, sirens pierced the Jerusalem air, warning of rockets coming from Gaza. Nathan Young, then a 22-year-old junior studying abroad, leaped off the bus heading toward his dorm room at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and hurried into a gas station store-turned-bomb-shelter, feeling numb. Young recalls being on the phone with a…

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Book Review: “Between Iran and Zion”

By Josie Krieger April 5, 2019

Photo credit: Josie Krieger. Lior Sternfeld wants you to judge his book, “Between Iran and Zion: Jewish Histories of Twentieth-Century Iran,” by its cover. Depicting the Tomb of the prophet Daniel in Susa, Iran, its movement and color speaks to the relationship between Iranian Jews with other Iranians – and other Jews. The fluid and…

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The Spaces in My Togetherness

By Kayla Cohen April 3, 2019

This essay originally appeared in ZAMAN, an arts & media collective dedicated to the remembrance, preservation, and re-evaluation of Mizrahi cultural consciousness.  Last year, my friends and I invited one of our visiting lecturers, a Tibetan Buddhist monk, to a Tu B’Shvat seder in the Charedi-turned-hippie neighborhood of Nachlaot. The event’s Facebook page asked guests to bring…

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J Street’s Israel-Palestine Trip Invites Critique and Hope

By Sarah Asch March 28, 2019

J Street recently announced the launch of a new free trip that will take American Jewish students to Israel-Palestine this upcoming July. The trip will include meetings with Israeli and Palestinian leaders and stops in both Palestinian cities and Israeli settlements in the West Bank. According to J Street U President and Stanford senior Eva…

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Spotlighting Unsettled: Deep Reporting From a New Series on Gaza

By Ariella Markowitz March 26, 2019

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…

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Tzedakah is a Feeling: Becoming a Caregiver for My Father

By Jourdan Stein March 21, 2019

As I pack the last box and turn out the lights to the apartment, I feel the tears begin to come. They are tears of anger, and of sadness, and of grief. They are the tears of a young woman who has had to make decisions that no 25-year-old should have to make. At the…

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Converting to Judaism in Small-Town Kentucky

By Jay Wells March 14, 2019

Before 23-year-old Aleah Gabbard began her conversion to Judaism four years ago, she grew up around deeply-rooted anti-Semitism in Owensboro, Kentucky. Owensboro made national news this past Halloween when a resident wore a Nazi soldier costume and dressed his young son as Hitler. This incident reflects the environment that Gabbard experienced in public schools in…

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