Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
(Where) My Body Did Not End after Loose Strife by Quan Berry Draw a map with no beginning you were not born but plucked from tree vast and placeless mark the spot in your mother’s garden ( ) you broke water, took root Draw a timeline with the texture of your hair knot the habits…
Three weeks ago, a journalist named Aisha Sultan published a column in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch detailing the experience that I and a student named Shaadie Ali each had with the website Canary Mission. Canary Mission places people who speak out about Palestinian rights – mainly undergraduates like me – on a blacklist, listing us…
This poem originally appeared in ZAMAN, an arts & media collective dedicated to the remembrance, preservation, and re-evaluation of Mizrahi cultural consciousness. Three calendars hang in our kitchen: One begins in spring, one in fall One in winter. The start and halt Of a well-used car. A sundial Someone keeps moving. Summer begins In my Papa…
The new rabbi is running late. It’s the first day of eleventh grade and there is a buzz of hushed excitement in the room. Our brothers have been studying Talmud since they were seven or eight and we know its cadence. We’ve heard its rhythm chanted and recited at our kitchen tables while we stood…
Sitting at the dinner table over winter break with her parents, holding her very own three-person Shabbat service, Adrienne Sugarman got the distinct sense that home was not quite the place it used to be. Sugarman, a Middlebury College sophomore, was intent on recreating the Shabbat services that she attends every week on campus. Needless…
Having written for dozens of publications, from Vogue to Vice, Marissa Miller’s extensive portfolio is certain to strike the interest of many journalists and media consumers alike. Miller, who hails from Montreal, Quebec, isn’t what many would consider a typical Jewish journalist. Her beat doesn’t center on the Jewish world, but rather on gender, fashion,…
Kosher haggis was everything I hoped it would be — oaty, savory, and smooth. I scooped spoonfuls alongside fellow UK Jewish students at the Edinburgh Jewish Society’s annual Burns Ball. The night was a fusion of Scottish and Jewish cultures, and the kosher food — delivered from Glasgow — was well worth the wait. Until that night, I’d…
Last summer, a group of students from the University of Texas (UT) at Austin met up with Ben Packer, a fringe, far-right nationalist, in Jerusalem. Their trip leader, then-Hillel Rabbi Moshe Trepp, says the meeting was unplanned, a happy accident. He asked Packer to show them around. “The great guy that he is, and so…
Walking through Jerusalem’s Old City, the tour guide brandished his gun in front of a group of students from the University of Texas (UT) at Austin. “I’ll shoot,” he said. “I’ll shoot an Arab if I have to. I’m not scared.” Ben Friedman, a business honors major at UT, remembers this moment well. He was…
In my hollowest moments I wish my mother named me after a breathing thing a name with a voice to choke it over I pray for RachelRebeccaLeah, nice Jewish girl names that never die bonded to a land we bulldozed to make our own, but a man calls me the new Josephus curses me…
Yiddish holds an extraordinary place in Jewish history. From a Middle High German lexical and syntactic base, Yiddish was shaped by the conditions of Jewish life in Central Europe. It adopted words and syntax from Romance and Slavic languages, and, of course, was heavily influenced by the Hebrew and Aramaic of traditional Jewish learning. The…
When I first saw my profile on Canary Mission, I felt a sense of violation and fear that I had never experienced before in student activism. My hands shook as I washed the dishes at my campus cafe job, and I mulled over who could have taken the time to hunt me down online and…
A few weeks ago at JFK airport, I huddled with fellow Brown University students and members of IfNotNow near the El Al check-in line. The airport was crowded that night. It was filled with anxious travelers of all sorts, including dozens of young Jewish adults searching for their Birthright groups. As they wandered the airport,…
The central question of “First Reformed,” Paul Schrader’s film about a pastor reckoning with climate change, is, “Can God forgive us for what we’ve done to this world?” It’s a good question for American Protestants, and for all of us living between skeptical optimism and righteous despair. It’s high time for Jews to have our…
It’s off-season for the Jewish summer camp world. But the conversation about including Palestinian perspectives in Israel education, started by IfNotNow earlier this year with their #YouNeverToldMe campaign, will continue to haunt institutions like Camp Ramah, the Conservative movement’s camping arm. As any camper, counselor, or camp professional knows, last summer defines what next summer…