How to travel Europe with your ghosts

By Leah Tribbett June 3, 2016

To grow up Jewish is to grow up haunted. I’ve never lived on a Civil War battleground, and I’ve never shared my closet with a ghost (two brothers who tried to scare me to death, yes — but never a ghost), and yet the feeling of being haunted is as well known to me as…

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Holocaust education needs greater depth

By Alexa Kempner October 15, 2015

At some point in our school careers, we learn about the horrors of the Holocaust. But what information is presented to us in that academic setting? Perhaps the teacher delves into a brief history ranging from January 1933, when Hitler became chancellor of Germany, to May 1945, when the Nazis surrendered.  Maybe we read Anne…

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How to keep a survivor’s story alive after he’s gone

By Alexa Kempner September 24, 2015

Imagine that you’re 14 years old. It’s December 1936. Today, and for a while now, you’re focusing on the fact that you are leaving home. Possibly forever. Your parents bring you to the local train station with your medium-sized black suitcase, and the three of you await the arrival of the next locomotive. All you…

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“Even Jacob Went Down to Egypt”: On Shmemel’s “Berlin” and Israeli Out-Migration

By Jonathan Katz September 3, 2014

The Israeli band Shmemel recently released a controversial, tongue-in-cheek video single entitled Berlin(English translation and annotation here, courtesy of The Forward). In the song, the band sings a ballad of Israelis leaving the country – for economic opportunity, for the madness of living in a state of constant war, or for a better and more…

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My Illumination: Making History by Uncovering the Past

By Jonathan Kamel September 2, 2014

A section of this article was featured in the Daily Northwestern on September 1st, 2013.   She fell into the ditch thinking she was dead. All around her she breathed and touched dying human flesh. The bullet had apparently missed her. She desperately raised her arms to push through the masses of bodies that were…

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Why I Couldn’t Work for Hillel

By Jesse Baum August 4, 2014

Recently while killing time at work, I saw an email regarding a position I had applied for at my university’s Hillel. Expecting a rejection, I clicked, and realized that I was not being consoled- they were offering me a job. I’d applied for the job almost accidentally – working an event for my bike repair…

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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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What the Warsaw Ghetto Starbucks Taught Me About Time

By Dani Plung January 2, 2014

When I traveled to Warsaw on a Holocaust study tour two summers ago, my group found the city particularly warm. In the middle of the day, we stopped for a respite—from the heat as much as the emotional drain of touring Holocaust sites—at a Starbucks in the city center. The juxtaposition—of both the air conditioning…

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One Name, 30 Million Documents

By Simi Lichtman April 4, 2013

When I was in my Holocaust phase—and by that I mean the years I spent consuming every book about the Holocaust I could find, wildly curious about my own family’s personal Holocaust stories—I was transfixed by one person in particular: my grandfather’s brother, Todris. Both of my mother’s parents are survivors, and both had many…

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The Reading List – Israeli FM thinks peace unlikely, somebody making a Bible video game… good God, what did I wake up to?

By David A.M. Wilensky September 6, 2010

Apparently it’s an RPG, but it’s also like The Sims and Civilization… and it has a biblical setting. And it’s being created by Germans? [Religion Dispatches] Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman says that peace is an “unattainable goal.” Someone remind me why this jackass is the FM. [JTA] In a case that could go to…

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WTF, Helen Thomas?

By Ben Sales June 7, 2010

Unless we’re seeking an easy target for righteous indignation, we tend to ignore the mass of anti-Semitic crackpots on the internet. It’s another thing, though, when a respected journalist who’s been covering the Oval Office for half a century tells all the Jews to “get the hell out of Palestine,” as former Hearst columnist Helen Thomas…

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A New Jesus for Germany

By Carly Silver May 19, 2010

For the first time since Angela Merkel made that weird facial expression when George Bush tried to give her a massage, I can say: the Germans did something right. Recently, the German village of Oberammergau has revised its traditional “Passion Play,” a rite of passage that has gone on since 1633, to emphasize the historical…

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