Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
From a young age, Serena Dykman, a young European filmmaker, has known about the Holocaust. As the granddaughter of three survivors, she not only received a school education on the Holocaust, but a very personal one as well. She has witnessed the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe with the attack on the Jewish Museum of Belgium…
In 1939, the United States denied entry to the MS St. Louis, a ship filled with Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution. Half of the passengers subsequently perished in the Holocaust. In 2015, the now iconic image of a drowned Syrian child illustrated the human cost of the Syrian Civil War and the consequences of closed…
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…
With over two hundred thousand students enrolled at more than 800 institutions, Jewish day schools are becoming more and more prevalent in the American Jewish community. That’s two hundred thousand students learning about Israel from an early age — but what are these students actually learning about Israel? That’s what “Between The Lines,” a documentary…
Have you ever wondered how Tu B’Av became marketed in Israel as an Israeli Valentine’s Day? When I went to Israel to visit my cousins, I was surprised to see Tu B’Av being celebrated as such a commercial holiday. Being the yenta that I am, I set out on a journey to find out why….
In May, BirthWrong gave students the opportunity to travel to Spain to learn about communism, the Spanish Civil War, and Jewish culture outside of Israel. BirthWrong was founded by the left-wing British organization Jewdas as a response to Taglit-Birthright Israel, an organization that takes Jews aged 18 to 26 on a free trip to Israel….
Some people go to the United Kingdom and develop a love for the royal family. I went to the U.K. and became strongly anti-monarchist. Don’t get me wrong: the current Queen is fantastic, and the British monarchy is one of the most fascinating traditions alive today. But there’s something I find utterly ridiculous about a…
Can a Jew ask “what would Jesus do?” I have two answers: Yes and no. Yes. Of course. How could we not? Jesus of Nazareth was Jewish, full stop. I am perplexed by the almost total lack of Jewish theological engagement with Jesus. To be sure, Jesus’ Jewishness has been emphasized by historical and biblical…
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…
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…
I’ve got this list. On it, I jot down the names of authors I mean to read when I have the time, and at the top of this list is James Baldwin. Knowing little about him, I somewhat absent-mindedly opened a 1967 essay Baldwin wrote in the New York Times Magazine. I was speechless:…
One familiar thing about the United Kingdom for me is that I frequently hear South African accents. Here in the colonial heartland, I have met a lot of folks like me: born to South African [Ashkenazi] Jewish parents abroad, raised abroad, and with varied ties to South Africa. Some, like me, maintain citizenship in South…
Hanukkah gets a bad rap. It is seen as the most Americanized of the Jewish holidays and as the Jewish pinnacle of consumerism and indulgence. On top of that, when looking closer at the Hanukkah story, we see a radical, anti-assimilationist militant group that, in reality, ended up embracing the Hellenism they had worked so…
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…
If we’re going to talk at all about Open Hillel, we first have to ask, “Why would someone want to stop someone else from speaking in the first place?” Presumably, because they fear the speaking invitation will lend legitimacy or act as a seal of approval to the offending view, or else it will lead…