The History of Jewish Summer Camp Could Change its Future
“It can be hard to let go of the sense that camp is full of tradition and history… but change is ok. It’s inevitable.”
Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
“It can be hard to let go of the sense that camp is full of tradition and history… but change is ok. It’s inevitable.”
“Right at the moment when I felt the least aligned with Judaism, I was cast in the most Jewish musical in existence.”
“The Torah of OCD is simple: it is an important and very serious mitzvah to manage my OCD as skillfully as I am able on any given day, seeking out the support and resources I need to live well and in good health. And it is deeply complicated: I am no longer comfortable theologizing pain.”
For the safety of the writer, this piece has been published anonymously. Every part of the term “domestic violence” is misleading. The author bell hooks once said that the proper name for domestic violence is patriarchal violence because violence against women and children does not begin at home. It is directly connected to sexism and…
Originally published in the Fall 2016 edition of The Current. Since the famed student uprising of 1968, many generations of Columbia students have felt an obligation to perpetuate the legacy of the late 60s by creating a myriad of activist clubs and organizations here on campus. And not uncommonly, Jewish students have occupied prominent lay…
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…
On May 18, students at the University of California, Irvine, protested a screening of the documentary “Beneath the Helmet,” an Israeli film about the Israeli Defense Forces. “They were screaming. They tried to push open the door, but we were holding the door from the inside,” said President of Students Supporting Israel Katrin Gendova in…
There’s a stereotype that engagement programs for Jewish young adults are geared solely at producing the next generation of Jewish children. Many stereotypes exist for a reason — and this one is no exception. Many efforts to engage youth make a desire to produce the next generation of engaged Jewish youth explicit — and that’s…
“What do you mean, you’re not allowed to have bacon?” “If you go to public school, how do you have time to daven every morning?” “So, you don’t believe in Jesus?” “You never learned to speak Hebrew?” It seems unlikely that every one of these questions — expressions of bewilderment about Judaism, and confusion about…
Comic books, for me, were an acquired taste. Growing up, I devoured anything with words — the backs of Pokémon cards, books pilfered from my mom’s shelf, the booklets stuffed inside CD cases — but never comics. Nobody in my life read them, and my weekly TV rotation was tuned into Rugrats rather than the…
Unlike many other people I know who grew up in but have since left the Modern Orthodox community, I don’t look back on my childhood religious experiences with sadness. Instead, many of the decisions that I have since made in my religious life have been because of — not despite — having been raised in the…
i. Tevye Comes to Brooklyn My dad and I read Sholem Aleichem when I’m young. He has a copy of Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories, but we stick to Tevye. We sit on the couch and he reads out loud to me. I grow up on Aleichem, not Fiddler on the Roof; my…
On May 11, more than 70 students from Brown University came together to commemorate the Nakba by watching three films produced by the Israeli NGO Zochrot. Nakba is the term for the 1948 expulsion and displacement of over 700,000 Palestinians, and Nakba Day is observed on May 15, the day after Israeli Independence Day. “Within…
Yesterday, despite its official cancellation, a group of Brown University students gathered at the Brown RISD Hillel building to watch three short films about the Nakba. According to a statement from Sophie Kasakove, one of the event’s three organizers and a member-at-large of Open Hillel’s steering committee, the event had been in the works for…