In Pursuit of a Kosher Campus
How Jewish students across America are struggling to keep kosher at COVID colleges.
Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
How Jewish students across America are struggling to keep kosher at COVID colleges.
A conversation with the Pink Peacock Café on anarchist Yiddish revival and the tastiest parts of diaspora.
Every Friday at 7:30 p.m., University of Minnesota students pile into the Steiner family’s Chabad House for dinner. As usual, there is homemade challah and matzo ball soup, but there’s also something special – the dinner was made by the students themselves. That’s because of the Kosher Cooking Club, or KCC. Every Thursday, students get…
From pop-up Shabbats around Miami, to black caviar bagel spreads, to halvah ice cream, Jewish food is having a gourmet makeover. The definition of soul food is food of life, which is exactly what bagels are to American Ashkenazi Jews. The bagel has Jewish roots dating back to seventeenth-century Europe, where it was eaten…
Keeping kosher in college is not easy; keeping kosher for Passover is even harder. Pizza, bread, eggs, fruits, veggies, and desserts are my go-to dorm foods. While mentally preparing for Passover, I realized many of the main staples of my already restricted diet were no longer options, and that was daunting. No more opening the…
As I sat in Sixth & I Historic Synagogue the night before the start of Passover, I was surrounded by a sea of hipsters swagging SovJew, or Soviet Jewish. They were clamoring around, speaking in fast- paced Russian, to hear the self-proclaimed “ethno-chaos” of the Ukrainian folk fusion band DahkaBrahka. All around me, I heard…
Passovers during my high school years were games of “What-will-Dani-bring-to-school-for-lunch-today”? Hosting Seders at my house almost every year meant that we always had an insurmountable amount of leftover Peschadike food in our fridge. This, combined with the fact that the only Kosher for Pesach thing my school cafeteria served was plain matzah with butter, meant…
There’s been a bit of news about Sephardim lately. Although the attempt began a few years ago, the Spanish government recently announced a more concerned effort at paving the way for Sephardim – ancestors of those Jews expelled in the Inquisition of the 15th century – to acquire Spanish citizenship. The ways of determining who…
I will never forget the day I brought herring sandwiches to school. There I was, an awkward little seven-year-old, eating a vinegary and odorous pickled herring sandwich on brown bread in the middle of the lunch room. A delicious and very filling lunch for a first-grader. And there were the faces of my (mostly Jewish)…
“You and I can change the world” The refrain from Arik Einstein’s iconic song, “Ani ve-Atah” (literally, “You and I” — no, Lady Gaga, you didn’t have the song first) seems to ring especially true as we enter Hanukkah and Thanksgiving and as news breaks of the United States and Iran agreeing to enter formal…
For a kosher-keeper like me, Kosherfest 2013 was almost too good to be real. A huge room full of free food I can actually eat coming at me from every direction, the longer I stayed, the further my train of thought devolved to the level of a dog in a sausage factory: I see they’re…
Two weeks ago I had the absolute pleasure of participating in the Jewish Farm School alternative spring break at Tierra Miguel Farm in southern California. Hillels from the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell, and New York University brought students from all over the country (including students like myself with no relation to that specific Hillel but…
A few weeks ago, I wrote about community, specifically the Jewish one amongst the colleges and universities in Pittsburgh. While the University of Pittsburgh’s community is flourishing (at least, that’s how it appears on the outside), the sense of community at Carnegie Mellon University is waning. As I talk to friends, both Jewish and goyim,…