Not All Time Is For Sale: Keeping Shabbat Under Capitalism
“There are still 25 hours of the week where time holds still, makes room for something quiet and eternal. It is, by its very nature, a world designed to exist outside of capital.”
Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
Two New Voices Fellows discuss their year working with Jewish Currents, weaving memory about the Jewish Left through the eyes of the magazine’s lineage of writers and editors.
An archival story of how “Summer Children’s Colonies” became known as Jewish diasporic humanitarian aid.
Originally published in The Forward. Watching the events of these past weeks unfold, we were confronted with a feeling of desperation. Nazis rioted in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, and anti-Black slogans, threatening a synagogue. The president of the United States sided with racism and violence, drawing praise from the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists. The New England Holocaust Memorial, a landmark…
My favorite childhood books, “Curious George” and “Where the Wild Things Are,” always gave me a smile. They’re both fun light reads with lovable, mischievous main characters. Their creators, however, share a dark, trying past. The authors and their ancestors, H.A. and Margaret Rey and Maurice Sendak, respectively, survived the Shoah before creating some of…
In the beginning God created the heavens and a round earth But for five thousand years we couldn’t see our world’s true extent. Blind and unknowing, we drew our flat paper maps with heavy lines and solid edges, Contained, finite, concrete, And when we were cast off to its four unfamiliar, foreign corners We fixed…
As double minorities, LGBT Jews are small in number but have left a profound mark on the course of history. It’s not surprising that Jews have played a monumental role in erasing bigotry in all shapes and forms. Inherent in Jewish identity is a drive for social justice, or tikkun olam, the belief in repairing…
Originally published in the Winter 2017 issue of The Leviathan Jewish Journal. When I was young and told the other children at school that one of my ancestors came to America from the Mayflower, they looked at my almond-shaped eyes, my long black hair, and laughed. “You can’t be from the Mayflower,” they mocked me. “Because…
When my great-grandfather left England around the turn of the century, in part due to anti-Semitism, his name was Harris Moses. By the time he set foot on U.S. soil, it had changed to the much more goyishe Julius Harris. Of course, he was not the only immigrant Jew to change his name to better…
Gift-giving on Chanukah is so popular a custom that we rarely stop to think about it. Why do we do it? Are we just copying Christmas, or is there some Jewish tradition present in the act of gift-giving? (No pun intended.) To find out how gift-giving became such a prominent aspect of Chanukah, we have…
At first glance, “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” seems like a movie made on a wild dare. It’s based on the fictional tome by magical zoologist Newt Scamander in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter universe. Some may remember the 128-page encyclopedia written by Rowling in 2001 along with Quidditch Through The Ages. So, how…
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…
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…