Living Memory of the Jewish Left: A Jewish Currents Fellowship Reflection
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.
Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
Article Archive
How to keep a survivor’s story alive after he’s gone
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…
Why I Love Yom HaAtzmaut Anyway
We’re usually pretty hard on Israel here at New Voices, and though more forgiving than some, I’m no exception. Yet, I find that in the midst of all my anxiety over the results of the last election or railing against the settlements, Yom HaAtzmaut provides the ideal opportunity to step back and remember why I…
Imagining an Alternate History in Lithuania: A Jew in the Motherland
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…
On French Anti-Semitism and Conflicting Identities
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…
Who Owns the Holocaust?
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:…
My Illumination: Making History by Uncovering the Past
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…
How Can You Honor the Holocaust The Day After Yom HaShoah?
When I was a day school student, Yom ha-Sho’ah, or a Holocaust Memorial Day was a yearly occurrence. Every year, there were assemblies and meetings with Holocaust survivors, and it was all followed by what I assumed was survivor’s guilt. Following Passover, I inevitably felt like the Wicked Son at the seder: not on in…
Ghosts of Passovers Past
Yom Tovs aren’t days we traditionally think about death. They’ve always been, at least in my understanding, about life, and the preservation of life, celebrations of survival despite all the odds being against us to live or to live well. In the case of Pesach, we celebrate our overcoming persecution to live autonomously—in short to…