Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
According to a survey recently reported in the New York Times, 41 percent of millennials wrongly believe two million or fewer Jews died in the Holocaust and that 66 percent of millennials could not say what Auschwitz was. American Jews understandably reacted with extreme concern, shocked that so many of their fellow Americans – particularly…
According to the Oxford dictionary, ghosting is defined as the practice of ending a personal relationship with someone by suddenly and without explanation withdrawing from all communication. (Yes, ghosting is now an official term in the dictionary – one of our generation’s many accomplishments alongside avocado toast and sushi burritos.) As a frequent user of…
Over the course of my time at New Voices, I’ve been called a lot of things in comment sections, tweets, and emails from dubious Hotmail accounts. I’ve been called a radical leftist, a right-wing apologist, a snowflake, a “silly little girl who should listen to her mama.” (My mama is a progressive, too – surprise!)…
The Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to groups deemed anti-Muslim by the Southern Poverty Law Center and Center for American Progress, alleges a new report from Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) Chicago. In a world where Muslims and Jews alike are threatened by rising hatred, there is no room for…
We’ve made a lot of headlines recently at Middlebury College. Most news coverage of the student protest resisting controversial speaker Charles Murray has been discouraging and demeaning – “Violent Student Mob in Vermont Shuts Down Charles Murray” and “Understanding the Angry Mob at Middlebury that Gave Me a Concussion” and “The Middlebury Protest and Our…
This week, social media users witnessed a beautiful onslaught of snark and defiance from the Jewish millennial corner of the Twitterverse. Young Jews took to Twitter appalled by a swiftly deleted tweet suggesting that Israeli Knesset member Michael Oren had called their views on Israel appalling. “The opinions of young #american #jews are appalling. They need the…
Over the past three weeks, President-elect Donald Trump’s choice of Steve Bannon for chief strategist has drawn a lot of attention. Bannon has been accused of turning conservative website Breitbart News into a home for neo-Nazis and the alt-right movement, of being a racist, a white supremacist, and even an anti-Semite. At the same time,…
I’m not afraid of the big bad wolf. But I do worry about the people that voted for him. Last week on “Real Time” with Bill Maher – a primary news and politics outlet for a huge number of my peers – David Frum of The Atlantic made a plea to all those millennials who…
Millennials, we get a bad rap for a lot of things – many of them undeserved. We know the stereotypes: We’re self-obsessed, we’ve ruined the English language with our lol-worthy emojis and text speech, and we demand intellectual baby blankets in the form of political correctness. Basically, if there’s a venerated institution out there, someone…
Originally published in the Spring 2016 edition of The Current. It has been over seventy years since the end of World War II and the Holocaust. As remaining survivors become fewer and fewer, the Holocaust moves from being a living memory to one that is more historical in nature. Inevitably, as we are further removed…
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…
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…
I was hoping that in 2016, the Jewish community would find better ways to reach out to millennials. I guess they have, if co-opting social justice, intersectionality, and related ideas counts as outreach. It started with an op by David Bernstein, the current CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, published Jan. 4 in…
Introduction Anti-Semitism is everywhere, and it is nowhere. It is claimed to be behind every critique of Israel voiced by progressive youth, yet is said to have been vanquished as American Jews have found themselves increasingly present among the fringes of the establishment. Of course, anti-Semitism still exists. The attacks on Jews in Paris and…
I am a Millennial. I say this proudly. I dance around Jewish tradition, modernity, and practice in a way that Millennials do. I whole-heartedly enjoy my status as a Generation Y’er. At the same time, however, I really don’t like how much of the conversation about how to engage my peers is fundamentally had…