What Bari Weiss Gets Wrong About Anti-Semitism
We cannot defeat anti-Semitism in isolation. In fact, it is the same ideology that puts all of us – Jews, Muslims, Palestinians, and people of color – at risk of violence.
Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
We cannot defeat anti-Semitism in isolation. In fact, it is the same ideology that puts all of us – Jews, Muslims, Palestinians, and people of color – at risk of violence.
Several weeks ago, 11 people were gunned down while attending Shabbat morning services at a synagogue in Pittsburgh. Throughout the United States, people mourned with the Jewish community after the worst act of violent anti-Semitism in our country’s history while candidates campaigning for the upcoming midterm election promised to make sure nothing like this ever…
The day that my street became a crime scene, I didn’t go to my job as a waitress. Everything was too heart-achingly fresh and the lockdown wasn’t lifted until it was too late, anyway. I went to work the next day, though. And the day after that. On Tuesdays, my second job entails teaching high…
When I saw the news I tried to think if I know anyone who lives in Pittsburgh. If any of my Jewish friends have family there. If any of the first years we’ve welcomed to Hillel over the last few months grew up there. I couldn’t think. I called my friend and cried on the…
When applying to colleges, I gave barely any thought to Jewish life on campus. This was not because I didn’t care about being engaged with a Jewish community; on the contrary, between leading my Temple Youth Group, attending regional NFTY events, working as a teaching assistant at a religious school, and moving up the ranks at…
When I was very young, I was jealous of the way my sister and her friends played together. Other boys were always so aggressive, so into breaking stuff, but girls just played nice. What they were playing–Barbies, house, Mall Madness–I thought was stupid, but I was frustrated that I couldn’t find another boy who wanted…
Some people study whales. Some people study epistemological analysis. I study white people. More specifically, I am interested in diaspora networking and migrant housing stock, but I am also interested in the way whiteness as a concept affects these in host countries. A lot of the time, that idea means things like deeply…
This is a busy week at the University of Chicago. For one thing, we students are consumed with the mid-quarter rush of exams and paper due dates. This week in particular, though, we are also exceedingly busy non-academically—if you can imagine anything but academics ever occurring at the University of Chicago. Two major events are…
I am a History and Geography major. No, I do not look at maps all day: Geography is actually a real academic discipline, which can basically be summed up as “the study of the land and the things on it.” All sorts of Geography exists: cultural, physical, political, linguistic, theoretical, and demographic among them….
I must have told my mother one too many times that she embodies the Jewish Mother stereotype. (She really does, by the way. Ask, as one example, the ten cast and crew members of a show I worked on in high school for whom my mother provided enough food for forty people, lest anyone starve…
Al Jazeera. Simply hearing the name would bother me two years ago, like nails on a chalkboard. In my ethnocentric view, I believed Al Jazeera existed for the sole purpose of promoting anti-Israel propaganda with the utmost criticism of the nation. How could I trust any of their other journalism with their articles containing blatant…
For the past few weeks I’ve seen from various sources on Facebook, and most recently on Tablet, a growing concern about a potentially frightening new trend: Featured on several Amazon.com best-seller lists are e-book editions of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The first responses I’ve seen have been understandably negative, coming from some reasonably…
In high school, I idolized Jack Kerouac. I dreamed of beatnik-esque wanderings, of driving wherever the highways took me without a particular destination in mind. I had a realization, though, when some friends and I waited on the el platform in one of Chicago’s northern neighborhoods to return to our campus in the southern part…
Tikkun Olam, it seems, is all the rage. Having grown up in a very Jewish area , physical acts of tikkun olam, or “healing the world” have been a part of my Jewish life since preschool. Street cleanups, community gardening, food bank packing, helping animal shelters, the list goes on. Despite all these opportunities to…