Our Institutions Will Survive Trump

By Josh Daniels November 11, 2016

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…

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Students React to Trump’s Victory

By New Voices Staff November 10, 2016

On Tuesday, Nov. 8, New Voices asked students across America and Canada for their first reactions to Donald Trump’s poll-defying win in the 2016 presidential election. Students share their experiences of the election on campus and their initial thoughts on the outcome: Adam Jacobs, George Washington University, Freshman “Last night I witnessed panic, fear, happiness, stress, relief, anger, denial….

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Will Trump’s Presidency Help Israel?

By Jackson Richman November 10, 2016

In an election between two of the most unpopular candidates in U.S. electoral history, real estate and media mogul Donald Trump accomplished the unthinkable – winning the presidency. His transition from the Trump Organization to political business in the Oval Office will entail a lot of challenges domestically and abroad. His domestic challenges will include handling…

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Is Voting a Mitzvah?

By Sara Weissman November 8, 2016

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…

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U of M Students React to Campus Apartheid Wall on Rosh Hashana

By Nicole Zelniker November 1, 2016

At the University of Michigan, many Jewish students spent the morning of Oct. 4 attending Rosh Hashanah services. That same morning, students in Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (SAFE) were getting ready to protest. “I just saw these two huge walls,” said first-year student Juliet Wishner. She also saw signs supporting BDS. SAFE, a…

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U.S. Aid Isn’t Good for Israel

By Jackson Richman October 19, 2016

The U.S. and Israel recently renewed the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU). The current version, signed in 2008, expires in 2018. According to officials, President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed to an MoU that would provide more than $30 billion over a decade, which would include advanced weaponry systems. The continuation of…

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UC Irvine students protest IDF presence on campus

By Nicole Zelniker June 1, 2016

On May 18, students at the University of California, Irvine, protested a screening of the documentary “Beneath the Helmet,” an Israeli film about the Israeli Defense Forces. “They were screaming. They tried to push open the door, but we were holding the door from the inside,” said President of Students Supporting Israel Katrin Gendova in…

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Brown students hope to continue events like the one that broke Hillel’s Standards of Partnership

By Nicole Zelniker May 13, 2016

On May 11, more than 70 students from Brown University came together to commemorate the Nakba by watching three films produced by the Israeli NGO Zochrot. Nakba is the term for the 1948 expulsion and displacement of over 700,000 Palestinians, and Nakba Day is observed on May 15, the day after Israeli Independence Day. “Within…

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Brown students break Hillel Standards of Partnership to discuss Nakba

By New Voices Staff May 12, 2016

Yesterday, despite its official cancellation, a group of Brown University students gathered at the Brown RISD Hillel building to watch three short films about the Nakba. According to a statement from Sophie Kasakove, one of the event’s three organizers and a member-at-large of Open Hillel’s steering committee, the event had been in the works for…

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Why doesn’t Emory University have a J Street U?

By Nicole Zelniker May 3, 2016

When Emory University first-year Zoe Robbin got to college, she was upset by the lack of left-wing Jewish organizations on campus. With four other students, she founded a campus chapter of J Street U and set out to become a chartered organization. “We wrote a constitution … according to the college’s charter rules exactly,” said…

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Stanford student: Saying Jews control banks isn’t necessarily anti-Semitism

By Chloe Sobel April 6, 2016

  At a meeting of Stanford University’s Undergraduate Senate last night, a student senator said the idea that Jews control “the media, economy, government and other societal institutions” is “not anti-Semitism.” According to the Stanford Daily, Gabriel Knight was questioning the language of a resolution to support the Stanford Jewish community against anti-Semitism. The bill was…

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It’s time for Jews to become intersectional

By Amram Altzman March 25, 2016

“Is _________ good for the Jews?” This question seems to be asked any time a major political development is revealed, especially in the Diaspora. One might ask, for example, if Canada’s new Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is good for the Jews; many asked if Obama’s election in 2008 was good for the Jews; and there…

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Jewish pluralism — and its limits

By Amram Altzman March 15, 2016

The Jewish community has always been in the project of negotiating itself — what people are part of the Jewish community, what opinions are acceptable, and what are not. We also have a tradition of ideological pluralism which dates back centuries — indeed, to some of the earliest rabbinic literature. Throughout all that tradition, some…

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Perspectives on Syrian refugees: Is the Holocaust comparison inappropriate?

By Jackson Richman February 26, 2016

Read the first part in our series of Jewish perspectives on Syrian refugees, “Finding commonality in Jewish history.“ For the last few months, I’ve seen the comparison of today’s Syrian refugees to the plight of European Jews during the Holocaust trending on social media. This is an ignorant comparison with no real critical analysis behind it….

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Stop analyzing Bernie Sanders’ Jewishness

By Amram Altzman February 16, 2016

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how Bernie Sanders makes the decision to talk about his Jewishness, specifically how it contrasts starkly with the ways in which Donald Trump talks about Jewishness. Since then, Bernie Sanders has gone on to nearly tie the Iowa caucus with Hillary Clinton and, last week, defeat her in…

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