Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
“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…
Here at New Voices, we’re no strangers to the questions of Jews and race. And while it seems like we’ve done a good job of beginning a very much needed conversation on the complicated relationship that we American Jews have with race, ethnicity, and privilege — and we’re nowhere near the end of this conversation…
In 1954, the American Jewish Committee supported the NAACP during the historic Brown v. Board of Education case. In 1965, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marched to Selma with Dr. Martin Luther King. And a month ago, I heard a college-aged white Jew equate his family’s historical experience in Europe to the struggle that people of…
I like Jewish boys. A lot. Which is why I was elated when Urban Outfitters released its 2016 Nice Jewish Guys calendar — and then I realized how conflicted I was. While I support the proliferation of the Nice Jewish Boy — and God only knows the world needs more of them — I also…
In America, Jews come from all racial and ethnic backgrounds, and have a shared memory of oppression and violence throughout history. That’s why, after the June 17 shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church that left nine dead in Charleston, S.C., several rabbis from across denominations came together and determined they had to do something…
These days, it seems I can’t scroll down my Facebook news feed without seeing something about privilege. At Boston College and within American Jewry more broadly, conversations about privilege of various kinds have been vigorous and ongoing. While much of it has focused on racial privilege, especially here at New Voices, there has been…
We here at New Voices seem no strangers to the question of whether or not the Jews are white. Yet the wider American Jewish community tends to go back and forth on the issue, especially now that racial tensions in this country have reached a boiling point. Despite the advancements made in the national…
I have written in the past about my experiences with gender, privilege, Jewish ritual, and the need to find new and creative ways to engage both men and women ritually. Women, I’ve argued, should be encouraged to try out more traditionally masculine rituals, and men should be encouraged to try out more feminine rituals. There…
One familiar thing about the United Kingdom for me is that I frequently hear South African accents. Here in the colonial heartland, I have met a lot of folks like me: born to South African [Ashkenazi] Jewish parents abroad, raised abroad, and with varied ties to South Africa. Some, like me, maintain citizenship in South…
Growing up in my sheltered, American, religious Zionist, Orthodox bubble, I was told that there were two options for me, especially in light of the Holocaust: I could live in Israel, or I could live in America. The term “Diaspora Jew,” or the idea that there could exist a group of Jews outside of Israel…
“I felt my feet were praying.” – Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel on his experience in the third Selma to Montgomery march for civil rights. I was marching through a display of Christmas trees with a group of Jews screaming for the rights of people of color when I was first struck by the question of…
My egalitarianism started out as a compromise: it gave me most of the traditional liturgy and observance I’d grown up around, while also giving me the modernity and progressive attitudes I’d been surrounded by for most of my life. It allowed me to cling to the tradition of my childhood and the feminism and liberalism…
This past week has left me, and many others, searching for answers to questions I only recently realized I had. What follows is a series of thoughts that I had over the last ten days. Privilege, at perhaps its most basic and functional iteration, is the ability to wake up in the morning and…
Last year, one of the clubs that I am a part of in school decided to hold a “Smashing the Patriarchy” workshop, to work on our group’s internal dynamics. To my mind, this was completely unnecessary. The group governed by consensus, and we were roughly half male and half female. It seemed to me that…
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…