Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
More American Jews find themselves called to justice work than ever before. April Rosenblum, organizer and author of The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere, brings Torah in this letter for young Jewish activists resisting domination and approaching a tipping point.
“I used to feel so ostracized, so stigmatized and isolated because of my leftist beliefs…but I don’t feel like a pariah anymore. The network of support I’ve found with other young Persian Jews is small, but it’s really made an immediate difference in our lives. It feels like there’s been a shift in the ground I’m standing on.”
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…
Perhaps nothing characterizes the divisions I see in American and world Jewry better than the list of opening and closing keynote speakers at HaaretzQ, a conference on Israel hosted by Haaretz and the New Israel Fund in New York Sunday. The day kicked off with speeches from Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, MK Tzipi Livni of…
When I was in high school, I stopped wearing my kippah. I felt myself drifting away from the ultra-Orthodox community of my childhood and the Modern Orthodoxy my parents tried to model for me at home. I stopped wearing my kippah because I wanted to disaffiliate from the Orthodox Jews that filled New York City…
Merav Michaeli, the Israeli journalist and women’s rights activist-turned-Knesset member for the Labor Party, is a sign of hope for a progressive future in Israel. Last Tuesday, she tried to convince an exclusive crowd of worried Jewish leftists gathered in an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side that there was hope for the upcoming elections…
“The African newscaster asked the Jewish rabbi why there were no female rabbis, and the rabbi was very clever – he asked why there were no female chiefs!” I am not sure if it was the self-congratulatory racism, rehash and ignorance of colonial dynamics, or the justification of sexism that irritated me more. There I…
“Orthodoxy’s greatest innovation was its decision to stop innovating.” These were the words of a friend of mine in high school, a non-Orthodox student at my Modern Orthodox high school, voicing his frustration at Orthodoxy’s seeming inability to develop and adapt to (post-)modern values. When I published my last article, one of the largest criticisms…
Early in my Jewish education, I was taught that, as Jews and as human beings living in an imperfect world, we are obligated to stand up and speak out in the face of injustice. However small or large the perceived wrong, and despite our shaking legs and cracking voices or how powerful and vocal the…
Last week it was discovered that New York’s new mayor, Bill de Blasio, held an off-the-record meeting with AIPAC. This caused the Jewish political left in New York to draft a letter to Mayor de Blasio expressing their disappointment over his decision to ally himself with AIPAC, as opposed to taking a harder look at…
I have a hard time answering the question, “So how do you identify? Like, Jewish-ly?” On the one hand, I grew up in a Modern Orthodox home and attended Modern Orthodox schools since kindergarten, but, for most of my life so far, was part of a haredi community in southern Brooklyn. On the other hand,…
There is quite a lot of talk about denominational unity. “Let’s draw together as a Jewish community!” “Let’s build cross-denominational ties!” “Denominations are irrelevant and we live in a post-denominational era!” It is almost as if we, the eternally factional and rather divisive Jewish people have discovered a magic, unified, cohesive land beyond the rainbow,…
This article was originally posted on jU Chicago’s blog, and can be found here. Tikkun olam has become a motto for young socially-conscious American Jews, at least so it seems to me. This phrase has been adopted as the Jewish call to social justice action. It is commonly translated as “repairing the world.” The verb…
In past blogs, I have talked about progressive Judaism at length. I’ve written about queering Jewish spaces. I’ve explored the burgeoning institutionalization of Jewish atheism. I’ve critiqued the bureaucracy of conversion in Israel and for immigrants. Sometimes, the reaction to these pieces is positive. Thanks for that. Other times, the reaction goes something like this: “How much…