Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
In light of last week’s shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., we need to extend the same solidarity to Charleston that was given to the victims of January’s Charlie Hebdo and Hypercacher attacks. The phrases “Je suis Charlie” (“I am Charlie”), for the satirical Parisian newspaper, and “Je suis Juif”…
Treason has been on my mind a lot the past few weeks. In the Jewish world, the website Canary Mission – which seeks to create a “blacklist” of pro-Palestinian activists – has caused a controversy. Many of those profiled on the site are Jewish – including New Voices contributor Tom Pessah; those of our brethren…
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…
Can a Jew ask “what would Jesus do?” I have two answers: Yes and no. Yes. Of course. How could we not? Jesus of Nazareth was Jewish, full stop. I am perplexed by the almost total lack of Jewish theological engagement with Jesus. To be sure, Jesus’ Jewishness has been emphasized by historical and biblical…
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…
Evan Goldstein’s recent contributions to New Voices have featured fascinating and insightful meditations on the cultural location of Jewishness in our world. They are a welcome move toward a critical conversation around the hybrid forms of modern Jewish identity, a project that requires a historical understanding of whiteness. Sharona Bat-Ephraim, the subject of Goldstein’s critique…
I’ve wanted to write about Kendrick Lamar for a while. Mostly because listening to Kendrick seems to be what I turn to when I’m supposed to be writing, so integrating the two activities felt ideal. But what angle could possibly be found to write about hip-hop for a Jewish student website? Well, I’m not sure….
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…
There’s a point in academic research where one becomes somewhat monomaniacal. I wouldn’t know what that word means unless it had been on an episode of The West Wing, but here I mean to say that I’ve sort of lost the ability to think about things that aren’t Jewish identity and theology (to the eternal…
This poem was inspired by this article in Tablet Magazine about the anti-Semitic poet Amiri Baraka (born LeRoi Jones) and his Jewish ex-wife Hettie Jones (née Cohen). I was born to be swept off my feet by a hip brotha, poetic justice and a tight beat. I was bred Ashekenzi on borscht, vodka…
Recent occurrences on campuses have greatly undermined freedom of expression and should serve as a forewarning of what will happen in the future. While the hardliners of any ideological camp will seldom admit it, the perpetrators and victims have been people on both the left and right; both Zionists and anti-Zionists. In a…
“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…
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…
This was a bad week for people who believe in human progress. Whether you imagined America was on its way towards becoming a post-racial society or that residents of the Levant could maybe learn to live peacefully side-by-side someday soon, the better dirt of our nature has again graffitied and burned down our delusions. What…
“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…