Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
Words are strangely versatile; put them on a page and they glow with intellectual distinction. Put them over music and they transcend themselves to become vehicles of beauty (or they don’t). Put them on a website for Jewish students…and who knows? Maybe words are subject to a quota system; write too many about Emil Fackenheim…
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…
Are you a Jewish student? Are you fed up with the state of American Zionism? Have $5? Good. Click here before April 30, pay the $5, then vote to change things. I can’t explain the process, the necessity, or the candidates better than J.J.Goldberg did in two articles in the Forward, so I won’t try….
Full there is a deep breath resonating through the walls and I am coming closer to catching it not concerned with lasting concerned with now not before but because of arriving not leaving made-up not fantasy there is a deep breath resonating through these paper walls not calm but…
As I got ready to light the menorah for the last time this year, I could not help but think about the meaning of the shemash, or head candle, amid all the other candles. Each night a new candle is added to the menorah and the light spreads. Come the end of Chanukah, you have…
Hanukkah gets a bad rap. It is seen as the most Americanized of the Jewish holidays and as the Jewish pinnacle of consumerism and indulgence. On top of that, when looking closer at the Hanukkah story, we see a radical, anti-assimilationist militant group that, in reality, ended up embracing the Hellenism they had worked so…
I am a Millennial. I say this proudly. I dance around Jewish tradition, modernity, and practice in a way that Millennials do. I whole-heartedly enjoy my status as a Generation Y’er. At the same time, however, I really don’t like how much of the conversation about how to engage my peers is fundamentally had…
Last week, two Palestinian cousins, armed with a meat cleaver and a gun, attacked worshipers at Kehilat B’nei Torah synagogue in Har Nof, Jerusalem, killing four Israelis. This is the most devastating attack Jerusalem has seen since 2008 and it is now, more than ever, imperative that people start thinking about the religious and cultural…
Both Avigayil and I (Amram Altzman) have written extensively about the ways in which we have taken on Jewish rituals which, traditionally, fall outside of our traditional gender identities. This is a conversation we’ve been having, more specifically, about what it means to take on Jewish rituals and how that relates to our Jewish identities…
I grew up knowing that one of the most important values is to honor one’s body. I learned that I was made in the image of God and that made my body holy. I have never felt that way, though. I have always felt that my body is disgusting, something to be ashamed of, not…
I’ve been the token Jew for much of my life. People have referred to me as “my Jewish friend, Amber” and some have told me that I’m the only Jew they’ve ever met, especially out here in Wyoming. Since I went to Israel for the first time 7 years ago, I have successfully lived up…
“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…
Yesterday, I reviewed Hoaxocaust!, a new play performed and written by Barry Levey that satirizes Holocaust denial simply by putting the arguments of some of its biggest proponents, Arthur Butz, David Irving, Robert Faurisson, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in context. I saw the show the night of September 11 (coincidentally), then on September 12, I caught…
I’ve written about the successes and shortcomings of my fourteen years of Modern Orthodox day school education before, from religious, secular, and Zionist perspectives. I’ve also written about the thought processes behind my decisions to leave the Modern Orthodox world and join — at least for now — egalitarian communities that fall more in…
Preliminary results of the Demographic Survey of American Jewish College Students 2014 are out. Started last spring by Drs. Barry Kosmin and Ariela Keysar at the Trinity College Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture, this is the first comprehensive scientific survey ever of an underrepresented and under studied demographic: American…