Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
When I was a child, my mother taught me that Thanksgiving was a holiday of immigrants and refugees. It was fitting, then, that Thanksgiving was a holiday my family spent with my maternal grandparents, who were themselves, along with my mother, Jewish immigrants from the Soviet Union in 1981. Although my understanding of the holiday…
As I sat in Sixth & I Historic Synagogue the night before the start of Passover, I was surrounded by a sea of hipsters swagging SovJew, or Soviet Jewish. They were clamoring around, speaking in fast- paced Russian, to hear the self-proclaimed “ethno-chaos” of the Ukrainian folk fusion band DahkaBrahka. All around me, I heard…
A section of this article was featured in the Daily Northwestern on September 1st, 2013. She fell into the ditch thinking she was dead. All around her she breathed and touched dying human flesh. The bullet had apparently missed her. She desperately raised her arms to push through the masses of bodies that were…
It’s old news that the Israeli rabbinate rejects those who are not Orthodox, especially in regards to immigration or marriage. What was recently revealed, however, was exactly how this process of rejection or acceptance happens, in light of the Israeli Rabbinate’s recently calling Rabbi Avi Weiss’ status as an Orthodox rabbi into question. This was…
I thought I would take a moment to engage in some shameless self-promotion. If you read my article posted last week, you’ll know that I am researching a group called Boulder Action for Soviet Jewry. As Soviet Union was unraveling, this group advocated for the rights of Soviet Jews to emigrate and worked tirelessly to…