Consider the sporadically observant Jewish student at Hampshire College in Massachusetts. Her Jewish experience on campus has consisted of two Friday night dinners at the local Chabad House. Can we consider her to be a member of the same community as, say, a modern Orthodox student at Yeshiva University’s Stern College who is married by graduation? Or a Jewish atheist at Michigan State? Or a Hillel president at Harvard?
In this post-ideological, post-denominational era, when no broad-based, student-initiated Jewish movements exist on campus, it’s become harder and harder to identify what binds Jewish college students. As New Voices is a community paper, this amounts to something of an existential crisis for us. Do Jewish college students share an identity? If not, do they need to share a magazine?
When New Voices was created, our target audience included only a subset of the Jewish student population. The magazine was designed for those students who identified with the independent Jewish student movement. When that movement disappeared in the mid-1990s, we were left without a defined readership. Today, we try to appeal to the Jewish student body as a whole. And yet, that body remains diverse. Our religious, political, and cultural identities are wide ranging. Our only common experiences come courtesy of a few professionally led Jewish institutions.
With this issue, New Voices begins a project of rediscovering our shared identity. We’re starting from that most basic emotion, common to all college students: fear of graduation. In these pages, our authors report back from the real world on sex, roommates, and politics.
Our cover story addresses the eternal question, “How do I get laid after graduation?” A year after their move to the big city, two recent college graduates turn to JDate, only to find that there’s no replacing the college kegger.
Sticking with the party theme, Richard Semegram writes on Fuel For Truth , an Israel advocacy organization that’s trying to convert young urbanites to the cause with drinks, dancing, and some worryingly militaristic rhetoric.
Post-college living arrangements can be confounding. Also in this issue, we write on a group of young Jews who are sharing their income at an urban kibbutz in Brooklyn.
Of course, there’s plenty of coverage of collegiate issues, too. Check out Amanda Milstein’s article on the Jewish Awareness Movement , an Orthodox outreach group recently sanctioned by the University of Southern California, and Ashley Bagan’s story on Yugntruf , a student group working to bring Yiddish to the college campus. Plus, interviews, reviews, and images. Enjoy.
