Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
I was pretty surprised about the interest people showed when I finally let my Haunted Minyan idea out of the box. Haunted Minyan, for those of you who don’t know, is what happens when you have Kabbalat Shabbat services outside on the lawn of your haunted campus, preferably next to the campus graveyard. Sadly, the…
Harold Camping, President of Family Stations, Inc., predicted that Judgment Day would occur on Friday, October 21, 2011. Needless to say, the day passed without any readily apparent existential threats. While many would call Camping crazy or insane, his belief is no less plausible than Moses’ splitting the Red Sea, Jesus’ walking on water or…
The Torah commands us to love our neighbor and treat them compassionately. But it also condemns the act of “man [lying] with man as with a woman.” How do we reconcile Judaism with LGBT issues? Also, what about women “lying” with women? – LB, Florida, U.S. There’s a lot to unpack in this question: what…
Jews of my parents’ generation were broadly involved in the protests of their youth: marching in Selma, Ala; riding for freedom; marching on Washington. Given that, the attempt by the establishment and by politically conservative Jews to discredit the association between Jewish ritual and the Occupy Wall Street protests is shockingly misguided. The claim that the protesters are anti-Semites is as specious as any attempt to paint an entire group of contemporary Americans as such. And the reliance of those making that claim on the presence of pro-Palestinian sentiments among the protesters shows how out of touch establishment Jews are with the younger generation of American Jews that turned out in staggering numbers (as few as 700, according to some; as many as 1,000, according to others) for a Kol Nidre service in a plaza across the street from Occupy Wall Street’s home base. This is not a group of Jews with much sympathy for the old “You’re either pro-Israel or anti-Israel” line of the Jewish establishment.
It’s always enlightening to realize how much I don’t know. I’ve spent my entire life ensconced in the Jewish Orthodox world, and in spite of that– or perhaps because of it– I hardly know anything. I mean, I know what brachah to say and when. I can even tell you what order to put your…
To get to the Beit Zait Moshav located just outside of Jerusalem, where I spent my Rosh Hashana Holidays this weekend past, it took an hour and a half on three different buses to get there. Each and every bus–the one from Holit to Eshkol and the one from Eshkol to Ashkelon and the one…
Today in New Voices Magazine Max Elstein Keisler recounts the tale of terror and woe that was his brief time living with the anti-Semitic roommate from hell. On top of that, the video above is Max’s rap about the same incident.
On Saturday I went on a holy pilgrimage to New York Comic-Con – the ultimate East Coast nerd gathering. Comic-Con is a convention where comic book publishers, video game companies, anime and manga makers, and local collectible stores gather to sell colorful character themed crap to people paying at least $45 for admission. It is…
I had no idea what I was in for. The apartment was nice, for Allston. It had hardwood floors, two bathrooms, a working dishwasher, a porch and quite a bit of floor space, all for $600 dollars a month. Plus, laundry in the basement. I moved in three days after Irene didn’t hit and had my mezuzot up by the second day. The first week there was cool. Then the problems started. Let me introduce you to my fifth roommate–let’s call her Tiffani. Pink blotches in her hair, stomach bulging out from under her crop-top, omnipresent smell of stale cigarette smoke. Straight out of the trailer park, you feel me? I let her sign the lease thinking I shouldn’t be a snob, people need to co-exist, there’s enough room for everyone.
On October 3 it was announced that Alan van Capelle – a well-established activist within the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender civil rights movement – has been appointed president of the recently merged Progressive Jewish Alliance and Jewish Funds for Justice (JFSJ). According to an article posted by the Jewish Daily Forward, van Cappelle will…
Students for Justice in Palestine is currently holding its first national conference at Columbia University from October 14 to 16. The keynote address — the only part of the conference open to the press — featured academic luminaries Mahmood Mamdani, an professor of government at Columbia, and Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh, an anthropologist who has taught…
It’s pre-frosh season again. I remember it like it was yesterday: the spam from colleges imploring me to apply, waived application fees to universities I’d never heard of, and the constant feeling of dread inspired by the Common Application website bookmark on my browser, an ever-present reminder that I would have to spend hundreds of…
Whenever I attempt to explain to someone what I am doing in Israel, their first question is always, “What’s a kibbutz?” A kibbutz is a kind of gated community. It’s a collective community based on a high level of social and economical sharing, equality, direct democracy and tight social relations. A member of a kibbutz…
I was in high school, spending the summer at a Jewish summer camp in New York, when Gilad Shalit was captured. For every generation of Americans, there is a conflict that defines the image of Israel that is most vivid to them. For some, it was the War of Independence, for others it was the capturing of the Sinai, the return of the Sinai or the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. For those not much older than myself and the writers whose reflections are presented below, it was the Second Intifada. For us, it looked like it would always be the capturing of Gilad Shalit. But it looks like we may soon be able to replace that with his release.
Those are my brief thoughts on the apparently impending release of Shalit. Below, we present the thoughts of five more New Voices Magazine writers. –David A.M. Wilensky, Editor of New Voices Magazine
There are stickers with Michigan spelled out phonetically in Hebrew characters, Jewish bling abounds and satisfying a falafel craving isn’t hard to do: Welcome to the University of Michigan.
For a lot of seniors, the beginning of the school year means being back in Ann Arbor for the first time in eight months–for others that hiatus was spent where hummus and shawarma are plentiful and shekels are the preferred form of currency. It seems only natural for these students to return even more in love with Israel than when they left. Eight months later and with much-improved Hebrew skills, two U of M students, Ben Wolf and Alyse Opatowski returned with a perspective that perplexes the creators of the programs that sent them to Israel–frustrated and disenchanted with Israel.