Archive
For the fifth consecutive year, Manhattan’s Jewish Community Center hosted the Other Israel Film Festival. A project devoted to exposing issues facing Israeli minorities, the festival brought together directors and films from Nov. 10-17 to “foster social awareness and cultural understanding,” according to the festival’s website. The festival included two Palestinian filmmakers this year. “We are constantly expanding and including other minority populations,” Isaac Zablocki, the JCC’s director of film programs, wrote in an email. The films shown at the festival represent the identities of many of contemporary’s Israel’s disenfranchised communities.
Last year, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) advised “conscientious filmmakers not to participate in this festival,” according to a release on its website. The organization’s concerns included allegedly propagandistic wording in official OIFF statements and “whitewashing” of what they call Apartheid-like practices in Israel.
I have always anxiously anticipated the arrival of Thanksgiving, filled with the promise of time with my family and some delicious turkey. But this year my excitement has taken a new form: for the first Thanksgiving of my life, I will be celebrating as a vegetarian.
By abstaining from turkey, which is often injected with hormones and antibiotics, and choosing instead to eat from the local fall harvest available in my area, it will be possible for me to observe Thanksgiving more ethically. The Thanksgiving holiday — which I choose to look at as a harvest holiday, rather than a commemoration of a mythical story about our Native American and Pilgrim ancestors — is the perfect opportunity to be thankful for nature’s bounty and the many gifts the earth gives us year after year.
Crossposted at Crystal Decadenz I am disturbingly familiar with the arguments against Orthodoxy. I imagine someone will take issue with my characterizations of the liberal branches, but it’s good to disagree sometimes. I know that really accurate characterizations would take a book to write (I’m telling you now so I don’t have to break up […]
In the first part of his watershed work, Imperialism and Jewish Society: 200 B.C.E to 640 C.E., Seth Schwartz, the Gerson D. Cohen Professor of History at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, argues “that imperial support for the central national institutions of the Jews, the Jerusalem temple and the Pentateuch, helps explain why […]
I don’t mind Occupy Wall Street. I don’t mind civil disobedience. I don’t even mind police officers trying to do their jobs. Here’s what I do mind: People getting between me and taking that first look at my work email in the morning. I’m getting a little weary of OWS at this point. I’m not […]
Around a table of ice-cold of beer and steaming pizza, one of Judaism’s oldest traditions thrives in a weekly session of raucous Torah study.
It’s called Torah on Tap. This guided discussion of Jewish topics meets every Thursday night on the back patio of Leonardo’s by the Slice in Gainesville, Fla. Leonardo’s is a Gainesville staple and has seen many businesses around it come and go since it opened in 1973. But for the last 10 years, Leonardo’s has also been home to Torah on Tap. Because of Hillel and Leonardo’s, hundreds of students have sat and discussed timeless Jewish concepts over pizza and beer.
Wringing their hands over the imagined plight of “the youth,” the Jewish Federations of North America came together in Denver last week for their annual General Assembly. Rabbi Elie Kaunfer — a founder of Manhattan’s traditional egalitarian yeshiva, Yeshivat Hadar — was the scholar-in-residence at the GA this year. In his address, Kaunfer drew the connection between our generation’s increased willingness to criticize Israel and our generation’s decreased involvement with the Jewish establishment. But the post-GA discussions that have emerged indicate a broader misdiagnosis of what ails the Jewish community — it’s the very definition of community.
We have created a Jewish community so torn by internal politics about Israel speech that we can no longer so much as propose a social justice trip to Israel without creating a political divide in the Jewish community, alienating Jews of good conscience who have already been marginalized for their views.
Pursue is an alumni program cosponsored by Avodah and the American Jewish World Service. Knee-jerk reactions abounded when Pursue announced that it would sponsor an Israel trip. One Avodah staffer resigned in protest and a group of current Avodah participants circulated a petition, which demands that the trip include some Palestinian components like a visit to the territories and interactions with real live Palestinians.
The JTA has an interesting round-up of #Occupy’s Palestinian solidarity issues: While the pro-Palestinian events have been organized by outside groups, the closest Occupy Wall Street has come to endorsing Palestinian activism was a Nov. 3 tweet from the New York branch’s unofficial communications team expressing solidarity with the Freedom Waves mini-flotilla, which tried to […]
While researching my article about Jewish Greek life here at American University, one of the most Jewish private universities in the country (depending on who you ask), I ran into someone interesting. Ibraheem Samirah is a normal college student. He’s a junior studying political science and pre-dentistry, he likes hanging out with friends, he ran […]