Archive
“Standing Silent” This is a profoundly disturbing film. It’s not just the subject matter, although pedophilia isn’t exactly popcorn flick material, it’s the way it’s shot, the color scheme, everything about it. You know how in the “Twilight Zone,” a man could wake up in a world where everyone had four stomachs and goat horns […]
You may recall my post last week about sex at Yeshiva University, in which I wrote: Sex. Ostensibly there is nothing of the sort at Yeshiva University. As the exemplar of American Modern Orthodoxy, YU has something of a pristine reputation. […] YU is definitely more sheltered than most places; if someone’s looking for a […]
Have things gotten so bad for the leader of the free world that he’s slumming it on the op-ed pages of college newspapers? Last week, an op-ed written by President Barack Obama targeted at the college crowd appeared in a handful of college newspapers, including The Harvard Crimson and the University of Texas at Austin’s Daily Texan.
For a sitting president to run an op-ed in student newspapers is uncommon, to say the least; this one drew the ire of some commentators. The College Media Matters blog said, “A related post yesterday on Fox Nation ran with the headline, ‘Obama Reduced to Writing Op-Eds in Student Newspapers.’ A separate commenter on a Politico story wrote, ‘It’s a transparent and ethically challenged vote-buying gambit.'”
We’re not convinced.
On Friday, Oct. 7, Erev Yom Kippur, vandals desecrated Muslim and Christian cemeteries in Jaffa, the city where I live. They broke tombstones and graffitied clichés such as “Death to the Arabs” and “Tag Machir” (i.e. Price Tag, a Jewish anti-Arab extremist organization in Israel, based in the West Bank settlements). This was less than a […]
Though defeating Iran is a given, the costs of a war with Iran would be dramatically high. This much has to be made clear. Israel will never go it alone. The country does not have the assets currently to make any sort of unilateral assault sustainable against multiple foes at once. It would involve the […]
Members of Jewish Voice for Peace’s youth wing, Young, Jewish and Proud, disrupted an event last night in New York City hosted by Birthright Israel-Next. According to their press release: Using the ‘human microphone’ or ‘people’s microphone’ made famous by the Occupy Wall Street protests they interrupted a Birthright Israel Next-sponsored event. The event featured […]
In Part II of this three-part series about non-Jews in Bloomington, Ind. who have become deeply involved with the Jewish community, Jun Chen interviews two non-Jewish women whose children attend a Jewish preschool.
New uses of the word “occupy” abound. The latest is Occupy the Occupiers, a new campaign led by the Young, Jewish and Proud (YJP) division of the Jewish Voice for Peace, a far-left Jewish activist group. At a Birthright Israel NEXT event last night, YJP members interrupted speaker and author Steven L. Pease, using an Occupy Wall Street-style “mic check,” also know as the “human microphone,” to call attention to their Occupy the Occupiers initiative. The protesters were all escorted out by security, but continued their chanting on the sidewalk outside the room on 13th Street in Manhattan, where the NEXT event was being held.
Last week, I looked out over the old city of Jerusalem, barely paying attention to the view it afforded me. This week, as I sit in a hotel in Lublin, Poland, looking out at the graves of hundreds upon hundreds of Jews, I swear I will never take that image for granted ever again. When […]
I had the opportunity a few weeks ago to meet with leading American social critic Noam Chomsky in his office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where we spoke about a number of issues of international youth activism regarding American involvement in the Israel-Palestine conflict. One of the issues I was curious about was his youth advocacy work within the Zionist movement during the waves of foreign immigration to–and settlement of–Palestine, before Israel was established.