Archive
It’s been an eventful few weeks, full of holidays, cute anecdotes, law school applications and politics both domestic and international. And now, my pithy observations about all this: 1. My house built a Sukkah for Sukkot. It was really quite nice to sit, eat and sing in. I’d forgotten how much fun sing-alongs are especially […]
There’s nothing we here at New Voices like better than a press release email with a shouted subject line: “REP. ACKERMAN ATTACKS OVER 100 NYU PROFESSORS FOR SIGNING DIVESTMENT LETTER.” After catching our breath, we looked into it: Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-NY) doesn’t care for boycotts: I strongly condemn the ill-conceived and dangerous effort by […]
“Rare and based” according to random twitter cats. How many times can I say “hipster” without looking lame? Part one at Simi Lampert’s YU Beacon (opening acts): After Yellow Red Sky, Max Jared takes the stage. Jared bears an uncanny resemblance to Goldstein from the Harold and Kumar movies, and his music kind of sounds […]
Columbia University (New York City)–Columbia University has a large Jewish population but, according to some Sephardi students, the Columbia-Barnard Hillel can’t satisfy all of its constituents. Reflective of the makeup of the American Jewish community, most of the school’s Jewish students are Ashkenazi, meaning that they are of eastern European or German descent. Jews of other heritages, like Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews, face a lack of opportunities to express their religious and cultural identities. Ashkenazi and Sephardi-Mizrahi practices differ in a variety of ways, ranging from the order of prayers in services to Passover customs. “The prayers, of course, are similar, but there’s some differences,” Columbia senior Mathew Samimi, a French-Persian Jew, pointed out.
Today, in New Voices Magazine, Carly Silver writes about Sephardic student life, or lack thereof, at Columbia University. Though the picture is mostly bleak, one group mentioned in the article stands out, New Yachad City. Part of Columbia University Hillel, New Yachad City tries to create services that are more reflective of the diversity of world Jewry. […]
Several New Voices writers, including me, wrote a group of brief essays last week about Occupy Wall Street. Some of them were also published in the Forward (in print in the picture scan above). When the essays initially came Jane Eisner, the editor of the Forward, and I were surprised by how negative they were […]
I’m waiting for a bus near the Central Bus Station in Tel Aviv to get back home to Jaffa. A woman with a baby in a stroller hails a cab. The cab driver comes out to help her. She has difficulty trying to fold the stroller with one arm, while holding the baby in the […]
The scene at Norris University Center looked more like a Middle Eastern flea market than a student center. Recruiters yelled and sweet-talked, handed out candy and business cards as students squeezed through the packed aisles. Cultural groups, sports teams and even some students who developed a solar-powered car were trying to convince incoming Northwestern University students to listen to their pitches so that maybe, just maybe, the new students would make an appearance at their first meeting of the semester. This chaotic scene was the annual activities fair at Northwestern University, where student groups debated, pressured and begged freshmen to give their groups a chance. But several groups with a common denominator were noticeably more subdued, or even absent from the fair. The link between them? They were Jewish and Israel-centered groups.
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 […]