Archive
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 […]
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 […]