Archive
When it comes to Jewish rappers, there aren’t that many names–MC Serch, the Beastie Boyz, Shyne. The biggest one out right now is Kosha Dillz, an Israeli-American from New Jersey who raps everything from grimy battle raps to hasbara (staunchly pro-Israel messages). He plays festivals from Summer Jam in his home state of New Jersey to South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, Texas.
He’s a hustler. Before I even heard his music, I saw him on twitter, hitting up Israeli celebrities to promote his music. When I saw him at the Middle East nightclub in Cambidge, Mass. Back in June, he was in the crowd a half hour before his set, passing out bumper stickers and pins.
I called him up a few days ago to talk hip-hop, business and politics. A lot of politics.
Anyone accepting Columbia International Relations Council and Association’s invitation to sit down for an intimate dinner with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad next week should take a look at a photo taken at a public square in Iran, and distributed by the Associated Press on July 23, 2005. The image depicts two blindfolded boys, around 16 years of age, with nooses being affixed to their necks moments before they were publicly hanged by Ahmadinejad’s regime because they were accused of “raping boys,” or, as we call it, being gay.
I recall this photo not because it shocks–though it does–or because it will tell you anything new about the man who approved those hangings–it won’t. I bring it up because the moral burden of our Columbia University education and human dignity require us to examine whether it is right for us to sit down to dinner with a man who facilitates, even encourages, such executions.
After a controversial speech at Columbia University in 2007, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may have linked up with the New York school again to discuss his policies. And every news outlet from the Upper West Side to Israel has put their two cents in. According to a Sept. 10 article in the Columbia Daily Spectator, […]
The back cover of Joshua Cohen’s novel Witz is enticing, but misleading. It depicts an alternate history where all the Jews in the world die at the start of the 21st century, resulting in a Judaism pop-culture craze as the goyim try to preserve, imitate and commercialize Jewish culture. I read this synopsis and thought “either this […]
Today in New Voices, we have American University correspondent Zach C. Cohen’s story about the new Martin Luther King, Jr. monument on the National Mall. Gaze upon the beauty that is the photo above. I’ve been harping on the national correspondents about getting great photos to go with their stories. I’ve told them that I […]
To their friends and neighbors, they’re a standard Orthodox Jewish couple, a man and a woman married for five years, two children in tow. Their marriage is a product of convenience rather than love, but that’s not unusual. Yet the particular reason for their union is unique: the man is gay, and the woman is […]
When you first walk through the Mountain of Despair that marks the entrance of the new memorial to Martin Luther King, Jr. on the National Mall, the vision of two massive walls of water about to collapse is inescapable. As visitors pass through and see King’s likeness etched into the part of the monument known as the Stone of Hope, it is almost as if King is getting ready to part the Tidal Basin for his people’s long-awaited escape to freedom.
“It’s gorgeous,” Rachel Silvert, a senior at American University, said. “It’s a beautiful monument.”
The intimidating mural of stylized heads and arbitrary brushstrokes in the lounge of my dorm quotes the Talking Heads: “And you may ask yourself ‘Well, how did I get here?’” The most honest answer I can give: I have no idea. I’m living in a time warp, watching my seventeenth year fly by on fast-forward. […]
For Apple, that was indeed the question. After protests from Jewish activists, the software giant removed from their App Store a French program called “Juif ou pas Juif,” or “Jew or not Jew.” For $1.08, users could find out if their favorite stars qualified as members of the Tribe. The app’s creator, Johann Lévy, is […]
It’s tempting to call freshman Penina Yaffa Kessler a rookie reporter. But that would be misleading. We first met her back in May at our Jewish Student Journalism Conference. This was right after we had moved into our new office, inside the offices of the Forward. Penina told us that she was a rising freshman […]