Archive
When Hurricane Irene blew through the Eastern Seaboard last month, the coordinators of Wesleyan University’s annual pre-orientation Jewish camping trip were faced with dropping enrollment. They scrambled to find a new location after the campsite they planned to hold the program at closed ahead of the storm.
The camping trip, a Wesleyan tradition over the past five years that is entirely organized by students involved with the Jewish community–though not all of them are Jewish–has established itself as an integral part of the Jewish community’s outreach to incoming freshmen and a way of strengthening existing ties. So when Irene threatened its continuation, its leaders fought for its survival.
Full Name: Haley Jennifer Joy Pessin Bio: Haley Pessin is a junior at Williams College in MA majoring in French and History. She thoroughly enjoys reading books, attending the theatre and classical music concerts, and consuming gelato. You identify as a “JewMaican.” Would you explain what led you to identify this way? Well, my father […]
College is supposed to challenge your assumptions, but right now I’m experiencing the most annoying challenge possible. As planned, I went down a couple of days ago to talk to the rabbi—ordained Reconstructionist, though he insists that the congregation is “unaffiliated”—about my options for converting. He told me, of course, that I and my patrilineal […]
In 586 B.C.E., the Babylonians, under King Nebuchadnezzar, decimated the Temple in Jerusalem, forever ending ancient Israelite culture. With the Temple destroyed and most of its worshipers exiled to Babylon, it seemed that God had left His “Chosen People.” Yet, after defeating the Babylonians in 539 B.C.E., King Cyrus the Great of the Persian Achaemendid […]
When I was looking for 10 reporters to become this semester’s New Voices National Correspondents, the field was full of Cohens, Fines and Silvers; among seven others, we hired Zach C. Cohen, Dafna Fine and Carly Silver. But there was also this Chen in the mix, one Jun Chen. Jun is a graduate student at […]
Here’s the thing about your year in Israel: You plan for it for a full year, you make lists, you buy clothes (skirts that cover your knees!), you stock up on toiletries, you book your flight and you Facebook-stalk your future roommate. And yet, however prepared you might think you are, nothing can possibly prepare […]
Judah Cohen felt like he was living in a different world when he heard the news Sept. 11, 2001. Then teaching at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York City, he said his scare began the moment he turned on the TV, and continued throughout the next couple of weeks as he saw missing persons’ pictures plastered everywhere on the streets of Manhattan.
Over the last few weeks, a discourse has taken place between Rav Shlomo Riskin—chief rabbi of Efrat—and Rabbi Andrew Sacks—the director of the Rabbinical Assembly of the Masorti (Conservative) movement in Israel. The conversation started when Riskin wrote in the Jerusalem Post about the conversion controversy in Israel. For the not-yet-up-to-speed: Debates have surged in the past […]
Today in New Voices Magazine, we present “September 11, 2001: Half a Lifetime Ago,” seven essays by people for whom the decade since 9/11 represents one half of their entire life. Today’s college students grew up in the post-9/11 world and can hardly remember the pre-9/11 world. These essays were co-published with The Jewish Daily […]
If you’re in college today, you were as young as 8, as old as 12. The events of September 11, 2001 hover just at the edge of your memory, though growing up in post-9/11 America is an inescapable fact of life. Here, we present seven brief essays, the personal memories of New Voices contributors about that day.
–David A.M. Wilensky, New Voices Editor