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The next day, atop Masada, I chose my Hebrew name and began my Jewish life. I was Rivkah, Matriarch; I was done taking shit from any human, institution, or supreme being. The Judaism I found gave me space to be newly brazen, and radically myself.
I remember telling my mother on the first night of Hanukkah sometime in high school that I didn’t want to sing “Hanukkah O Hanukkah” or anything else in English while we lit the candles. However, I also didn’t want or know how to sing the Hebrew prayers, wrapped as they were in religiosity, complicated words, and foreign melodies.
We cannot defeat anti-Semitism in isolation. In fact, it is the same ideology that puts all of us – Jews, Muslims, Palestinians, and people of color – at risk of violence.
As a California native whose Jewish family is effectively barred from returning to Iran safely, Neman grew up embracing and celebrating the new place that his parents chose to call home.
That was all the time it took to make it clear that there is no “both sides” when it comes to the brutalizers of Yitzhar and the nearby Palestinian villagers who are brutalized by them.
“I love soup, I always have…and, crucially, it’s the kind of food you can make in large quantities without it being too expensive. It’s also a humble kind of food – even if it’s really high-quality. It’s friendly, it’s welcoming. It’s a comfort food, and no matter what culture you’re from, soup is often the thing you eat when you’re sick, or the thing you eat on cold nights.”
After the service, everyone exits the sanctuary to return to the Hillel House where an oneg awaits. Lawson’s wife Susan presents her homemade vegan challah for the rabbi to bless and the students to nourish themselves with. Despite many requests, neither Susan nor the rabbi will give up the secret recipe.
Judaism On Our Own Terms (JOOOT), a network of college students attempting to build Jewish communities without major donor-fueled organizations like Hillel and the Jewish Federations, has only existed since last April. The weekend of September 16th, they held their second-ever national conference on the campus of Brown University. According to one attendee, a former […]
Returning from a short break, after sitting in a small lawn outside between classes and reading the New York Times’s inside look at the squalid conditions in an American concentration camp in Texas, complete with maps demarcating where children are held in cinderblock cells and auxiliary tents for overcrowding, I stare at the wall of prayerbooks and wonder: How can I learn Torah while the world is burning?
Turkish scholar Nazan Bedirhanoglu traveled to the United States after submitting a dissertation for her Ph.D at Binghamton University. Four days before she was set to return to her native Turkey, Bedirhanoglu received the news that she had been blacklisted by the Turkish government.