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This zine was created by Rena Yehuda Newman, who is a 2019 fellow with New Voices and Judaism Unbound. It was originally published on Judaism Unbound’s website.
Two and a half years ago, I read a piece that changed my life. NPR’s Leah Donnella penned a deeply personal essay about being both Jewish and Black…I felt like she was speaking directly to my own experiences.
Four women sit around a table. Playing cards are laid out in front of each player and tiles are shuffled. Laughter and friendly chit-chat fill the air. The game begins; phrases that might seem foreign to bystanders replace the chit-chat, and off they go. Four Crak! Two Bam! Three Dot! Around the table it goes […]
the day i bit my fingers a biblical red i found an excerpt from the Talmud; a man becomes deathly ill with love for a woman i can count the number of men my body trusts on one hand the doctors say; he will have no cure until she engages in sexual intercourse with him […]
הִנֵּה מַה טוב ומַה נָעִים שֶבֶת אַחִים גַם יָחַד Hineh Mah tov umah na’im shevet achim gam yachad. Here! What good! What sweetness! Siblings, friends and comrades sitting together! When we embrace ritual, we stand in the threshold between community and isolation, sacred and profane, this moment and our history. Ritual is not just a […]
This series of graphite illustrations on paper combines images and text from a wide range of sources to pose and address the question: “what does it feel like to remember a place you have never been?”
Nurit arranges a tomato rose surrounded by green pepper spirals on a small glass plate of tuna salad. She admires her masterpiece and sets it down next to the box of spelt crackers on the table set for one.
On April 17th, the brand-new student organization Nice Jewish Queers at the University of Southern California was getting ready to host one of their biggest events of the year: the Passover drag show, which intended to celebrate the queer Jewish community on campus. Within a day, however, student leader Ariella Amit was sending in her […]
Hillel has a long way to go if it wants to live up to its stated values of inclusion and belonging. I arrived on the campus of the University of Southern California (USC) yearning for a Jewish space where I, as a queer Jew, could feel celebrated for all of my identities. I quickly became […]
Lift your head from the haggadah. Where is Pharaoh’s army today? This inquiry motivated Rabbi Arthur Waskow to create the first Freedom Seder. After Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s April 1968 assassination, Waskow saw the police occupation of black neighborhoods in DC and other cities nationwide as an uncanny parallel to the Passover story. The […]