Archive
Media representation of Gaza usually falls into one of two categories. There are programs covering the facts and figures: KALW’s “Gaza Corner” comes to mind, a weekly news program reported by foreign correspondents. The second category is the generalizing documentary project: think Ai Weiwei’s Human Flow, which employs Gaza as a metaphor in a more […]
As I pack the last box and turn out the lights to the apartment, I feel the tears begin to come. They are tears of anger, and of sadness, and of grief. They are the tears of a young woman who has had to make decisions that no 25-year-old should have to make. At the […]
Before 23-year-old Aleah Gabbard began her conversion to Judaism four years ago, she grew up around deeply-rooted anti-Semitism in Owensboro, Kentucky. Owensboro made national news this past Halloween when a resident wore a Nazi soldier costume and dressed his young son as Hitler. This incident reflects the environment that Gabbard experienced in public schools in […]
(Where) My Body Did Not End after Loose Strife by Quan Berry Draw a map with no beginning you were not born but plucked from tree vast and placeless mark the spot in your mother’s garden ( ) you broke water, took root Draw a timeline with the texture of your hair knot the habits […]
Three weeks ago, a journalist named Aisha Sultan published a column in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch detailing the experience that I and a student named Shaadie Ali each had with the website Canary Mission. Canary Mission places people who speak out about Palestinian rights – mainly undergraduates like me – on a blacklist, listing us […]
This poem originally appeared in ZAMAN, an arts & media collective dedicated to the remembrance, preservation, and re-evaluation of Mizrahi cultural consciousness. Three calendars hang in our kitchen: One begins in spring, one in fall One in winter. The start and halt Of a well-used car. A sundial Someone keeps moving. Summer begins In my Papa […]
The new rabbi is running late. It’s the first day of eleventh grade and there is a buzz of hushed excitement in the room. Our brothers have been studying Talmud since they were seven or eight and we know its cadence. We’ve heard its rhythm chanted and recited at our kitchen tables while we stood […]
Sitting at the dinner table over winter break with her parents, holding her very own three-person Shabbat service, Adrienne Sugarman got the distinct sense that home was not quite the place it used to be. Sugarman, a Middlebury College sophomore, was intent on recreating the Shabbat services that she attends every week on campus. Needless […]
Having written for dozens of publications, from Vogue to Vice, Marissa Miller’s extensive portfolio is certain to strike the interest of many journalists and media consumers alike. Miller, who hails from Montreal, Quebec, isn’t what many would consider a typical Jewish journalist. Her beat doesn’t center on the Jewish world, but rather on gender, fashion, […]
Until recently, I had never heard of Rabbi Ben Packer. And then I read two detailed reports about a summer trip to Israel led by Texas Hillel’s Rabbi Moshe Trepp that went ‘off the beaten path.’ Multiple students from the University of Texas at Austin reported meeting with this far-right extremist and receiving a tour […]