Archive
Last summer, I had the opportunity, along with 30 other British Jewish students, to visit the Palestinian Village of Umm al Kheir. It was a hard day. We walked around the village in the heat, seeing with our own eyes what it’s like living in a village where someone’s home could be demolished. The Bedouin […]
Rabbi Steven Wernick knows that he is abandoning Conservative Jews on college campuses. As CEO of the United Synagogue for Conservative Judaism since 2009, Wernick saw KOACH, the campus wing of the Conservative Movement, shut down on his watch in 2013, drawing ire from many Conservative leaders and students. Almost five years later, I caught […]
Rebecca Wahba’s family had been in Egypt since at least the Spanish Inquisition. But in 1939, when Hitler’s book “Mein Kampf” became a bestseller in Cairo, her great-grandfather left, landing in India by 1945 just as the war was ending. “All the news was coming out about what was happening to the Jews. He was […]
A green text bubble flashed across my phone. “You should write about the Farrakhan, Women’s March, anti-Semitism, intersectionality thing.” I turned my screen dark. I’d been avoiding this. I know. I’m a Jewish feminist writer. I drink my morning coffee out of an Emma Goldman mug and my phone auto-predicts the term “intersectional feminism.” I […]
Jewish high school students want to celebrate Shabbat by protesting gun violence, and their Jewish communities are stepping up to help. Rabbi Steven Wernick, CEO of the United Synagogue for Conservative Judaism, recently announced that USY (United Synagogue Youth) would support students wishing to attend the Washington D.C. March For Our Lives, a rally to […]
The University of Southern Florida student government passed a resolution last month entitled “New Hope,” critiquing President Trump’s decision to move the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. But what makes this bill different from all other controversial student government bills? Drafters and campus Jews worked on it together. The resolution came out […]
This week, the Trump administration proposed changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), including a plan that half of recipients benefits come in the form of a harvest box in the place of food stamps. The box would contain foods preselected for their economic benefit to U.S. farmers and nutritional value. Sounds good, right? […]
A new piece of right-wing Polish legislation, which criminalizes accusing Poland of complicity in the Holocaust, sparked international condemnation, hitting a particularly raw nerve with Jews in America and Israel. But for European Jewry – and Jewish students – this nerve has been exposed for years. The amendment to the Act on the Institute of […]
Statistics show that one in five women on American college campuses will be the victim of sexual assault. That’s why I work every day to educate my campus on Title IX issues, as a student at Pace University and the executive director of PaceUEndRape. Having watched my friends experience helplessness after assaults and debate if […]
Since this article was published, Hillel International released the following statement. Hillel International recently landed itself in a controversy among its constituents by endorsing President Trump’s civil rights nominee for the Department of Education, Kenneth Marcus. A little background: Marcus is the founder and president of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under […]