Archive
Jerusalem has long been the center of the world in Jewish life, but not since the time of King David has the city felt so personal and laid bare as it is in Sarah Tuttle-Singer’s new book “Jerusalem, Drawn and Quartered.” Interwoven with the fighting, love, loss, and the longing of a mother, it speaks […]
I’m no stranger to issues of mental health. Depression set in shortly after the beginning of the second semester of my sophomore year. I cried incessantly for no apparent reason, I had difficulty getting out of bed in the morning, I loathed running into an ex for fear that he would trigger a panic attack. […]
Originally published in the OC Hillel blog. Around 18,000 pro-Israel people in one room singing Hatikvah together, admiring Israeli innovation, hearing empowering stories about Israel, and giving endless standing ovations for countless speakers. It is easy to get carried away in this incredibly pro-Israel environment. This was my fifth consecutive year attending the AIPAC Policy […]
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? […]