Archive
My initial reaction after the fact was relief. After months of planning, weeks of searching for the perfect readings, and a few crazy days of racing around like a chicken with its head cut off, I had finally crafted my first Friday night Shabbat service. And thankfully, it was a success. Earlier this year, as […]
Originally published in The Forward. Watching the events of these past weeks unfold, we were confronted with a feeling of desperation. Nazis rioted in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, and anti-Black slogans, threatening a synagogue. The president of the United States sided with racism and violence, drawing praise from the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists. The New England Holocaust Memorial, a landmark […]
Originally published in J. Weekly. Being isolated from community tests one’s commitment to the values and practices that normally bring that community together. This is what the experience of being a Jew in China has taught me. I grew up in the warm embraces of Judaism, spending many hours at Yavneh, a Jewish day school in […]
Originally published in The Jewish Exponent. For the past year and a half, I have served as president of the student board of Hillel at Temple University. Over the course of my time on board, I’ve seen students plan weekly Shabbat dinners, various types of holiday programming (including the ever-popular Chocolate Seder) and our first-ever […]
Originally published at Red Alert Politics. At the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference, I passed by prominent white supremacist Richard Spencer, who beforehand said, “Effectively, any policy, idea, or belief that is markedly right-wing and traditional — that evokes identity, power, hierarchy, and dominance — must be regulated by the possibility that it could potentially lead […]
Now more than ever as I am trying to make sense of the world and find employment, I find myself looking for female role models. I realized quite recently that my Jewish grandma is the only female icon that I really need. To put it simply, my grandma is a badass who pursued her dreams […]
Throughout the 20th century, American Jews – particularly young Jews – were agents of social change. The pre-war generation stood for worker’s rights, while the generation after the Holocaust marched at the forefront of the Civil Rights Movement. Why then are there so few Jews active in the contemporary resurgence of progressive student activism? Some […]
“Where do you go to school?” “UC Berkeley.” “UC Berkeley? Wow, the front line. You students are fighting an important battle over there. Keep it up!” I can’t tell you how many times I had this conversation – at shuls, Shabbat tables, even half a world away in Jewish communities abroad. The language always struck […]
Every Friday at 7:30 p.m., University of Minnesota students pile into the Steiner family’s Chabad House for dinner. As usual, there is homemade challah and matzo ball soup, but there’s also something special – the dinner was made by the students themselves. That’s because of the Kosher Cooking Club, or KCC. Every Thursday, students get […]
Dear Jewish community, So, you wanna understand Israel/Palestine debates on campus. The first thing you have to do is stop talking about BDS. Shocking, right? We try. But really, BDS doesn’t summarize what Israel conversations on campus are all about these days. BDS measures on major campuses are actually going down, and yet, somehow, they […]