Archive
Dear Sean Spicer, You had to do it, didn’t you? You had to play the Holocaust card. With Steve Bannon watching smugly from his perch on the president’s shoulder, you held Hitler up as a model fascist, because at least he didn’t use chemical weapons. You said this on the first day of Passover. And […]
When I first came to Boston University in the fall of 2014, I split my time about evenly between two places – the Center for Gender, Sexuality, and Activism (CGSA), home to all the LGBT-centric groups on campus, and BU Hillel, the center of Jewish life. But as time went by, I gravitated more and […]
Other than the mention of holidays like Christmas and Easter in the Wizarding World, J.K. Rowling avoided the topic of religion in her “Harry Potter” books. After all, the complexities and controversies surrounding faith would have felt a little out of place in a young adult series and would have bogged down the momentum of […]
Ohio State University Hillel cut ties last week with an LGBTQ Jewish student organization, and possible homophobia is just the beginning of why it’s a problem. To recap, the split occurred after the group, B’nai Keshet, hosted an event to help queer refugees. They co-sponsored the event with Jewish Voice for Peace, a Jewish group […]
There are anti-Semites in the White House. They rank among the president’s closest advisors. Still, when I tell student activists that I feel unsafe in Trump’s America, I’m met with blank stares. I may be Jewish, sure, and everyone knows Jews have been persecuted. But in today’s student activist circles, Jews don’t count as a […]
Dozens donned tacky pink yarmulkes, danced the hora, and had a l’chaim at Drom in Lower Manhattan on Thursday, March 23 to celebrate the nuptials of the band Golem – and, well, it’s not really clear what that means. The event, titled Golem Gets Married was an irreverent, gender-bending riff on an old Catskills tradition, […]
LGBTQ Jews have long been on the front lines, fighting for social justice. We are found on every page of the LGBTQ movement, from Harvey Milk, the first openly gay person to be elected to office in California, to Avram Finkelstein, who co-founded the AIDS advocacy group ACT UP. We are found on every page […]
I saw women and men sitting across from each other at tables and sat on the ground in between to make my presence visible. It was awkward for all of us. Apparently the irony of a heteronormative speed dating event taking place next door to a gay bar was lost on my Hillel. But the […]
In an oddball crossbreed between leftist language and retro anti-Semitic tropes, posters that read ‘End Jewish Privilege’ appeared on University of Illinois at Chicago’s campus earlier this month. The posters proclaimed, “Ending white privilege starts with ending Jewish privilege,” followed by an image of a pyramid with Jews at the top and “goyim not drawn to scale” at the bottom. Eva […]
The Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to groups deemed anti-Muslim by the Southern Poverty Law Center and Center for American Progress, alleges a new report from Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) Chicago. In a world where Muslims and Jews alike are threatened by rising hatred, there is no room for […]