Archive
One of my favorite professors recently told me a story about her second-grade son. Asher* and his classmate were carpooling to school when the other eight-year-old began to lecture him about “correct” religious observance. My professor, who has raised Asher in a deeply Jewish, mixed-denomination home, was proud to hear her son reply with the […]
At the University of Michigan, many Jewish students spent the morning of Oct. 4 attending Rosh Hashanah services. That same morning, students in Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (SAFE) were getting ready to protest. “I just saw these two huge walls,” said first-year student Juliet Wishner. She also saw signs supporting BDS. SAFE, a […]
Throughout my university experience, I sat in the middle of a seesaw – spirituality on one end and skeptical materialism on the other. As I took my classes, the weight of skepticism seemed to get lighter and lighter, and the seesaw slowly shifted closer towards spirituality. But no matter how much I read, I could […]
The movie “Denial” is about a court case between Fact and Fiction. Through the case David Irving v. Penguin Books Limited, Deborah E. Lipstadt, “Denial” shows how injustices like the Holocaust cannot be denied. One of the most controversial cases of the 1990s, this case distinguished scholarship from bigotry. Emory University Professor Deborah Lipstadt (played […]
Originally published in Ha’Am. There is perhaps no decision more representative of the difficulties of being a practicing Jewish college student than the quintessential question of whether or not to attend class during Chag. To me, this is not a question of grades or even the inconvenience of having to spend long, sleepless nights catching […]
Original version published in The Daily Californian. When I was preparing to come to UC Berkeley, my biggest fear wasn’t the academic rigor of college, making friends, or getting used to the sometimes-unidentifiable food at Crossroads dining hall – though those were definitely all high up on my list. It was observing Jewish holidays, including Shabbat, and […]
The U.S. and Israel recently renewed the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU). The current version, signed in 2008, expires in 2018. According to officials, President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed to an MoU that would provide more than $30 billion over a decade, which would include advanced weaponry systems. The continuation of […]
Originally published via Medium by Sheila Katz, the Vice President of Social Entrepreneurship at Hillel International and a board member of the Jewish Coalition Against Domestic Abuse: The most recent Presidential debate was a missed opportunity. The opening question about sexual assault elicited Donald Trump’s excuse that his recent remarks about groping women without consent were just “locker […]
There it was – the Western Wall, hakotel hama’aravi. The sun was hanging over the top of the wall, reflecting off the stones at my feet. As I stood in front of the holiest sight in Israel, I realized I was waiting for something, some reaction to the realization that I was finally at the […]
There’s a good reason Jews are referred to as the “people of the word.” Our focus on texts is a long-standing tradition that encourages respect, even reverence, for the written word. Words are meaningful, powerful. They can create entire worlds. I highly appreciated this concept even as a child when I used to create fictional […]