Archive
Unlike many other people I know who grew up in but have since left the Modern Orthodox community, I don’t look back on my childhood religious experiences with sadness. Instead, many of the decisions that I have since made in my religious life have been because of — not despite — having been raised in the […]
I love over-the-top, grindhouse, Tarantino-esque exploitation B-movies as much as the next Nice Jewish Boy™ — but sometimes I wonder if there’s a cut-off for when the blatant mocking of reality goes a little too far. I’m not talking about the explicit use of sex, drugs, violence and cursing; these elements are the essential cornerstones […]
i. Tevye Comes to Brooklyn My dad and I read Sholem Aleichem when I’m young. He has a copy of Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories, but we stick to Tevye. We sit on the couch and he reads out loud to me. I grow up on Aleichem, not Fiddler on the Roof; my […]
On May 11, more than 70 students from Brown University came together to commemorate the Nakba by watching three films produced by the Israeli NGO Zochrot. Nakba is the term for the 1948 expulsion and displacement of over 700,000 Palestinians, and Nakba Day is observed on May 15, the day after Israeli Independence Day. “Within […]
Yesterday, despite its official cancellation, a group of Brown University students gathered at the Brown RISD Hillel building to watch three short films about the Nakba. According to a statement from Sophie Kasakove, one of the event’s three organizers and a member-at-large of Open Hillel’s steering committee, the event had been in the works for […]
On this weekend, five years ago, a community member of the synagogue in which I’d grown up stood up at the podium of my teen minyan, and talked about the verse in this week’s Torah portion — one that’s served as the basis for discrimination against queer Jews for decades. I had just come out […]
There was an announcement back in March that was great news for some and dreadful news for others — that is, of course, the announcement of a fifth installment in the “Indiana Jones” franchise. It’s currently scheduled for the summer of 2019, with Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford set to return to directing and acting […]
When Emory University first-year Zoe Robbin got to college, she was upset by the lack of left-wing Jewish organizations on campus. With four other students, she founded a campus chapter of J Street U and set out to become a chartered organization. “We wrote a constitution … according to the college’s charter rules exactly,” said […]
At first glance, you might think Meir Kalmanson is just another 25-year-old hipster filmmaker from Brooklyn. But if you take a closer look, you’ll find that he’s far from typical. Kalmanson was born into the Chabad Lubavitch movement, which is a sect of ultra-Orthodox Hasidism — and the largest and fastest-growing Jewish organization in […]
When Rabbi Steven Pruzansky released a column on his personal blog at the end of March, he claimed that the solution to college campus rape culture is abstinence. If more women abstained from sex, he wrote, as his Judaism warrants, then campus rape culture will magically vanish. I am grateful to have seen so many […]