Archive
I was hoping that in 2016, the Jewish community would find better ways to reach out to millennials. I guess they have, if co-opting social justice, intersectionality, and related ideas counts as outreach. It started with an op by David Bernstein, the current CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, published Jan. 4 in […]
Haredi Rabbi Yosef Mizrachi is a renowned worldwide Torah lecturer, claiming to be devoted to bringing Jews closer to Judaism. But it’s clear in light of recent remarks that his devotion to kiruv — Orthodox outreach — is anything but unificatory. It’s time that the Jewish community, regardless of affiliation, takes a stand against the […]
There are few things in this world about which we can be absolutely certain. However, despite the year’s many disagreements and altercations, there is one thing on which we can all agree: The “Fantastic Four” movie this past summer was absolutely, unequivocally dreadful. One could go so far as to call it fantastically awful, pun […]
In 1954, the American Jewish Committee supported the NAACP during the historic Brown v. Board of Education case. In 1965, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marched to Selma with Dr. Martin Luther King. And a month ago, I heard a college-aged white Jew equate his family’s historical experience in Europe to the struggle that people of […]
It’s a strange feeling, growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust. It’s never a topic of conversation; there are never any “hey, so how about that Holocaust?” comments thrown into the air at the bar on a Friday night, but it’s there nonetheless, hiding in the shadows. The quiet “after the war, they moved […]
When the documentary “The J Street Challenge” was released in 2014, one of its main arguments was that while certain Israel advocacy groups who claim to be bipartisan are acceptable political advocates, left-wing political groups, like J Street, should be condemned as beyond the pale of acceptable conversation about Israel for disagreeing with the Israeli […]
There seem to be two choices in mainstream Jewish life: Either you’re pro-Zionism, or you’re anti-Zionism. A new online publication, Zionish, rejects that binary. “Our stance is to reject the traditional stances,” Zionish editor Aaron Simons told New Voices via email. “People conceive of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as one where you have to be either […]
Perhaps nothing characterizes the divisions I see in American and world Jewry better than the list of opening and closing keynote speakers at HaaretzQ, a conference on Israel hosted by Haaretz and the New Israel Fund in New York Sunday. The day kicked off with speeches from Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, MK Tzipi Livni of […]
When a UC Santa Cruz student leader is instructed to abstain from a BDS vote due to his allegiance to a “Jewish Agenda,” the proper response from the Jewish community is very simple: Such activities are anti-Semitic, and do not belong on diverse, pluralistic campuses. This is only the latest case of anti-Semitism that has […]
There seems to be many ways for presidential candidates to pander to Jews. One might look to the 2012 election, during which Republican candidate Michele Bachmann said she loved Israel so much that she put aside her fiscally conservative values to join a utopian socialist kibbutz when she was eighteen. Donald Trump, however, seems to […]