Archive
Growing up, I thought I had a normal Jewish family. I had two wonderful and loving parents, and two awesome older brothers. We kept kosher, lit Shabbat candles, and were a part of the local synagogue community. The only difference between my family and yours is that my middle brother has special needs. My middle […]
You walk across the quad to your next class, take the stairs up to a second level and sit down in a standard school-sized seat. Sounds typical, right? You don’t even think about things like walking, climbing steps, and sitting comfortably down among others. February is Jewish Disabilities Awareness Month. The purpose is to recognize […]
“They tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat.” This is, as my mother and countless other vessels of Jewish wisdom have expressed, the theme of every major Jewish holiday. It is also the theme of my freshman year of college, where “they” is my haywire immune system, and “us” is the royal we. I’ll […]
Words are strangely versatile; put them on a page and they glow with intellectual distinction. Put them over music and they transcend themselves to become vehicles of beauty (or they don’t). Put them on a website for Jewish students…and who knows? Maybe words are subject to a quota system; write too many about Emil Fackenheim […]
This past June, Boston University junior Raphael Fils decided he was fed up with the stances Jewish organizations take on the conflict in the Middle East. Whether Hillel, Jewish Voice for Peace, or J Street, all organizations seemed to have a bias. To change that, Fils launched Justice and Unity in Mideast Policy, or JUMP […]
One familiar thing about the United Kingdom for me is that I frequently hear South African accents. Here in the colonial heartland, I have met a lot of folks like me: born to South African [Ashkenazi] Jewish parents abroad, raised abroad, and with varied ties to South Africa. Some, like me, maintain citizenship in South […]
The question of who should speak for the Jews is not a new one, nor is the question of whether or not Israeli political or religious leaders can or should speak on behalf of American (or other Diaspora) Jews. It dates back to a series letters between Jacob Blaustein, then the head of the American […]
What do we call a society where you have to gain state permission before you can travel a few miles in order to marry? Perhaps it seems that we are searching for an “-ism,” some grand unified theory that nobody without the letters Ph.D. after their name cares about. But as the New York Times […]
For so many young Jews in North America, the idealistic images seen on particular trips with organizations including NFTY, BBYO, Young Judaea, USY, and especially Birthright, come to define our views of Israel. After my first trip to Israel, when I spent 4 weeks exploring Israel with my camp and NFTY friends, I immediately felt […]
When I was in high school, I stopped wearing my kippah. I felt myself drifting away from the ultra-Orthodox community of my childhood and the Modern Orthodoxy my parents tried to model for me at home. I stopped wearing my kippah because I wanted to disaffiliate from the Orthodox Jews that filled New York City […]