Archive
When I told people I was going to Poland for spring break, I received all sorts of responses: “Why are you going there? Isn’t it just concentration camps?” “Wouldn’t you rather be on a beach?” “I would never go to Poland after what they did to the Jews.” To be honest, before I left it […]
This academic year I am a part of the Peoplehood Project: a UJA sponsored program that brings together students from Columbia/Barnard Hillel, Oranim College in northern Israel, and ZWST, a German Jewish organization. Each cohort spends time learning in their respective home countries, then, over winter break, all three groups spend time traveling and learning […]
When I was in high school, I had this fantasy where I told myself that I would come out of the closet as soon as I got that one text from a friend asking if they could tell me something, and then they would tell me that they are gay. That fantasy was never realized. […]
As with much of Leviticus, the material found in this week’s Torah reading, Parashat Tazria, can make us, with our modern sensibilities, squirm a bit. With the description of tzarat, a specific skin disease, the text seems to be stating that any who have strange marks on their skin are sinners who must be isolated […]
I My stepfather always told me that all the best books have maps. So when I opened Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel a map was the first thing I looked for. I found it on the first page of the book, just after the title page and the […]
Two calls, a text, and three Facebook messages, all in less than a week. That was how I learned about B’rith Shalom, South Dakota’s first Jewish student culture club at South Dakota State University. You see, for years, I had been known as “The Jew.” Growing up in the middle the Sioux Empire, we were […]
I don’t remember much about my brief stint on the high school crew team, probably because it only lasted one spring season when I was fourteen. Most of what I do remember is meaningless—and not exceedingly positive—like not being able to carry my share of the boat and thereby forcing a coach to take over […]
For all its hype, the Pew report missed a lot of college-aged Jews, and therefore might have missed a lot about us. Two professors from Trinity College in Connecticut, Barry Kosmin and Ariela Keysar, hope to get the true picture of who we are and what we want by creating an online survey accessible here […]
In his recent article in the Forward, Jay Michaelson argues that students who feel marginalized by the increasing tendency of right-leaning major Jewish organizations to air only those views which toe their institutional lines should vote with their feet and leave. This works well in theory for institutions like the Jewish Museum, which recanted its […]
Throughout the last few weekly readings, things have been going quite well for the Hebrew tribes—nothing bad has really happened and everyone is excited to have the Tabernacle up and running. This week in Parashat Shmini, still on the high of the last few weeks, we move to the last day of sacrifices, with the […]