Archive
MLA Hosts Panel on Boycotting Israel at Annual Conference The Modern Language Association will hold a panel called “Academic Boycotts: A Discussion of Israel and Palestine,” described as a discussion of “the political movement Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions against Israel, seen by its defenders as a viable means to end the Palestinian occupation,” according to […]
I have some reasonable propositions for how Hillel International should respond to the Swarthmore Hillel debacle based on four important facts missed by most other pundits on this subject. The first fact is that Swarthmore Hillel is uniquely financially independent. Swarthmore University has an endowment for all its religious groups on campus, and as […]
Well, by the Gregorian calendar, we have officially lived in the year 2014 for a week. For one thing, this means I will spend about three more weeks dating assignments “2013,” only to see autocorrect bluntly demonstrate the error of my ways. For another, this means that both the Jewish and secular seasonal winter holidays […]
I will never forget the day I brought herring sandwiches to school. There I was, an awkward little seven-year-old, eating a vinegary and odorous pickled herring sandwich on brown bread in the middle of the lunch room. A delicious and very filling lunch for a first-grader. And there were the faces of my (mostly Jewish) […]
I have a hard time answering the question, “So how do you identify? Like, Jewish-ly?” On the one hand, I grew up in a Modern Orthodox home and attended Modern Orthodox schools since kindergarten, but, for most of my life so far, was part of a haredi community in southern Brooklyn. On the other hand, […]
If you’ve been following the story so far, God, through Moses, has been sending plague after plague upon the Egyptians, steadily bringing the greatest empire on Earth to its knees all for the sake of a small nation of slaves. This week, in Parashat Bo, the story is coming toward its great climax, with […]
When I traveled to Warsaw on a Holocaust study tour two summers ago, my group found the city particularly warm. In the middle of the day, we stopped for a respite—from the heat as much as the emotional drain of touring Holocaust sites—at a Starbucks in the city center. The juxtaposition—of both the air conditioning […]
I am very openly willing to criticize the Israeli government. Two of my recent blog posts for New Voices have been criticisms of Israel’s Housing Ministry for announcing the constructions of new settlements at a crucial point in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and Israel’s Prime Minister in condemning the announcement of negotiations between the United States and […]
A good deal of time passed in my life where Judaism was very far back in my mind. Jewish life for me used to just mean meeting up with extended family and friends for the holidays, and here and there Friday night dinners with my family were made a little more special by turning them […]
If you are reading this, you have almost certainly been affected by the life and philanthropy of Edgar Bronfman, who passed away Saturday. An heir to the Seagram’s beverage fortune, Bronfman used much of his wealth to contribute positively to Jewish students of all stripes, including creating the Bronfman Israel Fellowships, which has sent over […]