Archive
Tikkun Olam, it seems, is all the rage. Having grown up in a very Jewish area , physical acts of tikkun olam, or “healing the world” have been a part of my Jewish life since preschool. Street cleanups, community gardening, food bank packing, helping animal shelters, the list goes on. Despite all these opportunities to […]
For 12 weeks I dated an Israeli. The majority of our relationship involved watching TV and smoking cigarettes on his couch. National Geographic was our favorite channel, since it was guaranteed to be in English. At first I felt guilty about staying indoors when I could hear Tel Aviv’s beaches a block away, but I […]
My high school taught about the Holocaust in English class. It was part of the unit on Elie Weisel’s Night, which is required reading for students entering tenth grade. I remember the Holocaust was nothing more than a picture of Jews in a concentration camp with an explanatory caption in my AP European history textbook. […]
There is quite a lot of talk about denominational unity. “Let’s draw together as a Jewish community!” “Let’s build cross-denominational ties!” “Denominations are irrelevant and we live in a post-denominational era!” It is almost as if we, the eternally factional and rather divisive Jewish people have discovered a magic, unified, cohesive land beyond the rainbow, […]
For a kosher-keeper like me, Kosherfest 2013 was almost too good to be real. A huge room full of free food I can actually eat coming at me from every direction, the longer I stayed, the further my train of thought devolved to the level of a dog in a sausage factory: I see they’re […]
[fblike style=”standard” showfaces=”false” width=”450″ verb=”like” font=”arial”] You’d think after forty years of wandering and two thousand subsequent years of diaspora, the Jewish People would be used to spatial transitions. I mean, we seem to pass everything else L’dor v’dor, from generation to generation, so why not the nomadic nature? Don’t we even take a full eight […]
Part 3 in a 3 part series. Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here. 7. What are your reactions to survey respondents’ answers to “What does it mean to be Jewish”? What creates Jewish meaning for you? Dr. Steven M. Cohen, sociologist: These questions pertain to areas of great ambiguity. I wouldn’t […]
Part 2 of a 3 part series. Part 1 is here. 4. Are the survey’s categories of denomination a useful marker of determining true religious affiliation/practice in today’s Jewish world? Dr. Steven M. Cohen, sociologist: Yes. Denominational identities can be meaningful for people as many are strongly attached to Orthodoxy, Conservatism, Reform, and Reconstructionism. But […]
Part 1 in a 3 part series. We might just be the last Jewish organization to respond to the big bad Pew Survey and we’re fine with that. It seems like every response so far is other people telling us what how we need to feel about it, whether we should be scared, take […]
The Midwest does not get enough credit for its foundational role in the American Jewish community. However, the first campus Hillel was established in 1923 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In an atmosphere where Jewish campus life was largely non-existent, the first Hillel marked a new age for American Jewish students who endured […]