Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
The Kiddush Club, a euphemism for a group of (traditionally) elderly men who sneak out of Orthodox Shabbos services during the haftorah to eat herring and drink schnapps, has been a tradition of American observant communities for decades. But even in Orthodoxy, writes Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz, some traditions need to end. [The Jewish Week] In…
Good afternoon! What happens when a pre-pubescent non-Jewish kid reads a revolutionarily risque Philip Roth book about a frustrated MOT? Sentences like, “There are a lot of words in Portnoy’s Complaint that I didn’t really get, like shtupp and schlong and shmutzig and punim. I don’t know what they mean, but they’re really fun to…
This article was edited on Aug. 12 to reflect a correction: the Israel Land Authority and the Israeli Police–not the Israeli Army–were responsible for the demolition of the Bedouin village. I’m not an expert on domestic security. Unlike my Israeli friends, I’ve never served one day in combat nor toted an M-16, so I can’t…
Good morning! As this photo proves, LeBron “Most Hated Man Not in Cleveland” James met with a rabbi to solicit some advice on a major business deal. The rabbi’s price: somewhere around $100,000. [TMZ] Women in the Washington DC area call some more (needed) attention to the age-old problem of agunot, or Jewish women whose…
Hello loyal New Voices blog readers! This is the first installment of our newest feature–the Reading List–a short roundup of the interesting, quirky, relevant, funny and/or important happenings on the Jewy internet. We’ll publish the Reading List every weekday morning and on Friday evenings. On Sundays, the Reading List will link to several articles discussing…
Those gosh-darn liberal, anti-Israel, anti-Semitic, Palestinian-loving Likkudniks. In a bizarre turn of events, members of the Israeli right-wing are now endorsing an answer to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that was once the purview of the Israeli far left and the intellectual circles of Europe and the US: the one-state solution. An article in the JTA reported today that Knesset…
I’m not sure if other people know this, but the community center/mosque that New York City just approved for construction is not a Jewish project. Given the public statements on the center from the American Jewish Committee, Anti-Defamation League and J Street–all leading Jewish American organizations–your Jew on the street could assume that this was…
Pity Dmitriy Salita. A Jewish  immigrant from the Former Soviet Union, Salita is now a professional boxer in New York and practices Orthodox Judaism. You’d think this would make him pretty unique, a good story for the Jewish papers. But though Salita has gotten some coverage in his community, Yuri Foreman–also an Orthodox Russian Jewish…
People love to show how intellectual they are nowadays by drawing historical parallels between the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other seemingly similar past events. Thus, Iraq is Vietnam; no, wait, Iraq is the Tripoli Wars; no, wait, Iraq is the Gulf War gone bad… No, wait, says Christopher Dickey, Iraq and Afghanistan should…
Egyptian pop heartthrob Amr Diab has many hits throughout the  Arab world, such as “Nour al Ain” and “Habibi.” The one I’ve watched most on YouTube, however, is “Al Quds De Ardina,” which translates to “Jerusalem is Our Land.” There aren’t any subtitles, but the title and music video make the point pretty clear. See if you…
On June 16th, J Street NYC and the New York Society for Ethical Culture hosted a vital conversation between Jeremy Ben Ami, J Street Founder and President and Jeffrey Goldberg, National Correspondent for the The Atlantic entitled, “Who Speaks for Me? Israel and America in the 21st Century.” .The Center for Ethical Culture on 64th…
Helen Thomas’s statement, and the equivocating reaction it elicited from the anti-Israel left, opened up the question of which rhetoric is just, and which is just hateful.
One Thanksgiving during college, my father told us that though we criticize many of the United States’s policies and actions, we should never forget that we live in the greatest country in the world: a country that pioneered and sustains religious and civic freedom, political equality, tolerance and democracy. His point was that criticism and appreciation should…
In case you were wondering, tobacco is terrible for you. And in case you were wondering, hookah is tobacco. If you’d chosen to forget that until now, don’t worry: I’d sublimated it for some time too. Hookah used to be, for me, a way of looking exotic, feeling Israeli and trying out low-risk smoking, and…