Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
Around the time I learned that my UChicago team won this year’s annual Scavenger Hunt, I happened to be on the phone with my mother. Knowing how much of my previous weekend had been devoted to “Scav,” how I had stayed up into odd hours of the night every night for three days completing…
write this piece having just returned from a fascinating lecture by Bernard Wasserstein, a prominent history professor emeritus here at the University of Chicago. The lecture roughly corresponded to a recent book of Wasserstein’s, “The Ambiguity of Virtue: Gertrude van Tijn and the Fate of the Dutch Jews.” Unsurprisingly, Wasserstein discussed the story of Gertrude…
This is a busy week at the University of Chicago. For one thing, we students are consumed with the mid-quarter rush of exams and paper due dates. This week in particular, though, we are also exceedingly busy non-academically—if you can imagine anything but academics ever occurring at the University of Chicago. Two major events are…
On a scorching day, during my Holocaust studies trip to Poland in the summer of 2012, a fellow student and I wandered through Birkenau like ghosts, pale despite the fact that the July sun was burning our backs, pondering the same question. It was the same question that we, and several others of our peers…
Yom Tovs aren’t days we traditionally think about death. They’ve always been, at least in my understanding, about life, and the preservation of life, celebrations of survival despite all the odds being against us to live or to live well. In the case of Pesach, we celebrate our overcoming persecution to live autonomously—in short to…
Passovers during my high school years were games of “What-will-Dani-bring-to-school-for-lunch-today”? Hosting Seders at my house almost every year meant that we always had an insurmountable amount of leftover Peschadike food in our fridge. This, combined with the fact that the only Kosher for Pesach thing my school cafeteria served was plain matzah with butter, meant…
I must have told my mother one too many times that she embodies the Jewish Mother stereotype. (She really does, by the way. Ask, as one example, the ten cast and crew members of a show I worked on in high school for whom my mother provided enough food for forty people, lest anyone starve…
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…
I am proud of being Jewish, and the people I live with know this. Though it’s not Halachally required, my dorm room’s door frame sports a mezuzah (which is kosher, according to Chabad.com—I checked!). Friends from my residence hall know that I don’t make plans on Friday nights, because I go to Hillel for services. …
In last week’s article, I talked about a need for klal yisrael—or Jewish unity—and how Jewish languages are ultimately not great means for fulfilling this goal. While I didn’t have anything else to say about this once I finished writing, I kept thinking about it afterward: is a Jewish unity really possible, or are we…
Yiddish is my favorite class. This isn’t new information, I’m sure; I’ve written about it on several occasions, including a piece entitled “On Why I Take Yiddish.” I furthermore use Yiddish allusions and colloquialisms as a matter of practice—in writing as well as in general conversation—so I’m sure my new found passion for the language…
Every night, I fall asleep to a playlist titled “Jewish Sleep Music.” Once upon a time, as a child, it consisted of mainly Kol B’seder’s covers of melodies that I’d learned in Hebrew School, like Shalom Rav and Oseh Shalom. At the time, before I really knew what their lyrics meant, the songs relaxed me because…
I begin this piece with a massive thank you and apology to the University of Chicago housing staff. A few weeks ago, shortly after returning to school and before the work for the grading quarter had become intense, while absentmindedly perusing the UChicago Housing policy book , I came across the section concerning bedbugs. I…
For the past few weeks I’ve seen from various sources on Facebook, and most recently on Tablet, a growing concern about a potentially frightening new trend: Featured on several Amazon.com best-seller lists are e-book editions of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The first responses I’ve seen have been understandably negative, coming from some reasonably…
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…