Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
Everyone is awkward when they start college. Eventually, most students find a group they feel comfortable with, build a community, and the awkwardness goes away. For students with special needs, however, that awkwardness can become a social stigma with aftereffects that can last a lifetime. People with special needs often report feeling invisible to others,…
We’re usually pretty hard on Israel here at New Voices, and though more forgiving than some, I’m no exception. Yet, I find that in the midst of all my anxiety over the results of the last election or railing against the settlements, Yom HaAtzmaut provides the ideal opportunity to step back and remember why I…
After reading my coverage of last week’s J Street Conference, a campus Hillel director reached out to me to confess their thoughts on Eric Fingerhut’s withdrawal from the conference and what the new Israeli government means for Hillel and its standards of partnership. To protect themselves and their Hillel, they would only let me publish…
WASHINGTON – Hundreds of students stormed Hillel International’s headquarters Monday, the second day of the 5th annual J Street conference, demanding the organization show tangible support for them and their pro-two states agenda. The march was organized by J Street U, the lobbying group’s campus affiliate, in protest of Hillel International CEO Eric Fingerhut…
I came to the J Street Conference earlier this week with a question in mind for students: How do you advocate for Israel and for peace on campus after last week’s elections? In true Jewish fashion, their answers went beyond the question to address other important points about Israel advocacy and Jewish life on campus….
Even after following the situation so closely for the past two years, the news that Hillel CEO Eric Fingerhut withdrew his commitment to speak to 1,000 J Street U students at the upcoming J Street conference in Washington, D.C. shocked me in its ineptitude. Though Hillel credited the presence at the conference of Saeb Erekat,…
It’s no secret that the war for Israel currently has two fronts: the Middle East and American university campuses. Jewish students feel increasingly threatened and intimidated by anti-Israel activity on campus that too often crosses the line into anti-Semitism, as seen recently in incidents at UC Davis and UCLA. All people concerned with the…
I’m a member of that niche demographic who is really excited by the idea of a dance performance inspired by Jewish text study, and luckily for me, this is essentially the premise behind Sydney Schiff Dance Project’s signature work Dry Bones: Resurrection of the Living. Sydney Schiff graduated from Princeton University in 2010 with a…
Are you a Jewish student? Are you fed up with the state of American Zionism? Have $5? Good. Click here before April 30, pay the $5, then vote to change things. I can’t explain the process, the necessity, or the candidates better than J.J.Goldberg did in two articles in the Forward, so I won’t try….
“Middle ground is just another word for failure. I do NOT want to make a deal! We deserve it all!” That’s the philosophy of the “NO-gotiatior,” a man who wants to teach you how to make the power of “No” work in your life. It got me to thinking: What advice might the NO-Gotiator…
In Palestinian activist circles,“Anti-normalization” broadly refers to the idea that pro-Palestinian activists should not partner in any way with Zionists or Zionist groups lest they be seen as making the occupation seem like an acceptable, or “normal” state of affairs. Normalization has been a controversial topic within Open Hillel since at least their conference at…
“I felt my feet were praying.” – Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel on his experience in the third Selma to Montgomery march for civil rights. I was marching through a display of Christmas trees with a group of Jews screaming for the rights of people of color when I was first struck by the question of…
Holly Bicerano, a student at Boston University and the former Campus Outreach Co-Coordinator for Open Hillel, made waves in the Jewish world after publishing an op-ed in the Times of Israel called “Standing athwart lies,” explaining why she decided to leave the organization. Chief among her complaints are that, far from promoting true open dialogue…
Merav Michaeli, the Israeli journalist and women’s rights activist-turned-Knesset member for the Labor Party, is a sign of hope for a progressive future in Israel. Last Tuesday, she tried to convince an exclusive crowd of worried Jewish leftists gathered in an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side that there was hope for the upcoming elections…
This was a bad week for people who believe in human progress. Whether you imagined America was on its way towards becoming a post-racial society or that residents of the Levant could maybe learn to live peacefully side-by-side someday soon, the better dirt of our nature has again graffitied and burned down our delusions. What…