Zach C. Cohen

Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, had a sobering message for Monmouth University’s mid-year graduates: Life after college isn’t going to be easy.


“Your dreams, for sure, should never be abandoned. But they may have to be, for a while, delayed,” Oren told the 650 graduates on Jan. 13 in Monmouth’s Multipurpose Activity Center in West Long Branch, N.J.


Oren started with a grim picture of the American economy, saying college graduates will inevitably enter the workforce slowly and only after a lot of effort.


But there’s hope, Oren said, because people like his parents, members of “the Greatest Generation,” were able to weather the Great Depression and defeat Germany and Japan in World War II.


“If my parents, your grandparents, could overcome such obstacles and persevere at all odds, just think about what you could do,” Oren said.


Oren strove to connect the United States to Israel. No surprise there: He moved there from New Jersey (“Exit 145” to be precise) in 1979. He later served in the Israeli Defense Forces and won a gold medal in the Maccabiah Games.

We’ve all heard the joke: A synagogue is trying to get rid of a field mouse that won’t leave the building. So they give it a bar mitzvah.


Aiming to put an end to that punchline, the Union for Reform Judaism launched a new initiative called the Campaign for Youth Engagement at the Reform movement’s biennial convention, held near Washington, D.C. on Dec. 14-18.


“I think it’s going to be fantastic,” Ryan Leszner, a senior at York University, told New Voices. “It doesn’t immediately speak for college campus needs … but you have to start somewhere.”

“‘Pi’ me in the face! Save a child’s heart!” It’s a typical shout on the quad from brothers in the local chapter of historically Jewish fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi during their biannual AEPi-in-the-Face fundraiser. Passersby pay for the privilege of pushing plates full of whipped cream into brothers’ faces to raise money for Save a Child’s Heart, an organization that provides life-saving services to underprivileged children. The sight is what one would expect from a fraternity: an image of a bunch of fun-loving guys, flirting with female students and laughing along with — or at — their dessert-covered comrades. But beneath the surface, the chapter of this historically Jewish frat is exactly that: Jew-ish.

When you first walk through the Mountain of Despair that marks the entrance of the new memorial to Martin Luther King, Jr. on the National Mall, the vision of two massive walls of water about to collapse is inescapable. As visitors pass through and see King’s likeness etched into the part of the monument known as the Stone of Hope, it is almost as if King is getting ready to part the Tidal Basin for his people’s long-awaited escape to freedom.
“It’s gorgeous,” Rachel Silvert, a senior at American University, said. “It’s a beautiful monument.”