Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
Nu, you! Yes you, rhetorical-you, why don’t you like being seen as a Jewish writer? Is it because you imagine the Jewish writer as a man with a long beard, peyes, and a fur hat? Is it because you imagine the Jewish writer as a prickly Sabra holding a gun? Is it because you imagine…
Daisy Friedman is an up-and-coming writer/director whose most recent film, Unholy, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this year. The film follows a young woman, Noa, as she navigates her family’s Passover seder with a gastrointestinal disorder that requires a feeding tube. In her own words, “Unholy is a film about what it means to…
We can learn a great deal about Aaron Zeitlin’s Monolog in Pleynem Yidish מאָנאָלאָג אין פּלעינעם יידיש just from the title. Immediately, the title informs readers that this monologue is in Yiddish, but it also uses the preposition “in” which echoes the English preposition, rather than the contextually expected Yiddish preposition “af” or “oyf.” Zeitlin…
In his autobiography, Berlin Childhood Around 1900, Walter Benjamin describes an Imperial Panorama, or Kaiserpanorama, a revolving cylinder with a stereoscopic projection of images popular across Europe in the late 1800s and early 1900s. With this device, “it did not matter where you began the cycle. Because the viewing screen, with places to sit before…
Photo by Judy Goldstein On March 8th 2025, Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent resident of the U.S., was detained by ICE. He had committed no crime, only exercising his free speech as one of the primary organizers of pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University. The day before his detention, President Trump cut $400 million in funding to…
October 8: The Fight for the Soul of America was released on March 14th in theaters nationwide. The film chronicles an obtusely one-sided narrative of the rise of antisemitism on social media and US American college campuses in the aftermath of the Al-Aqsa Flood attacks. Against a backdrop of sinister orchestral music and b-roll from…
“Yiddishland is everywhere.” This is what Chaia, (she/her), creator of kleztronica – a fusion of klezmer and techno, told me a few weeks after I attended the Yiddish NY Festival Afterparty, the event – described as “where archival Yiddish and klezmer samples combine with racing electronic grooves, drag, disco, and so much more!” –…
A few years ago, author Shalom Auslander took a weight loss drug so poisonous that later, when he was hospitalized, doctors suspected he had tried to kill himself. Auslander claimed that he hadn’t, but the question remained, what made him hate himself enough to take such a dangerous substance? The answer is the title of…
The Nights Before Christmas It was two hours before the Off-Broadway opening of The Gospel According to Chaim, and there was shiml on the bread: that’s Yiddish for mold. Melissa Weisz, one of three actors in the performance, needed the two slices of rye as part of a prop sandwich for a scene during the…
The Penguin, starring Colin Ferrel, Cristin Millioti, and Rhenzy Feliz, released its first episode this week to much praise. A televised sequel/spinoff of Matt Reeves’ 2023 film, The Batman, it plans to show viewers Oswald Cobb’s rise to power in the criminal underworld following the death of Carmine Falcone, aka The Roman. The 8-episode series…
This weekend I had the pleasure of watching the recent film ‘Kneecap’ starring the titular Belfast-based rap trio, Kneecap. With their tracksuits and Beastie Boys-esque beats, one might have approached the film expecting a boyish romp through Belfast or perhaps a simple coming of age flick told through Irish language music. However Kneecap are anything…
I. Looking “The right to look is not about merely seeing. It begins at a personal level with the look into someone else’s eyes to express friendship, solidarity, or love. That look must be mutual, each inventing the other, or it fails.” – Nicholas Mirzoeff, “The Right to Look” Growing up, I hated davening. The…
“We’d been flirting for over a week now, but being in an Orthodox Jewish seminary made it hard for us to actually do anything.”
“Black Jews like myself can often have a double consciousness about how they may be seen in one space or another, and hold serious reservations about entering predominantly-White Jewish spaces.”
“I learned there is almost no chance that I or any of my peers would be able to create enough near-future change to prevent climate catastrophe. When I left my environmental education, I only had hopelessness.”