Holocaust or ‘Hoaxocaust!’?

By Derek M. Kwait September 22, 2014

It’s 9/11 in New York and I’m commemorating by seeing a Holocaust comedy. Though Barry Levey originally wrote Hoaxocaust! written and performed by Barry Levey with the generous assistance of the Institute for Political and International Studies, Tehran for the New York Fringe Festival, I became aware of it during its second run at the…

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Why We Should and Shouldn’t Be Mourning Joan Rivers

By Amram Altzman September 8, 2014

I had an opportunity to meet Joan Rivers at the tail end of my senior year of high school. She told me I was a nice Jewish boy. She then moved along and continued to make some joke which was probably far too inappropriate to quote, then proceeded to flip off the photographer. What I…

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OMGWTFEXODUS: A Dialogue With the Man Who’s Bringing the Bible to the 21st Century

By Derek M. Kwait September 5, 2014

Part live spectacle, part Biblical scholarship, comedian David Tuchman’s OMGWTFBIBLE podcast “reframes the Bible as the world’s oldest weekly comedy serial.” A year-and-a-half after its debut in April 2013 (as seen in New Voices), he’s now heading into Exodus. I caught up with David recently in the food court of Grand Central Station to discuss…

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A Glimmer of Hope for Religious Women in Israel

By Talia Weisberg September 4, 2014

Most Americans are familiar with what the media has dubbed the “War on Women,” or Congress’ relentless attacks against many basic women’s rights. Fewer know that Israel is also suffering from a resurgence of conservative ideologies and consequent rollback of feminist gains. In her book The War on Women in Israel: How Religious Radicalism is…

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“Even Jacob Went Down to Egypt”: On Shmemel’s “Berlin” and Israeli Out-Migration

By Jonathan Katz September 3, 2014

The Israeli band Shmemel recently released a controversial, tongue-in-cheek video single entitled Berlin(English translation and annotation here, courtesy of The Forward). In the song, the band sings a ballad of Israelis leaving the country – for economic opportunity, for the madness of living in a state of constant war, or for a better and more…

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My Illumination: Making History by Uncovering the Past

By Jonathan Kamel September 2, 2014

A section of this article was featured in the Daily Northwestern on September 1st, 2013.   She fell into the ditch thinking she was dead. All around her she breathed and touched dying human flesh. The bullet had apparently missed her. She desperately raised her arms to push through the masses of bodies that were…

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5 Layers of Soul

By David G. August 29, 2014

As someone with quite an anti-authority bent, this week’s Torah portion, Parshat Shoftim, has always been one that I have struggled with. Parshat Shoftim lays the foundations for the future government of the Kingdom of Israel, establishing five different leadership roles. These roles include judges, law enforcers, kings, priests and prophets.  The former anarchist in…

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Rage Against the Material

By David G. August 22, 2014

There is an anachronistic story in the Talmud in which Rav Ashi, a 4th Century Sage from Babylon, engages the infamous Judean King Menashe  in a debate. Rav Ashi, shocked by King Menashe’s knowledge of Jewish law, had to ask how such a great Torah scholar could commit one of the gravest sins in Judaism…

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The One Wish Project is Coming to a Campus Near You

By Derek M. Kwait August 20, 2014

I think all of my friends are amazing people. But every now and then, some friends do such incredible work that you just want to shout about it from the highest mountaintop. But absent a mountaintop, profiling them in your magazine is the next best thing. Joseph Shamash and Andrew Lustig are two of those…

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Stuff White People Like: Savior Complexes and Palestine

By Jonathan Katz August 15, 2014

    Some people study whales. Some people study epistemological analysis. I study white people. More specifically, I am interested in diaspora networking and migrant housing stock, but I am also interested in the way whiteness as a concept affects these in host countries. A lot of the time, that idea means things like deeply…

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It’s All Your Fault?

By David G. August 1, 2014

Together, we have reached the last leg of our journey through the text of the Torah, coming to the fifth and final book, Devarim, or Deuteronomy. In Parshat Devarim, from which the entire book gets its name, the Jewish people stand at the foot of a mountain, on the last leg of their own journey…

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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Those Awkward Moments

By David G. July 25, 2014

There is this belief that the rich and famous have these amazingly exciting lives, making some of us regular people want to live vicariously through them in the form of memoirs, tabloids, and TV documentaries. Our own lives seem boring in comparison to the recorded ups and downs of celebrities. With less than three decades…

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How Hobby Lobby Forces American Jews to Reexamine Our Commitments to Religion, Pluralism, and Secular Governance

By Maddie Ulanow July 23, 2014

The case of Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., presented a classic conundrum in American constitutionalism: a conflict between religious expression and the lengths to which such expression may infringe on the rights of others. The case also raised controversial questions of personhood and gender equity, and ultimately seemed to pit the interests of religious…

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Promises are Like Fast Food – The More You Commit to, the More Regrets You’ll Have

By David G. July 18, 2014

The typical translation for the Hebrew name of the Book of Numbers, Bamidbar, is not “Numbers,” but “In the Wilderness.” While this translation is most definitely accurate, I have discovered that there is actually a different meaning to this name. The root of the word “speak”, d’var, is actually hidden in the name of this…

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Restore the Northwest Semitic Altar: On Using Archaeology in Jewish Practice

By Jonathan Katz July 8, 2014

  It happens frequently when I go to a new synagogue now. Someone gives a dvar Torah or a talk on the Torah portion, and uses a verse to talk about how different Jews were from all their surrounding peoples. Or there is a discussion of an Israel trip, in which the (justice-obstructing) magic of…

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