Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
Having written for dozens of publications, from Vogue to Vice, Marissa Miller’s extensive portfolio is certain to strike the interest of many journalists and media consumers alike. Miller, who hails from Montreal, Quebec, isn’t what many would consider a typical Jewish journalist. Her beat doesn’t center on the Jewish world, but rather on gender, fashion,…
Yiddish holds an extraordinary place in Jewish history. From a Middle High German lexical and syntactic base, Yiddish was shaped by the conditions of Jewish life in Central Europe. It adopted words and syntax from Romance and Slavic languages, and, of course, was heavily influenced by the Hebrew and Aramaic of traditional Jewish learning. The…
The central question of “First Reformed,” Paul Schrader’s film about a pastor reckoning with climate change, is, “Can God forgive us for what we’ve done to this world?” It’s a good question for American Protestants, and for all of us living between skeptical optimism and righteous despair. It’s high time for Jews to have our…
Photo credit: athree23 | Pixabay.com. This past summer, Ronit Treatman read a wedding announcement in the New York Times about a successful match made at a bar mitzvah. Treatman, a 50-year-old Philadelphia native, has spent the last decade connecting the Jewish community, largely through several community forums she has built and managed on Facebook. Reading the…
The day that my street became a crime scene, I didn’t go to my job as a waitress. Everything was too heart-achingly fresh and the lockdown wasn’t lifted until it was too late, anyway. I went to work the next day, though. And the day after that. On Tuesdays, my second job entails teaching high…
My parents are too young to be historical artifacts. But they’ve seen and lived through a lot. My mother came to America in 1993 under the Jackson-Vanik amendment, a provision that put pressure on the Soviet Union to allow freedom of emigration to Jews and other groups trying to flee. My father, born in Los…
A few weeks ago I met my boyfriend, who is an identical twin, at the movies to watch the critically acclaimed CNN documentary, “Three Identical Strangers.” Both being film buffs, we were excited to experience a film that was talked about nonstop at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. It was talked about for good reason….
Jerusalem has long been the center of the world in Jewish life, but not since the time of King David has the city felt so personal and laid bare as it is in Sarah Tuttle-Singer’s new book “Jerusalem, Drawn and Quartered.” Interwoven with the fighting, love, loss, and the longing of a mother, it speaks…
Dozens donned tacky pink yarmulkes, danced the hora, and had a l’chaim at Drom in Lower Manhattan on Thursday, March 23 to celebrate the nuptials of the band Golem – and, well, it’s not really clear what that means. The event, titled Golem Gets Married was an irreverent, gender-bending riff on an old Catskills tradition,…
I consider myself a balaboosta in training, as my Bubbe would say, using the Yiddish word for a Jewish homemaker who has it together. For this reason, my Torah of trying to cook food for family is The New York Times’ best-selling cookbook “Balaboosta” by feminist Israeli chef Einat Admony. Admony came to my hometown,…
Let’s face some unsavory facts: the first season of “Stranger Things” is over and the show won’t be back until 2017. If you’re anything like me, there’s a gaping Eggo waffle-shaped void in your soul where Eleven and the rest of the Hawkins, Indiana gang used to reside. Was it the best new television series…
At first glance, “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” seems like a movie made on a wild dare. It’s based on the fictional tome by magical zoologist Newt Scamander in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter universe. Some may remember the 128-page encyclopedia written by Rowling in 2001 along with Quidditch Through The Ages. So, how…
The movie “Denial” is about a court case between Fact and Fiction. Through the case David Irving v. Penguin Books Limited, Deborah E. Lipstadt, “Denial” shows how injustices like the Holocaust cannot be denied. One of the most controversial cases of the 1990s, this case distinguished scholarship from bigotry. Emory University Professor Deborah Lipstadt (played…
There’s a good reason Jews are referred to as the “people of the word.” Our focus on texts is a long-standing tradition that encourages respect, even reverence, for the written word. Words are meaningful, powerful. They can create entire worlds. I highly appreciated this concept even as a child when I used to create fictional…
“Punk rock?” your bubbe might say. “Funny, it doesn’t look Jewish.” But according to author Michael Croland, Jews and the punk movement go way back. In April 2016, Croland published Oy Oy Oy Gevalt! Jews and Punk, a book detailing Jews’ historic role in the punk movement and the ways in which Jewish artists use…