Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
Judy Weiss, RNC had been in nursing for most of her life. She had a stable job, a good salary, and a predictable routine. All of that changed when Weiss founded A Jewish Blessing in 2005 after helping a friend find an egg donor. “I was working at a job that I loved. I was…
This semester, I read C. J. Pascoe’s Dude, You’re A Fag, an ethnography of a typical American public high school. To summarize some of Pascoe’s “findings” (I put “findings” in quotes because to most teenaged American boys, what follows may come as no surprise), high school boys become men in a two-part process: 1) embracing…
As an Orthodox person who attended an all-girls high school, single-sex spaces basically defined my life for four years. Keeping with the general attitude of the right-wing Orthodox community toward gender relations, students at my school were actively discouraged from associating with boys, who were considered temptations that could only lead us down the wrong…
Last year, one of the clubs that I am a part of in school decided to hold a “Smashing the Patriarchy” workshop, to work on our group’s internal dynamics. To my mind, this was completely unnecessary. The group governed by consensus, and we were roughly half male and half female. It seemed to me that…
Across the country, rape culture permeates life on college campuses, affecting all areas of campus life. According to the BBC, those who join fraternities are three times more likely to commit an assault. “Another fraternity on campus got kicked off for sexual harassment,” said University of Arizona sophomore and Sigma Alpha Mu brother Brent Davis….
On April 30, 2014 the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, an umbrella organization, rejected the liberal lobbying group J Street’s bid for membership by a vote of 22-17. Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, wrote an editorial shortly afterward denouncing the vote, saying “The question of ‘what could be…
Folks at Hillel International seem worried about the future of Judaism. They seemed worried about it long before Open Hillel existed. There have been many prescriptions doled out to address this perceived problem of our generation’s apathetic and disaffected nature. Send the kids on a free trip to Israel, that’ll solve it. Make sure…
I’ve been the token Jew for much of my life. People have referred to me as “my Jewish friend, Amber” and some have told me that I’m the only Jew they’ve ever met, especially out here in Wyoming. Since I went to Israel for the first time 7 years ago, I have successfully lived up…
On Monday, the final day of what Previous New Voices Rebbe David A.M. Wilensky calls “Liberal Jewish Comicon,” my first interaction was with Ali Kreigsman, who was attending in support of her and Jana Kozlowski’s upcoming documentary, Between the Lines, about Jewish day school students who come to university and discover that in spite of…
Though If Not Now, When? An Open Hillel Conference began at Harvard Saturday night, I wasn’t able to arrive until Sunday afternoon. When I got there, the swarm of familiar black t-shirts seemed to indicate my worst suspicions would be confirmed: This is basically a student JVP conference in disguise with some Jewish SJP activists…
By now, the controversy over the Ohio University “Blood Bucket Challenge” video is relatively old news: About a month ago, Megan Marzec, president of the OU student senate, was challenged by the university president to dump a bucket of ice water over her head in support of ALS research. She responded by making a video…
Yesterday, I reviewed Hoaxocaust!, a new play performed and written by Barry Levey that satirizes Holocaust denial simply by putting the arguments of some of its biggest proponents, Arthur Butz, David Irving, Robert Faurisson, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in context. I saw the show the night of September 11 (coincidentally), then on September 12, I caught…
Preliminary results of the Demographic Survey of American Jewish College Students 2014 are out. Started last spring by Drs. Barry Kosmin and Ariela Keysar at the Trinity College Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture, this is the first comprehensive scientific survey ever of an underrepresented and under studied demographic: American…
I grew up in the New York area: capital of the world, city of no rival, the Fourth Rome (defeating the Third, and there shall be no Fifth). True, I could note that this place – city and suburbs thereof – is overconfident, maddeningly arrogant, and rude to a horrifying degree. Yet it was a…
On Friday, August 22, Aaron Sofer was taking a shortcut through the Jerusalem Forest with his friend. The two became separated when his friend wanted to try hiking up a hill, and later that evening when the friend returned home, he discovered that Aaron was missing. When I came online Saturday night, I learned about…