Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
This is the second in a two-part feature on recent changes in the Reconstructionist movement. For the first part, an interview with Rabbi Dan Ehrenkrantz, current president of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, follow this link. The modern rabbi is vastly different from her traditional counterpart. In addition to the responsibilities of scholarship and leading meaningful liturgical…
Dr. Jill Stein, the Green Party’s 2012 presidential nominee, was the one of the few Jewish candidates to ever run for President. Stein, a former physician, has been involved in politics since 1998 and has consistently been a loud voice in favor of social reform. Her 2012 campaign focused on issues including environmental sustainability and the increasing cost…
This is the first in a two-part feature on recent changes in the Reconstructionist movement. Stay tuned for part two, which will feature an interview with S. Tamar Kamionkowski, Ph.D., Vice President of Academic Affairs and Academic Dean at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, on the future of rabbinic studies. While some have described it as the…
Aside from Israel, there is no question that Jews are a minority in most of world. Whether you are the only person at your office taking time off for the High Holidays or the only house on the block not decorated with Christmas lights in December, most Jews have felt small at some point or…
It was shocking enough to read that a protest against Islamophobia was being organized at Portland State University. When I found out that a pro-Israel group had invited the speaker being protested, my jaw dropped.
I’m on a Middle East Studies listserv at school. During May, I received an e-mail inviting me to attend the protest of an appearance by ultra-right-wing Christian Broadcast Network pundit Erick Stakelbeck.
Stakelbeck’s blog and articles are overwhelmingly anti-Islamic. He once called Dearborn, Michigan “Dearbornistan” because of its large Muslim minority. It was also disturbing that Stakelbeck’s appearance was sponsored by a pro-Israel group, Christians United for Israel. CUFI is an evangelical Christian Zionist group; Stakelbeck holds similar views. Stakelbeck uses the Jewish people and our home, Israel, as a platform for his discriminatory, vitriolic position.
THANE, India– Inside the narrow alleys of the Kalwa slum, past the shanties abutting the train tracks and the stray pig rummaging through garbage scraps, Pramila Mane rattles her rice dish and gently blows on the kernels on the second floor of her home. Across the room, Shayna Lebovic, 19, a volunteer with the Gabriel Project Mumbai, a Jewish nonprofit working to reduce hunger and provide educational services in Kalwa, crouches in front of a small chopping board diligently chopping onions.
Mane, a member of a local women’s group partnered with the Gabriel Project, and Lebovic would not be cooking partners in this enclave north of Mumbai were it not for Jacob Sztokman. The director and founder of the Gabriel Project, Sztokman toured the Dharavi slum during a business trip to Mumbai in 2011 while working for a data security company. Sztokman, 42, did not visit just to pay homage to the slum that inspired “Slum Dog Millionaire.” While doing research prior to the trip, he watched YouTube videos and read up on poverty in India and felt inspired to work in the slums.
Editor’s note, July 2012: As the 40th anniversary of the deaths of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches and a West German police officer approach, and as the 2012 London Olympics games begin, a call for some recognition of the Munich Massacre goes unheeded by this year’s organizers. We present this piece, written by our co-founder, David Twersky, in September of 1972, in aftermath of that tragedy.
If Yeshiva University is “the flagship institution of Modern Orthodoxy,” as it is often called, then Mechon Hadar is the flagship institution of the traditional egalitarian set, a not-quite-movement made up mostly of independent minyanim concentrated in a few major cities. To most students at Y.U., Hadar — which runs America’s only full-time egalitarian yeshiva — would appear to be obviously out of bounds, but a few supplement their Y.U. education with the more liberal, mixed-gender learning available at Hadar.
Reform movement V.P. says their campus presence is ‘like an abyss,’ ‘not acceptable’
Peter Beinart is not the most popular pro-Israel, Zionist critic of Israel these days.
His new book, “The Crisis of Zionism,” has spurred controversy and debate, particularly when it comes to his two new catch phrases: a boycott of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, or “Zionist BDS,” a reference to the largely anti-Israel movement to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel; and calling the West Bank “nondemocratic Israel.”
Two weeks ago on Yom Hashoah, the Jewish day of Holocaust remembrance, I remembered how lucky I was to be sitting in a balmy lecture hall listening to a boring lecture about Native American history. On an April afternoon 70 years ago my grandma Ethel was in Siberia, where she and her mother landed after fleeing Poland, peddling trinkets after school. Grandpa Sam might have been hopping a train to the Russian-Chinese border or waking up from a nap on top of a gravestone.
A production of an erotic Isaac Bashevis Singer story raises questions about the role of Yiddish theater.
Carly Silver explores her family’s ancestral haunts in Brooklyn.
A couple nights a week in downtown Tel Aviv, a group of young people pay a small cover charge to dance late into the night. They move energetically for hours, before eventually getting tired and going home. It might sound like the nightlife Tel Aviv is famous for, dancing in the city’s clubs to the latest hip-hop beats. But this group prefers a different scene, and some much older music.