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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.

Educating a new generation of Jewish learners

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.

The week is notorious for heavy-handed tactics like “apartheid walls” and mock checkpoints at universities all over the world. It is surrounded by passionate arguments from the pro-Palestinian side and equally charged counterpoints from pro-Israel groups. And though it is often a week of heated politics on college campuses, this year’s Israeli Apartheid Week, held Feb. 28-March 3, seemed quieter than usual.

While reactions came in different forms from different pro-Israel groups, they were almost unanimous in their embrace of a new strategy this year: Avoid a direct attack on pro-Palestinian groups in response to Israeli Apartheid Week. As Brandeis University marked its first ever Israeli Apartheid Week, fighting was absent on campus as pro-Israel groups celebrated Israeli life and culture in place of the usual conflict between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian groups.

“From what I have seen, not many people have been interested,” said Daniel Hammerman, a freshman at American University who is involved with AU Students for Israel.

For many American Persian Jews, self-identification can be complicated. Whether they were born in Iran or they are first-generation Americans, the culture and patriotism of their parents’ homeland can clash with their lives in America. This inner conflict has been exacerbated by the ongoing political tensions between Iran and the United States. Mix in some public musings on the possibility of war with Iran from Israel, and Persian American Jews (or are they Jewish Persian Americans? American Persian Jews?) are effectively being pulled in three directions.

The Persian Jewish community in American remains quite insular, concentrated in a few close-knit enclaves, including one on Long Island. And while the western label Orthodox doesn’t quite apply, Persian Jewish religious practice certainly has more in common with contemporary Orthodox Judaism than it does with any of the liberal streams. Because of all of these factors, Yeshiva University, the Modern Orthodox university with its various schools scattered around the city of New York, has a particularly high concentration of Persian Jews.

“I feel an internal conflict,” admitted Sarit Bassal, a student at Stern College for Women at Yeshiva University.

Rabbi Mordechai Rackover, the Jewish chaplain of Brown University and the rabbi at Brown-RISD Hillel (which serves both Brown and the Rhode Island School of Design), doesn’t quite fit the popular conception of Orthodox Jews as out of touch with the modern world. He’s rarely found without his iPhone (except on Shabbat, of course), maintains a Kosher food blog, and is an almost alarmingly prolific tweeter. By any measure, he is as deeply involved in both modern American and Orthodox life as anyone can be. So what led him to strongly decry a recent statement by a group of Orthodox rabbis that condemned gay marriage, though he agrees with them that it is “halachically impossible”?

While most Americans push marriage further and further off into adulthood, marriage is alive and thriving among some Jewish college students in Manhattan.

Only 51% of American adults (individuals 18 and older) were married in 2010, compared to 72% in 1960, says a recent report from the Pew Research Center. But many Jewish college couples have found that now is the right time for them to make a life commitment. Some are shomer negiah — meaning that they follow a strict interpretation of Jewish law that only allows them to be in intimate physical contact within the confines of marriage. Other Jewish pairs simply find that tying the knot is the next stage in their relationships. Maybe it’s a mixture of both.

A small and close-knit group, the queer Jewish community represents a double minority — a minority of Jews are LGBT, and a minority of the LGBT community is Jewish.

So it’s no surprise that attendees at last weekend’s annual conference of the National Union of Jewish LGBT Students found the conference helpful simply because it gathered together so many students with a similar identity.

“There’s a part of me that was always really curious: What would it be like to be the majority?” Steven Philp, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, said. “That’s the interesting thing about walking into this room.” (Philp used to blog for New Voices.)

NUJLS gathered at American University in Washington, D.C. for its 15th annual conference last weekend, bringing students from across the country together to discuss the intersection between the LGBT community and Jewish life.