Article Archive

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.

The federal investigation of anti-Semitism at UCSC

This was originally published in the Winter 2011 issue of the Leviathan Jewish Journal, the 40-year-old Jewish undergraduate publication at the University of California, Santa Cruz. New Voices has re-published as a supplement to a new op-ed by the author on the same subject.

This version of the article concludes with a section on new developments since article’s original publication. A fully footnoted version is available at the Leviathan.

On a typical Friday morning, most college students would sleep in if they had the opportunity. Not in the nation’s capital, where some students don blazers and pantsuits to lobby on Capitol Hill.

For many years, students from American University, George Washington University, Georgetown University and the University of Maryland have set out in person for lawmakers’ offices to lobby on behalf of Israel. All four schools coordinated to send a total of more than 60 students to 31 senators’ offices on a lobbying day last month.

The David Project has long been known as one of the most aggressive, acrimonious pro-Israel voices on campus. But their new report, “A Burning Campus” Rethinking Israel Advocacy at America’s Universities and Colleges,” is starting to change that reputation. Full of new strategies for combating what they see as destructive efforts to delegitimize Israel on campus, they hope the report will form the basis for a new unifying strategy for all on-campus Israel advocacy organizations. At its core is a complete 180: the idea that vigorously attacking “anti-Israelism” on campus is counterproductive.

David Bernstein was hired as the executive director of the David Project two years ago. I spoke with Bernstein yesterday. We went beyond the new report and touch on everything from the definition of pro-Israel to the upcoming Israeli Apartheid Week — and Bernstein talked about correcting common misconceptions about what Jewish campus life is like today.

Wilensky: After working at the American Jewish Committee for several years, what drew you to the David Project?

Bernstein: I started out as a pro-Israel student activist in college. I was the head of the pro-Israel student group at [Ohio State University], an activist in the Soviet Jewry movement and I was on the national Hillel student executive committee. I’ve always felt a special kinship to the campus scene.

The group’s complexion changes every few minutes. It starts with a girl from Korea, a Panamanian Jew and a redhead dragging around a large acoustic bass. But moments later, that same group has transformed into an African-American bobbing his head and listening to his headphones and a tall white guy in a kippa. This group, though, shares little more in common than the fact that all these people go to Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. And they all are waiting in line to eat kosher food at Northwestern’s Allison Dining Hall.

Israel is largely a nation of immigrants. However, as many African refugees discover, some foreigners are less welcome than others.

First-time visitors to Tel Aviv are often greeted by an unexpected sight. In Levinsky Park, immediately outside the city’s Central Bus Station, dozens of young African men hang around at almost all hours. They are not simply loitering; most are refugees from war-torn North African nations with nowhere else to go. They endured terrible hardship before arriving in Israel, but found little sympathy or support when they arrived here.

Their problems are also far from over.

Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, had a sobering message for Monmouth University’s mid-year graduates: Life after college isn’t going to be easy.


“Your dreams, for sure, should never be abandoned. But they may have to be, for a while, delayed,” Oren told the 650 graduates on Jan. 13 in Monmouth’s Multipurpose Activity Center in West Long Branch, N.J.


Oren started with a grim picture of the American economy, saying college graduates will inevitably enter the workforce slowly and only after a lot of effort.


But there’s hope, Oren said, because people like his parents, members of “the Greatest Generation,” were able to weather the Great Depression and defeat Germany and Japan in World War II.


“If my parents, your grandparents, could overcome such obstacles and persevere at all odds, just think about what you could do,” Oren said.


Oren strove to connect the United States to Israel. No surprise there: He moved there from New Jersey (“Exit 145” to be precise) in 1979. He later served in the Israeli Defense Forces and won a gold medal in the Maccabiah Games.

We’ve all heard the joke: A synagogue is trying to get rid of a field mouse that won’t leave the building. So they give it a bar mitzvah.


Aiming to put an end to that punchline, the Union for Reform Judaism launched a new initiative called the Campaign for Youth Engagement at the Reform movement’s biennial convention, held near Washington, D.C. on Dec. 14-18.


“I think it’s going to be fantastic,” Ryan Leszner, a senior at York University, told New Voices. “It doesn’t immediately speak for college campus needs … but you have to start somewhere.”

The classroom is filled with energy despite the hour. It’s 9:40 a.m. and students work to unscramble the Hebrew word on the board as their classmates trail in. At 10:10 the class is immersed in Israel, travelling to Tiberius and the Dead Sea. By the time the entire class has arrived, students are sitting in a close-knit circle, taking turns reading the Shema with a greater fluency than the week before.


Staffed by energetic undergraduate students, the Boston-area Jewish Education Program has transformed the way kids and parents are thinking about Hebrew school. Based on the campus of Brandeis University, the program allows college students to tackle the classroom from a different angle as educators at the start of each week, teaching Hebrew school to elementary school aged kids.

The YU Beacon, an all-online newspaper published by the students of Yeshiva University, has attracted non-stop controversy since its inception about a year ago. The Beacon was founded by Simi Lampert, Ilana Hostyk and Tali Adler — a trio of students at YU’s Stern College for Women who had run out of patience with the status quo at an existing YU newspaper.


A few months into its existence, the Beacon became an official YU publication. “People had a lot of doubts that we could go on without being censored,” Lampert told New Voices over the phone today. But the staff quickly agreed that if YU ever tried to censor the Beacon, “we would pull out from being funded by YU.”


Their resolve on that point was tested this week. An anonymous piece was published in the Beacon, written from the point of view of a female YU student told the story of the narrator’s sexual encounter with her male lover in a hotel room. Thousands of hits and hundreds of comments later, they were asked to remove the article.


The situation came to a head last night when Lampert and Toviah Moldwin, the current co-editors-in-chief of the Beacon, met with administrators and student leaders. Lampert and Moldwin decided it was time for YU and Beacon to part ways.

This anonymously written article was originally published in the “Written Word” section of the YU Beacon, Yeshiva University’s co-ed student newspaper. Under pressure from administrators at YU, the editors of the beacon pulled the article down last night and replaced it with a note explaining their actions. They plan to put the article back, but until they do, New Voices will host a copy of the article, which you can read below.

Students don’t have too many nice things to say about Arthur R. Butz. He is a professor of electrical engineering at Northwestern University, and according to his students, he is boring, his handwriting is too small to make out on the board and he leaves all the real teaching to the teaching assistants. While their words about Butz are harsh, students tend to keep their silence when it comes to a darker part of his work, one that extends far outside the realm of electrical engineering. Butz is a prominent Holocaust denier, but many students walk into his classes without knowing it.