Article Archive

Hebrew is everywhere on the campus of Brandeis University. It’s heard conversationally in the fast-paced exchanges of Israeli students with thick accents and in ritual form at Hillel. It’s found on posters in the campus center and on the clothes of students sporting Brandeis apparel. It’s embedded in the Brandeis seal — which features the word emet, Hebrew for truth — and takes an academic role inside the classroom. But faced with the increasing financial challenges of the ongoing economic crisis, Brandeis announced in 2010 the termination of the Hebrew Language and Literature Major, beginning with the students of the class of 2015, who began school this semester.

In Part II of this three-part series about non-Jews in Bloomington, Ind. who have become deeply involved with the Jewish community, Jun Chen interviews two non-Jewish women whose children attend a Jewish preschool.

New uses of the word “occupy” abound. The latest is Occupy the Occupiers, a new campaign led by the Young, Jewish and Proud (YJP) division of the Jewish Voice for Peace, a far-left Jewish activist group. At a Birthright Israel NEXT event last night, YJP members interrupted speaker and author Steven L. Pease, using an Occupy Wall Street-style “mic check,” also know as the “human microphone,” to call attention to their Occupy the Occupiers initiative. The protesters were all escorted out by security, but continued their chanting on the sidewalk outside the room on 13th Street in Manhattan, where the NEXT event was being held.

The laughter of playing children can be heard amid the chatter of college students at Hillel on Friday nights. It may be unusual for Hillel attendees to show up with their own children, but at Franklin & Marshall College, students aren’t the only regulars. Many professors and their families celebrate Shabbat on campus, too. The close student-professor relationship is the reason why senior Jessica Fink came to F&M, a small liberal arts school. “Whether or not I actually speak to my professors at Hillel, I feel that seeing them around campus, and at Hillel, enhances the feeling of community and familiarity that makes F&M so special,” Fink said.

Jun Chen is a non-Jewish New Voices writer at Indiana University. In Part I of a three-part series called Non-Members of The Tribe, Chen writes about her own experiences getting to know the Jewish people and about why young Chinese have an affinity for the Jews. In Parts II and III, coming over the next two weeks, she will profile other non-Jews who have become deeply involved with the Jewish community in Bloomington, Ind.

Wesleyan University (Middletown, Conn.)–Before the media coverage, before the videos of police brutality and before six Wesleyan University students were arrested for their roles in Occupy Wall Street, Wesleyan students awoke on the morning of Sept. 25 to an unexpected sight on a familiar grassy knoll–someone had erected a tent city on Foss Hill. The hodgepodge of hurriedly assembled canvas aimed to raise awareness about the burgeoning protest movement that started in downtown Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park, as well as create a community that would sit in solidarity with the protesters during the school week. The protestors gathered support from Out House, a campus outing club, which donated the tents and other materials used by the tent protesters. Foss Hill, the Wesleyan version of a quad, was chosen for its central location and availability.

Columbia University (New York City)–Columbia University has a large Jewish population but, according to some Sephardi students, the Columbia-Barnard Hillel can’t satisfy all of its constituents. Reflective of the makeup of the American Jewish community, most of the school’s Jewish students are Ashkenazi, meaning that they are of eastern European or German descent. Jews of other heritages, like Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews, face a lack of opportunities to express their religious and cultural identities. Ashkenazi and Sephardi-Mizrahi practices differ in a variety of ways, ranging from the order of prayers in services to Passover customs. “The prayers, of course, are similar, but there’s some differences,” Columbia senior Mathew Samimi, a French-Persian Jew, pointed out.

The scene at Norris University Center looked more like a Middle Eastern flea market than a student center. Recruiters yelled and sweet-talked, handed out candy and business cards as students squeezed through the packed aisles. Cultural groups, sports teams and even some students who developed a solar-powered car were trying to convince incoming Northwestern University students to listen to their pitches so that maybe, just maybe, the new students would make an appearance at their first meeting of the semester. This chaotic scene was the annual activities fair at Northwestern University, where student groups debated, pressured and begged freshmen to give their groups a chance. But several groups with a common denominator were noticeably more subdued, or even absent from the fair. The link between them? They were Jewish and Israel-centered groups.

I was in high school, spending the summer at a Jewish summer camp in New York, when Gilad Shalit was captured. For every generation of Americans, there is a conflict that defines the image of Israel that is most vivid to them. For some, it was the War of Independence, for others it was the capturing of the Sinai, the return of the Sinai or the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. For those not much older than myself and the writers whose reflections are presented below, it was the Second Intifada. For us, it looked like it would always be the capturing of Gilad Shalit. But it looks like we may soon be able to replace that with his release.
Those are my brief thoughts on the apparently impending release of Shalit. Below, we present the thoughts of five more New Voices Magazine writers. –David A.M. Wilensky, Editor of New Voices Magazine

There are stickers with Michigan spelled out phonetically in Hebrew characters, Jewish bling abounds and satisfying a falafel craving isn’t hard to do: Welcome to the University of Michigan.
For a lot of seniors, the beginning of the school year means being back in Ann Arbor for the first time in eight months–for others that hiatus was spent where hummus and shawarma are plentiful and shekels are the preferred form of currency. It seems only natural for these students to return even more in love with Israel than when they left. Eight months later and with much-improved Hebrew skills, two U of M students, Ben Wolf and Alyse Opatowski returned with a perspective that perplexes the creators of the programs that sent them to Israel–frustrated and disenchanted with Israel.

On a Friday night in July, I and three other American Jewish college students assembled for Shabbat services and a kosher dinner. But this night was different from all other nights. For amid the formal Hebrew prayers and familiar tunes, we spoke to each other only in Arabic. “Sabaat Salaam,” we greeted each other at the service’s conclusion. Shabbat Shalom.
The two months I spent this summer studying and speaking only Arabic through the Middlebury Arabic Language Institute in California were full of such seemingly strange occurrences. But having pledged along with 180 other students of all ages and backgrounds to speak, read and listen only to Arabic, situations like this quickly became the new norm.

In the midst of the U.N. vote on Palestinian statehood, which has sparked debate everywhere, college students across the country gathered on Sep. 21 and 22 as part of Hillel’s Talk Israel initiative to engage in dialogue about the Middle East. With large tents set up in the center of 20 universities, equipped with large blue banners reading “Talk Israel,” Israeli cuisine and videos featuring talks from several prominent pro-Israel figures, the goal of the event was to provide a forum for students to ask questions and discuss Israel “at a time when civility is in rare supply in the public sphere,” according to a Hillel International press release. Students at universities spanning the map from the University of Florida to McGill University in Montreal stopped by between classes to grab a falafel and talk Israel.

The High Holidays are upon us, and so is a newly updated and expanded edition of the Hillel machzor (High Holidays prayer book), “On Wings of Awe.” The original 1985 edition was ground-breaking in its inclusion of transliterations for many prayers, which was then a rarity even among liberal Jewish prayer books; the new edition’s cover boldly proclaims itself “A Fully Transliterated Machzor for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.”
While Bernard Scharfstein, vice president of “On Wings of Awe” publisher Ktav, told me, “We sold maybe 1,000 a year; it’s not a bestseller,” it has been a constant presence in many Hillels and in a handful of congregations for many years.
I spoke on the phone recently with the editor of both editions, Rabbi Richard Levy, about what makes “Wings” a Hillel machzor, what has changed in the new edition and how worship has changed over the last quarter-century.

It’s an idea so simple you may wonder why you didn’t think of it yourself: Grab a few friends and bake some deliciously eggy challah, then sell it and donate the proceeds to help feed the hungry around the world.
That idea was the inspiration behind Challah for Hunger, an organization with chapters at 44 colleges and universities across America–and two in Australia–dedicated to making and selling the much-loved traditional Shabbat bread to raise money for hunger and disaster relief organizations. CfH was founded in 2004 by students at the Claremont Colleges, a consortium of seven liberal arts colleges in Southern California. So far, the have raised over $250,000.

When you first walk through the Mountain of Despair that marks the entrance of the new memorial to Martin Luther King, Jr. on the National Mall, the vision of two massive walls of water about to collapse is inescapable. As visitors pass through and see King’s likeness etched into the part of the monument known as the Stone of Hope, it is almost as if King is getting ready to part the Tidal Basin for his people’s long-awaited escape to freedom.
“It’s gorgeous,” Rachel Silvert, a senior at American University, said. “It’s a beautiful monument.”