Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
Taher Herzallah is one of the newly convicted students collectively known as the “Irvine 11”. Ten of the original eleven were prosecuted (one had his charges dropped) by the Orange County District Attorney’s Office and, this past Friday, convicted of “disruption” and “conspiracy to disrupt” a public lecture by Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren at the…
1000 tables. That’s right. You heard me. 1000 tables. Round ones. Picture this: A warm Tel Aviv September night. Motzaei Shabbat (Saturday night). The Tel Aviv Museum plaza is filled with round tables—several hundred of them, in fact. Sitting around the tables, in groups of about eight to 10, are several thousand people. Around the…
Turns out there was no need for such a fuss. On September 19th, two days before Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was scheduled to have dinner with 15 members of the Columbia International Relations Council and Association (CIRCA), the Iranian mission to the United Nations revoked the invitation due to the “media firestorm” surrounding the event, according to the…
On Saturday night, I went to our Hillel’s welcoming ceremony for the new rabbi. I guess they decided it would be a good idea to start out with a Havdala ceremony, but no amount of gentle singing could compensate for the lighting of yet another candle – under the luminous rays of the bright 7:00…
The destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E. was a watershed moment in Jewish history. With Roman control of Judea making the idea of rebuilding a third temple impossible, the question became not so much as where to meet God but as how to meet God, for the Temple’s destruction eliminated Jews’ ability to …
A new Hillel International program (a little explanation from JTA here) called Talk Israel placed tents on 20 campuses yesterday and Tuesday. The tents were open to all for “conversation and not debate,” according to Columbia-Barnard Hillel Assistant Director Carrie Fischbein. “Dialogue is a key component of the day,” she said. Fischbein was also careful…
“There seems to be a lot of talk that non-Orthodox Judaism is Chillul Hashem. Is Hashem angry?” –D.B., London, U.K. That’s a great question—and one with a messy answer. First off, let’s come to an understanding about what Chillul Hashem actually means. In Vayikra (Leviticus) 22:31-33, following an extensive legal document that dictates the terms…
I grew up in Baltimore, MD, where the one non-Jewish family within a 5-block radius was famous simply because they had Christmas decorations when the rest of us were lighting candles in our windows for Chanuka. I always felt bad for the kids in that house around Halloween–in the 15 years that I lived in…
This summer, I received an opportunity to travel to Poland, to study Jewish-Polish relations before, during and after the Holocaust, with nine other graduate students. The trip was three weeks. When I was asked what my plans were for the summer and I replied, “Three weeks in Poland,” the response was generally the same. “Three…
Following up on our post on Monday, the “Ahmadinedinner” (as friend of New Voices and editor-in-chief of The Current David Fine called tonight’s student dinner with the grand poobah of Iran in an op-ed in the Columbia Spectator) will go forward tonight, albeit with a change in the cast. The student organization originally reported to be…
After a controversial speech at Columbia University in 2007, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may have linked up with the New York school again to discuss his policies. And every news outlet from the Upper West Side to Israel has put their two cents in. According to a Sept. 10 article in the Columbia Daily Spectator,…
The back cover of Joshua Cohen’s novel Witz is enticing, but misleading. It depicts an alternate history where all the Jews in the world die at the start of the 21st century, resulting in a Judaism pop-culture craze as the goyim try to preserve, imitate and commercialize Jewish culture. I read this synopsis and thought “either this…
Today in New Voices, we have American University correspondent Zach C. Cohen’s story about the new Martin Luther King, Jr. monument on the National Mall. Gaze upon the beauty that is the photo above. I’ve been harping on the national correspondents about getting great photos to go with their stories. I’ve told them that I…
To their friends and neighbors, they’re a standard Orthodox Jewish couple, a man and a woman married for five years, two children in tow. Their marriage is a product of convenience rather than love, but that’s not unusual. Yet the particular reason for their union is unique: the man is gay, and the woman is…
The intimidating mural of stylized heads and arbitrary brushstrokes in the lounge of my dorm quotes the Talking Heads: “And you may ask yourself ‘Well, how did I get here?’” The most honest answer I can give: I have no idea. I’m living in a time warp, watching my seventeenth year fly by on fast-forward….