Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
AVIGAYIL HALPERN: When I was fourteen and just beginning to explore what it would mean to me to be a halakhic, or Jewish-law-abiding, Jewish feminist, I was delighted to stumble across a blog called Star of Davida. The blog’s author, who went by the name “Talia bat Pessi,” explored her own beliefs and experiences as…
These days, it seems I can’t scroll down my Facebook news feed without seeing something about privilege. At Boston College and within American Jewry more broadly, conversations about privilege of various kinds have been vigorous and ongoing. While much of it has focused on racial privilege, especially here at New Voices, there has been…
The Shabbat of Parashat Akharei Mot-Kedoshim— the Torah portion that was read in many synagogues this past Saturday morning — is always a painful one for me and many other queer Jews. The verses it contains concerning the prohibition of male homosexuality have long been used as justification for excluding queer people from religious life….
Can a Jew ask “what would Jesus do?” I have two answers: Yes and no. Yes. Of course. How could we not? Jesus of Nazareth was Jewish, full stop. I am perplexed by the almost total lack of Jewish theological engagement with Jesus. To be sure, Jesus’ Jewishness has been emphasized by historical and biblical…
Keeping kosher in college is not easy; keeping kosher for Passover is even harder. Pizza, bread, eggs, fruits, veggies, and desserts are my go-to dorm foods. While mentally preparing for Passover, I realized many of the main staples of my already restricted diet were no longer options, and that was daunting. No more opening the…
I have written in the past about my experiences with gender, privilege, Jewish ritual, and the need to find new and creative ways to engage both men and women ritually. Women, I’ve argued, should be encouraged to try out more traditionally masculine rituals, and men should be encouraged to try out more feminine rituals. There…
I’ve wanted to write about Kendrick Lamar for a while. Mostly because listening to Kendrick seems to be what I turn to when I’m supposed to be writing, so integrating the two activities felt ideal. But what angle could possibly be found to write about hip-hop for a Jewish student website? Well, I’m not sure….
Words are strangely versatile; put them on a page and they glow with intellectual distinction. Put them over music and they transcend themselves to become vehicles of beauty (or they don’t). Put them on a website for Jewish students…and who knows? Maybe words are subject to a quota system; write too many about Emil Fackenheim…
When I was in high school, I stopped wearing my kippah. I felt myself drifting away from the ultra-Orthodox community of my childhood and the Modern Orthodoxy my parents tried to model for me at home. I stopped wearing my kippah because I wanted to disaffiliate from the Orthodox Jews that filled New York City…
I read with enthusiasm and appreciation my good friend Amram Altzman’s recent piece on Jewish masculinity and egalitarianism. So much of Amram’s work centers on exploring the significance of egalitarian practice for him and other men, and this is necessary and important. I was deeply disturbed, however, by how little women with egalitarian practice…
As I write this Friday night, several things are true. A prolonged manhunt continues in France, pursuing suspects involved with an attack on a kosher supermarket. The Grand Synagogue of Paris is closed on Shabbat for the first time since World War II, a harrowing start to 2015 following a year of resurgent, ugly anti-Semitism….
“I felt my feet were praying.” – Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel on his experience in the third Selma to Montgomery march for civil rights. I was marching through a display of Christmas trees with a group of Jews screaming for the rights of people of color when I was first struck by the question of…
My egalitarianism started out as a compromise: it gave me most of the traditional liturgy and observance I’d grown up around, while also giving me the modernity and progressive attitudes I’d been surrounded by for most of my life. It allowed me to cling to the tradition of my childhood and the feminism and liberalism…
As I got ready to light the menorah for the last time this year, I could not help but think about the meaning of the shemash, or head candle, amid all the other candles. Each night a new candle is added to the menorah and the light spreads. Come the end of Chanukah, you have…
Hanukkah gets a bad rap. It is seen as the most Americanized of the Jewish holidays and as the Jewish pinnacle of consumerism and indulgence. On top of that, when looking closer at the Hanukkah story, we see a radical, anti-assimilationist militant group that, in reality, ended up embracing the Hellenism they had worked so…