Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
Being gay in a fraternity has not been the easiest experience. I joined Alpha Epsilon Pi as a wandering, socially inept freshman. I was at lunch at Hillel and one of the brothers of the fraternity, a fellow psychology major, took an interest in me. He brought me out to a party, and after meeting…
Last week was New Voices’ #GenderWeek, and many of us (including yours truly) chose to write about the gendering of Jewish ritual, as well as the need to de-gender — or create a new paradigm for— ritual and gender performances. At the same time, however, part of what draws me to rituals seen as traditionally…
Tupac, Anne Frank, & Hannah Szenes – Poetic Justice Of Beshert In this shtetl known as life, I wonder if I will see a brighter tomorrow when everyday seems darker than night. I wonder if heaven has a shtetl, and if I will go there tonight to escape another hate filled day for a brighter…
This semester, I read C. J. Pascoe’s Dude, You’re A Fag, an ethnography of a typical American public high school. To summarize some of Pascoe’s “findings” (I put “findings” in quotes because to most teenaged American boys, what follows may come as no surprise), high school boys become men in a two-part process: 1) embracing…
“The African newscaster asked the Jewish rabbi why there were no female rabbis, and the rabbi was very clever – he asked why there were no female chiefs!” I am not sure if it was the self-congratulatory racism, rehash and ignorance of colonial dynamics, or the justification of sexism that irritated me more. There I…
As an Orthodox person who attended an all-girls high school, single-sex spaces basically defined my life for four years. Keeping with the general attitude of the right-wing Orthodox community toward gender relations, students at my school were actively discouraged from associating with boys, who were considered temptations that could only lead us down the wrong…
The layout of a room is its first impression. It sets the tone for what goes on there, what the proper decorum is—the general mood. Classrooms are good examples of this—a room with a circle of chairs invites a group conversation; a table and desks sets us up for a lecture. When we build our…
When I was younger I used to tell my dad that I wanted to be a Cantor someday. I learned how to read Torah, lead services, and my singing voice was not too shabby, either. Then, I went off to a Jewish boarding school and my view of what Judaism’s involvement in my life would…
Deuteronomy 24:1 states, “If a man takes a wife and possesses her and she fails to please him because he finds something obnoxious about her, he writes her a Bill of Divorcement, hands it to her and sends her away from his house.” Based on this verse of the Torah, the entire decision to divorce…
Last year, one of the clubs that I am a part of in school decided to hold a “Smashing the Patriarchy” workshop, to work on our group’s internal dynamics. To my mind, this was completely unnecessary. The group governed by consensus, and we were roughly half male and half female. It seemed to me that…
Across the country, rape culture permeates life on college campuses, affecting all areas of campus life. According to the BBC, those who join fraternities are three times more likely to commit an assault. “Another fraternity on campus got kicked off for sexual harassment,” said University of Arizona sophomore and Sigma Alpha Mu brother Brent Davis….
Both Avigayil and I (Amram Altzman) have written extensively about the ways in which we have taken on Jewish rituals which, traditionally, fall outside of our traditional gender identities. This is a conversation we’ve been having, more specifically, about what it means to take on Jewish rituals and how that relates to our Jewish identities…
When I was very young, I was jealous of the way my sister and her friends played together. Other boys were always so aggressive, so into breaking stuff, but girls just played nice. What they were playing–Barbies, house, Mall Madness–I thought was stupid, but I was frustrated that I couldn’t find another boy who wanted…