Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
When I came to college, the first thing I did was join Hillel. I participated in a pre-semester welcome weekend designed to introduce incoming freshman to Jewish peers and foster a stronger community. I was swept off my feet. Hillel is generously endowed, or so it seemed, and the endless barbecues and pizza dinners were…
When I was a child, my mother taught me that Thanksgiving was a holiday of immigrants and refugees. It was fitting, then, that Thanksgiving was a holiday my family spent with my maternal grandparents, who were themselves, along with my mother, Jewish immigrants from the Soviet Union in 1981. Although my understanding of the holiday…
I haven’t always been scared for Israel. When the news of soldiers going into Gaza flooded our TV airwaves last year, I shrugged and then went on with my routine life, largely unaffected and unfazed. This year, when the horrific attacks and stabbings began to happen, I was immediately enraged and consumed with dread. These…
At some point in our school careers, we learn about the horrors of the Holocaust. But what information is presented to us in that academic setting? Perhaps the teacher delves into a brief history ranging from January 1933, when Hitler became chancellor of Germany, to May 1945, when the Nazis surrendered. Maybe we read Anne…
In light of last week’s shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., we need to extend the same solidarity to Charleston that was given to the victims of January’s Charlie Hebdo and Hypercacher attacks. The phrases “Je suis Charlie” (“I am Charlie”), for the satirical Parisian newspaper, and “Je suis Juif”…
Treason has been on my mind a lot the past few weeks. In the Jewish world, the website Canary Mission – which seeks to create a “blacklist” of pro-Palestinian activists – has caused a controversy. Many of those profiled on the site are Jewish – including New Voices contributor Tom Pessah; those of our brethren…
Most Jews have at least heard of the World Zionist Congress. They know that it had something to do with Theodore Herzl and played a critical role in creating the State of Israel. What many don’t know is that the World Zionist Congress still makes very important decisions affecting Israel and the Jewish community around…
Evan Goldstein’s recent contributions to New Voices have featured fascinating and insightful meditations on the cultural location of Jewishness in our world. They are a welcome move toward a critical conversation around the hybrid forms of modern Jewish identity, a project that requires a historical understanding of whiteness. Sharona Bat-Ephraim, the subject of Goldstein’s critique…
It is no great surprise that Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu was reelected last week. He is a skillful politician and an astute campaigner. What did surprise some, however, including many American Jews and American Jewish communal institutions, were the various statements Netanyahu made during the last days and hours of his campaign. The day…
I’ve got this list. On it, I jot down the names of authors I mean to read when I have the time, and at the top of this list is James Baldwin. Knowing little about him, I somewhat absent-mindedly opened a 1967 essay Baldwin wrote in the New York Times Magazine. I was speechless:…
It wasn’t until I had left school and went to study in an Israeli yeshiva that I understood the implications of occupation. Until then, my lack of engagement with the issue meant I uncritically acquiesced to a status quo that disenfranchised millions, subjecting them to military rule. During my time in Israel, I made an…
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…
One familiar thing about the United Kingdom for me is that I frequently hear South African accents. Here in the colonial heartland, I have met a lot of folks like me: born to South African [Ashkenazi] Jewish parents abroad, raised abroad, and with varied ties to South Africa. Some, like me, maintain citizenship in South…
What do we call a society where you have to gain state permission before you can travel a few miles in order to marry? Perhaps it seems that we are searching for an “-ism,” some grand unified theory that nobody without the letters Ph.D. after their name cares about. But as the New York Times…
What Judaism will actually look like 50 years from now
I don’t often like to think about the future. Instead, I like to study my past (hence my Jewish History major) and understand my present (hence my sociology major). But when Commentary released its symposium wherein seventy professional Jews — academics, philosophers, researchers, and the like — were asked about what Judaism will look like…