Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
Every year, even if I celebrate it differently and even as my perceptions of Zionism and the Jewish State become evermore complicated, Yom HaAtzmaut always evokes in me a certain special nostalgia. It was only once I was no longer forced to celebrate the holiday like I did in elementary and high school—with Israeli dancing,…
We’re usually pretty hard on Israel here at New Voices, and though more forgiving than some, I’m no exception. Yet, I find that in the midst of all my anxiety over the results of the last election or railing against the settlements, Yom HaAtzmaut provides the ideal opportunity to step back and remember why I…
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…
I came to the J Street Conference earlier this week with a question in mind for students: How do you advocate for Israel and for peace on campus after last week’s elections? In true Jewish fashion, their answers went beyond the question to address other important points about Israel advocacy and Jewish life on campus….
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…
Even after following the situation so closely for the past two years, the news that Hillel CEO Eric Fingerhut withdrew his commitment to speak to 1,000 J Street U students at the upcoming J Street conference in Washington, D.C. shocked me in its ineptitude. Though Hillel credited the presence at the conference of Saeb Erekat,…
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…
Are you a Jewish student? Are you fed up with the state of American Zionism? Have $5? Good. Click here before April 30, pay the $5, then vote to change things. I can’t explain the process, the necessity, or the candidates better than J.J.Goldberg did in two articles in the Forward, so I won’t try….
There’s a point in academic research where one becomes somewhat monomaniacal. I wouldn’t know what that word means unless it had been on an episode of The West Wing, but here I mean to say that I’ve sort of lost the ability to think about things that aren’t Jewish identity and theology (to the eternal…
In the fall of 2011, Yeshiva University demanded that The Beacon, a student-run publication, remove a ‘scandalous’ story about premarital sex from its website. The student editors fought back, but the administrators threatened them with sanctions if they did not comply with the Orthodox university’s perceptions of modesty. Ultimately, the editors decided to sever ties…