Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
It’s popular today to talk about the trouble encountered by Jews on American college campuses. We see it differently: As we wrote recently, there’s never been a better time to be a Jewish college student in America. Most supposed examples of contemporary anti-Semitism on American college campuses are actually examples of anti-Zionism mistaken for anti-Semitism, legitimate debate…
Jon Stewart has occasionally joked about the inferiority of Jewish holidays when compared with our Christian counterparts. He’s lamented the cardboard taste of matzah, expressed his jealousy at the yummy chocolates given out on Easter, and generally represented the sentiments of many Jewish Americans that our calendar of holidays is not quite so fun. Well,…
Hillel is advertised as “the foundation for Jewish campus life.” Yet, even before I joined the programming board of my Hillel at Tufts University, I could tell it was missing an important part of the Jewish campus community: those who support Palestine through international non-violent movements that currently fall outside the Jewish institutional mainstream. In order to…
We hear it all the time: The American Jewish community is in decline. Interest is lacking, affiliation is down — and Jewish babies are popping out less frequently than we would like. If members of the Jewish establishment are correct, the future of American Judaism is in great peril, and if we don’t do a…
I have a quick question to ask our readers in the wake of recent elections in both the USA and Israel. What is Barack Obama’s middle name? My guess is that you, like much of our electorate, know that his middle name is “Hussein.” My guess is that you know this not because you were…
If community is a foundation of Jewish life, what does Judaism have to say about solitary confinement, the forcible separation of a person from the community? A few months ago I began an internship with Solitary Watch, an investigative news organization dedicated to reporting on solitary confinement. Once I got started, I became interested in…
Last winter, I attended the second Occupy Oakland port shutdown, along with hundreds of other students. At a midday rally, Angela Davis, one of my greatest heroines and a professor of my alma mater, addressed the crowd. My heart soared as she spoke of the “wins” of the first port shutdown. However, my beating pulse…
At least one member of the New Voices editorial board sat in a meeting of their Hillel board this week at which a discussion of security spontaneously took its place on top of the agenda. We assure you it was not the first such discussion in a Jewish organization this week, nor the first on…
We’ve all heard the story: Chanukah, the festival of lights, celebrates the miraculous event that occurred a couple thousand years back, where the Maccabees and their friends only had enough oil to kindle their menorah for one day, but it somehow lasted for eight days and nights. We’ve also heard this story: Chanukah is an…
There is a long history of anti-Semitism at Harvard University, though it is essentially gone today. There is also a long history of subtle — and not so subtle — grandiose acts of satire at Harvard. Last Friday morning, students who live in Harvard University’s nine River Houses awoke to find that the intersection of those two…
I have a confession to make: I’ve been cynical. While I love Israel deeply, studied abroad in Haifa, and study the Middle East academically, for the bulk of my college career I would not get involved with campus Israel-related activity. It was too polarized, too entrenched, and too disconnected from the nuanced and intellectual conversations…
Last week, it became painfully clear to the Harvard College Progressive Jewish Alliance (PJA) that Hillel is moving farther and farther from being “the foundation of Jewish campus life” that it claims to be. As an affiliated group of Harvard Hillel, PJA tries to promote dialogue and discussion between Jews and Palestinians on campus and…
Sitting in the opening plenary of the 2012 Jewish Federations of North America’s General Assembly, I was struck by one thing. American Jews are really into college students. Speaker after speaker emphasized the vision they have for the future of American Judaism, and time and time again they spoke of the importance of our “leaders…
In a stunning twist, a national organization just invested a great deal of time and effort into researching the nature of Israel’s reputation on college campuses. The American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, a non-profit established to spread knowledge of “the values our nations share” (America and Israel), has produced the latest report on anti-Israel and anti-Semitic sentiment…
Anat Hoffman does good work for the Jewish community. As the head of the Israel Religious Action Center, she directs an organization that is helping to build the civil society devoted to liberal democracy that Israel desperately needs. Yet many in the Jewish world have never heard of her. She doesn’t even pass the does-she-have-a-Wikipedia-article…