Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
“I love soup, I always have…and, crucially, it’s the kind of food you can make in large quantities without it being too expensive. It’s also a humble kind of food – even if it’s really high-quality. It’s friendly, it’s welcoming. It’s a comfort food, and no matter what culture you’re from, soup is often the thing you eat when you’re sick, or the thing you eat on cold nights.”
Returning from a short break, after sitting in a small lawn outside between classes and reading the New York Times’s inside look at the squalid conditions in an American concentration camp in Texas, complete with maps demarcating where children are held in cinderblock cells and auxiliary tents for overcrowding, I stare at the wall of prayerbooks and wonder: How can I learn Torah while the world is burning?
If, like me, you find yourself with a bit more free time on your hands (and hopefully a comfy hammock or other great reading spot), here’s a list of books I’ve enjoyed recently– some new and some old, some Jewish and some not– that are all worth a read.
This zine was created by Rena Yehuda Newman, who is a 2019 fellow with New Voices and Judaism Unbound. It was originally published on Judaism Unbound’s website.
Two and a half years ago, I read a piece that changed my life. NPR’s Leah Donnella penned a deeply personal essay about being both Jewish and Black…I felt like she was speaking directly to my own experiences.
Four women sit around a table. Playing cards are laid out in front of each player and tiles are shuffled. Laughter and friendly chit-chat fill the air. The game begins; phrases that might seem foreign to bystanders replace the chit-chat, and off they go. Four Crak! Two Bam! Three Dot! Around the table it goes…
הִנֵּה מַה טוב ומַה נָעִים שֶבֶת אַחִים גַם יָחַד Hineh Mah tov umah na’im shevet achim gam yachad. Here! What good! What sweetness! Siblings, friends and comrades sitting together! When we embrace ritual, we stand in the threshold between community and isolation, sacred and profane, this moment and our history. Ritual is not just a…
On April 17th, the brand-new student organization Nice Jewish Queers at the University of Southern California was getting ready to host one of their biggest events of the year: the Passover drag show, which intended to celebrate the queer Jewish community on campus. Within a day, however, student leader Ariella Amit was sending in her…
Hillel has a long way to go if it wants to live up to its stated values of inclusion and belonging. I arrived on the campus of the University of Southern California (USC) yearning for a Jewish space where I, as a queer Jew, could feel celebrated for all of my identities. I quickly became…
Lift your head from the haggadah. Where is Pharaoh’s army today? This inquiry motivated Rabbi Arthur Waskow to create the first Freedom Seder. After Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s April 1968 assassination, Waskow saw the police occupation of black neighborhoods in DC and other cities nationwide as an uncanny parallel to the Passover story. The…
Controversy erupted at Middlebury last week after a question from a chemistry midterm came to light that invoked the Holocaust. The question identified Hydrogen Cyanide as “a poisonous gas that Nazi Germany used to horrific ends in the gas chambers during the Holocaust,” and then asked students to calculate a lethal dose of the substance…
This article was originally published in the Middlebury Campus on April 8th, 2019. A question posed on a chemistry midterm last month asked students to calculate “a lethal dose” of the gas “Nazi Germany used to horrific ends in the gas chambers during The Holocaust.” The test question was brought to public attention last Friday…
In July of 2014, sirens pierced the Jerusalem air, warning of rockets coming from Gaza. Nathan Young, then a 22-year-old junior studying abroad, leaped off the bus heading toward his dorm room at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and hurried into a gas station store-turned-bomb-shelter, feeling numb. Young recalls being on the phone with a…
This essay originally appeared in ZAMAN, an arts & media collective dedicated to the remembrance, preservation, and re-evaluation of Mizrahi cultural consciousness. Last year, my friends and I invited one of our visiting lecturers, a Tibetan Buddhist monk, to a Tu B’Shvat seder in the Charedi-turned-hippie neighborhood of Nachlaot. The event’s Facebook page asked guests to bring…
As I pack the last box and turn out the lights to the apartment, I feel the tears begin to come. They are tears of anger, and of sadness, and of grief. They are the tears of a young woman who has had to make decisions that no 25-year-old should have to make. At the…