Stuff White People Like: Savior Complexes and Palestine

By Jonathan Katz August 15, 2014

    Some people study whales. Some people study epistemological analysis. I study white people. More specifically, I am interested in diaspora networking and migrant housing stock, but I am also interested in the way whiteness as a concept affects these in host countries. A lot of the time, that idea means things like deeply…

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The Reform Movement Must Apply its Values to Israel

By Hannah Ehlers July 31, 2014

Early in my Jewish education, I was taught that, as Jews and as human beings living in an imperfect world, we are obligated to stand up and speak out in the face of injustice. However small or large the perceived wrong, and despite our shaking legs and cracking voices or how powerful and vocal the…

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Fifty Shades of J Street

By Derek M. Kwait October 21, 2013

It used to be, said a speaker at J Street U’s plenary session during the national J Street Conference, that students were expected to listen to learn from others. Now, he said, with the success of the fights for civil rights, marriage equality, unionizing, and women’s rights—all of which were led by student movements—the world…

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“Real” Rape

By Meggie O'Dell October 14, 2013

When my roommate at USC, a film student with a pink streak in her hair, edited a documentary on rape, I remember the ambivalence I felt. This issue, I thought, was a closed book: a mandatory assembly on rape and consent, massive turnout for Take Back the Night demonstrations, “yes means yes and no means…

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The freaks of J Street [J Street]

By Shani Chabansky April 2, 2012

I came to the J Street Conference looking for allies. As a queer Jew who is sternly critical of Israel, but still a staunch Zionist, I was looking forward to meeting some like-minded folks. Folks who can’t help but discuss privilege, minorities, and oppression. Folks who are obsessed with identity politics. Folks who face the…

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Drawing the Activist Line [Activism]

By pkessler March 29, 2012

Justice Antonin Scalia came to speak at Wesleyan a few weeks ago. Cool, right? Isn’t it great that the University chose to bring a Supreme Court Justice and highly educated Constitutional scholar to campus in order to engage in discussion with the students? Well, not quite. I respect the University’s choice to bring to campus…

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Torah and modern activism; don’t pray the gay away; and more. [Required Reading]

By John Propper February 27, 2012

Israel has more non-orthodox Jews than Haredim, study finds [Jewish Journal] A recent study demonstrates that Israel’s Conservative and Reform populations appear greater in number than that of its Haredim (ultra-orthodox), though not by much. Could this knowledge spell a shift in representation for an Israeli population that doesn’t seem to make as much political…

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When Tahrir was my hangout [Abroad]

By Gabriel T. Erbs November 28, 2011

As we sat drinking knock-off, yoghurt-tasting whiskey (“Johnn Walke Red Label”) and smoked hashish cigarettes, it was hard to imagine things would ever be different for Mohey and Mahmoud, our Egyptian friends who lived their whole lives under President Hosni Mubarak’s iron fist. Their rhetoric didn’t invite much room for change. They called the entire…

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JVP: Student Activism Gone Wrong

By Ben Sales November 9, 2010

Protest movements, to gain legitimacy, often relate their cause to another, more established one from the past. Thus we see that gay rights advocates cite the Civil Rights movement of the fifties and sixties, and advocates against the Iraq War find common cause with antiwar protesters from the Vietnam era. Not all protests are the…

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