Pew Survey Conversation (Part 3)

By Derek M. Kwait October 30, 2013

Part 3 in a 3 part series. Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here. 7.      What are your reactions to survey respondents’ answers to “What does it mean to be Jewish”? What creates Jewish meaning for you? Dr. Steven M. Cohen, sociologist: These questions pertain to areas of great ambiguity. I wouldn’t…

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Meet Steve, Sarah, Eliana, and Jonathan.

An Inter-Everything Conversation About the Pew Survey

By Derek M. Kwait October 28, 2013

Part 1 in a 3 part series.   We might just be the last Jewish organization to respond to the big bad Pew Survey and we’re fine with that. It seems like every response so far is other people telling us what how we need to feel about it, whether we should be scared,  take…

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Open Hillel for an Open Hillel

By Gabriel T. Erbs October 23, 2013

The Midwest does not get enough credit for its foundational role in the American Jewish community. However, the first campus Hillel was established in 1923 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In an atmosphere where Jewish campus life was largely non-existent, the first Hillel marked a new age for American Jewish students who endured…

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Self-Loathing “Jewtopia”

By Derek M. Kwait September 30, 2013

Jewtopia features Tom Arnold as a gynecologist. That could be the review right there; any further commentary seems superfluous. Yet I will go on because in truth, I have a lot more to say, or at least vent, about this movie. Its central plot concerns the unlikely friendship between Christian O’Connell (Ivan Sergei) and Adam…

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Let’s Talk About Here!

By Jonathan Katz September 25, 2013

Publications aimed for a queer Jewish audience, like any niche-aimed work, tend to concentrate on certain themes. There are your coming out to your community publications, there are your famous-queer-Jews publications, there are your “my story” publications. And then there is another trend: a deep, heavy, nearly-overwhelming concentration on Israel. Israel is everywhere in the…

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A New Year of Peace?

By Emily Greenspan September 23, 2013

Just a few weeks ago, the White House released a video of President Obama wishing the American Jewish community a sweet New Year.  Obama emphasized the importance of the newly-resumed peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians, as well as the responsibility of American Jews to act to bring an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Now…

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Lots of Jewish Commencement Speakers: Surprising?

By Ben Sales May 20, 2011

As commencement season draws to a close, I turned the Jewdar on to see how MOTs fared in this year’s roster of commencement speakers. The result: rather well. The most complete list I could find included 47 speech-makers adressing graduates at over 50 universities nationwide, so there’s a lot of data missing. The sample I…

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Why I support the Park 51 community center

By admin September 27, 2010

This is a post by Moriel Rothman, the president of J Street U and a senior at Middlebury College. The recent rise in American Islamophobia has taken many forms. This past May, someone attempted to bomb a Florida mosque in which 60 worshippers were praying. Perhaps more disturbing than the specific event itself was the…

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American Jews and Park51: Tell Us How You Really Feel

By bspringer September 16, 2010

Why do the Jews hate Park51 (the so-called “ground-zero mosque” to be built on the shallow grave of the ever-mourned Park Place Burlington Coat Factory in lower Manhattan, two blocks from the site of 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center)? Abe Foxman, Holocaust survivor and the world’s leading crusader against anti-Semitism, told Sufi Imam…

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J Street U: Endorsing Peter Beinart’s “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment”

By admin May 24, 2010

Crossposted from J Street U. Welcome to seventh grade Hebrew School class: the unit is Israel awareness. The teacher stands at the front of the room, and stresses the purity of Israel’s cause, the danger of our enemies – Nazis and Palestinians alike – and the need to support Israel unquestioningly. We are young, and…

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