Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
An article by Amanda Borschel-Dan in the Times of Israel has described American youth as moving with “lightning speed” towards anti-Semitism. The proof in the nationalist pudding, it seems, is a lessening support for Israel among American youth. It seems that non-Jewish teenagers and young adults associate Israel a little too much with the over…
A college student’s first encounter with anti-Semitism on campus can be mildly terrifying: after all, anti-Semitism does not announce itself with a big red flag or banner. In some cases, it may even take a while for the student to realize what happened. A comment such as “no wonder you’re irritable, you can’t eat bacon”…
July 6, 2014: The recent decision of the Presbyterian Church (USA) to divest from three companies, Caterpillar, Hewlett-Packard, and Motorola, it sees as playing an instrumental role in Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian Territories, has succeeded beyond the church’s wildest expectations, ending the occupation and bringing about peaceful co-existence between Israelis and Palestinians mere weeks…
The #YesAllWomen meme has been one of the most transformative moments in the history of social media, and it’s been exciting to watch the long-overdue conversations it has inspired unfold across all media platforms. Recently, it got me thinking: Are there experiences common to all Jews, or at least all North American Jews? My thoughts…
In response to the abduction of three teenagers, Eyal Yifrah, Gil-ad Shaar, and Naftali Frankel, over a week ago in the West Bank, a petition to President Obama has been circulating around the Internet asking for the Executive Office to pressure the Palestinian Authority to release the one American citizen of the three kidnapped teenagers….
April, 1944. Just weeks after the Nazis invaded Hungary, 15-year-old Ben Lesser and his family were forced to Munkachevo, Hungary. After months of avoiding the Germans in Hungary, the town was liquidated. Lesser and his family were marched to a brick factory shadowed by freight trains. In early May, they were loaded into cattle cars….
Here’s why I usually hate Twitter: We will never get to the bottom of the big issues facing humanity—poverty, disease, warfare, Israel on campus—without a long dialogue held in good faith between dissenting viewpoints. In other words, getting to the bottom of the world’s ills will take more than volleying 140-character spitballs with a…
On a scorching day, during my Holocaust studies trip to Poland in the summer of 2012, a fellow student and I wandered through Birkenau like ghosts, pale despite the fact that the July sun was burning our backs, pondering the same question. It was the same question that we, and several others of our peers…
2 Poems by Sophie Katzman: Descendant’s Blessing Zadie. Zionist. Yellow stars. Young and old yearning for years passed. Yahrzeit. Yiddush: lyb, sholem. War. Woody Allen. Leaving notes on the Western Wall. The V’ahavta. U-blessed by the Orthodox Union. Torah. Tzedakah. Tikkun Olam, we repair the world. Shabbat. Sternberg Sewing. Samuel’s Metal Shop. Schlep. Shylock….
With the release of the University of California’s campus climate survey results, the Anti-Defamation League and the regional pro-Israel watchdog AMCHA Institute pounced on the results, which indicated that life for Jewish students on UC campuses is less than perfect. The results, announced last month, show Jewish students self-describe as some of the most uncomfortable…
I My stepfather always told me that all the best books have maps. So when I opened Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel a map was the first thing I looked for. I found it on the first page of the book, just after the title page and the…
South Dakota State University’s B’rth Sholom is more than just the only Jewish cultural club in the state. Its nine members constitute one of America’s most diverse Jewish organizations, as about half them identify as Messianic Jews, or those with Jewish practice who accept Jesus as the Messiah. “We really don’t try to segregate by…
Scores (if not hundreds) of Jewish and Pro-Israel students spent Tuesday night in a crowded ballroom at UCLA to advocate against the student government’s proposed passage of a divestment resolution. I, on the other hand, sat at my computer 125 miles away, wearing sweatpants and drinking Coke Zero with lemon watching the USAC divestment meeting…
I think my education started early. I remember sitting in the car with my mother at the age of 10, en route from my Hebrew school to … somewhere. It was the spring of 2002, height of the Second Intifada,and the rhetoric that went alongside it. I was narrating all of the things we had…
Zach Cohen’s New Voices article was not exactly the most adulatory of Costa Rica. His piece prompted responses: one from Q Costa Rica and two from the Costa Rica Star – an initial piece and a follow-up. These pieces took a largely self-defensive, mocking, and somewhat anti-Semitic tone. Yet at the same time, the pieces…