Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
I recently published my first op-ed in the Jewish Press. In it, I made the claim — contrary to the beliefs of the far-right wing publication —that those of us who were raised in the left-wing Modern Orthodox world are not, actually lost to secularism, but are instead, re-imagining the world of traditionally observant Judaism…
Bloggers made much ado as Julia Lipnitskaia took to the ice in the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. It wasn’t because she was one of the best figure skaters in the world at only 15 years old. It wasn’t that in Lipnitskaia Russia had a representative on the rink for the first time in 10…
Every night, I fall asleep to a playlist titled “Jewish Sleep Music.” Once upon a time, as a child, it consisted of mainly Kol B’seder’s covers of melodies that I’d learned in Hebrew School, like Shalom Rav and Oseh Shalom. At the time, before I really knew what their lyrics meant, the songs relaxed me because…
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…
I am a product of thirteen years of primary, elementary, and secondary Jewish day school education. I’ve been enrolled in a Jewish day school since I was three years old, and the idea of starting my school day at nine in the morning and ending at 2:30 in the afternoon is totally foreign to me….
I am blessed to have had the opportunity to travel extensively in the last six months. Following a four-and-a-half month stint in Costa Rica studying at la Universidad Nacional in Heredia, I traveled in Israel on Birthright provider Kesher. After leaving those travels, I had a lot of thoughts on what it means to be…
Growing up in the early 2000’s means I watched copious amounts of Arthur, Cyberchase, Pokémon, and Yu-Gi-Oh!; I knew the dance to “Soulja Boy,” played on my Gameboy obsessively, and ate Go-gurts (or the kosher equivalents thereof) on the school bus ride home. Growing up in the 2000’s also meant that I saw men…
For the past few weeks I’ve seen from various sources on Facebook, and most recently on Tablet, a growing concern about a potentially frightening new trend: Featured on several Amazon.com best-seller lists are e-book editions of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The first responses I’ve seen have been understandably negative, coming from some reasonably…
Just a few days after my blog post from last week ran, the Israeli rabbinate decided that it would, indeed, accept Rabbi Avi Weiss’ testimony as legitimate for people he vouched for as Jewish. This is a step in the right direction for the Israeli rabbinate, which had previously called Rabbi Weiss’ validity into…
David Harris-Gershon is a Jewish educator, author, speaker, and regular blogger for Tikkun Magazine. He was recently asked by the Israel Committee of Santa Barbara to be a keynote speaker at its annual event, which was to be housed in the Santa Barbara Hillel building. He was going to speak about his book, What Do You Buy the Children of the Terrorist…
It’s old news that the Israeli rabbinate rejects those who are not Orthodox, especially in regards to immigration or marriage. What was recently revealed, however, was exactly how this process of rejection or acceptance happens, in light of the Israeli Rabbinate’s recently calling Rabbi Avi Weiss’ status as an Orthodox rabbi into question. This was…
Well, by the Gregorian calendar, we have officially lived in the year 2014 for a week. For one thing, this means I will spend about three more weeks dating assignments “2013,” only to see autocorrect bluntly demonstrate the error of my ways. For another, this means that both the Jewish and secular seasonal winter holidays…
I have a hard time answering the question, “So how do you identify? Like, Jewish-ly?” On the one hand, I grew up in a Modern Orthodox home and attended Modern Orthodox schools since kindergarten, but, for most of my life so far, was part of a haredi community in southern Brooklyn. On the other hand,…
When I traveled to Warsaw on a Holocaust study tour two summers ago, my group found the city particularly warm. In the middle of the day, we stopped for a respite—from the heat as much as the emotional drain of touring Holocaust sites—at a Starbucks in the city center. The juxtaposition—of both the air conditioning…
I am very openly willing to criticize the Israeli government. Two of my recent blog posts for New Voices have been criticisms of Israel’s Housing Ministry for announcing the constructions of new settlements at a crucial point in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and Israel’s Prime Minister in condemning the announcement of negotiations between the United States and…