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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Teach Modern Hebrew

By Noah Westreich October 17, 2013

Jewish education in American synagogues is often compartmentalized into a curriculum: an hour of Judaic Studies and an hour of Hebrew, twice weekly. Judaic studies includes watered-down lessons on holidays and Torah stories. Mastery of the alef-bet, the Hebrew alphabet, is often all students gain from the Hebrew class. By the Bat/Bar Mitzvah  age of…

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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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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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Andrew Blitman: The Voice of Our Jewish Generation?

By Simi Lichtman March 13, 2013

Be yourself. It’s advice we’ve all heard before, and for the most part ignore—after all, it leads to those pesky questions like, “Who am I?” that no one wants to answer—but to Andrew Blitman, 22 year old author of two books and a successful blog, it’s the most important thing of all. A graduate school…

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We Burned newvoices.org Down. Welcome to The New newvoices.org.

By David A.M. Wilensky September 20, 2012

We finally did it. We burned down that horrible, pain-in-the-[insert funny Yiddish-ish word for “ass” here] website. Welcome to the new and improved newvoices.org. And make sure you check out everything this glorious new blog has to offer. If we do this right, the Conspiracy will cover everything you’d expect a cell of the Jewish…

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Bloggity Bloggity Blog

By Simi Lichtman September 20, 2012

It’s not every day a Jewish college student gets to announce the commencement of a new (or is it the continuation of a millennia-old?) media conspiracy. So we intend to do so with great pride and pomp. Insofar as such, heretofore and wherewithal: Welcome, one and all! To those coming from far, from near, from…

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I really, really, really dislike modifiers

By Ben Sales February 18, 2010

Read the following sentence, from the cover story of this month’s Utne Reader: On the trail of decoding attention, Mike Posner–unarguably the greatest attention scientist of our time–is invariably two steps ahead. Now, try this sentence: On the trail of decoding attention, Mike Posner–the greatest attention scientist of our time–is two steps ahead. It’s the…

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