Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
Photo credit: Josie Krieger. Lior Sternfeld wants you to judge his book, “Between Iran and Zion: Jewish Histories of Twentieth-Century Iran,” by its cover. Depicting the Tomb of the prophet Daniel in Susa, Iran, its movement and color speaks to the relationship between Iranian Jews with other Iranians – and other Jews. The fluid and…
This essay originally appeared in ZAMAN, an arts & media collective dedicated to the remembrance, preservation, and re-evaluation of Mizrahi cultural consciousness. Last year, my friends and I invited one of our visiting lecturers, a Tibetan Buddhist monk, to a Tu B’Shvat seder in the Charedi-turned-hippie neighborhood of Nachlaot. The event’s Facebook page asked guests to bring…
Though 150 journalists and bloggers from 30 countries had gathered in Jerusalem for the Israeli Press Office-sponsored Jewish New Media Summit in late November, American Jewry was very nearly the only subject of conversation when discussing the strained relationship between Israel and the Jewish Diaspora. Over the course of the three and a half day…
I never knew that a world union of Jewish students existed, let alone the World Union of Jewish Students, until only a few months ago. My Jewish campus worldview was shaped by my time involved in Hillel and Chabad, with the assumption that because both the organizations are international, Jewish life at universities worldwide must…
After Jewish summer camp, USY, and a Talmud Torah education, my friend told me he was disillusioned with Zionism. “I’ve always found the idea of Diaspora to be super meaningful,” he said. “The majority of Judaism is based on Diasporic tradition and the allegory of Diaspora. Modern Zionism sort of spits at this.” He explained…
Originally published in the Spring 2016 edition of The Current. It has been over seventy years since the end of World War II and the Holocaust. As remaining survivors become fewer and fewer, the Holocaust moves from being a living memory to one that is more historical in nature. Inevitably, as we are further removed…
i. Tevye Comes to Brooklyn My dad and I read Sholem Aleichem when I’m young. He has a copy of Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories, but we stick to Tevye. We sit on the couch and he reads out loud to me. I grow up on Aleichem, not Fiddler on the Roof; my…
We, the American Jewish community, have an Israel problem, and we need to talk about it. It’s not the fact that Israel exists. It’s not the fact that it’s a politically fraught topic to discuss — although that’s certainly part of it. It’s the mere fact that Israel and Zionism as abstract concepts are…
There seem to be two choices in mainstream Jewish life: Either you’re pro-Zionism, or you’re anti-Zionism. A new online publication, Zionish, rejects that binary. “Our stance is to reject the traditional stances,” Zionish editor Aaron Simons told New Voices via email. “People conceive of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as one where you have to be either…
Every morning for the last two weeks, like many other people, I’ve woken up hoping that the wave of violence between Israelis and Palestinians has ended overnight. Every morning for the last two weeks, I’ve been upset, frustrated, and saddened to realize that, no, the violence hasn’t ended. It often seems that I and…
In May, BirthWrong gave students the opportunity to travel to Spain to learn about communism, the Spanish Civil War, and Jewish culture outside of Israel. BirthWrong was founded by the left-wing British organization Jewdas as a response to Taglit-Birthright Israel, an organization that takes Jews aged 18 to 26 on a free trip to Israel….
Every year, even if I celebrate it differently and even as my perceptions of Zionism and the Jewish State become evermore complicated, Yom HaAtzmaut always evokes in me a certain special nostalgia. It was only once I was no longer forced to celebrate the holiday like I did in elementary and high school—with Israeli dancing,…
Israel advocacy started out for me as the “unconditional” support for the State of Israel and its policies because they, broadly, were in agreement with my Western, liberal values. For the most part, the Israeli government—in lip service, if not at all in action—supported the idea of a two-state solution, of a government that would…
I’ve got this list. On it, I jot down the names of authors I mean to read when I have the time, and at the top of this list is James Baldwin. Knowing little about him, I somewhat absent-mindedly opened a 1967 essay Baldwin wrote in the New York Times Magazine. I was speechless:…
What Judaism will actually look like 50 years from now
I don’t often like to think about the future. Instead, I like to study my past (hence my Jewish History major) and understand my present (hence my sociology major). But when Commentary released its symposium wherein seventy professional Jews — academics, philosophers, researchers, and the like — were asked about what Judaism will look like…