The Shtetl Goes Digital: Modern Yentas Turn to Facebook

By Sarah Asch November 27, 2018

Photo credit: athree23 | Pixabay.com. This past summer, Ronit Treatman read a wedding announcement in the New York Times about a successful match made at a bar mitzvah. Treatman, a 50-year-old Philadelphia native, has spent the last decade connecting the Jewish community, largely through several community forums she has built and managed on Facebook. Reading the…

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Socialist Circles Have an Anti-Semitism Problem – They’re Called Tankies

By Julia Métraux June 26, 2018

In the days following the results of the 2016 American presidential election, I actively searched for places to express my frustration as a young American socialist living abroad who was frankly devastated by the election results. I was overjoyed to find one Facebook group made up of Bernie Sanders supporters who wanted a place to…

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Young Jews Created an Online Community for Kvetching – Jewbook

By Lev Gringauz April 17, 2018

Young Jews are increasingly disaffiliated from mainstream Jewish institutions and those institutions are panicking. But many young Jews aren’t lost at all. They’re just expressing their Jewishness elsewhere – Facebook. In fact, they’ve built their own institution of sorts: Jewbook, a term referring to a community of Jewish Facebook groups. “I think there are several…

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Social Media Was Bad For My Judaism

By Sarah Simon July 11, 2017

Our generation has created two gods. One of them is Facebook. Bold statement, right? But let me explain: There is a real G-d and a god we have created in our own (albeit distorted) image, and we dubbed that god “social media.” We spend all our time on it and use it to engage in…

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5 Jewish Facebook Spaces For All Your Procrastinating Needs

By New Voices Staff June 26, 2017

Sure, it may be summer now, but fall semester is coming quicker than you know it. And when it does come, you’re going to need ways to procrastinate your midterms, projects, and more. Thankfully, New Voices has you covered with five Jewish Facebook spaces to enhance your procrastinating experience. Whether you’re into arguing with fellow…

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The Prophetic Problem With ‘Privilege’

By Evan Goldstein May 7, 2015

  These days, it seems I can’t scroll down my Facebook news feed without seeing something about privilege. At Boston College and within American Jewry more broadly, conversations about privilege of various kinds have been vigorous and ongoing. While much of it has focused on racial privilege, especially here at New Voices, there has been…

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Beware of the Thought Police on Campus

By Holly Bicerano December 31, 2014

    Recent occurrences on campuses have greatly undermined freedom of expression and should serve as a forewarning of what will happen in the future. While the hardliners of any ideological camp will seldom admit it, the perpetrators and victims have been people on both the left and right; both Zionists and anti-Zionists. In a…

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5 Ways to Make Jewish Life Less ‘Clichéd’ from an Actual Millennial

By Amram Altzman December 15, 2014

  I am a Millennial. I say this proudly. I dance around Jewish tradition, modernity, and practice in a way that Millennials do. I whole-heartedly enjoy my status as a Generation Y’er. At the same time, however, I really don’t like how much of the conversation about how to engage my peers is fundamentally had…

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The ‘Blood Bucket Challenge’ Controversy and the Days of Awe

By Derek M. Kwait October 3, 2014

By now, the controversy over the Ohio University “Blood Bucket Challenge” video is relatively old news: About a month ago, Megan Marzec, president of the OU student senate, was challenged by the university president to dump a bucket of ice water over her head in support of ALS research. She responded by making a video…

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From Italy, A Bridge to Anne Frank

By Sofia Domino October 1, 2014

My name is Sofia, I’m 26 years old, and I live in Italy. Like any young woman, I have many interests: I love traveling, reading, listening to music, eating, and living new experiences. I have been to the Unites States several times, and also to France and Spain, and I also lived in London for…

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OMGWTFEXODUS: A Dialogue With the Man Who’s Bringing the Bible to the 21st Century

By Derek M. Kwait September 5, 2014

Part live spectacle, part Biblical scholarship, comedian David Tuchman’s OMGWTFBIBLE podcast “reframes the Bible as the world’s oldest weekly comedy serial.” A year-and-a-half after its debut in April 2013 (as seen in New Voices), he’s now heading into Exodus. I caught up with David recently in the food court of Grand Central Station to discuss…

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Why the Search for Aaron Sofer Matters

By David G. August 27, 2014

On Friday, August 22, Aaron Sofer was taking a shortcut through the Jerusalem Forest with his friend. The two became separated when his friend wanted to try hiking up a hill, and later that evening when the friend returned home, he discovered that Aaron was missing. When I came online Saturday night, I learned about…

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Bring Back Our Boys, Not Just Our Boy

By Amram Altzman June 23, 2014

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….

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Two Student Censorship False Alarms

By Derek M. Kwait June 19, 2014

Kate Jacobson, the former Israel chair at the University of Calgary, recently bowed to pressure from other students and resigned her post due to her highly controversial views on Israel, as reported by the Calgary Jewish News. The most important thing to note here is that she was not told to leave by Hillel— upon…

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A Failure of Sense and Torah Study: On the “Indigenous” Argument

By Jonathan Katz May 21, 2014

So my last article– discussing the historical parallels between Israel today and White South Africa pre-1994 – went mildly viral. It was something I was not prepared for: I had expected the typical (warm, exciting, and fairly big, but nevertheless decidedly niche) response a New Voices article garners: a few dozen Facebook “likes,” no more…

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