Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
My friend Kyle emailed me earlier this morning with the subject line “Baruch Hashem.” And baruch hashem indeed. As AP reports, Hugh Heffner’s vast pornographic empire has finally extended its titillating grasp to the olive-lined land of our brethren: Playboy, the 60-year-old popular men’s magazine/soft porn magazine (depending on your mood), has just launched its very own Hebrew…
It’s popular today to talk about the trouble encountered by Jews on American college campuses. We see it differently: As we wrote recently, there’s never been a better time to be a Jewish college student in America. Most supposed examples of contemporary anti-Semitism on American college campuses are actually examples of anti-Zionism mistaken for anti-Semitism, legitimate debate…
Hillel is advertised as “the foundation for Jewish campus life.” Yet, even before I joined the programming board of my Hillel at Tufts University, I could tell it was missing an important part of the Jewish campus community: those who support Palestine through international non-violent movements that currently fall outside the Jewish institutional mainstream. In order to…
On the first day of Ulpan, Jenna Gang showed us the tattoo of her Hebrew name printed on the back of her neck. From then on, we called her Yosefa. We lived together in a cramped apartment in Jerusalem, she the established New York City photographer and I the aspiring California writer, both participating on…
By way of following up on yesterday’s post on a new report about Israeli and Palestinian textbooks: (via quickmeme)
Yesterday afternoon, I sat on a park bench in my neighborhood, soaking up the sun. Dhana, a small Filipino girl made her way over to me, soccer ball tucked under her arm, dragging her mother by the wirst. When she reached the bench where I sat, she dropped the ball, threw her arms around me…
We hear it all the time: The American Jewish community is in decline. Interest is lacking, affiliation is down — and Jewish babies are popping out less frequently than we would like. If members of the Jewish establishment are correct, the future of American Judaism is in great peril, and if we don’t do a…
I have a quick question to ask our readers in the wake of recent elections in both the USA and Israel. What is Barack Obama’s middle name? My guess is that you, like much of our electorate, know that his middle name is “Hussein.” My guess is that you know this not because you were…
As Obama signaled a more liberal second term during his second inaugural speech, I braced for the Israeli election. International media predicted a “right-wing doomsday,” decrying the end of once dominant “secular liberalism” in Israeli politics. One article from Israel/Palestine-based +972 Magazine projected that Prime Minister Netanyahu was losing ground—to the extreme right. In other words,…
Jerusalem, ISRAEL — As the 2010 film Inception suggests, the introduction of a simple idea can be done very subtly but can transform a person’s resulting thought pattern or behavior completely. In reality, if you do not have conviction about a particular fact, you are much more likely to be swayed to believe the opposite when…
Last winter, I attended the second Occupy Oakland port shutdown, along with hundreds of other students. At a midday rally, Angela Davis, one of my greatest heroines and a professor of my alma mater, addressed the crowd. My heart soared as she spoke of the “wins” of the first port shutdown. However, my beating pulse…
This article was originally posted on the author’s personal blog, and can be read here. What I have to say is controversial. But bear with me, and let me first contextualize, with something I think we all can agree on. The Jewish narrative is one of struggle. With me so far? Since the birth of the…
The Forward’s Artist-in-Residence, Eli Valley just published a comic about a recent episode at Bnai Jeshurun, a non-denominational, liberal synagogue in New York City. The rabbis had sent out an email to their congregants praising the U.N. Palestinian vote, and then, after intense media coverage and mixed reactions from the community, they later apologized and…
This article was originally posted on the personal blog of the author, which you can find here. Today I saw a pregnant woman lying in an alleyway crying, and I jogged right past her. Re-read that sentence. I jogged right past her. Yes. That’s right. Who have I become? Around 7:30 tonight, I left my apartment…
Jerusalem, ISRAEL — Life-threatening terror ripped into Israeli skies two weeks ago, sweeping sleep from the eyes of an elderly resident of Moshav Even Shmuel and paralyzing his heart. A 2 a.m. siren wail and the nearby explosion of a Hamas-fired grad missile triggered a heart attack that might have listed Mordechai among the fatalities…