Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
In January 2014, Rabbi Avi Weiss’s conversions were called into question by the Israeli Rabbinate. At the time, this was the most prominent example of the differences between the Orthodoxy’s left and right wings, as well as the growing gulf between American and Israeli Jewries. This gulf widened last week when news broke of the…
When I was in high school, I stopped wearing my kippah. I felt myself drifting away from the ultra-Orthodox community of my childhood and the Modern Orthodoxy my parents tried to model for me at home. I stopped wearing my kippah because I wanted to disaffiliate from the Orthodox Jews that filled New York City…
I’ve written before on my day school education and its different aspects, critiquing how it taught me (or perhaps should have taught me) to look at my history and my past; I’ve also offered what can perhaps be best described as a back-handed compliment to my Jewish education. Now, as someone who has been…
Modern Orthodoxy has a problem and a blessing: it is the belief that one can be both Modern and Orthodox. The problem is that when one changes, the other must, too, for if we are truly to be both Modern and Orthodox, then as modern world changes, our Orthodoxy must change, too. And that must…
Students trickle into a cozy room. Boys walk to the farther side, and girls sit in the closer side. A mechitza [partition] runs down the middle. Everyone opens up his or her siddur and prepares for Kabbalat Shabbat as a female student walks up to the bima [stage] and starts the Yedid Nefesh prayer. This…