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

Amram Altzman for newvoices.com

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 by people who don’t seem to understand how our system works. And, as a self-confessed Millennial, I would like to share, in response to Rabbi Daniel Korobkin’s “Clichéd Judaism,” based on an article about how Christian Millennials are also facing problems engaging with religious institutions, five ways the establishment generations can make our Judaism less clichéd:

Understand that the world we live in is infinitely more connected than it was before: Our world is connected by the technology we grew up around, and that we have fully integrated into our lives. It connects us to people thousands of miles away, which we cherish. Our connectedness also means that we are more aware of the changing world around us, and are scrambling to find answers to questions about how we should treat the injustices we see in the world. We get to see, through photographs, blog posts, and tweets, a world that is far more complex than you told us it would be, and we need to digest that. Sometimes we come out with answers that you don’t like. We don’t want to take things at face value because in a world where everything can—and should—be thoroughly researched and fact-checked, we can’t just accept what you tell us as reality and move on. Our narratives about everything — history, Israel, identity — have all changed drastically because of the fact that we don’t want to take things for what they are.

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We’re Young, But We Get It

By Amna Farooqi for Baltimore Jewish Times

Two weeks ago, thousands of American Jewish leaders from across the country gathered outside Washington, D.C., for the Jewish Federations of North America’s General Assembly to discuss issues pertaining to Israel, Jewish continuity and campus life.

One of the more engaging programs at the GA was a plenary panel featuring journalists I admire: Jeffrey Goldberg, Aluf Benn, Steven Linde and Linda Scherzer. As the conversation drifted from the media’s coverage of the war this summer to support for Israel, Benn pointed out that American liberals, especially young people, still traditionally support Israel but are growing more critical of the occupation.

Scherzer responded with: “Do you think young people just don’t get it?” With its deep condescension toward me and my peers, that moment revealed a major flaw in the American Jewish community’s approach to young people. The JFNA, like the rest of the community, knows that it has a problem engaging with us. It was frequently discussed at the GA. But the nature of those conversations actually epitomized the problems they purported to solve.

The panel “Doing Jewish in College and Beyond: Effective Ways to Engage Young Jews” had not a single student or young person on the panel. In fact, several of the students who asked questions were told that their views were “parochial” and only representative of a tiny, insignificant minority.

The program “Generation #Hashtag” highlighted statistics about the rise of anti-Semitism on campuses, even as the students on the panel itself insisted that they didn’t feel unsafe or insecure as Jews.

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The Fierce Battle for Israel on Western College Campuses

From The Algeneiner

The Jewish State is fighting wars for its very survival against barbarous, genocidal foes like Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran. But far outside the Middle East, ferocious battles are being fought on the campuses of the world’s great universities – this time for Israel’s reputation and good name. The consequences of failure are too horrible to contemplate, including the destruction of Israel’s economic lifeline through economic boycotts that germinate on campus and pass into the mainstream.

I became an Israel campus warrior in 1988 when the Lubavitcher Rebbe first sent me as Rabbi to Oxford University. A steady stream of attacks on Israel were launched by the likes of Hanan Ashrawi, Saeb Erekat, and Yasser Arafat himself. Many of these speeches took place at the world-famous Oxford Union. Our Oxford University L’Chaim Society responded with five Israeli Prime Ministers, including Benjamin Netanyahu, Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Yitzchak Shamir, and Ehud Olmert. We partnered with the Union for most of the speeches including mesmerizing defenses of the Jewish state delivered by a young and hyper-charismatic Bibi Netanyahu.

Since those days the battles have become ever more ferocious with the much more timid pro-Israel groups at America and Europe’s leading universities being clobbered by Students for Justice in Palestine, Israel Apartheid Week, and BDS.

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Wellesley Fires Hillel Leaders Even as Anti-Israel Activism Rises

Hillary Clinton Alma Mater Cites 'Restructuring' for Moves

By Debra Nussbaum Cohen, The Jewish Daily Forward

(Haaretz) — Soon after the new school year got underway at Wellesley College, posters bearing the images of Palestinian children who were killed or wounded during the Gaza war appeared on dining hall walls.

A large poster, likewise sponsored by the new campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, went up in the student center asking, “What does Zionism mean to you?” with lots of space for people to fill in answers. Within a week people had written “genocide,” “apartheid” and “murder” on the poster at the Boston-area college.

Upset, Wellesley women turned to Patti Scheinman, Wellesley Hillel’s director, and David Bernat, the Jewish chaplain, along with student leaders of the Jewish community, for support. They jointly pushed for a meeting with Wellesley’s SJP leaders.

Both Hillel employees were abruptly fired last week by Wellesley College, with administration officials offering “restructuring” as the reason.

Jewish students dealing with what some say is ratcheted-up anti-Israel and anti-Jewish sentiment on campus are dismayed by the precipitous firing. “It makes me and other students feel like we just lost our support system and are on our own,” said Tali Marcus, a senior psychology major who is co-president of Wellesley Friends of Israel. “It’s really disconcerting.”

Wellesley is one of the prestigious Seven Sisters network of women’s colleges and counts potential presidential candidate Hillary Clinton among its alumnae. Roughly 10 percent of the current student body of 2,100 is Jewish. It has now joined the growing number of college campuses where often-intense anti-Israel sentiment at times bleeds into anti-Semitism, in the view of some there, in the process discomfiting large numbers of Jewish and pro-Israel students.

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‘Open Hillel’ Is a Much Bigger Problem Than You Think

by Aiden Pink, Assistant Editor of The Tower Magazine and

A new movement started by college students seeks to dramatically disrupt Jewish activities on campuses. How the community responds will have a large impact on the future of American Jewish life.

There’s a story about the Dalai Lama, who was looking for advice on how to keep his community united after being exiled from Tibet. Knowing that the Jews have had centuries of experience living as a minority in diaspora, he asked for a meeting with the two Chief Rabbis of Israel. One chief rabbi said, “Before we begin, your Holiness, you should know that we Jews never agree on anything.” Immediately, the other chief rabbi yelled, “That’s not true!”
I thought of this joke a lot when I attended the first ever “Open Hillel” conference, which took place October 11-13 at Harvard University. The Open Hillel phenomenon is a largely student-led effort devoted to eliminating the standards that guide Israel-related programs at Hillel houses, seeking to legitimize and include groups that advance anti-Israel (and sometimes anti-Semitic) agendas in mainstream Jewish campus life. Hillel houses, which host religious, political, and cultural events, and provide resources for many Jewish- and Israel-related campus student organizations, are the most important (and sometimes only) centers of Jewish life on college campuses, providing Jewish students with a safe environment at a time when hostility and violence is being directed at them with disturbing frequency—aggression that in some cases is being perpetrated and encouraged by the very groups Open Hillel says Hillel itself should now legitimize.

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Embracing Uncertainty: Why You Don’t Need To Have Everything Figured Out

by Amber Ikeman for newvoices.com

Do you ever get so overwhelmed about your future that you want to just stop what you’re doing, run out into a field and scream,

“WHAT AM I GOING TO DO WITH MY LIFE?!?”

Yeah. That’s about where I am right now.

I left Yellowstone National Park three weeks ago, where I was working seasonally. Since then, I’ve resumed my nomadic lifestyle and have been traveling the southwest. I have to admit that it’s been a bit difficult for me.

Really? You’re about to complain about getting to travel all over the country completely on your own schedule with no obligations or deadlines?! Wow. That sounds rough.

No, I’m not being sarcastic; it’s not always as fun as it sounds. Leaving Yellowstone with no concrete plans was terrifying, to say the least. I’ve pretty much always had a plan; after high school, I knew I was going to go to college; after college, I felt that I needed to spend some time in Israel learning more about my heritage; after Israel, it felt like time to get a “real” job. And even when I decided to pack up and start a new life, I had Yellowstone as my destination following a two-week road trip. But when the season ended, I set out on the road again with no anchor and no specific plan.

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Why Hillel Matters More Than Ever

by DANIEL SMOKLER for Mosaic

85% of young American Jews attend college. They need tending.

In their noble attempt to arouse communal action in response to the Pew Center’s now notorious Portrait of Jewish Americans, Jack Wertheimer and Steven Cohen declare the college campus “an opportunity waiting to be seized.” What, we might ask, is that opportunity, and how can it best be seized?

College is the single most common experience shared by Jews in the United States. The proportion of young American Jews on university campuses—a full 85 percent—exceeds the number who light Hanukkah candles, attend a Passover seder, or, certainly, marry other Jews. By some estimates, moreover, these young Jews are mainly concentrated on just 75 campuses. The opportunity is therefore clear: to ensure the continuity and cultural vitality of Jews in America, here is one place where Jewish organizations and philanthropies are well advised to invest.

As Wertheimer and Cohen show, the Orthodox community has taken this message to heart, funding a booming presence on campus. But “the message conveyed by [Orthodox] programs,” they write, “does not always appeal to non-Orthodox Jews.” They are right, and the point can be sharpened. Most Orthodox outreach, no matter how pleasantly delivered, is rooted in the hope of turning Jews toward traditional religious observance. Some organizations, like Aish HaTorah, are explicit about this. Some, like Chabad, communicate it quietly and, as it were, incrementally (just one mitzvah at a time!).

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Learning to Undo Ashke-normativity – A Jew in the Motherland

by Jonathan Katz for newvoices.org


Like most Jews with ties to South Africa, my heritage is extremely Ashkenazi. In fact, both sides of my family largely originate from the same region of what is now northeastern Lithuania and northern Belarus. Growing up in New York, most of what I was exposed to as “Jewish culture” was really “Ashkenazi, specifically Lithuanian practice”: savory gefilte fish, Yiddishisms, and my grandmother’s frown at the mere mention of the word Chabad. (As almost every Litvak family does, we claim [perhaps incorrectly] that we are descended from the Vilna Ga’on, whose archenemy was the Hasidic movement.) Suffice to say that, in a country whose Jewish community equates “Jewish” and “Eastern European,” my Jewish upbringing was extremely Ashke-normative.

Some of this changed in college. I learned about Sephardi and Mizrahi customs and traditions – from the additions in the Kaddish to the foods consumed on various holidays. I learned particularly about the discrimination Mizrahi migrants faced in the early days of Israel, and about continued struggles in that regard today. However, my engagement with non-Ashkenazi custom by and large remained somewhat curtailed, and our Hillel was certainly very Ashkenazi-centric – despite the staff’s best efforts at inclusion.

And then I crossed the Atlantic.

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8 Cities, 11 Flights, 4 Questions

By By Robbie Gringras for eJewishPhilanthropy.com

I have recently returned from an 8 city, 11 flight, 2 weeks’ tour of campuses in North America – with 4 questions.

I was one of the Jewish Agency’s Makom team running full-day workshops on “Gaza, Israel, and the Jews” for the staff of thirty Hillels. Our aim was to empower Hillel and campus leaders to frame constructive conversations about the Gaza Conflict by identifying pertinent questions (rather than institutional answers), and by defining a successful conversation as one that leads to a second conversation…

As always happens in a workshop that is a combination of frontal teaching and dialogical interaction, the entire tour was as illuminating for me as one hopes it was for the participants. Apart from learning that DC taxi drivers are the most interesting in the world, and that United Airlines are not always to be trusted with your luggage, I have been left with a few thoughts to ponder:

1. The conflict attracts institutional attention and repels most students

Incredibly generous donors were able to fund Makom to run a workshop on Gaza for 30 campuses. This amount of money and size of project normally takes months if not years to put together. It was agreed upon in a matter of minutes. This is because Israeli military conflicts, and the conflict perceived on campuses, will always be regarded as an emergency issue. It was an honor and a pleasure to be engaging with Hillel staff and student leadership throughout North America, but at the same time there was a feeling of disconnect. As we learned from most (not all) campuses, the vast majority of Jewish students that Hillels might come into contact with are not interested in the Israel-Palestine conflict. In fact the chances are that the best way to repel a Jewish student is to begin a conversation about the conflict.

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Bringing Holocaust Denial to Campus: Interview With ‘Hoaxocaust!’ Star Barry Levey

by Derek M. Kwait for newvoices.org

Yesterday, I reviewed Hoaxocaust!, a new play performed and written by Barry Levey that satirizes Holocaust denial simply by putting the arguments of some of its biggest proponents, Arthur Butz, David Irving, Robert Faurisson, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in context. I saw the show the night of September 11 (coincidentally), then on September 12, I caught up with Levey in a coffee shop in Downtown Manhattan to discuss what it is like to portray such horrible people, how Holocaust denial and similar conspiracies spread, the Holocaust’s role in American Jewish identity, and his plans to take the show to campus.


Have you heard  from anyone portrayed in the play?

No. Sometimes I’m grateful I haven’t heard from any of them, and sometimes I think getting sued by a crazy Holocaust denier wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.

It would be good publicity.

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Popping New York’s Jewish Bubble

by Jonathan Katz for newvoices.com

I grew up in the New York area: capital of the world, city of no rival, the Fourth Rome (defeating the Third, and there shall be no Fifth). True, I could note that this place – city and suburbs thereof – is overconfident, maddeningly arrogant, and rude to a horrifying degree. Yet it was a marvelous, diverse place to grow up, filled with the strange wonder and confident hum of a global center. Especially as a Jew – for this city and its surroundings comprise a Jerusalem of America.

To be a Jew in New York is to in many ways be completely normal: though our people only comprise one out of ten of the region’s population, the number of Jews in New York is overwhelming. One out of eight Jews in the world lives somewhere on a MTA or New Jersey Transit line leading to Midtown Manhattan; the city of New York has more Jews than any city other than Tel Aviv. Rosh Hashanah is a city-wide public school holiday. To be a Jew in New York is remarkably easy, especially compared to anywhere else in the Diaspora; some, myself included, argue that it is even easier than Israel. One never has to worry about kashrut or finding a synagogue for the observant, events and memory for the secular, and finding a Jewish match for us all. Who would want to live anywhere else?

…there are many reasons to leave this bubble of Jewish ease.

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Jewish Professors Hit Back Against Pro-Israel Campus 'Blacklist'

40 'Heavyweight' Academics Attack AMCHA Initiative

By Paul Berger for The Jewish Daily Forward

A Jewish advocacy group is warning students about 218 Middle East studies professors in colleges and universities across the country whose classes might contain “anti-Israel bias, or possibly even antisemitic rhetoric.”

The AMCHA Initiative singled out the professors because, during the conflict between Israel and Hamas this past summer, they signed a petition calling for an academic boycott of Israel.

“We believe the professors who have signed this petition may be so biased against the Jewish state that they are unable to teach accurately or fairly about Israel or the Arab-Israel conflict, and may even inject antisemitic tropes into their lectures or class discussion,” wrote Tammi Rossman-Benjamin and Leila Beckwith, co-founders of the AMCHA Initiative.

Now, 40 of America’s leading Jewish studies professors, including Hasia Diner of New York University and Robert Alter of the University of California, Berkeley, have signed a statement calling AMCHA’s actions “deplorable” and a threat to academic freedom. Bernard Avishai, a business professor who splits his time between Dartmouth College and Hebrew University and who has written extensively on Jewish matters, also signed the statement, which said, “We find it regrettable that AMCHA, so intent on combating the boycott of Israel, has launched a boycott initiative of its own.”

The Jewish studies professors say their worries go beyond AMCHA’s list of Middle East professors.

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First Results of the Jewish Student Survey are In!

from newvoices.com

Preliminary results of the Demographic Survey of American Jewish College Students 2014 are out. Started last spring by Drs. Barry Kosmin and Ariela Keysar at the Trinity College Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture, this is the first comprehensive scientific survey ever of an underrepresented and under studied demographic: American Jewish college students. They polled 1,157 self-identified Jewish students across the country on a number of key issues to find out what’s on the minds of the next Jewish generation. So, according to their findings, what are the crucial issues facing young Jews today? Kosmin and Keysar prepared this Wordle of student answers to that question:

Chart 1

“In your opinion, what are the crucial issues concerning young Jewish people like yourself today?”

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For College Students Who Keep Kosher, More Campuses Offer More Options

Kosher food is becoming an option at a growing number of schools, from Hillels to dining halls to restaurants

By Yair Rosenberg for Tablet Magazine

The great knish controversy erupted at Harvard in the spring of 1992. It began with a toaster oven. The unassuming appliance was introduced into the dining hall of Dunster House—one of Harvard’s 12 residential dormitories for upperclassmen—as a courtesy to kosher-keeping students. Until then, observant Jews had been restricted to consuming the few kosher staples on offer, like sliced bread and tuna fish. Now for the first time, with the aid of their new toaster, they could sample such delicacies as rabbinically certified frozen knishes and pizza bagels.

But this did not sit well with Noel Ignatiev, a tutor in History and Literature at Dunster. In a letter to the dining-hall manager, he protested the use of “public funds” to finance “sectarian” concerns, which he deemed an unacceptable breach in the “separation of church and state.” It was a curious complaint, given that Harvard is a private institution with its own Divinity School and that the money for the $40 toaster was essentially coming from religious students, who would otherwise be paying for a meal plan from which they could not actually eat. “I don’t know whether to be offended, annoyed, or simply to laugh,” then-Hillel President Shai Held told the Harvard Crimson. Students decided to split the difference, and Ignatiev was alternately condemned and mocked in the pages of the school paper, which reported the outcry under the immortal headline “Students Support Kosher Toaster.” That May, Ignatiev’s contract with Dunster House was not renewed.

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The ‘Mainstreaming’ Of Jewish Studies

Steve Lipman, Staff Writer, The Jewish Week

Houston — Administrators at Texas Christian University, an institution in Forth Worth affiliated with the Disciples of Christ denomination, needed some advice last year on starting a Jewish studies program, which is now in the planning stages. A small program that had begun under the auspices of the school’s Brite Divinity School offered only a few courses a year to prospective members of the clergy; TCU administrators wanted to establish a larger Jewish studies program for the entire university.

Instead of contacting the leaders of decades-old, better-known Jewish Studies programs like those of Columbia University or Ohio State University, they called Matthias Henze, founding director of The Program in Jewish Studies at Rice. That program was founded in 2009 at Rice University, a prestigious private institution in Houston.

Henze, who knew members of the TCU administration from earlier academic meetings, said they had reached out to him because they knew he had started the Rice program from scratch. “They wanted to know how I built the program,” says Henze, associate professor of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and holder of the Watt J. and Lilly G. Jackson Chair in Biblical Studies.

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“Gaza = Auschwitz”

Holocaust inversion—the claim that Israelis are the new Nazis and Palestinians the new Jews—has come to the American university campus.

By Martin Kramer in Mosaic Magazine

Five years ago, during an earlier Israeli operation in Gaza, the British novelist Howard Jacobson explained why “call[ing] the Israelis Nazis and liken[ing] Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto” goes far beyond mere “criticism” of Israel:

Berating Jews with their own history, disinheriting them of pity, as though pity is negotiable or has a sell-by date, is the latest species of Holocaust denial. . . . Instead of saying the Holocaust didn’t happen, the modern sophisticated denier accepts the event in all its terrible enormity, only to accuse the Jews of trying to profit from it, either in the form of moral blackmail or downright territorial theft. According to this thinking, the Jews have betrayed the Holocaust and become unworthy of it, the true heirs to their suffering being the Palestinians.

Experts call this Holocaust inversion. Based in the claim that Israel now behaves toward the Palestinians as Nazi Germany behaved toward the Jews, it originated in post-World War II Soviet propaganda, and from there spread to the Soviets’ Arab clients. It is now fully embedded in the Arab-Muslim world, where it grows and mutates in symbiosis with outright denial that the Holocaust occurred or a radical reduction of its genocidal scale, ferocity, and number of victims. Holocaust inversion has a graphic omnipresence in cartoons all over the Arab and Iranian press, where Israelis are regularly portrayed in Nazi regalia. Elsewhere in the Middle East and beyond, it has surfaced in the rhetoric of populist demagogues and the media. In Turkey’s new president and long-time prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, it now has a champion in a head of state. In Europe, Holocaust inversion is busy spreading beyond its original locus of infection and finding a home among intellectuals and activists, especially on the Left.

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Campuses Hone Tactics As BDS Wars Loom

In wake of Gaza conflict, local students, officials expect tense atmosphere as semester begins.

Amy Sara Clark for The Jewish Week

In Gaza, there may be a cease-fire, but for Jewish college students, the war is about to begin.

Groups as varied as J Street U and the Israel Action Network are bracing for what many insiders believe will be the most contentious school year yet.

Rabbi Yehuda Sarna, who directs the Bronfman Center for Jewish Student Life at NYU, agreed that pro-Israel students are facing a challenge when they return in the fall.

“I think it’s widely held that this is going to be one of the most difficult semesters for Israel on campus in a long time. It’s not just because of the war over the summer, but it’s also because the BDS [boycott, divestment and sanctions] moment has been gaining steam over the past few years, and the war over the summer just provides the fodder for the momentum to continue,” he said.

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Non-Jewish College Students Find an Unexpected Home on Campus—at Hillel

Whether they’re drawn by social programs, religious practice, or the food, non-Jews have changed the face of the organization

By Isabel Fattal for Tablet Magazine

Nellie Gayle’s introduction to Jewish life on campus began, appropriately, with bagels. In 2011, during her first week at Barnard College, a Jewish friend mentioned a bagel brunch at Hillel. The event sounded like fun, but Gayle, who grew up in an irreligious household in Eugene, Ore., figured that it would be impossible for her to attend, because she wasn’t Jewish. After some encouragement from her friend, she decided to go. Three years later, she returns to school this week as one of the most active members of Columbia/Barnard Hillel.

“Hillel encouraged me to explore my own spirituality,” said Gayle. She has even begun to incorporate certain Jewish values into her worldview. “Just coming into contact with Judaism has made me really committed to not speaking lashon hara,” or gossip, she said.

Be it bagels or spirituality, there’s something about Jewish communities on the college campus that attracts students who do not personally identify as Jewish. The number is not always sizable, but at many colleges there is a group of students who, while not technically Jewish, become some of the community’s most dedicated members. Often, as in Gayle’s case, it all begins with an invitation from a Jewish friend to attend an event at Hillel. For some students it might end at that one visit, but many others become attracted to Hillel’s wide variety of programs and social events. And so they become fellow travelers.

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Better The Enemy You Know — Gaza's Other Terror Groups

By Ben Sales for JTA

After four weeks of a punishing Israel air and ground campaign that left nearly 2,000 dead and much of Gaza in ruins, Hamas has lived to see another day.

For Israel, that might not be the worst thing. That’s because for all of Hamas’ violent extremism, it also governs a territory, maintains a social service wing and controls smaller, more extremist factions. Through mediators, Hamas and Israel have reached agreements in 2011 and 2012, and are negotiating another one right now in Cairo.

But many of Hamas’ jihadi fellow travelers in Gaza don’t have the same interests. For most, their sole goal is to fight — not just against Israel, but to spread Islamist rule across the whole world. That’s why, in the thick of the conflict on July 28, outgoing U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency head Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn said ousting Hamas could bring on “something like ISIS,” the radical Islamist group now conquering swaths of Iraq and Syria.

“If Hamas were destroyed and gone, we would probably end up with something much worse,” Flynn said, according to Reuters. “The region would end up with something much worse.”

Who are these groups? Here’s a quick rundown of the other major organizations in Gaza that seek Israel’s destruction.

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Top 25 Sororities Who Raised The Most Money For Their Philanthropy

From BetterGreeks.org

When it comes to Sorority life, it isn’t just about partying it up. Sororities love to give back to their town, community, and other 501C (3) Organizations. So which sorority racked up the most money for charities?

The following information is from Newsweek.com for the year 2012. Newsweek noted that, “…the amount of money the sorority’s non-profit fund donated to 501(c)(3) organizations according the most recent public filing (funds were normalized using a per-chapter ratio). Funds donated to individual chapters, classified as a 501(c)(7) non-profit social club, were not considered for this aspect of the ranking…”

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Why is a Nice Jewish Girl Like You Moving to Wyoming?

by Amber Ikeman for newvoices.com

I turned 25 this year. Something about that looming birthday made me evaluate who I was, who I am, and who I want to be. I asked myself if I was happy, if I was fulfilled and doing what I pictured for myself in my mid-twenties. It didn’t take long to realize that the answer was no. I was certain that the apocalypse would come on my birthday, or at least that my world would cave in on my quarter-life crisis.

Two years ago, I landed back in my hometown of Sarasota, Florida after spending 6 months in Jerusalem. It was such an intense experience that afterwards all I wanted to do was retreat to what I knew was safe and comfortable – home. My parents are here, I know my way around like the back of my hand, and who can turn down living 10 minutes from the #1 beach in the country? I wanted to feel grounded.

I thought one of the ways to do this would be with a stable job. No, not with horses in the Wild West, unfortunately (although I do hope something like that will be in my future), I wanted a paycheck every two weeks. I wanted an office and business cards with a title that made me sound important. I thought that was what twenty-somethings were supposed to be working towards. After four months of searching, applying, and negotiating, I accepted a as a Jewish communal professional that I bet all of my happiness on. I moved out of my parents’ house and got my own place. My first apartment out of college, paid for by myself, all to myself! (And my cat, of course.) I had it made – an apartment AND furniture AND a job! And for a while, it was really nice. It was what I needed. Building and rebuilding.

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To the Students for Justice in Palestine, a Letter From an Angry Black Woman

‘You do not have the right to invoke my people’s struggle for your shoddy purposes’

By Chloe Valdary for Tablet Magazine

The student organization Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) is prominent on many college campuses, preaching a mantra of “Freeing Palestine.” It masquerades as though it were a civil rights group when it is not. Indeed, as an African-American, I am highly insulted that my people’s legacy is being pilfered for such a repugnant agenda. It is thus high time to expose its agenda and lay bare some of the fallacies they peddle.

• If you seek to promulgate the legacy of early Islamic colonialists who raped and pillaged the Middle East, subjugated the indigenous peoples living in the region, and foisted upon them a life of persecution and degradation—you do not get to claim the title of “Freedom Fighter.”

• If you support a racist doctrine of Arab supremacism and wish (as a corollary of that doctrine) to destroy the Jewish state, you do not get to claim that the prejudices you peddle are forms of legitimate “resistance.”

• If your heroes are clerics who sit in Gaza plotting the genocide of a people; who place their children on rooftops in the hopes they will get blown to bits; who heap praises upon their fellow gang members when they succeed in murdering Jewish school boys and bombing places of activity where Jews congregate—you do not get to claim that you are some Apollonian advocate of human virtue. You are not.

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Police protect Jewish students from Pro-Palestinian mob…in Boston

by Guy Benson for HotAir.com

For the third time in eight days, Boston police were forced to intervene when a small group of student Israel supporters was swarmed by demonstrators screaming anti-Semitic epithets and initiating physical contact, said students involved in the incident…A handful of Jewish students with Israeli flags was surrounded by demonstrators shouting anti-Semitic epithets and – according to two of the students – a tense minute of “pushing and shoving.” Soon after the “die-in” ended, Brett Loewenstern — a Berklee College of Music student and pro-Israel activist – entered the fray with his boyfriend, Israeli-born Avi Levi. According to Loewenstern, he and his boyfriend’s combining of an Israeli flag with a rainbow flag – the symbol for gay rights – set off a hailstorm of insults from demonstrators. Among other things, the shouts included “Jews back to Birkenau” and “Drop dead, you Zionazi whores,” said Loewenstern and other witnesses…During a gathering outside the Boston Public Library on Thursday evening, police had to protect Valdary and student activist Daniel Mael from what Valdary called “hundreds of people shouting ‘Allah is great.’”

The mere presence of a gay pro-Israel couple at the rally “set off a hailstorm” of venom from Hamas supporters that would no doubt be national news by now if the epithets had been hurled by, say, Tea Partiers. (Incidentally, I’ve never been able to square the circle of grassroots Lefties’ anti-Israel attitudes. The tiny nation is an oasis of pluralistic democracy in an autocratic and oppressive neighborhood, it boasts a robust nationalized healthcare system, and it proudly protects the rights of women and gays. And yet many on the far Left aggressively side with Israel’s violent, intolerant — and in some cases, genocidal — adversaries. Why?) In any case, let’s forget about these Holocaust- and death-celebrating slurs, and ignore disgusting scenes like this. All Hamas is (currently) requesting in exchange for a ceasefire is an Israeli pledge to lift its blockade of Gaza, thus flinging open the floodgates for even more weapons to stream into the hands of terrorists, equipping them to launch additional salvos against Israeli civilians. That’s all. Palestinian violence, the apologists claim, is ultimately about policy disputes, so “peace” requires Israel to end the blockade. Or release terrorist prisoners. Or uproot its settlements. Or divide up its capital city. Or, you know, cease to exist. The demands and pretexts for violence may be slippery, but the goal remains the same: Annihilating the Jewish State. Not all criticism of Israel’s actions is rooted in anti-Semitism, of course, but a lot of it is. Look no further than elements of the ‘Free Palestine’ crowd’s impulse to attack synagogues, rather than picket Israeli consulates and embassies. And look no further than the abominable rhetoric flying at increasingly violent “anti-Israel” protests in Europe:

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Hebrew University Student Invents World’s First Bacteria-Free Food Packaging

By NoCamels Team

An apple a day keeps the doctor away, but not if your apple is covered in bacterial biofilm, a potentially chronic illness-causing bacteria that sticks to produce and packaging in the shipping process.

Now a graduate student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has discovered a way to attack the potentially harmful bacteria that sticks to food packaging, a discovery with immense commercial potential.

Meet biofilm – your produces’ worst nightmare

Bacterial biofilms are an ever-increasing problem in the food industry, especially for fresh produce. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently reported that food-borne diseases cause an estimated 48 million illnesses each year in the United States alone, 45 percent of which are caused by bacteria.

The issue of biofilm build-up is increasingly significant as industrialized countries see an increased demand for fresh produce and raise awareness of the health benefits of eating fruits and vegetables. But public health concerns about fresh produce are especially acute because many of these products are consumed raw. Countless microorganisms, including illness-causing bacteria, attach to food and packaging surfaces, forming biofilms in a complex and multifaceted process.

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A Survivor on the Flight

By Ann Zivitz Kientz for MyJewishLearning.com

My husband and I recently journeyed from New Orleans to Israel—a first trip for him, an always-sacred return for me. On our El Al return flight, seated near us was an older gentleman. We briefly noticed him when boarding the plane; he smiled and so did we, thinking little of the encounter beyond the fleeting thought that he could be anyone’s sweet grandfather.

As everyone began to settle in, my husband noticed the numbers tattooed on the older man’s arm, and pointed them out to me.

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Past Meets Future: Ground-Breaking Rabat Genizah Project Fueled by Students

by Derek M. Kwait for newvoices.org

A storied community in a room. Hand-written notes, wedding documents, and Mezuzahs piled everywhere. When Oren Kosansky discovered these items and more in bags and boxes in a small room in the old synagogue of Rabat, Morocco as a Fulbright Scholar in 2005, they would change his life and the lives of his future students forever.

The room contained the community’s genizah, or place where Jewish documents containing the sacred Name of God such as books, letters, documents, and ritual items are kept until they can be properly buried in accordance with Jewish law.

Rabat had a strong Jewish community numbering in the thousands into the 20th century, when most Jews emigrated, primarily to Israel and France. Today, Morocco’s capital contains fewer than 100 Jews. In their genizah, the community left behind an invaluable record of hundreds of documents and artifacts in Hebrew, Arabic, French, Judeo-Arabic, Aramaic, Spanish, Judeo-Spanish, Russian, and even English, dating back as far as the 18th century, that powerfully tell the story of the life of a lost community in its own words.

In 2010, Kosansky, now a professor at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Ore., won a $50,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to establish The Rabat Genizah Project in collaboration with the Morocco Jewish Museum in Casablanca– the only Jewish museum in the Arab world.

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What Stake Should American Jews Have in Israeli Affairs?

From The Conspiracy in newvoices.com

Israel has always been always at least somewhat present in my life. Though I have only visited once, as a Jew who was raised in a Jewish educational system, Zionism came part-and-parcel with my religious education. In school, I learned Modern Hebrew as a second language and was exposed to Israeli culture and food. Israel was the Jewish homeland, and I, in religion, in peoplehood, and in Israeli law, was guaranteed a home (or, at the very least, citizenship) there.

As I grew older, I was taught that as an American Jew, I had a duty to defend and support Israel; therefore, I began to engage in a wide range of pro-Israel activities. I attended AIPAC’s 2012 Policy Conference, and began writing and thinking critically about what it means to be pro-Israel in the context of a world that is increasingly hostile toward perceived colonialism (and many do perceive Israel and Zionism as a colonial project, even if we supporters of Israel do not).

One of the claims made in the documentary The J Street Challenge (which — yes — I did, finally, watch) is that J Street specifically (and, perhaps, other left-wing Zionist organizations as well) are imperialist in their desire to circumvent the Israeli political system by advocating for a two-state solution that the Israeli government does not support at present. However, could this question not be posed more broadly? Couldn’t any intervention into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by Americans, either from the political left or the political right, be considered imperialist? Are we not imperialist in our desire to end a conflict in a region not our own, in a country that does not directly threaten our own borders and our own country?

If we Jews truly believe Israel to be our homeland, we have a vested interest in our protection, be we politically on the left or on the right — in essence, we have no choice but to be imperialists. Alternately, if we truly belong in Israel, then we, too, have a say in how our Jewish homeland should function.

Or, perhaps, we should not.

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