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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