In France, 88-year-old Abolhassan Banisadr died from a long illness on Saturday, October 9, 2021. After supporting Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Banisadr became Iran’s first elected president in February of 1980 but was shortly impeached and fled to France following an…
World
Free Speech Is Often Conditional.
While the first amendment specifically protects you from the government, it is the private sector where punishments are doled out. The now infamous anti-communist McCarthyism of the 1950’s was only superficially a government movement. The most glaring example of the…
2021: A Promised Land for American Jews?
With 2020 in the rearview mirror, it is a good opportunity to look at what 2021 holds politically for American Jews. 2020 saw the (current) best chance for a Jewish president fizzle out in March, when Bernie Sanders suffered primary…
Covid Forces the Closure of Jewish Newspapers Nationwide
For over 30 years, the Jewish Journal opened the floodgates of information for the Jewish community. They published weekly print editions, and typically included a feature piece, an in-depth story, or occasionally profile, on a historic event or person on…
Conspiracies Have Reached The Mainstream
Conspiracy theories used to be a joke in society, fun stories that tried to explain world events in a convoluted way that assigned meaning to trivial details. People who believed in things that weren’t based on facts or science, such…
Have You Ever Wondered What Jewish Life is Like at Other Universities?
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, I joined the “Zoom University Hillel” Facebook page alongside nearly 15,000 other young Jewish college students from around the world. It has since been utilized for many purposes, including the sharing of memes,…
The Art that Fought the Holocaust
“Black milk of morning we drink you at dusktime We drink you at noontime and dawntime we drink you at night We drink and drink We scoop out a grave in the sky where it’s roomy to lie.” Those are…
The Bund: Hereness and Resistance
Doi’kayt– a Yiddish word signifying “hereness.” For decades, this was the central principle of the General Jewish Labor Bund, a multinational and decentralized labor organization of Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews. Founded in 1897, the Bund and its various branches was…
Zionism: A Brief Guide in Perplexity
It’s the perfect moment in which to re-examine Zionism afresh–and not only because of the recent spate of fighting between Israel and Gaza, the controversy surrounding the SJP national conference held some weeks ago here at UCLA, or the fact…
United we stand; and why we’ll never fall
As I made myself some tea and schmoozed at the coffee station after Shabbat lunch this week, I heard a surprising announcement. “Let’s take a moment of silence to honor the people we lost in today’s tragedy.” I waited for…