I am honored and thrilled to have just been published in the Berkeley Journal of Sociology, and featured in the journal’s relaunch– ”Instead of publishing traditional research articles, we are writing the history of the present.” […]
Category: Reflections & Analyses
4 Suggestions for an American Jew navigating Israel-Palestine discourse during the Gaza crisis and in general (Part 1 of 2)
”I come from an orthodox background, and the fact that I am no longer religious makes my opinions even more easily dismissable. Right now I’m just at ‘I refuse to take sides’ and ‘I don’t […]
An Apology, a Non-Recission & some clarifications re: “Symmetry.”
Last Thursday, I wrote a post entitled “Symmetry,” and I began it as follows: ”Can you imagine– scores of armed men, who do whatever their leaders tell them to do, could kidnap or kill whoever […]
What is the connection between SodaStream and Gaza?
Guest writer: Jacob Udell A few months ago, during the days when the occupation seemed somehow more mundane, back when over 100 senseless deaths in the span of 24 hours would have felt unexpected, Scarlett […]
Shattering, or, How People Like Me or You are Capable of Extreme Brutality
This news is not breaking. I do not break news. If anything, I feel sometimes -like these times- that the news will break me. This news is shattering. Or at least it should be. It […]
There is no such thing as a “Revenge Attack.”
Framing matters. Language shapes reality, and reality is unwinding sickly, deadly, unreal. If the reports coming in are confirmed- and they are not confirmed yet- that it was Jewish people who kidnapped and murdered the young […]
How do you punish murderers?
The news of the murder of the three kids is horrific. No qualifications, no rationalizations, nothing. The murder of children is one of the most horrific things imaginable. I found myself staring again at the pictures […]
Young Leftist Jews Standing with the Black South in 1964 and in 2014
Yesterday, I wrote a piece called “The Jewish Left is Alive and Vibrant” in the Jewish Daily Forward as a response to Jay Michaelson’s piece in the same paper, “Death of the Jewish Left.” In my piece, […]
War is Terrorism: Three Reflections on Silence, “the” Crisis & Hanin Zuabi
1. Break the Silence. The events of the past two weeks are raw, emotional, divisive- and there is a part of me that wants to keep quiet, to “wait until things calm down.” But that is not […]
How Moving to the Jewish State Made me Stop Wearing a Kippah
This piece is a very personal one, and one that I decided not to publish when I first wrote it, as a letter to two friends, almost three years ago. Now, with time forging a buffer between me, in the present, and the rawness of this experience then, I have decided I am ready to retroactively publish it, and to see where its resonances land. I reread this with a measure of sadness, and also with compassion for myself then, and also with admiration for those who are able to constantly hold the contradictions that I did not feel strong enough to hold, and also with relief that this is no longer a struggle that tears me up on a daily basis. Here is:
Fall, 2011
I woke up Thursday morning, the first day of Rosh HaShana, the Jewish new year, a time of renewal and rebirth and reawakening and reevaluating and re-being. I woke up Thursday morning, and I put on my kippah, and I looked in the mirror, and I thought to myself:
“What is this thing I am putting on my head?”
The Leftern Wall 