“To effectively communicate, we must realize that we are all different in the way we perceive the world and use this understanding as a guide to our communication with others.” — Tony Robbins This January, a group of student leaders from New York University departed on a flight bound for Israel. Together, they represented more…
Walking onto NYU’s campus during my freshman year, I wasn’t sure what to expect but I feared the worst. I’d heard the stories about Students for Justice in Palestine antagonizing and threatening Jewish students, the administration and faculty taking part in the BDS movement, and Jewish students generally feeling unsafe. On top of the stress…
Everyone loves lists. Lists are fun and informative, and ranked lists in particular help us make decisions more efficiently. But lists are also deceptively powerful: it’s really hard for a person to properly judge the objective value of something distinct from its ranking once they’ve seen it on a ranked list, whether that “something” is…
If NYU rates #9 on the list of “Worst Universities for Jewish Students,” then the Algemeiner would weigh in as #1 on the list of “Worst News Outlets for the Jewish Future.” Generally, it doesn’t top that list. To the contrary, the Algemeiner has established an important voice in the Jewish communal conversation. It was…
My time at McGill University was intellectually satisfying but spiritually deficient. Let me preface my words by acknowledging that I am an Orthodox Jew and Orthodoxy was absent from McGill University’s campus. Benchmarks of Orthodoxy such as a daily prayer quorum, hot kosher food, fellow observant Jews, and Shabbat and Chagim observance were scant. Orthodox…
NEW YORK — A pro-Palestinian student group at NYU that blamed Israel for recent police shootings of black men is now scaling back, somewhat, on the accusations it made on Facebook. In the original Facebook post from July 7, the New York University Students for Justice in Palestine group held Israel accountable for the black…
— The United Auto Workers union struck down a vote by the graduate student union at New York University to support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel. Last week’s decision came two months after the resolution to support the BDS movement was approved by two-thirds of the 600 union members who cast ballots…
It was ironic, to say the least, that it took coming to an oil-rich Arab emirate to get me to lead my first Rosh Hashanah service. Forty-five years ago I had earned Conservative rabbinic ordination from New York’s Jewish Theological Seminary. But this was the first time I had ever used it. I had turned,…
