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Man, I am just a posting-on-other-sites-but-not-my-own MACHINE today!  Here’s my Jewschool post on Glenn Beck’s equation of social justice with Nazism.

I’ve got a new post at Jewschool, in which I examine an article Alan Dershowitz wrote about Israel Apartheid Week.

Here’s my Jewschool post about it.  Links to informational and opinion sources are included.

I wrote a new post for Jewschool!  Predictably, it is about political debate, or lack thereof.  Check it out.

I promise I’ll write a blog post here soon.  In the meantime, check out my newest post at Jewschool.  It was just too good a topic to miss.

Interrupting my unofficial final-induced blogging hiatus is this newest post over at Jewschool!

I wrote a new post for Jewschool!  This is very exciting as I haven’t written a blog post in a little while.  It’s also the first NSFW post I’ve ever written (or at least it links to NSFW content).  And still, I hope, maintains intellectualism.  A major milestone.  Enjoy!

I’ve decided to stop cross-posting the content of my Jewschool work, so here’s a link to my newest piece over there.

The J Street U opening program has just finished. Technically, this program beings and ends a day earlier than the regular J Street conference, so our individual programming takes place throughout the day tomorrow. In the evening, we join the conference, and go through their programming on Monday. We then have the option of our own advocacy session on Capitol Hill, or staying in the regular conference for Tuesday and going to their advocacy session on Wednesday. I’ve elected to take this option, and so, it turns out, has one of our guest bloggers, Moriel Rothman, whom I bumped into at the beginning of the opening program.

We turn out to have a lot in common (such as as both beatboxing), and we’re spending some time talking about how to cover the events here meaningfully as we go through the program. Tonight has been very constructive. I’m looking forward to crashing at the hostel a few blocks away where a lot of us are staying. Tomorrow’s an even busier day.

There’s a palpable sense of excitement in the air. But people are surprisingly level-headed. No one’s flying off the handle with radicalism or unfounded idealistic dreams of changing the world right away. But there’s real hope here. We heard some speakers talk about the role college campuses play in the shaping and realization of U.S. Middle Eastern policy; it’s empowering to have people address you like that. So tomorrow, when we actually make good on these ideas, and have real discussions with real facts, it’s going to come home – we have a job to do, and we’re here to learn how to do it.

I’ll continue to tweet the student and regular conferences.

This post originally appeared on Jewschool.

This high holiday season was new for me in many ways. It was my first away from my family, it was the first time I fasted without drinking water, and it was also the first time I didn’t go to services during the day on Yom Kippur. This last one, and a related concept I’ve been thinking about a lot recently, are what I want to talk about here. As anyone who’s done it knows, praying is not a simple concept. It’s a big category within the religion (as in it encompasses a lot of practices and ideas), and there are a myriad of opinions about every single aspect of it. When, how, where, and why you should do it, and so on. Like many Jews, I’ve always had a complicated relationship to prayer. I was raised religious, but without much connection to a synagogue. Although very nice, the shul in our town never excited us that much (I think I’ve talked about my struggles with this a bit in a previous post), and I’ve looked for other options for a long time. (more…)