Ashton Macklin, the 2023-24 Judaism Unbound/New Voices Magazine Jewish Media Fellow, created a beautiful and deeply moving Passover resource. Check it out at www.judaismunbound.com/sederfortwo, and you can find printable and accessible versions at the links below. Ashton: Passover, like many Jewish holidays, has over time molded its practices to contemporary conditions. Some notions of it have become the norm, and there can be a danger that we expect every Jew to experience holidays in that particular manner. Being one of those Jews who does not experience Passover via a classic family seder ..read more

With 2023 being the hottest year ever recorded, our climate reality is beginning to feel fatal. And yet, despite ongoing international efforts, the necessary action for lasting change constantly falls short. In a show of international pressure to pursue climate action, the voices of the strongest environmental organizations around the world are gaining popularity. Many of these organizations cite the scientific importance of taking climate action and call on individuals, companies, and governments to act before it is too late. Judaism has its fair share of these organizations; maybe you have h ..read more

As we enter the eight days of Passover, we’ve got you covered with eight broad-ranging New Voices articles from the past decade. In the following pieces, you’ll find hot takes on seder plate additions, resources and art to add to your haggadah, ideas for incorporating grief into yom tov celebrations, poetic reflections on queerness and liberation, campus reporting on freedom seders, thoughts on Israel/Palestine at the seder table, a scathing review of our least favorite haggadah, and even an investigation of diet culture’s impact on Passover. Make sure to click on the links below to read the f ..read more

High noon in Washington was cold, and I was sitting on the yellow grass, shivering while speaking with my friends. I could barely hear them over the boom of the speakers in Washington’s National Mall. Various students and speakers spoke passionately about the Israeli cause, “Bring Them Home Now” chants filling the air.  As a Yeshiva University student, it may have looked like I fit in seamlessly at the march. But inside, I was deeply questioning my place within the conflict.  Growing up attending Modern Orthodox day schools, I learned to be a passionate self-proclaimed Zionist. All I ..read more

It was on the plane to Warsaw that Irena Klepfisz’s writing began to feel less like poetry and more like prophecy. As I stared out the window into the hazy clouds, my fingers traced the words on my worn copy of Klepfisz’s A Few Words in the Mother Tongue. She looks out the window. All is present. The shadows of the past fall elsewhere. I repeated these words in my head as the plane touched down. All is present. It was easier than thinking about the obvious—how I was the first person to go back to Eastern Europe since my family left the Pale of Settlement in poverty, fleeing from pogroms. What ..read more

From fashion to music to culture, a conversation between popular past and contemporary Jewish masculinities It was 1976, and producer Phil Spector was waving a bottle of Manischewitz in one hand — in the other, a gun — in the face of Leonard Cohen. The two were working together on Cohen’s album-after-marriage, Death of a Ladies’ Man, where the colloquial married man, Cohen — a dictator of suavity — was destined to die. Unbridled Jewish manhood was in the making, and it was angry. Today, it rages on. Could secular Jewish men find meaning in manhood? As the Old World was forgotten in the early 2 ..read more

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On March 21, 2024, Gashmius Magazine joined the New Voices Fellows to study hasidic texts. The fellows thought we were entering a regular class, but we were wrong. After studying one text together, Gashmius Editor, Jonah Mac Gelfand told us: “Torah wasn’t just given at Sinai, Torah continues to be given again and again, since Sinai.” As we read a text about Adar, and one about feeling the pain of those suffering, Jonah tasked us with writing our own Torah as a response. In hasidic fashion, he told us to remove ourselves from the equation, and let the words flow without judgement. He told us ..read more

At 10 years old, I decided it was time for me to start fasting on Yom Kippur. While most people don’t start fasting until age 13, I had a craving for spirituality and wanted to do whatever I could to get closer to God. Based on what I’d heard from adults, fasting seemed to be the most extreme, most valuable way that I could connect to God and Judaism. For a few years, I felt the intended effects. During those 25 hours of fasting, I was hyper-aware of my humanity, my fragile mortality, and how thin the strings were that tied me (and all of us) to the physical world. Fasting ..read more

Kessim on Sigd, clad in white clerical turbans and robes, embroidered, colorful umbrellas to announce and denote their presence, and wearing beautifully embroidered velvet cloaks.  – Jerusalem, Nov. 23, 2022. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90) Within many Black communities, migration often entails redefining one’s identity for the sake of others – shedding part of the self for the safety and comfort of a new identity. But in the case of Ethiopian Jews, “we’ve seen the opposite,” says Kes Shimon Semai Elias, an Ethiopian Israeli religious leader. “The younger generation is returning to its roots, st ..read more