Let's get one thing straight: what happens on Taglit-Birthright Israel stays on Taglit-Birthright Israel — except for the selfies you take with your seemingly evil camel, the Instagram photos with perfect lighting at the top of Masada, the videos of your soldiers teaching you a Hebrew word of the day (because everything's sababa ["cool"]), the breathtaking panoramic photos of the...

Have you ever had difficulty trying to find the right words to say? Language allows us to communicate with one another but also tends to limit our ability to say what we mean and mean what we say. It is perhaps one of the most important yet most limiting of all human capabilities. Nowhere is this phenomenon more apparent or...

With the recent panic over the Charlie Hebdo terror attacks in Paris and its implications for the future of free speech in the Western world — in addition to the safety of Jews in Europe — UCLA students have done little to discuss other atrocities in the world. Among these number the 2000 Nigerians killed in a recent Boko Haram...

Barely two weeks have passed since a catastrophic wave of terror shook Paris, leaving 17 people dead. The impact of the attacks was felt across the world — the media overcome with expressions of shock. As day faded into night, shock was washed away and in its place stood unity, with perhaps the greatest mass protest in recent history. Parisian...

Written by Daniel Levine, third-year cognitive science major and gabbai of UCLA's Jewish Learning Initiative on CampusThroughout the Exodus story, we are presented with multiple interactions between Moses and Pharaoh. On their surface, these meetings seem to comprise Moses asking Pharaoh for permission to allow the Jews to go to the desert in order to worship G-d and Pharoah reacting...

In an eye-opening lecture at Hillel this week, Paul Von Blum spoke to students about his life of social activism and unshaken secular Jewish identity. A second-generation Holocaust survivor, he claims his experience in civil rights began before his birth in Berlin, where his family was taken by the Gestapo and moved directly to their deaths in Auschwitz. He knows...

As murmurs in Hebrew permeated the room and the predominantly sprightly, older crowd found their seats, it became quickly evident that this event would exude a vibrant energy. Hosted by the UCLA Nazarian Center for Israel Studies and entitled “Not So Special Relationship?: Israel-U. S. Relations During the Obama Administration," the event promised an appealing forum to learn about the...

One of our richest cultural inheritances is the Talmud. Its roughly 6,200 pages consists of rabbinic folklore, customs, history, ethics, philosophy and law, oftentimes moving between these topics in the span of a sentence. Since I went to private Jewish day schools my entire life before coming to UCLA, I spent many hours poring over the cryptic texts written in...

Written by Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan, Jewish Learning Initiative on Campus. Heralded as a leader and revered in history as a paradigmatic hero, it’s hard to imagine that there was a time in Moses’ life marked with desperation. In this week’s parashah, Moses, a newly appointed ambassador, returns to G-d defeated. His initial fears were realized as the Jews, overwhelmed with...

This past Monday night, UCLA students held a vigil for the victims of the Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher grocery store shootings, as well as for the policewoman who was killed in a related shooting. 8:30 p.m. found about 70 students huddled against the chill of Meyerhoff Park in front of Kerckhoff Hall. Speakers included Lenie Torregrossa of Euro Bruins,...