Just build the memorial, already.

Today marks 105 years since the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, the tragedy that killed 146 workers (most all of them young Jewish or Italian women) and served as a rallying cry for labor reform. The first-person accounts of the event are horrifying, with collapsing fire escapes, victims locked inside the inferno, and many jumping to their deaths in an attempt to escape.

While the fire on Washington Place destroyed nearly 150 lives, the building survived, and still stands, refurbished, today. Although it’s both a National Historic and New York City Landmark, like much of Manhattan south of 14th street, the structure, now called the Brown Building, belongs to NYU. Other than a plaque that doesn’t even mention the fire until halfway through its text, there’s not much to alert passersby of the devastation that occurred there, or the changes that ensued in response.

Over a century, and the building still stands as if nothing happened there. The building looks like any other NYU-owned structure near Washington Square, and there’s something sinister about the original structure going unmarked. Luckily, there are currently plans to finally remedy the situation, and the Remember the Fire Coalition is close to finally adding a real memorial to the Brown Building. They held an architecture contest, selected a winner, and started raising money. Then, this past December, Governor Cuomo pledged a $1.5 million towards the project.

So what’s the hold up? First, the Coalition still needs more money, but believe it or not, there’s still resistance to the project, mostly by local residents who did not have a chance to participate in the process of choosing the contest winner. They worry, for example, that the proposed design’s steel beams will reflect into their homes and create an issue for heat and light. Other concerns have been artistic, and alternatives have been proposed, like a plaque with the names of the victims.

The Coalition has said that the group is working to address concerns, and if they can successfully reassure locals that glare won’t be an issue, let that be that.

Not everyone is going to like any one memorial. Critiques of its design are valid, but what’s important now is getting something, anything up. Every anniversary of the fire that goes by without a permanent commemorative installation is an embarrassment.

It’s a mitzvah to give to the poor on Purim, so on this Shushan Purim, give to the memory of those who died because it was so easy to use and abuse workers, a struggle that continues today. If you want to donate to the Memorial Fund, you can do so online.

However, while crowd-funding is all well and good, those with power have not done enough. The governor made the right decision, but the city hasn’t pledged anything yet.

And what of NYU? Most of the remaining costs of the memorial are for an endowment fund that will cover insurance and maintenance of the project, which the Memorial assured NYU they would provide in exchange for cooperation to use the university-owned building. But given NYU’s own ever-thickening pockets and acquisition of real estate throughout Manhattan, would it kill them to do a mitzvah, or even a publicity stunt for new president Andrew Hamilton?

Those with privilege need to think about what resisting this project means in light of a historic event that was abuse of power turned deadly.

If all goes according to plan, the Coalition hopes to install the memorial by spring 2018. Let’s hope it’s not any later.

Image credit: Wikimedia and the Kheel Center via Flickr

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For hours on Monday night after the announcement that Darren Wilson would not be indicted, I stared at my computer screen feeling as though no language could be adequate. My heart was and still is with the expressions of grief, shock, outrage and solidarity. Each post in my Facebook feed offered something of that ilk: a poem by Langston Hughes, clips of Michael Brown Sr. and Lesley McSpadden urging “positive change,” quotes from Atticus Finch and James Baldwin. Simple expressions of sadness hit hardest.

Every so often, disagreement would flash across comment threads—but it seemed designed to provoke, usually to troll.

I tried to imagine those who were unsure, who didn’t live in an echo chamber of either ilk, not getting constant reinforcement from either script, that “black lives matter” or that the a police officer had lawfully killed a violent thug.

Twenty hours remained before I was due to board my flight home to Cleveland for the Thanksgiving holiday. I knew that I was bound to encounter someone just that unsure—maybe a cousin, a high school acquaintance, or a neighbor. I knew we’d be even more likely to talk about the deaths of black people at the hands of police, with a family member on staff at the school that was attended by Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old boy shot and killed by the Cleveland police after waving a toy gun.

That’s the Thanksgiving trope: gathered around a picturesque table laden with food and beatific expressions of gratitude, somehow all the fissures and disagreements, personal and political, that lurk beneath the familiar façade find a way to leach into the dinner talk. Were we going to shout our slogans, condemn loved ones’ inadvertent condoning of racism and targeted police violence? What happens after we demand that our less social-justice-oriented family members adopt our frame of mind, and then they disappoint us with their ambivalence? Some awkward passing of the Ocean Spray cranberry sauce and a desultory goodbye kiss on the cheek?

I thought about the Passover seder, how, while the wise child and the rebellious child are having it out over their strongly-formed opinions, Jews are still obligated to make space for the simple child, who asks only, “what is this?” and for the one who does not even know how to ask a question. What follows is the best response I could brainstorm (originally posted on Facebook).

Presumably the grand jury deliberated on evidence, conflicting accounts, information presented on all sides as “the facts.” In fact, reports show they may have been provided with an overabundance of evidence, an unusually voluminous document dump of the type usually reserved for trials.

There must be, I can only assume, legally compelling reasons for not indicting this officer. “The jurors had to consider whether Officer Wilson acted within the limits of the lethal-force law,” according to the New York Times, and evidently they did.

But there were legally compelling reasons to acquit George Zimmerman, and the officers who beat Rodney King. We have yet to find out what actions if any will be taken against the officers who killed Eric Garner, Akai Gurley, or Ezell Ford. With Darren Wilson, the decision to decline indictment is tantamount to saying Mike Brown’s death, along with others, did not require any retribution or response.

The arguments that every one of these acts, to say nothing of hundreds more, were done in self-defense implies that, black men always represent potential criminality and lethal threat—even when they are found (too late) to be unarmed. When, each time, the law condones use of lethal force against black men, when there are no consequences for actions that result in death, the message to those who kill is: “You did the right thing.”

The result: black men are 21 times more likely to be killed by police than white ones.

If you are confused or intimidated by people’s outrage, anger and sadness: we are not “making” race an issue. We are naming the central role that race plays in civilian deaths at the hands of police officers. Deaths that represent lives so insignificant that their loss does not warrant a trial—these deaths only happen to black men.

To insist on examining each of these strictly on a case-by-case basis only illustrates a larger point: that there are a seemingly inexhaustible number of legal rationales for killing a black man.

Every time our juries, our police forces, our judges and our media, paid for by our taxes and our consumerism—condone the notion that some people’s lives really are just that insignificant, we bring ourselves closer to that same judgment. This matters for you. Black Lives Matter FOR. YOU.

When speaking to Jewish family, I recalled a sermon from Rosh Hashanah called Ferguson/Fargesn, about the mandate for Jews to remember that it was us who were “stopped and frisked” –

“If anyone could identify with young men magically deemed pathologically criminal for no other reason save their ethnicity, it would be Jews… Now we are not the ram in the story of Isaac’s sacrifice. We can be the angels, who are not afraid, who speak for God – “don’t put a hand on the boy!”

Amy Schiller writes about politics, feminism, philanthropy, and pop culture. Her work has appeared in The Nation, Salon, The Daily Beast, and The American Prospect. Her website is amybessschiller.com. Follow her on Twitter here.

(Image: Scott Olson/Getty)

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If you’re a woman who frequents parties, parks, bars, libraries, college campuses, grocery stores—anywhere, really—chances are you’ve been asked by a creepy guy for your phone number at some point. What do you do when he asks aggressively, or keeps harassing you after you’ve declined? Maybe you give out a fake number, or apologize and say you have a boyfriend (which may or may not be the truth, but anyway, you shouldn’t have to say it). It’s a scary situation to be in, and one that women all over the world are confronted with every day.

Enter the Feminist Phone Intervention. Conceived by two Jewish feminists, it’s a real phone number you can give to potential “suitors”—but one that delivers automated quotes from the feminist writer/activist/theorist bell hooks. (i.e.: “If any female feels she needs anything beyond herself to legitimate and validate her existence, she is already giving away her power to be self-defining, her agency.” WORD.) It went totally viral this past weekend, but in the midst of all the buzz one of the co-creators, an anonymous Latina from the Bronx, took some time out to explain the genesis of the project to Jewcy.

How did you come up with the idea for the Feminist Phone Intervention?

In the last couple of months, we’ve been shaken by the Boko Haram kidnappings, the mass disappearances of Canadian First Nations women, the murder of Islan Nettles and other transwomen, and the Elliot Rodgers killings in California. Each of these tragedies was an act of misogynistic violence on a mass scale, and in the cases of Rodgers and Boko Haram, female students were specifically targeted.

Compounding the horror of the Rodgers shooting was its media coverage: for example, the New York Post printed bikini photos of a woman who had “spurned” Rodgers under the headline “Killer Crush.” This is one example of how the press sometimes sympathizes with misogyny, by exposing an innocent woman and portraying the murderer’s experience of “romantic rejection” (the woman was 10-years-old when they met).

In addition, a number of close friends have experienced stalking and harassment in their daily lives and in the workplace.

In the wake of these issues, I wanted to design a project that would usefully and creatively talk back to sexism in daily life.

How does it work, technically? What are the costs involved in running such a service?

Twilio, the service we chose, charges one cent per call—so for a $1 donation, you just blocked 100 creeps and/or helped spread some feminist inspiration! I think that’s a pretty good turn-around.

We are paying the phone bill ourselves, and since we had no idea that it would receive this much attention, we would very much appreciate any donations to keep it running. Money donated beyond the cost of the phone bill will be donated to the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health.

The main creative issue for me was balancing its practical usability with its larger artistic/protest concept. For example, it would be safer to design a code to delay text message auto-reply, so that a person has time to leave the scene after giving out the number. But how long do we wait? Is twenty minutes enough? If we set it up to reply four or six hours later, well, you just got someone a booty call from “bell hooks.” So in order to mitigate the safety issue, we removed the text service, since it was the most provocative aspect of the project. As a result, phone calls have spiked.

This choice changes the experience for people who want to interact with the bot themselves and easily receive bell hooks messages for their own inspiration. But we had to prioritize the safety function over the artistic possibilities. Eliminating the text service also saved money, so we can buy more phone lines in other area codes and countries.

Are you surprised by how popular the concept is? (This post on The Hairpin post has over 45,000 shares already!) How did you get the word out?

So far, we’ve been contacted about 100,000 times! I am absolutely surprised by how quickly it spread and how powerfully people responded to it. I sent a note about my project to the feminist website The Hairpin because I always liked their work, and then it spread from there.

I am proud that it was able to travel so quickly, requiring very little explanation. I think it’s important to engage intellectually and theorize about gender, power, and society—but keeping specialized vocabulary out of the messages allowed it to work for a much wider group of people.

You don’t need to identify as a radical feminist to want to enjoy your life and move more freely in the world. We had to ask ourselves: are we interested in contributing to a better feminist movement, or a better world? If it’s the second, then feminist tactics need to be able to move out of academic and activist spaces with limited readerships.

Why have you chosen to remain anonymous?

The Feminist Phone Intervention is meant as a reminder that we don’t owe strangers our time, our names, our bodies, or our contact info, so the choice of anonymity fits with that.

In a larger, tactical sense, choosing anonymity also makes room for more collective action. We are setting up open-source versions, to make it easier for people to adapt our project to their own needs or regions. Not having a “face” associated with it will hopefully empower more people to make their own versions.

In U.S. history, fame is often used as a destructive force against activist communities, a way of singling out one person and making her a spokeswoman, which erases collective efforts. Well-known examples include Kathleen Hanna and Gloria Steinem, both of whom were selected by the outside media to represent a much more complex feminist community.

Several journalists who contacted me about this project were primarily interested in discovering and disclosing my own identity, rather than engaging with questions of sexism and activist tactics. For a project concerned with protecting women’s privacy, the irony is striking!

You’re currently studying the Yiddish radical press. What influence has that had on this project, and your political activism generally?

I am a researcher and historian of the Yiddish radical press in the United States, and so I think a lot about the role of media in social movements. I am interested in the social life of newspapers and how the press of a minority language group can create community.

One aim and practice of Yiddish anarchist culture of the early 1900s was the cultivation of comradeship in everyday life, not just within the movement but in all human interactions. We can see this expressed in letters to the editor and in the extent of their social practices, such as setting up schools and mutual aid societies. A very popular book at the turn of the last century was Alexander Harkavy’s American Letter Writer and Speller, which taught immigrants how to write letters in Yiddish and English. The letter templates are not neutral documents, but shape the readers’ responses: for example, a woman is advised to marry a worker for love, not to break the engagement for lack of money.

Harkavy was a linguist and author of a trilingual English-Yiddish-Hebrew dictionary, and he also contributed to the anarchist press though his translations and editorials. I was always struck by their efforts to teach comradeship through the press and the books of letter templates, usually without the explicit vocabulary of anarchism or socialism. It shows a real attention to the particularities of life before abstract ideology, and it rejects the view of human nature as inevitably selfish. I think there’s also some quality of mussar practice there, in terms of the intense focus on individual ethical behavior.

So I would say that this project has in some sense been inspired by the media of the Yiddish anarchists of the past century, who labored to develop a method of mutual aid that would transcend their own social groups. I think we could learn a lot from their investment in cultivating a radical etiquette, and especially in using language that speaks to people outside of gender studies or a small group of activists.

What would your response be to men who respond to the Feminist Phone Intervention with confusion, even dismay? (Like, “I’m not a creep! Most men can handle rejection! Just say no!”)

I haven’t seen men responding that way, but I have seen quite a few comments from women saying, “Be mature and just say no!” I am very glad that they have not received the kind of harassment we are addressing. However, there are many occasions where a person must exercise judgment and may choose to share a fake number. It’s for those situations that we hope to provide another option.

The primary weight of scrutiny should be on disrespect towards women, not on the tactics women use to respond. So we should try to be generous when considering the strategies women use to make ourselves safer in public.

People who have been assaulted, harassed or hounded in public often become hyper-vigilant in their daily lives, or develop other strategies for maintaining their personal safety. It’s a natural protective response, but often the heightened awareness of threats which develops after trauma can constrain our freedom of movement, narrowing the fullness of our lives and interactions. There’s a great quote about the difference between getting by and getting free by Mia McKenzie: “Because the things we learn to do to survive at all costs are not the things that will help us get FREE. Getting free is a whole different journey altogether.”

What do you hope to achieve with the project? What do you hope other people get out of it?

I hope that it will contribute to the expansion of our political imaginations. Just because something happens all the time, doesn’t mean it’s inevitable or that we have no choice in how to respond. Just knowing that our feminist phone line has been contacted 100,000 times makes me realize the mass scope of both harassment and potential everyday resistance. I am moved to know we are confronting the same struggles; that cyber-comradeship is heartening to me.

Right now we are working on adding more languages and quotations from feminists specific to the region where the area code is located. We recognize the ways in which racialized violence combines with misogyny to target women of color. It’s a small gesture, but we are working to get the Feminist Phone Intervention messages to also be read in a native language for our Canadian numbers. In Canada, indigenous women (Inuit, First Nations, and Metis) are five to seven times more likely than white women to die from violence.

For those who want to set up their own similar feminist intervention phone lines outside the reach of our servers, we are developing open-source programming, which will allow people to create their own versions and address sexism in more local ways. [Ed. note: lines have been set up in Mexico, Canada, the UK, and Israel.]

I think this project has really touched a nerve. Hopefully it will make people examine whether their everyday behavior is threatening or aggressive, and for others, to remember that they need not feel alone when facing harassment.

Image: Shutterstock

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Today is May Day, a celebration of summer and flowers and maypoles… and workers’ rights, natch. Confused? Let’s back up a little: the origins of May Day—like those of all good holidays—are Pagan. Traditionally in Europe, May 1 has marked the beginning of summer, and for a very long time people have celebrated the day with all sorts of nature-oriented festivities—picnics, romping in the fields, dancing around maypoles, donning flowers, crowning a May Queen, etc.

As Europe became Christianized, so did the holiday, but the date took a revolutionary turn in 1886, following the American general strike in support of the eight-hour work day, and the subsequent Haymarket Massacre in Chicago. Writes Judith Rosenbaum at the Jewish Women’s Archive:

Workers across the country rallied on May 1, and in several cities with active labor organizations protesting continued into the following days. In Chicago, a city with a large immigrant and anarchist population, violence erupted on May 3rd, when police opened gunfire on the striking workers. The following day, as laborers gathered in Haymarket Square to protest the police shootings, a bomb was thrown into the meeting and the ensuing gunfire killed seven police officers and at least four workers. With no conclusive evidence of who threw the bomb, anarchists were blamed; a show trial jury found eight guilty and sentenced seven to death.

The Haymarket massacre, as it came to be known, not only sparked the new commemoration of May Day as International Workers’ Day; it also awoke many people to the injustices around them. Emma Goldman attributed her own political awakening to the Haymarket affair, calling it in her autobiography “the most decisive influence” on her life.

So, May Day and the Jews and the labor movement: what’s the deal?

Well, here’s a ridiculously brief summary of an illustrious history: between 1880 and 1924 two million Jews emigrated to the U.S., and many of them became factory workers. They formed some of the largest unions and produced some of the labor movement’s most influential leaders, including Samuel Gompers, Bessie Abramowitz and Sidney Hillman (who announced their engagement on May Day; the proposal story to end all proposal stories!), Rose Schneiderman (who was instrumental in helping to institute reforms following the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in 1911), and Morris Hillquit. Oh, and that career Betty Friedan abandoned, which led to her disillusionment with domestic life, which led to the writing of The Feminine Mystique, which led to second wave feminism? She worked as a journalist for left-wing/labor publications, including the United Electrical Workers Union.

But wait, there’s more! Fifty years ago today, a rally in New York City launched the American movement to free Soviet Jewry, and the choice of May Day was no coincidence. Writes Rafael Medoff for JNS.org:

In April 1964, after reading reports in the press about the mistreatment of Soviet Jews—including the Kremlin’s refusal to allow Jews to obtain matzahs for that year’s Passover holiday—[Jacob] Birnbaum and [Morris] Brafman decided to call a meeting on the campus of Columbia University to brainstorm about the situation. Glenn Richter, a Queens College sophomore, was one of those who attended.

Richter told JNS.org that about 150 students attended that meeting—a surprisingly large number, considering the Soviet Jewry issue was almost completely unknown at that point. “It was an amazing scene, kind of electrifying,” he recalled. “We had the indignation of college students, we were outraged over an injustice and anxious to do something.” One of the students suggested they hold a rally outside the Soviet Mission to the United Nations, on Manhattan’s 67th street, on May 1—just four days away… Birnbaum was instantly attracted to the rally proposal because of the symbolism of holding it on May Day—the international holiday of the Communist movement. Rebuking the Soviets on their own holiday was exactly the kind of irony that he believed would attract public and media attention. And he was right.

More than a thousand people attended the protest, which was covered in the New York Times and marked the beginning of the public movement for Soviet Jewry.

So happy May Day, everybody. Here’s to justice, equality, and fair working conditions for all.

(Image via Library of Congress: Two girls wearing banners with slogan “ABOLISH CH[ILD] SLAVERY!!” in English and Yiddish. Probably taken during May 1, 1909 labor parade in New York City.)

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103 years ago today, the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire killed 146 garment workers in New York City. The fire most likely started when an unextinguished match or cigarette butt set a bin of fabric cuttings alight. For the workers inside the building—mostly girls and young women; immigrants from Eastern Europe and Italy—there was no escape: the doors and stairwells of the factory had been locked to prevent unscheduled breaks, trapping them inside. Many jumped to their deaths.

Two days after the tragedy, Forverts editor Abraham Cahan penned this moving cri de coeur:

The entire neighborhood is sitting shiva. Every heart is torn in mourning. The human heart is drowning in tears. What a catastrophe! What a dark misfortune!

Have we not written and initiated for weeks, months, years about the risky modern shop buildings with hundreds of young men and women workers who are always in danger for their lives in those buildings? Have we not agitated about these horrible firetraps?

Significant positives did emerge from the tragedy, however, including sweeping labor reforms, the strengthening of the unions, and the enshrinement of workers’ rights in law. But today, in other parts of the world, the conditions that led to the Shirtwaist fire are still the norm—a seemingly necessary part of the developed world’s insatiable demand for cheap, disposable clothing. Writes Kate Stoeffel at The Cut:

Today, more than 97 percent of American garments are imported from countries where our century-old regulations are not adequately enforced, like Bangladesh, the world’s second-largest garment exporter.Bangladesh’s Rana Plaza garment factory was the site of the deadliest accident in the history of the garment industry less than a year ago, when a factory built without a permit—but that passed Western audits—collapsed, killing more than 1,100 people. (More than half of the victims were women.)

Since 2004, volunteers have been chalking the names of the Shirtwaist victims as an annual memorial on the sidewalks of New York, outside the buildings they once called home. The organizers of the event write: “the chalk will wash away but the following year we return, insisting on the memory of these lost young workers.”

You can find a detailed map of the victims’ names, educational materials, and more information about today’s events at the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition.

And to help to support workers’ rights today, check out this great list of resources courtesy of the good folks at Repair the World.

(Chalk image: courtesy of Tablet columnist Marjorie Ingall.)

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As a child, celebrating Purim was about dressing up and making noise when our rabbi chanted Haman’s name during his reading of the megillah. But two different life-changing events during my adolescence have led me to understand the holiday in a more complex light. What was once a day of dressing up and acting out has become, for me, a call to social justice.

Unlike most of my Orthodox peers, I celebrated my bar mitzvah on Purim. I traded the usual weekly Torah portion read on a Saturday morning for the much longer Megillat Esther. Although my Hebrew birthday—the eighth of Adar—was actually six days prior to Purim, the holiday became the time that, according to Jewish tradition, I entered adulthood.

Back then, I read the megillah primarily as a coming-of-age story. Esther went from being a shy, sheltered child to a brave and courageous woman in a matter of chapters. I understood her hesitation when she invited King Ahasuerus and Haman to a banquet, but decided at the last minute to push off her revelation to a second banquet. Esther’s reticence echoed my fears about assuming the role and responsibilities of an adult man in Jewish ritual life. Here was I, a kid of thirteen, trying to take off the mask of childhood and become a fully-fledged member of the Jewish people. My own family was firmly modern Orthodox, but I was raised in an ultra-Orthodox community. Would I ever be able to live up to the expectations set out for me by those far to my family’s religious right?

Three years later, Purim was the holiday during which I came out to my best friends. Since middle school, I had worked to keep my true identity hidden from my peers. I refused to do or say anything that might be even remotely been seen as stereotypical and lead people to the (correct) assumption that I was queer. I refused to listen to any music that was seen as “gay” or to wear skinny jeans or brightly-colored clothing. I was sheepishly quiet, lest I slip up and say the wrong thing to the wrong person.

When I came out, the pretense finally began to fall away, though it happened gradually. Around a few friends, I began to open up and leave both the closet and the personal cocoon that I had set up to protect myself. As I came out to my parents (who were probably just as surprised to find out that I was queer as Ahasuerus was to find out that someone was planning to eradicate his queen’s nation) and to more of my friends, I began to feel more comfortable with who I was. I began listening to music that I genuinely enjoyed, stereotypes be damned. I fully embraced the phenomenon of brightly-colored skinny jeans, which were already popular at my Jewish prep school.

Coming out also led me to see a new dimension in the Purim story. It was not only Esther’s fear of taking responsibility that scared her: it was the peeling away of the false identity she had created to conceal her Judaism. As a child, I had read rabbinic stories of how Esther would light Shabbat candles and practice Judaism in secret, with only Mordechai and a few of her maids aware of her real identity. After hiding for so long, she feared the response to her true self. Would she be rejected by her husband, the king, who had approved Haman’s plan to exterminate her people? What if she couldn’t save her people? And what if the king decided that she, despite being queen, would not be spared?

Like I did when I was coming out, Esther shed her false identity in stages. Initially she does not mention her Jewishness, only that a nation is about to be exterminated. Later, she reveals her affiliation with Mordechai and the greater Jewish community. Ahasuerus  becomes angered not at the fact that the Jews are in danger, but that a single minority is in danger. In executing Haman, Ahasuerus sent the message that intolerance of any kind was unacceptable in his kingdom, which was known for its diversity (the beginning of the megillah tells us that the Persian empire included no fewer than 127 distinct nations). Megillat Esther is story about—and a call for—social justice, as much as it is about shedding the false identities we create so as to not be rejected.

Interpreting the story of Purim as a story of social justice has helped me identify my goal as an aspiring advocate for LGBT Jews. I should not only be fighting for the inclusion of those who feel excluded because they are queer. My goal is to create a community that encourages and celebrates diversity, a community that not only accepts LGBT people, but also other disenfranchised Jews. For me, the final goal is the creation of a stronger, more inclusive Jewish community: it is not only I, as a queer person, who benefits from this, but the Jewish people as a whole, which benefits from becoming more diverse.

Amram Altzman is a first-year student in a joint program with the Jewish Theological Seminary and Columbia University. He is also a blogger for New Voices, a website for Jewish college students. You can find him on Twitter @thesubwaypoet.

Related: DIY: Fighting Homophobic Bullying
“I’d Be Much Happier Married To A Religious Gay Man”

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Tzedakah boxes are things of childhood memory for many Jews, except me. I tithed. Growing up with a Baptist mother, a Methodist father and educated in Catholic schools, the idea of giving charity was not lost on me. I can remember my mother reaching into her pocket book every Sunday morning to fish out crisp dollar bills for my sister and I to put in the collection plate that was passed around. I don’t remember what it felt like to put that money in the shiny gold plate, because it wasn’t my money.

Fast forward two decades and now I’m a Jewish woman with a giant student loan balance. The promise I made in the mikveh comes with the responsibility to give funds according to our Jewish tradition. Student loan payments aside, the idea of giving money rather than time sometimes seems like a cop out. Why get your hands dirty helping the poor when you can write a check and not think about the people in need? Just giving money rather than time and energy seems like a way of avoiding the situation by throwing money at it.

Yet Jewish tradition requires each person give ten percent of their financial earnings to people in need. We’re obligated to do so not just as a nice thing to do, but to bring us closer to God and to atone for wrongdoing. Living in a city like New York, giving to people in need comes with an entirely different set of conflicts. If I give money to the homeless person asking for spare change on the subway, how can I be sure that they will use it for food rather than alcohol or drugs? Would it be better to give my money to an organization that works toward helping people in need or give to individuals living on the street?

Taking a cue from one of my conversion rabbis, I’ve gotten in the habit of adding money to my tzedakah sack (it’s a cloth bag rather than an ornate box) when I’ve ignored a panhandler on the subway or walked by a homeless person on the street. I say a little prayer asking God to bless the person and when I get home I put all of my spare money into my sack. Depending on the day it’s a few pennies or a few crumpled up dollar bills. I’ve got all of this money–now what?

Where Do You Give? , a project of American Jewish World Service, just launched their new interactive website asking Jews to “Re-imagine Tzedakah for the 21st Century.” As you click through the website you will find links, videos, and guides around tzedakah as well as a design contest which opens on January 10. Reading through the site and listening to the stories of people who are already actively engaged in giving helps put the idea of tzedakah into perspective. We’re obligated as Jews to give tzedakah. Where we give is where we can find passion in a time-honored tradition.

Where do you give? Click here to add a video to the Where do You Give? site. Camera-shy? No worries: add a note here instead

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If you find yourself sitting around debating why you don’t observe the day of rest, that is really one of the most beautiful traditions of the Jewish people, maybe you’d consider participating for the sake of other people, and taking part in Freedom Shabbat.

Freedom Shabbat is an opportunity for Jews all over the world to come together at one time and voice their call for an end to slavery, and their desire for freedom worldwide so inherent to the Jewish heart.

37 communities all across the country have signed up to help decry the enslavement of people all across the globe on April 22-23rd.

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Last December, Repair The World released the results of its commissioned study about the effect that short-term service trips have on the participants and the communities they seek to help. The verdict: these shorter ventures can have positive impacts on the communities in which they take place. This, of course, is contingent on the planning and execution of the trip. If the program is carefully thought out, negative outcomes are anticipated and problems are handled proactively, then the results could be very positive for all sides.

In addition to the completion of a concrete task, such as building a house or digging a ditch, the trips can also yield several unanticipated benefits. They can help get the locals involved in service, develop community leaders and provide an opportunity for cultural exchange between the students and hosts.

These trips haven’t always had such stellar reputation. In the most recent edition of the Jewish Week, Tamar Snyder explores the phenomenon of short-term service in “Living Out Their Jewish Values — Quickly.” She notes the inauspicious start to some of these programs:

For years, the short-term service trip has been treated like the kid sister of the more established and professionalized yearlong Jewish service program. These short-term programs, which range from a week to 10 days, were often seen as more trouble than they were worth. A group of college students who had never touched a drill in their lives, but were inspired to do social justice work and live out the Jewish value of repairing the world, suddenly swooped into a downtrodden village in a Third World country and built a house — one that needed to be rebuilt by professionals after the well-meaning group had boarded their flight home.

But short-term immersive Jewish service learning programs have made great strides in recent years, mostly due to an increased professionalization. These trips are now the work of months of preparation. And instead of sending a dozen Jewish teens or college students to a foreign country with little prior instruction, the trips are now the final step of the program — not the first. The volunteers are better prepared to handle the challenges of working in the Third World and poor communities with hours of training and reading before their passports are stamped.

The success of these better run programs can be seen in the numbers of trips and participants, which have been continually increasing. In 2009-2010, more than 2,000 university students and young professionals went on one of these trips. Snyder posits a few reasons for the increases. First, she writes, many favor shorter projects because they are unable to take a full year off to devote to service, and the greater number of options is in part due to their needs being heard and met. Secondly, this trend is a reflection of a globalized world where more Americans work and travel abroad. It’s logical that this would be reflected in the American Jewish community, too.

The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) has seen its short-term service trip budget increase and is planning more programs for the coming year. Yeshiva University (YU) and the American Jewish World Services (AJWS) also plan to send more participants abroad in 2011.

All of this means more work for organizations committed to doing a good job, both for participants and the host communities. Ellen Irie, a consultant who worked on Repair’s study told Snyder, “Short-term service can lead to greater positive community impact than funding alone…It’s worth it when it is done well, despite the time and effort and resources it takes to do it well.”

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A lot of the individuals that get highlighted on this site and others devoted to service, volunteering and social justice tend to be activists. Some even work in the nonprofit field, meaning that their professional lives are devoted to the cause of repairing the world. Of course, their efforts are significant and certainly should be encouraged and promoted. But we should not forget that it is also possible to have a positive impact on society even if you don’t serve food at a local soup kitchen or go on an alternative spring break trip. A businesswoman who acts ethically in her dealings with employees is also fixing up her little corner of the world.

That’s why the Jewish social justice organization, Uri L’Tzedek, is launching a new award campaign – the Annual Yosher Award. This prize will be given to an observant Jewish business hero that treats employees in an ethical fashion. This means that he pays them minimum wage and overtime and maintains a workplace that respects their rights. As we all know, far too many companies, both large and small, fail to do this.

Chairperson of the award, Laura Burnosky, wants “to nationally recognize those that sanctify their everyday business actions by imbuing their work environment with the Torah values of justice and righteousness. Business ethics have always been a core Jewish value and we want to honor those whose commitment to that value has elevated the lives of others.”

But because doesn’t have eyes and ears everywhere — they’re not Big Brother — they need your help. If you know of a Jewish business man or woman who is worthy of this honor, nominate him/her for the award by going to Uri L’Tzedek’s website.

Here’s a short video that explains the scope of Uri L’Tzedek’s goals and work.

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