This week in my journalism class is ethics week. We wrote a paper addressing different ethical scenarios, completed pages upon pages of reading about frameworks for ethical thinking, and spent lecture today looking at and discussing some tough situations and how to solve them.

One thing that stuck out to my particularly was the discussion about what ethics was not—namely, that ethics is not equal to religion. This was something I’d never considered before. For me, being Jewish was such a major part of my heritage that I always took the values I learned in religious school for granted, without questioning them. When I really started to think about the fact that ethics and religion were not synonymous, I first questioned myself for “blindly” following the teachings of my religion until I realized that the ethical code defined by Judaism and its commandments lines up with the general ethical principles that most people buy into.

Most everyone cosndiers it common to not steal, not murder, and respect “thy parents,” as the ten commandemetns state. Some of the lesser known commandments, included in the full list of 613, are equally as important and relevant to so-called universal values:

• Not to stand idly by wen a human life is in danger
• Not to leave a beast, that has fallen down beneath its burden, unaided
• To give charity according to one’s means
• Not to do wrong in buying or selling
• Not to delay payment of a hired man’s wages

Granted, there are some commandments that I disagree with, and some that I find irrelevant in the modern day, but another feature of reform Judaism is the welcoming of questioning and interpretation. In high school, I was taught by an amazing rabbi who encouraged us to discuss and debate the teachings of our religion on present-day issues and allowed us to reach our own interpretation of the laws.

I am so thankful to be part of a religious community that does not force me to question my values or blindly obey when making my decisions. I love that the values I have learned in Judaism align with what I choose to believe, and I love that I can take my Jewish beliefs into consideration when making a decision without feeling like I have been led astray. As a journalist, it will be crucial for me to be ethically “on my toes” at all times, and I’m grateful that I will incur no conflicts on interest in reporting because of my religious beliefs.

The writer and her awesome Jewish mother enjoy a Red Sox game together.

Today is Mother’s Day, a holiday some call an invention of Hallmark, but at least in in my family, it is a day of breakfast in bed, time spent together and the one day a year my mom does not have to be selfless.

My mom is, more than any other word, generous – with her time, her compassion and her love. She listens to me, whatever my worries, complaints, good news, bad news or uncertainty may be. She pushes me to be brave and consoles me when courage fails me. She never lets me feel spoiled but I always feel very lucky. She has taught me to love family, a good book, clothing sales, and football. I credit her with my drive, resiliency, and grounded sense of self.

She is of course a wonderful mother to me and my brother, but as I have gotten older I have noticed more and more that she extends the same kindness and nonjudgmental understanding to her friends, acquaintances, and even near strangers. She is someone people just want to talk to, and I am proud to share her.

With the exception of a select few teachers in my pluralistic Jewish high school, my mom has taught me everything I know and hold dear about being a Jewish human being. She (and my dad too, but today is her day) has made Judaism meaningful for me by instilling in me the values of tzedek, righteousness, and chesed, loving kindness. She gives so much of herself to the Jewish community at home – especially in the area of education – and it inspires me to be involved and feel a stake in my own Jewish community, whatever that means in the different times and places of my life.

Since I have gone on and on about how great she is, it is only fair to talk about some of her faults as well. We certainly argue, and when we do we yell a lot and loudly. She has moments of helicopter parenting. She is probably the only Jewish mother who will openly admit she can’t cook. Though, in her own words, “I follow recipes well.”

And many, many more things of which she is remarkably self-aware.

And I love her for all of them. Happy Mother’s Day, Mommy!

Before taking a break from Facebook for the weekend, Glancy uses it to express her excitement for Shabbat.

Internet backlash is on the rise. Every few weeks I find out about another person my age who has deleted his or her Facebook. Today a friend told me he unsubscribed from his entrepreneurship news blasts because he was tired of mental masturbation. I don’t blame him—it gets exhausting. Every moment I check my social media pages, or the news, or my e-mail, I am overloaded with information and connectedness. And it’s hard to stop looking at it.

Shelly Turkle would agree with me. In her Op-Ed a few weeks ago in The New York Times, she writes about The Flight from Conversation. In it she discusses just how tied to our objects we are nowadays. She describes families sitting together on their emails, or people at board meetings checking their phones the second they become disinterested. Just the other night in my sorority house, I noticed how eight of us were all looking at our own computer screens, starting one-sided conversations about the content we were looking at.

Sometimes we are physically present, but not really there.

I don’t know about you, but I’m dying to get away. I need some solitude away from information, away from articles telling me how to live, away from my friends’ posts that I’m constantly skimming. Hotels are now offering internet-free getaways, in which they charge extra to cut you off. People are actually paying so that someone takes away their mode of communication; that’s how bad it’s gotten. I would probably pay for it. [Just checked my Facebook]. We can use SelfControl to block websites, or the StayFocusd app to limit our usage of Facebook or e-mail. But there has to be some way to pause and to find peace and quiet away from text and images, and then to proceed.

Which leads me to the conclusion: we need more Shabbat. We need Shabbat more than ever before. We need time to disconnect, time to spend with our own minds in solitude, time to connect with each other has human beings and not as mirrors of our own egos. My prediction is that Shabbat will be getting trendier in the coming months and years because it is impossible to lead a happy life when you’re only ever hearing voices other than your own. My challenge for you this Shabbat is to leave your phone in your coat pocket, or to let your computer die and hide your charger. Or maybe even delete your Facebook. Feel the shalom trickle in as you keep the buzz out.

Read the Shelly Turkle article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/22/opinion/sunday/the-flight-from-conversation.html?pagewanted=all

The book "The Eichmann Trial," by Deborah Lipstadt

I am reading in the library on the main floor near the computers. I have taken the paper cover off my book, leaving a black face that gave no hints as to the novel’s subject. I am so engrossed I do not notice my friend walk up.

“Whatcha reading?”

“Hmm?” I look up from my chair and flip around the book to show him the words on the spine: The Eichmann Trial.

“The what trial?”

“Eichmann,” I say, but his face remains blank. So I briefly explain Eichmann, a Nazi behind the Final Solution, responsible for helping to deport millions of Jews to concentration camps during the Holocaust. After World War II, Eichmann escaped from Germany and fled to Argentina under a false identity. In 1960, Israeli intelligence agents tracked him down and staged an operation to capture and bring him back to Israel. The trial began in April of 1961 and Eichmann was finally held accountable to justice.

I finish my explanation, placing verbal emphasis on justice. But my friend just frowns.

“How can they do that?” He asks.

“Do what?”

“So Israel just thinks it has the right to kidnap people off the streets. Like that’s just not cool. Isn’t it ironic that Israel broke the law in the first place so they could have this trial?”

Slightly in shock, I stand up and look at my friend. Adolf Eichmann was behind the deaths of six million Jews—of six million people who share my culture. And my friend’s response is to question the validity of the trial? I want to give a sharp response. My friend is Catholic and I want to tell him that Eichmann escaped justice in the first place thanks to the help of his Catholic church. But I don’t say that. I bite my tongue and sit back down.

In the book, Lipstadt regards the Western culture of anti-Semitism that had been festering in Europe long before the Holocaust. Hitler didn’t create the anti-Semitism—he simply gave it a push. And without such anti-Semitism, Lipstadt argues, the Holocaust could never have happened. Her conclusion: unfortunately, this anti-Semitism still exists today.

Naturally, I assume my friend is not anti-Semitic. But in such occasional conversations, I notice the slightest touches. Should I have addressed my friend directly instead of sitting back down and letting his comment slide? Am I simply overreacting? I don’t presume to know the answer. But as I think some more, my questions bring to mind the beginning of Rabbi Hillel’s famous quote: “If I am not for myself, then who will be for me.”

The friends Wiznitzer shared a shocking conversation with about how the Holocaust lives on today.

The Holocaust shaped the way my home community engaged with Judaism. We talked about it regularly and everyone had some connection to the war. I thought that was the norm, until a conversation that I had with two of my best friends Olivia Probetts and Anna Rietti.

Sitting in my dorm room on a Thursday night we started talking about religion and how much it has shaped all of our lives. I am not exactly sure how, but we arrived at the topic of the Holocaust and World War II. Anna, a Westchester Reform Jew with an Italian Catholic father, said that although it was not talked about often, the Holocaust is something to which everyone has a connection. She continued to say that it is common knowledge that all Jews have a connection to the Holocaust, but it is not a big deal anymore. Olivia, a Christian from Denver, CO who went to a religious school, discussed how the first Jews she ever met were here at Northwestern. The Holocaust for her has always been something distant that she reads about in books.

I told Olivia the story of my grandparents in the Holocaust and that’s when the shock came. She had never before connected the event with real people. There was equal shock on my end, because I had always assumed that the Holocaust was something people talked about in places other than Jewish Day Schools and my isolated community. However, both Anna and Olivia described it as something distant and separate from our world today.

A large part of the mission statement of Jewish day schools is to combat anti-Semitism, which continues to be a prevalent part of the world. The prime example for me has always been the Holocaust. Therefore, throughout my education and in my community the Holocaust was a topic constantly discussed. It informed our secular subjects just as much as it informed our Judaic studies.

Anna and Olivia represent a majority of the population for whom the Holocaust is not relevant anymore. Because it is such a huge part of my life and has impacted me so much, I am struggling to understand the role it plays in other communities. I am not sure if I ever will fully understand.

A couple days later I asked Olivia her thoughts on our conversation. She said, “I’ve never come across it as something very real that people I know could have stories from.” The Holocaust is still very real to me and I hope it continues to be for other people as well, even as the generation of the Holocaust is passing away.

This image was used in a Facebook campaign to increase diversity awareness at Northwestern.

With all the talk around campus in recent weeks about what is called, for lack of a better word, “diversity,” I’d like to share few thoughts based on my experience as a student group leader and observer of Northwestern. I offer the following three propositions:

1. Diversity is a quality of a group, not an individual. It’s misleading to say that Northwestern needs to enroll more “diverse” students, as if this were a characteristic some students have but others don’t. In such cases, “diverse” functions as a euphemism for “racial minorities” and that’s a separate but important conversation. Rather, to articulate diversity as a goal means to gather a group of high-achieving students in which everyone brings a different perspective to the table. This group should include students with a variety of backgrounds, walks of life, races, religions and so forth in numbers large enough to form their own meaningful sub-communities but small enough to allow other groups to thrive as well. Having such a group is important because…

2. Diversity is an educational asset, not a problem to be overcome so the university can get along with its business. Why pay $50,000 a year to go to a school like Northwestern? Most of what we learn in classes can be learned independently or from increasingly popular video lectures that even elite schools are starting to produce for free. We pay tuition in order to join a high-achieving and diverse intellectual community, where students learn as much from each other as they do from their professors. The goal of the University should be to foster conversation and learning among the diverse students it has gathered and break down barriers to those experiences.

3. Diversity is really hard to talk about. Despite the gains of recent decades, much racial discrimination, prejudice and privileges continue to exist in American society. This is hard to talk about, and the kind of charged rhetoric emerging from all sides when things like the “Beer Olympics” part occur doesn’t help. But I think Northwestern students have the maturity and intelligence to express their feelings honestly but also to listen sympathetically to others. The goal is to learn to have real conversations with one another that create an educational experience for all. These conversations, in which people get to know each other as human beings, will hopefully prevent the kind of inconsiderate incidents of racial bias that continue to plague Northwestern and similar schools.

The author with her grandma, sister, and cousin at Hannukah in 2009.

This past weekend, my 73-year-old grandma Marilyn flew in from Baltimore to visit me for the weekend. It was one of the most fun weekends I’ve had in a while. Here’s the thing about Marilyn: she’s put a fresh, new twist on the term “typical Jewish grandmother.”

The stereotype of the Jewish grandmother is both a hilarious and deeply rooted one. Jewish grandmothers have acquired their reputations of being loud with New York accents and trouble grasping the concept of being full after thousands of years of careful observation (by grandchildren, of course). We grandchildren constantly get nagged about when we’re getting married and know that a kiss from grandma usually means a lipstick stain on our cheeks. Obviously, the above reasons are why the Jewish grandmother stereotype is so funny.

But like all stereotypes in today’s society, the Jewish grandmother one has the ability to both make people laugh and to offend them. As I’ve learned throughout the past few weeks with the occurrence of events at Northwestern that caused plenty of racially- and culturally-driven uproar, the harm that stereotypes can cause needs to be taken seriously.

So what does this have to do with my grandma? This past weekend, she treated me to delicious meals (the food part of the stereotype) and talked to me about the (lack of) male prospects at Northwestern (the marriage part). But what my grandma, like all other stereotyped groups of people out there, be they Jewish, black, Asian, rich, poor, fat or skinny, means to me is far deeper than just those two things.

My grandma treated me to delicious meals this weekend because she knows I enjoy fun restaurants. We talked about boys because, much to my surprise, she’s looking to start dating again herself. When my grandma kisses me, Giorgio Armani probably made the color that’s smudged on my cheek. And she works so hard to try to understand how her iPhone works, which is probably why she talks so loudly into it.

My point here is this: stereotypes are only skin deep. Yes, there is certainly some truth to them. But the extent to which they’re exaggerated in today’s society has made me think twice about how I use them, even if I will someday be a Jewish grandmother myself.

Jenna poses with some of her friends as they get ready for Shabbat.

I often take Shabbat for granted. I mean, its great to have a relaxing day, and I always welcome it, but sometimes I don’t appreciate it like I should. It’s just Shabbat. It happens all the time. Its wonderful, but its also weekly.

This past weekend was a major exception. Instead of just kicking back after a week of reading, practice problems, and maybe a quiz, I was coming off of two weeks of nonstop midterms and midterm prep. I had been running around like a crazy person for a fortnight, never really stopping to breathe. I was running right until I had to leave for services at Hillel at 6:10.

But my bitter weeks made Shabbat all the more sweet. I finally allowed myself to relax. I hung out with my friends, ate good food, played board games. No different than any other Saturday. But it was different, because my more exhausted body and brain were gaining more enjoyment than usual from it.

I could say that this experience really opened my eyes, and I’ll stop taking the simple pleasures in life for granted because of it. But let’s get real.

I love Shabbat. I love being forced to not do homework. I love spending time with my friends. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to remember just how great it is every single week. But every once in a while, it’ll hit me. Maybe now, just a little more often than usual.

The Philadelphia Jewish Film Festival, where Toplin will intern this summer.

After months of struggling, I finally got an internship! This summer, I’m extremely excited to be interning at the Philadelphia Jewish Film Festival. As an intern, I won’t be around for the actual festival (sad!) but I do get to help select films and speakers around hot-button topics relating to Jewish life.

I’m extremely excited to help plan something that’s so influential not only in the Philadelphia Jewish community, but also something that could help touch lives and raise discussion that really, truly needs to be occurring. This is something big in Philadelphia—it was the first film festival in the city, and anyone who knows about film (inside or outside of the Jewish community) has likely heard of it.

What makes me the most excited about this internship, though, is the fact that I get to bring what I have learned this year at Northwestern back home and finally immerse myself in the extremely rich Jewish community that the Greater Philadelphia area is so lucky to possess.

In high school, my life and Jewish life had a small intersection. I didn’t fit in well with most of my grade at my synagogue (they all went to high school together and I didn’t), I didn’t attend a strictly “Jewish” camp, and I was not involved in NFTY, BBYO, or USY. I worked as a TA at my Hebrew school once a week, and attended services as was appropriate, but I never took full advantage of my heritage and the community that comes with it until I stepped foot at Northwestern.

Now that I’m here, Hillel is my main activity on campus and the source of some of my favorite memories and many of my best friends. Having gained so much from it this year, and getting to see how a Jewish community outside of one large Reform synagogue in an upper-class suburb functions makes me even more excited to take that knowledge and apply it to an event that’s something meaningful and important. I can’t wait to see how it goes!