"I was born into a family that was half Ashkenazi (European Jews) and half Mizrahi (Middle Eastern Jews from Iraq) so that’s been a very big influence on my Judaism, just knowing that Judaism has a lot of faces and they all have different things to offer. I grew up learning Hebrew, Jewish law and bible study in a Jewish Day School, so it was very jarring to go from a school of 200 people with similar backgrounds, to Brown with 6,000 students from all walks of life - I didn't really know what hit me. I remember during orientation I showed up at Hillel for an event and I was like alright, here’s a pocket of something I know, a familiar environment - and I've definitely used Hillel that way ever since. Because I went to Jewish Day school and synagogue, all the people I interacted with growing up were Jewish by default, so it felt very different to come to college and have to seek that out and make it an active choice. Now that I have a lot of friends who are not Jewish, I think a lot of my practices like Friday night services have taken on new meaning because I’m there because I want to be and not because I have to be. I also think it’s really interesting that my Judaism has been redefined by my interactions with non-Jews. Among my school friends growing up I was always the least knowledgeable and the least religious, but when I came to Brown and started hanging out with people who weren't Jewish, I became a wealth of knowledge. Even amongst the greater Jewish community here I am one of the people in a position of teaching and sharing rather than always learning, and that has reshaped how I think about my Judaism. It all boils down to the fact that it has to be a conscious choice. I’m in the Maimonides class now with Moshe Moskowitz and the fact that I’m choosing to spend a few hours a week and a couple weeks a year taking a noncredit course, just to give myself the space to talk and learn is very much an active choice. I come every Friday night to Hillel and I also dance in Mezcla, Brown and RISD's Latin Dance Troupe. When I was President of Mezcla for 2 years, Mezcla e-board never met on Friday nights. I found this pretty amusing at first, but I soon realized that the fact that my Jewish choices have become so integral to my life that they affect the non-Jewishly-related things that I am doing - that seemed really great to me. My Jewish life in college has been defined not only by my interactions with other Jews at Hillel, but also the rest of Brown and the world, and this I really the first time I've gotten to experience that.”
Next year Natasha will be a graduate student in the Narrative Medicine Masters program at Columbia University.
Next year Natasha will be a graduate student in the Narrative Medicine Masters program at Columbia University.
