By Leora Abelson Rabbinical Student Fellow, JCUA I saw the movie
“The Hunger Games” this spring. I knew nothing about the books
or the movie and was caught totally off guard by the horrific
premise. If you aren’t familiar, it’s about a “game” in which
teenagers fight each other to the death over the course of
several days in a forest, while the rest of the world watches.
Fun, right? One of many intense scenes in the movie depicts a
lottery to determine which young people will be forced to
participate in the event; the suspense, obviously, is
tremendous. So when one of the high school students
participating in JCUA’s Or Tzedek Advanced Activism session
compared lotteries to get into high school with that scene in
“The Hunger Games,” I was really struck. It happened at an event
called “Youth Power: A Story Slam.” That evening, young people
from Or Tzedek, AVODAH, Immigrant Youth Justice League, UIC,
CAIR-Chicago and other organizations gathered to tell stories,
laugh and support one another. We heard stories ab