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The classroom is filled with energy despite the hour. It’s 9:40 a.m. and students work to unscramble the Hebrew word on the board as their classmates trail in. At 10:10 the class is immersed in Israel, travelling to Tiberius and the Dead Sea. By the time the entire class has arrived, students are sitting in a close-knit circle, taking turns reading the Shema with a greater fluency than the week before.


Staffed by energetic undergraduate students, the Boston-area Jewish Education Program has transformed the way kids and parents are thinking about Hebrew school. Based on the campus of Brandeis University, the program allows college students to tackle the classroom from a different angle as educators at the start of each week, teaching Hebrew school to elementary school aged kids.

The YU Beacon, an all-online newspaper published by the students of Yeshiva University, has attracted non-stop controversy since its inception about a year ago. The Beacon was founded by Simi Lampert, Ilana Hostyk and Tali Adler — a trio of students at YU’s Stern College for Women who had run out of patience with the status quo at an existing YU newspaper.


A few months into its existence, the Beacon became an official YU publication. “People had a lot of doubts that we could go on without being censored,” Lampert told New Voices over the phone today. But the staff quickly agreed that if YU ever tried to censor the Beacon, “we would pull out from being funded by YU.”


Their resolve on that point was tested this week. An anonymous piece was published in the Beacon, written from the point of view of a female YU student told the story of the narrator’s sexual encounter with her male lover in a hotel room. Thousands of hits and hundreds of comments later, they were asked to remove the article.


The situation came to a head last night when Lampert and Toviah Moldwin, the current co-editors-in-chief of the Beacon, met with administrators and student leaders. Lampert and Moldwin decided it was time for YU and Beacon to part ways.