Archive
The Union for Reform Judaism’s biennial convention, held this year at a gargantuan conference center/hotel outside Washington, D.C., is bigger than ever: It sold out when 5,000 people signed up before registration closed. But the excitement is palpable for another reason: This is Rabbi Eric Yoffie’s last, and Rabbi Rick Jacobs’ first, biennial as president […]
We take this as an article of faith: A press free from censorship is a prerequisite for an open, modern society. It is the right and responsibility of every community, acting through journalistic institutions, to hold a mirror up to themselves, to examine every inch of their communal face — and to linger when a blemish is found.
When it works, we don’t always like what we see; hopefully, we will right the newfound wrong. Sometimes we will simply avert our eyes in shame; this too is our right.
But we must resist the urge to shoot the messenger.
The ugly inclination to lash out at the press for bringing up a woefully seldom discussed issue reared its head at Yeshiva University last week.
If they’re not slogging through all-nighters, most college students are already home for the break. (Unless you’re on the quarter system; we have no idea what’s going on with you guys.) After meeting liberal and left-of-center Israel activists at school, they may bring some unwelcome ideas about Israel home with them. Many parents and students will find that bringing up Israel can create an atmosphere at home almost as tense as the atmosphere on some campuses.
College, as the cliche goes, is all about discovering unfamiliar ideas, stumbling into new interests and encountering fresh ways of looking at the world. At least, that’s what our parents always said, staring off all misty-eyed at the dinner table while recounting the glories of their radical days. But the dinner table is about to get a little more interesting. The Israel that many Jews hear about on campus today isn’t the same place they remember from Hebrew school.
The tale of the newly severed ties between Yeshiva University and the YU Beacon, the most controversial of YU’s several student newspapers, is over. But the telling of the tale continues: The New York Times arrived a little late to the party, but God forbid they should ever miss out on a quirky Jew-y New York […]
I have a propensity for contracting illnesses in inconvenient situations. I’ve had tonsillitis in Prague, influenza in Florida, and most recently, pneumonia in Middletown. The last was by far the least opportune time to be seriously ill – amidst four exams, three papers, and various other odds and ends that had seemed to all converge […]
It’s been a while since there has been a good bit of controversy about Jewish assimilation, but thankfully American Jews and Israeli politics are out of sync just enough to justify talking about it again. The latest blip, I think, challenges American Jews much more than any other public effort since the spread of the […]
Network television shows have long played upon various Jewish stereotypes. Several of these conventions were alive and well in prominent 1990s television situation comedies, or “sitcoms,” such as Will and Grace and The Nanny. Both shows frequently invoked stereotypes about Jewish women in relation to culture and religion. Characters rarely accessed their Jewish heritage outside […]
Updated, 2:20 p.m., 12/9/11: I added a bit about Failed Messiah’s piece on the story. On Wednesday, New Voices broke the news that the YU Beacon, a student newspaper at Yeshiva University was in hot water over an anonymous article about a sexual encounter. Then The Jewish Daily Forward‘s Sisterhood blog had a short post about […]
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.