New Voices Editorial Board

Academic Freedom Restricted in Name of Academic Freedom

By New Voices Editorial Board May 23, 2013

It takes a lot for the Association For Asian American Studies to make international headlines. The AAAS is a group of academics within the fields of Asian and Asian-American Studies who work to advance the fields of Asian Studies and Asian-American Studies. Not exactly the kind of organization regularly covered by CNN. A quick Google…

Read More...

Never Been a Better Time to Be a Jew in College

By New Voices Editorial Board January 31, 2013

We hear it all the time: The American Jewish community is in decline. Interest is lacking, affiliation is down — and Jewish babies are popping out less frequently than we would like. If members of the Jewish establishment are correct, the future of American Judaism is in great peril, and if we don’t do a…

Read More...

Gun Violence: A Jewish Issue, a Student Issue

By New Voices Editorial Board December 20, 2012

At least one member of the New Voices editorial board sat in a meeting of their Hillel board this week at which a discussion of security spontaneously took its place on top of the agenda. We assure you it was not the first such discussion in a Jewish organization this week, nor the first on…

Read More...

Traditions of Satire and Anti-Semitism Collide at Harvard

By New Voices Editorial Board December 6, 2012

There is a long history of anti-Semitism at Harvard University, though it is essentially gone today. There is also a long history of subtle — and not so subtle — grandiose acts of satire at Harvard. Last Friday morning, students who live in Harvard University’s nine River Houses awoke to find that the intersection of those two…

Read More...

Editorial: An opportunity at UChicago?

By New Voices Editorial Board April 23, 2012

Reinstate Daniel Libenson as Hillel director \xe2\x80″ and let him continue his history of innovation and engagement.

Read More...

Editorial: The expanding Seder plate

By New Voices Editorial Board April 4, 2012

Oranges, potato peelings & olives — what’s next?

Read More...

Editorial: UC gets it right on free speech

By New Voices Editorial Board March 20, 2012

The actions of University of California President Mark Yudof following a string of disturbing events are commendable, and should be an example to the rest of us.

Read More...

Editorial: What’s in a name?

By New Voices Editorial Board March 7, 2012

Too often, Israeli Apartheid Week degenerates into an argument over its own name.

It’s all rhetoric. If you believe that the situation in Israel and the Occupied Territories today is analogous to apartheid, so be it. And if you believe that it’s a poor analogy, that’s fine too. Either way, it’s all rhetoric. And either way, choosing your place within the intense campus debate (by which we mean shouting match) about Israel-Palestine based solely upon your beliefs about the use of a single word is irresponsible, simplistic and narrow-minded. No real debate can come from wordplay.

Read More...

Editorial: Spying on Muslim students, NYPD crosses the line

By New Voices Editorial Board February 24, 2012

We thought the days of spying on students went out with the likes of J. Edgar Hoover. And yet, we’ve been reading stories all week about the New York Police Department practice of spying on Muslim students for no other reason than their affiliation with Muslim student organizations.

The AP reported in October that undercover agents were active on eight New York college campuses, but a new report says that they went far beyond that, spying on students on more far-flung campuses, such as Yale and Princeton.

Read More...

Editorial: At Penn, a model of restraint

By New Voices Editorial Board February 15, 2012

Usually, when the letters B, D and S are strung together within spitting distance of a college campus, you can expect the Jewish community to mobilize the shock troops, whip local Jewish students into a frenzy and escalate the situation from crummy to nuclear.

That is, until now. The Jewish community’s reaction to an entire BDS conference at the University of Pennsylvania on the weekend of Feb. 5 was a model of restraint.

Read More...

Editorial: ‘Tough Love’ rabbi or Teflon?

By New Voices Editorial Board February 2, 2012

The stories have circulated for years. Stories of students being slapped and others called “Nazi” or “gay.” They are shared between alumni, passed on to prospective students and discussed between parents. They’re recounted in debates at high school and college lunch tables. They have inspired their own blog, the Rav Bina Abuse Blog.

They are stories about Rav Aharon Bina, rosh hayeshiva (head of the yeshiva) at Netiv Aryeh — an all-male yeshiva in the Old City of Jerusalem and a popular destination among American Orthodox high school graduates spending a gap year in Israel before returning to America for college.

And most recently, an article published last week by The Jewish Week has ignited a debate over Rav Bina’s questionable teaching methods, for which he has become infamous.

Read More...

Editorial: Out of Iraq, but not the woods

By New Voices Editorial Board December 22, 2011

The last U.S. troops may have left Iraq on Dec. 18, but this generation’s involvement with that country is far from over — whether they realize it or not.


Thousands of American private security contractors (read: mercenaries) remain on the Pentagon’s payroll — otherwise known as the taxpayers’ payroll. Tax dollars are still flowing, and Iraq’s stability is far from assured. For recent college graduates and those who will graduate in the new year and in coming years, the domestic financial aftermath of the war matters as much as the global security issues. The $1 trillion spent in Iraq means $1 trillion not spent at home — money that could have been used to benefit current and future students by forgiving college debt or providing low-interest student loans.

Read More...

Editorial: Liberals stifle conservatives too

By New Voices Editorial Board December 22, 2011

The editorial that originally appeared in this space has been retracted. It relied on a Dec. 16 article in Tablet Magazine that alleged that Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion had received an offer from Willy Stern to endow a chair for a politically conservative professor.


Tablet issued a correction on the article on Jan. 3:


“This article originally stated that the rumored funder was Willy Stern, an adjunct law professor at Vanderbilt University and occasional contributor to the Weekly Standard. Stern, who originally declined to be interviewed for the story, has since informed us that he did not make this offer.”


It is in light of this that New Voices has retracted this editorial.

Read More...

Editorial: Shut up and listen

By New Voices Editorial Board December 15, 2011

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.

Read More...

Editorial: At YU, the free press shines on

By New Voices Editorial Board December 15, 2011

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.

Read More...