Article Archive

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.

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.

The editorial that originally appeared in this space has been retracted.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.

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.

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.

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.

Yet again, someone trying in good faith to take their seat at the Jewish communal table has had their chair pulled out from under them.


At a Nov. 16 meeting of the Jewish Student Union at the University of California, Berkeley, the students of the union’s general board voted to reject the Berkeley chapter of J Street U’s application for membership. The union, considered the official voice of the Jewish community at Berkeley, is an umbrella organization funded partially by Berkeley Hillel and partially by the student government. Though Jewish groups can seek funding and recognition directly from Hillel, as J Street U does, many also choose to join the union, which gives additional funding to its 15 member organizations.

November was Out in Israel Month. As the Out in Israel Month campaign’s website puts it, the initiative was designed to “celebrate the LGBT community and culture in Israel.” It should be no surprise that a well-funded public relations campaign such as this — targeted at several heavily Jewish college campuses, and centering on both gay rights and on Israel’s image — attracted a bit of controversy. Out in Israel Month was sponsored by, among others, two national right-wing pro-Israel campus advocacy groups, The David Project and StandWithUs.


Controversy around Out in Israel Month centered around a little portmanteau: “pinkwashing,” the practice of employing Israel’s good track record on LGBT rights to whitewash its less liberal-friendly policies in the West Bank and Gaza.


This debate is becoming yet another piece of the larger debate about on campus. Great. Because what we really needed was the opening of another front in the campus war over Israel/Palestine.

Wringing their hands over the imagined plight of “the youth,” the Jewish Federations of North America came together in Denver last week for their annual General Assembly. Rabbi Elie Kaunfer — a founder of Manhattan’s traditional egalitarian yeshiva, Yeshivat Hadar — was the scholar-in-residence at the GA this year. In his address, Kaunfer drew the connection between our generation’s increased willingness to criticize Israel and our generation’s decreased involvement with the Jewish establishment. But the post-GA discussions that have emerged indicate a broader misdiagnosis of what ails the Jewish community — it’s the very definition of community.

We have created a Jewish community so torn by internal politics about Israel speech that we can no longer so much as propose a social justice trip to Israel without creating a political divide in the Jewish community, alienating Jews of good conscience who have already been marginalized for their views.


Pursue is an alumni program cosponsored by Avodah and the American Jewish World Service. Knee-jerk reactions abounded when Pursue announced that it would sponsor an Israel trip. One Avodah staffer resigned in protest and a group of current Avodah participants circulated a petition, which demands that the trip include some Palestinian components like a visit to the territories and interactions with real live Palestinians.

Have things gotten so bad for the leader of the free world that he’s slumming it on the op-ed pages of college newspapers? Last week, an op-ed written by President Barack Obama targeted at the college crowd appeared in a handful of college newspapers, including The Harvard Crimson and the University of Texas at Austin’s Daily Texan.


For a sitting president to run an op-ed in student newspapers is uncommon, to say the least; this one drew the ire of some commentators. The College Media Matters blog said, “A related post yesterday on Fox Nation ran with the headline, ‘Obama Reduced to Writing Op-Eds in Student Newspapers.’ A separate commenter on a Politico story wrote, ‘It’s a transparent and ethically challenged vote-buying gambit.'”


We’re not convinced.