The Golem as a Medium of Self-Defense

In the obscure corners of the internet that I frequent there has been some discussion about the golem as a story about self-defense in the context of recent Israeli military actions. Though it is understood that the self-defense angle is a modern addition to the story, I was kind of curious about how and when that element of the story developed. 

The earliest written version of the golem story is from a 17th century autograph kabbalistic text called יסודי תורת משה and remains unpublished. The short story, as translated by Moshe Idel in his book Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid, reads as follows:

And I have heard, in a certain and explicit way, from several respectable persons that one man, [living] close to our time, in the holy community of Helm, whose name is R. Eliyahu, the master of the name, who made a creature out of matter [Golem] and form [ẓurah] and it performed hard work for him, for a long period, and the name of 'emet was hanging upon his neck, until he finally removed for a certain reason, the name from his neck and it turned to dust.

Later retellings of this story would add a specific justification for why Rav Eliyahu Baal Shem of Chelm deactivated his golem. Rav Yaakov Emden, a descendant of Rav Eliyahu, in שאילת יעב"ץ ב:פ"ב explained that the golem slowly grew and Rav Eliyahu deactivated it out of a fear that it would destroy the world. This becomes the core of later more elaborate versions of the story. In which a rabbi creates a golem and the golem becomes a threat to the community or the wider world. 

In the earliest versions of the Maharal of Prague's golem, the Maharal creates a golem which he uses to help him with chores. When the Maharal forgets to deactivate the golem before Shabbat, the golem begins to go rougue and damages property. Then the Maharal deactivates the golem and hides the golem's body away. 

The story of the Maharal's golem is a historically romantic folktale that exists in the context of other romantic literature in the 19th century. These other romantic short stories and novels play with the idea of a golem or golem-like being developing feelings as an individual character. Most famously, there's Frankenstein's monster, but there are versions of this story that are specific to the golem. Rudolf Lother's short story The Golem of Rabbi Loeb, which was published in english translation in the Menorah magazine, portrays the golem as the manifestation of Eleazar's love for his reluctantly bethrothed Esther. (See Part 1, Part 2, Part 3); (Also see Eden Dekel and David Gantt Gurley, "How the Golem Came to Prague," in Jewish Quarterly Review, Vol. 103, No. 2 (Spring 2013): 241–238.)

None of these stories contain any events in which the golem becomes the protector of the Jewish communtiy. Yet somehow, in the 1920 film The Golem: How He Came into the World, the golem is specifically created to protect the Jewish community of Prague. 

In the narrative of the film, the emperor sends a decree to expell the Jews from Prague since they have been accussed of killing Christ and oppressing the Christian residents of the city. In response, the Maharal creates the golem. For a bit the Maharal tests the golem's abilities by having him aid in household chores. The Maharal and his golem soon set out to meet with the emperor during a festival and somehow convince him to repeal the decree. 

Upon arriving at the festival, the emperor asks the Maharal to entertain the crowd with one of his magic tricks. The Maharal offers to show a moving picture of Jewish history, but warns that if the audience laughs at all there will be dangerous consequences. This stipulation is a trap. The Maharal projects the image of a caravan of middle eastern nomads, one particularly wizzened man looks to the audience and declares that he is Ahasuerus the wandering Jew. The audience bursts out laughing. With the pretext, the Maharal causes the roof of the banquet hall to begin collapsing. Some people get crushed in the rubble, while others jump out of the windows to their deaths. In desparation the emporer offers to repeal his decree against the Jews if the Maharal saves him. Immediately, the Maharal orders the golem hold up the collapsing roof, saving the emperor and the others who haven't been crushed yet. 

Using the literary motifs of the romantic versions of the golem story, the movie translates the increasing power of the golem into the golem distancing itself from its creator and becoming more human. It is this emotional development of the golem that eventually leads it to kidnap the Maharal's daughter Miriam and accidentally set the ghetto on fire. 

The golem movie seems to have greatly popularized the self-defense element of the golem story. Almost all of the versions of the story that follow contain some element of Jewish community self-defense in the golem story. This element of community protection becomes integral to the comic book super heros that were based on the golem. 

The golem movie did not orginate the self-defense motif in the golem story. I was able to locate one published version of the golem story contianing a narrative of communal self-defense. It's likely there are a few more that pre-date the 1920 golem movie, but I have not been able to locate them. 

In 1897, the Jewish Publication Society produced a small book of Jewish folktales by Henry Iliowizi called In The Pale. One of the stories in this book is titled The Baal Shem and His Golem. Although the title seems to make it fit right into the tradition of previous golem stories, almost everything contained within it is a departure from the traditional golem story. 

This is the plot summary: 

Payutin, the recently appointed magistrate of Karolin, falls in love with Mayor Pozanow’s daughter Tilka. The couple, holding deeply antisemitic beliefs, recruit Russian Orthodox Father Shapirow, the son of a Jewish convert, to convince Mayor Pozanow to target the Karolin Hassidim. Mayor Pozanow instructs the Karolin fire brigade to respond to any loud festive noise created by the Hassidim worshiping as if it was a call of emergency, and then charge the Hassidim with disorderly conduct and fine them for the cost of the false alarm. 

Rav Aarele Baal Shem of Karolin instructs his Hassidim to ignore the new policy and continue worshiping as usual. Then, he enlists the help of the local Jewish blacksmith Pulasky to create a golem. After spiritually cleansing himself, Pulasky studies the divine names with Rav Aarele and summons a divine workforce to staff his workshop all night. When the sun rises, Pulasky and his spirit team have created a fire breathing iron monster. On the day of Payutin and Tilka’s wedding, Rav Aarele sent the iron golem to attack the wedding. The golem killed all the people at the wedding and destroyed the mayor’s house.

That's the story, its just the Jews lived happily ever after and defeated their enemies. There's no part where the golem turns on the Jewish community. In fact the story stresses "Not a Jewish house was damaged; not a Jewish body hurt." 

Although the story refers to Rav Aarele's creation as a golem, the creature is quite different from the traditional golem. In the underlying mystical reasoning for the golem, it is necessary for the golem to created from clay just like God created humans from dirt. The golem is created in a human form. The fact that the golem appears on the outside to be almost human was intriguing to the romantic authors who sought to explore the similarly almost human mind contained within the golem. 

Rav Aarele's golem is neither made from clay nor formed to look like a human. This is how Rav Aarele describes the golem to the blacksmith Pulasky, 

. . . forge for me a horror of black iron. It shall be as awe-inspiring as Death, as terrible as the Plague, gigantic as the Anak who followed Noah's Ark through the waters of the deluge, implacable as Satan the Beast and Lilith the Harlot. Hissing serpents shall be its hair; its eyes shall glow like the fire of hell; from its mouth shall shoot forth a live dragon as tongue; its claws shall be like those of the tiger; and its tail a venomous hydra. The Golem's hands shall reach to the soles of its feet. Dress it in a garb of feathers as black as Abaddon. It shall stride forth with wings outspread, shall breathe fire and vomit flame; a hellish roar shall issue from its throat; and I shall cause it to move and act as a power possessed of reason and will.

This golem is as inhuman as possible. Iliowizi specifically rejects any of the romantic human weakness or instability of the traditional golem. Rav Aarele's golem is simply an agent of death that can only harm oppressors of the Jewish community. The reference to the safety of Jewish houses during the golem's rampage is a clear reference to the death of the Egyptian firstborn in the Exodus story. Iliowizi's golem is an idealized form of divine protection and defense. 

In creating this perfect divine agent of retribution, Iliowizi rejects the foundational message of earliest golem stories. Looking back to Rav Yaakov Emden's retelling of the story, the golem is inherently a growing threat to safety of the world. Later story tellers found different ways of expressing this threat. They all illustrated it with some harm befalling the Jewish community. While transforming the golem into an agent for community defense, Iliowizi sheds the fundamental message of all the golem stories. That a human cannot create a perfect creation.

Paul Wegener synthesized Iliowizi's golem of self-defense with human feeling golem of the romantic stories. He created a powerful message about the dangers of violent self-defense and how it can backfire. In doing so, he maintained foundational message of the limits of human achievement.

The archetype of Iliowizi's golem is still very present in the cultural imagination of the modern Jewish community. We tell ourselves that Rav Aarele's monster golem is attacking the bad guys, and everyone it kills deserves to die. We tell ourselves that no Jewish houses will be harmed by the golem. After all the golem we created has been ridden of human weakness and will only target our oppressors. 

Just because Iliowizi denies that the golem is a danger to the world, does not make it true. He simply gives us permission to pretend that the golem can maintain our communal defense forever without any consequences. Such a blind attitude will only lead us to severe consequences. 

Iliowizi's golem is a complete fantasy, whether or not he intended it to be read as such, that's what it is. An army is made up of people, not divine mechanical monsters. Unlike divine mechanical monsters, people are immoral. There is no such thing as a moral army, let alone a 'most moral army in the world.'  

Anti-Zionist Discourse

With the current surge of support for Palestinian liberation, people are looking for an ideological framework to understand why everything has been happening. As always, it is easier to formulate an oversimplified model of ideologies, than to examine the current and historical events at face value. Accordingly, arguments that seek to delegitimize Zionism have resurged in popularity. 

Ideas such as the Khazar theory of Jewish origin are making the rounds again. The Khazar theory posits that Ashkenazi Jews are primarily descendent from Khazar converts to Judaism. The Khazar Khaganate was an early medieval central Asian state that converted to Judaism in the 8th century CE. There are many problems with this theory. Primarily, the historical evidence for the conversion of the Khazars is extremely limited. The singular primary source for this event, namely a letter that was supposedly sent by a "King Joseph" of the Khazars to Hasdai ibn Shaprut, the Jewish foreign minister of Abd ar-Rahman III, Kalif of Andalusia. Though it is certain that Hasdai believed there to be a Jewish Khazar state, and he most likely tried to send them a letter, the letter that is traditionally considered to be the response is very suspect. Forgeries of this kind abounded during the Middle Ages.

Jews during this era were stateless in a moment when the Christian and Muslim worlds seemed to united against each other. There was a general idea that a secret Jewish kingdom would arise to retake Jerusalem and usher in the Messianic era. A Jewish traveler who went by Eldad ha-Dani famously claimed that there was a hidden kingdom of the 10 lost tribes in East Africa. The letter from King Joseph of the Khazars fits right into this era of global travelers claiming to have found Jewish kingdoms. Some archeological evidence suggests that there were some Jew in the Caucuses during this era. It is possible that some of the Khazar nobility converted to Judaism as a middle-ground monotheistic religion that allowed them to stay neutral in the global dichotomy of Christianity and Islam. There is not nearly enough evidence to suggest that there were enough Khazar converts to be the primary ancestor population of Ashkenazi Jews. 

Anyone who has studied the historical record knows that there were already large Jewish population centers in Europe when the Khazars were supposed to have converted. This theory has to ignore so much of established historical fact that it feels ridiculous to have to refute. Despite this, most people have little idea of how history is studied and just assume that if this idea is written about, it must be true. 

The Khazar theory is helpful for people who seek to delegitimize Zionism. It allows them to form a category of illegitimate nationalisms that have no good reason to exist. Accepting the Khazar theory as a good model of Jewish heritage, the Jews have no reason to live in Palestine, since they are actually from central Asia. This is unlike the indigenous Palestinians, who have lived in Palestine since time immemorial. The Khazar theory itself fails to account for anyone who isn't a descendent of Eastern Ashkenazi Jews. Part of the original impetus for the Khazar theory was that the pre-WWII Eastern European Jewish population had grown so fast during the early modern period that some anthropologists were skeptical that they were really fully descendent of the western European Jewish migrants. Instead, the large population increase was due to the assimilation of many unknown central Asian Jews who they imagined migrated to the Kingdom of Poland en-masse. This theory was, and remains, fully European centric. In its origin context, it allowed western Europeans to respect the emancipation and integration of western European Jews, as they were true "Semites" and civilized, whereas the Eastern European Jews were fit to hate because they were primarily uncivilized barbarians of the central Asian Steppe. This also likely formed an associated with "invading" Eastern European Jewish migrants with the medieval Mongol hordes. Much in the same way that in the US, people like to label the Latin American immigrants as criminals and rapists. 

The Khazar theory does not account for the ancestry of Mediterranean, West, Central, and South Asian Jewish populations that participated in Zionism. 

It is legitimate to differentiate between the Jewish Zionists and the indigenous Palestinians. The vast, vast majority of the Jews who live in Israel are descendants of immigrants who came in the last century through Zionism. Many immigrants choose to change their names. In Israel, where modern-Hebrew was imposed as the national Jewish language, many families from all over the diaspora chose to change their last names to Hebrew equivalents under this cultural pressure. You find Eastern European Jews changing their names from Greun to ben-Gurion, or west Asian Jews changing their name from Abdullah to Ovadiah. You can find people online referring to Bibi by his ancestors' Polish last name, in an effort to highlight his immigrant Jewish heritage.  

The implication is that the immigration reflects an illegitimate nationalism or illegitimate existence in the land. I want to address each of these thoughts independently. 

Nationalism is always fabricated and made up. Political historians generally look to the French revolution for the origins of modern political thought, since that revolution really had it all. The idea of nationalism was expressed for the first time during this revolution. Previously, the leaders of a country imagined that they themselves embodied the government. The French revolutionaries adapted the ideas of social contract theory to mean that the French people, the nation, together held the power of French governance. In many ways the "French nation" was a fiction. The people who lived in France were determined by the borders drawn during the Monarchical period. The borders during the revolution had been drawn at the peace of Westphalia. In order to argue for the reality of the French people, the government began to impose of Parisian French as the true French language in order to create a common language for the people of France. Similarly, a national culture for France had to be developed. This manufactured unity of the French people was a powerful narrative that sought to unite them under a democratic political system. 

Not everyone who lived in the borders of France was immediately considered part of the French nation. The Jews of Alsace had to fight pretty hard to get nominally equal French citizenship, since it was not immediately granted when the revolutionary government formed. On one hand, nationalism can be used to liberate a people from an oppressive government that does not represent them, but it also necessarily excludes people and provides a new medium for discrimination. The Jews of Alsace were seen as foreigners who did not belong in the already complete French nation. Already built nation states tend to be stable enough to critique themselves and tolerate immigrants. This generally manifests in people arguing that immigrants can assimilate in the national culture or the nation can be multi-cultural. Generally, the prevalence of these ideas lead to more tolerance of immigrants, which is a good thing. 

Palestinian nationalism is foundationally as false as any other nationalism. I hope that people understand that when they critique Zionism in the same way. However, Palestinian nationalism is rightly deserving of our favor, since it is in the "fighting oppressive government" stage. Palestinian nationalism also has an "other," a group that is definitely not part of it. Those are the Zionist Jews. Though in theory, many claim they happily embrace non-Zionist Jews, in practice anti-Zionist regimes have ended up just discriminating against Jews in general. To be fair, there is much to hate about what Zionism does to a Jewish community. The transformation of religion into nationalism is not pretty. Unfortunately, most religious community in the world today possess elements of religious nationalism. We still live in the era of Ethno-Nationalism, and its popularity shows no signs of waning. Any discrimination against religious-Nationalism will lead to increased government oversight of the religious community, which if not distributed equally, will manifest as religious discrimination. Also it is almost impossible to destroy ideas directly, they generally need to be superseded by more popular ideas. 

Regarding immigration. Most of the Jews who live in Israel today are descendants of immigrants who came in the last century. Under Zionist direction, many of them have participated in the Zionist settler colonial process. Small amounts of Jewish immigration to the region has existed for centuries. Following the first crusade, when the historic Palestinian Jewish community was mostly wiped out, diaspora Jews began constituting the majority of Palestine's Jewish community. By the early modern period, there were sizable Jewish populations in the Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias, and Hebron. In 19th century, the majority of the Jews living in these areas were of Spanish Jewish descent, most of them were settled in the region by the Ottoman empire after they were expelled from Spain the 1492. A minority of them were immigrants from eastern Europe, and an even smaller minority were descendants of the indigenous Jewish population. 

With the increasing popularity of Zionism at the turn of the 20th century, more Jews began to immigrate to Palestine with the intention of colonizing it. In Palestine, at the time, the majority of the people living there were peasant farmers who rented from large landowners, in a feudal system of farming. The Zionists bought land from these large landowners and then evicted the native Palestinian peasants. This was effectively the start of tensions between indigenous Palestinians and Jewish immigrants. Indigenous Palestinian violence against the Zionist settlers was stoked by preachers like Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, who framed the Jewish immigrants within an Islamic context, weaponizing Islamic antisemitism against the Jewish colonizers. 

Anti-colonial resistance is a legitimate cause, but the anti-colonial activity of the area, took on an antisemitic character which threatened even the Jews who were not participating the in the colonial activity. Continuously increasing tensions. 

Foreign supporters of Palestinian liberation, who don't consider themselves antisemites, cannot be in favor of expelling the "foreign Jewish population" of Palestine. It is difficult to determine if people who believe in a liberated Palestinian state will be tolerant of a large Jewish population in the territory. The militant Palestinian liberation groups like Hamas and Hezbollah tend to believe that the Jews will emigrate out of fear once they achieve enough regional power. This mass emigration is unlikely to happen. The idea is based on the narrative of the wandering Jew who flees danger. Even though some Jews may leave, I find it unlikely that it will happen on the scale that they imagine. Other Arab states, like Yemen and Iraq have undergone processes like this, but they were only successful because Israel was willing to absorb so many Jewish immigrants. All the countries that attempted this before the state of Israel was created generally failed to induce a mass emigration of their Jewish populations.   

Those who fantasize about a mass emigration of their perceived enemies tend to be supportive of those enemies' extermination if they won't leave. We are seeing this right now with Israel. The most fascistic Zionists within Israel, especially the followers of Meir Kahane, fantasized about a mass emigration of Arabs from Israel. Kahane proposed bribing them all to leave, but they really wanted to them to leave out of fear. This fear tactic was first implemented with some success during the 1948 war, when about 800,000 Palestinian Arabs fled their homes in Israel out of fear and were never allowed to return. 

The fact of the matter is, 7 million Jews live in Israel today. Though the land they live upon was acquired in bloodshed, getting rid of them will required even more bloodshed. The best peace solution is not to return to the fantasy of a pre-Zionist independent Palestine. It's as impossible as the Zionist fantasy to return to a pre-Roman independent mono-cultural Judea. Decades of immigration, expulsion, and blood has irrevocably scarred the region. 

My own fantasy is for a singular secular state that recognizes the religious and national identities that it contains. This state would also offer reparations to victims of the violence. Even though these reparations will be offered to Israelis who lost family and property in the violence, the vast majority of the recipients will be Palestinians who live both domestically and abroad, since they make up the vast majority of victims of the violence over the past century. I fear that such a state will be far too unstable to maintain itself. Maybe it could create a unifying peace narrative, but there will be significant pockets of Zionists who would want to maintain Jewish supremacy and the "right to return" for Jews globally. On the other side, there will be Palestinian Islamic nationalists who would want to start forcing Jews out of the country. The history of violence would encourage people to take up arms once again. 

Another possible solution, which is supported by the international community, is the two state solution. This is an old idea that dates back to the British mandate period. It has always been a messy solution, since the population distributions within historic Palestine do not lend well to simple divisions. In spite of the border drawing difficulties, two states would allow for the national expression of both groups. The very small territory would require them to cooperate very closely with each other, though there remains the great worry of violence re-erupting should extremists come to power on either side. 

I don't know which solution would ultimately work the best. I do know that we must be thinking pragmatically about how to accommodate a peaceful coexistence of both groups in the land without fantasizing about the extermination of one or the other. As long as our discourse tolerates such ideologies, it will be very difficult to reach a lasting peace agreement.     

On the Matter of Student Governance

I began to be interested in the mechanisms of student government at Yeshiva University my Fall 2022 semester as I tried to learn more about what various positions did and the role student government played in the Pride Alliance litigation. I wrote an article for the Observer back then arguing that Student Government needed to be more transparent and take an active role in doing its own PR.

After carefully reading through the constitution that we used back then, I initiated a lawsuit against the General Assembly (which if you know, you know, I can't even begin to explain it here) the "legislative body" of the Wilf Campus Student Government apparatus. The GA has the power to do open meetings to allow students to be aware of what they are planning. There hasn't really been a true open meeting since 2006, which was the last such meeting that the Commentator reported on. 

I first thought I could force them to do it by trying them in Student Court. I was naive, but I prepared my case and tried to initiate a case. Unfortunately, my grandmother died while I was in the middle of the whole thing, and I really didn't want to keep up the fight while I was trying to mourn her, so I dropped the case. Which, in retrospect was probably for the better.

I was not the only person frustrated with the situation. Baruch Lerman, one of the rare students who spends four years at YU, a career politician in student government wanted to completely restructure the whole enterprise. 

So he assembled a constitutional committee to make a new constitution. I was invited to join, and I happily participated in the discussions. I read up on Roberts Rules of Order and offered my research abilities to analyze how student government behaved in the past. 

Our whole committee was rather unprofessionally run. We didn't actually produce a document for people to look at until the very last second, and in order for any legislation to pass it needs to go through a review process for the constituents to read it. Of course the document didn't even get a majority of votes cast. 

Internally, within the committee, we entered into a state of group think, where we just assumed that all the problems of student government were caused by the vague, unclear, and powerless rules that filled the existing constitution. If we could only make a constitution that clearly outlined a better organization that was filled with competent students, we could actually improve things. We could return autonomy to the students. There was discussion of returning students to the calendar committee so that we could have a say in the calendar so that it wouldn't be so inconvenient for us. We could present a united front of student advocacy and really make change. We could restore student control over the Student Union space in the Schottenstein Center and bring about a renaissance of student activities that people would actually attend. 

We were all living in a fantasy that these rules could somehow fix all of our problems. Now, I had some doubts that I would occasionally bring up in meetings. Will these rules really fix everything? Do we need to do an overhaul of this system to fix many of these problems? Even if we do get this whole thing passed, how will people know how to use it properly? Our ideas were not new. An older and more professionally run constitutional committee in 2001 successfully overhauled their constitution and it didn't really solve any problems. 

When our vote failed, some members of the group were angry that the students didn't listen to us. But I tried to talk sense into them, that it would make us all look like pieces of shit of we didn't take this lose graciously. The loss sent down a path of introspection. I reread some of the historical sources on student government. I tried to get a better understanding of the theory behind why it exists and how it exists. The more a rethought, outside of the eco-chamber of the constitutional committee, the more I was convinced that we students don't currently have the power and crucially never had the power to independently run student government. 

A much more lengthy treatment of this subject is necessary to hammer down all the details of the issue of student government at YU, but I want to summarize it as best as I can here.

Though we do find instances of students independently advocating for themselves in 1905 through 1908 during the years of turmoil in the early yeshiva, I find it unlikely that those primitive strike organizations formed the foundation of the school's oldest student council, the Student Organization of Yeshiva, or SOY. 

The earliest written record I have been able to find of it comes from the 1923 Talmudical Academy yearbook, which mentions the lag ba'Omer baseball game between the Yeshiva and the Talmudical Academy. The Students' Organization of the Yeshiva (SOY) and the Students' Organization of the Talmudical Academy High School (SOTAHS) arranged the annual baseball game. 

From then on we have the Hedenu newspaper that SOY published. Here we see their Hebrew name, הסתדרות תלמידי ישיבת ר׳ יצחק אלחנן. In the fact the first issue of the paper from May 1926 has an editorial from the president of SOY, Shlomo Wind (who would go on to teach at TI and Stern for many years) begging students to get more involved in the organization and to support it. Sounds a little familiar. It becomes immediately apparent that students at YU have never been entirely enthusiastic about student government type activities. We don't know exactly how this institution of SOY came to be. 

In addition to these early records of the SOY we also have writing from the Students' Organization of the Teachers Institute, הסתדרות תלמידי בית מדרש למורים. They published a yearbook called Nir, entirely in Hebrew. Once again we don't know exactly when the organization was formed, but both for SOY and SOTI, they needed to have been around for a bit to become established enough to publish their own magazines. There's no mention in these publications of the founding of the Students' Organization, everyone who's around just seems to assume it exists and doesn't feel the need to question it or be proud of its growth since its founding. 

I suspect that these organizations were created in shortly after 1915, when RIETS started to professionalize into an American seminary. It maintained its Yeshiva elements with Sedarim and Shiur on Talmud and Halacha, but it also incorporated classes on academic Jewish studies, language, and homiletics. Once the Teachers Institute was added in 1917, they started teaching pedagogy. The school was working to being professional. There is a longstanding practice of American schools having student governments to organize activities to keep up the spirits of the students while they engage in their studies. 

These institutions are intended to benefit the school, by ensuring there will be such activities to entertain the students and build comradery between then, and the students get to practice leadership skills in a controlled environment before they enter the real world.

It seems fairly likely that the school actively decided to adopt such a policy around 1915 to 1917ish, maybe a little later. That policy has not changed. The students are given a little funding from the school to arrange activities. They have to abide by the guidelines of the school's administration. 

When Yeshiva College was created in 1928, the school was quick to form its own Students' Organization of Yeshiva College or SOYC. Its similarity to SOY made then change the title after a year to be the Yeshiva College Student Council or YCSC. The student council answered to the dean of Yeshiva College. This arrangement was similar to how the SOTI worked with the dean of TI. These deans were able to arrange for meeting space for their school's student councils. They encouraged students to work with the faculty of the college to do academically oriented student activities. In the early years, the student council worked with the Yeshiva College librarians to purchase the textbooks needed for the courses being taught each year. The council even diverted some of its funding to that.

The YCSC, like all the other student councils likely worked closely with the deans of Yeshiva College, or the school it served, and the faculty of the school to accomplish its programing. YCSC organized athletic and intellectual competitions both within and outside of the school. They brought in guest speakers to talk about politics and intellectual pursuits, and paid for fun social events for people to just hang out in. 

We know that YCSC's relationship with the faculty was instrumental to its success, since it was one of the complaints they lodged against the dean of Yeshiva College, Dr. Shelly R. Safir, in 1936. During the very early years of the school, the Student Council directly collected the activity fee and managed its own banking. However fairly quickly, the activity fee collection was handled by the office of the Bursar (financial office.) 

The bursar then had to appropriate the money to the student council in order for them to spend it. I speculate that the process began with YCSC drafting a budget. This budget would plan out how their money for that particular semester would be spent. X amount would go to subsidizing the Commentator, X amount to the Yearbook committee, X amount to the chess club, and so on. The budget probably had to be approved by the dean of Yeshiva College before the bursar could authorize the funds. 

This whole process meant that the students had to pass a budget before anything could be done that semester, but it also meant that the students were the one's who directly spent the money on events. 

Even as far back as the 1940s, the school was trying to slowly professionalize its student services. Such as the career placement center, its dormitories, and health services. They created a position in the 1950s called the dean of men who supervised the men's housing and the dean of women who supervised women's housing. The dean of men/women and the deans of Yeshiv/Stern college worked with their respective student governments jointly. We can find an example of a training session these two deans did for the Stern College for Women Student Council during the early years of the school. 

The dean of the college still held the veto power for student activities during this era. A good example of this being exercised, was when Dean Isaac Bacon of Yeshiva College blocked the formation of a Student run radio station for several years until he was able to work out an agreeable arrangement with the Student Council in 1968. 

By the mid-1980s, the office of the dean of students was being solidified. The responsibilities of events planning were shifted away from the dean of the colleges and onto the dean of students. Since the dean of students office was created, the functional autonomy of the student government has decreased slowly over time. 

I suspect that this loss of power directly translates to a frenzy of amendments to the constitution and even rewriting the whole document in an effort to reclaim control. Students don't really realize that the policy of the school has changed since previous generations, and they believe that the constitution is a respected document. If only the could change it, things would get better. So we see that the SCWSC produced a new constitution for itself in 1996 that clearly outlined how the treasurer of the council would do the banking. I speculate that this reflects a reality where student council was losing the ability to do its own banking, and they were trying to keep it by putting it into writing. 

The Yeshiva College Student Council saw over 30 amendments passed over the 1990s leading up to an overhaul of the whole student council system in 2001 that combined all the small student councils in a large Student Union body. 

Very quickly, the original student council basically separated again, and its unlikely that they ever functioned as the unified body that the framers intended. The 2014 amendments, made this arrangement official. 

By 2004 the Dean of Student had organized the Office of Student Affairs that managed student activities. Its hard to say the extent of the office's control of the process of event planning. We know that the Commentator was still doing its own banking during this period, but the YSU was less vocal about its plans to do things. Long gone were the days when the Student Council would draft a budget in the first few weeks of the semester. The YSU still did an opening meeting that mimicked the budget, but they were just taking suggestions for things to do, the meeting was under no obligation to produce an actionable budget. 

By 2011, the Office of Student Affairs was subdivided again, and the Office of Student Life was formed to specifically focus on managing events. At least five full time employees were devoted to this cause. The office produced a policy sheet directed at student leaders to explain how the office worked. No longer were students allowed to independently spend student activity money. Every single purchase was managed through the Office of Student Life. This intricate involvement of every step in the process of event planning meant that the office recommended you submit all the details of your event three weeks in advance to allow for everything to be cleared and managed by the office. 

Both the Commentator and the Observer changed their website domains from .com to .org around this time. We know from some issues that recently arose regarding both domains, that OSL makes the payments to maintain the domains, and nowadays OSL also manages the banking of both papers. I suspect that this change in domain was due to an OSL policy that wanted to control all the spending of student activity money. 

Oddly enough, the Seforim Sale was given immunity to the control of OSL. The seforim sale operates like an old school student organization, with more autonomy than anything else. I don't know why that is exactly, but perhaps someone high up enough in the YU administration knew that forcing the Seforim Sale to comply with OSL regulations would cripple it and destroy it. 

Under the current system, one has to wonder, what is the place of elected student officials. In the early days of OSL, the office actually directly managed the election, but they quickly saw how dicey counting ballots can be and quickly stepped out of it. So the students independently run an election and then OSL recognizes whomever the election committee declares the winner. There are so many rules in the election that are so specific that every year there's been some kind of court case to settle who actually won the election due to issues of eligibility to have that seat in student government. 

OSL wants to cater to the interests of the students, but they also have to follow university policy and will limit what student leaders can do. Our current imagination of the all the positions in student government is based on a time when OSL didn't exist and student government actually needed to manage things. 

I don't really know what the answer is, but I do know that our current constitutions assume that students are doing a lot more than they actually are in these elected positions. 

The constitutions did not always need to exist. In fact the early student governments didn't have one. They likely just functioned off of the policies set forth by the deans of the schools that created them. These constitutions mimicked those policies when they were eventually drafted, but the secrecy of what actually is policy at YU nowadays means that so much of the constitution might not actually be policy. Which discredits its legitimacy as a document. 

With all that considered, I propose that the Office of Student Life and the Dean of Students publish their policies. They can update them as often they like. They don't have to be accountable to the students, but the policies have to be open for us to see. 

The policies should include info about the limitations of what activities can be, like no alcohol and sex. They should include limitations on who can be student leaders, such as whether or not a student's standing with the registrar should affect their eligibility to be part of things. 

Once we know what the limitations of student autonomy within activities is, we can work with OSL to draft a set of by-laws that actually reflect the political reality of the school and allow for more natural and seamless collaboration between students, faculty and administrators.     

On the Beit Midrash at Stern College for Women

At the moment there is a woman at Stern College who is volunteering her time and working to reorganize the Eisenberg Beit Midrash. It seems strange that there wasn’t already someone to manage the collection as is the case in the Glueck Beit Midrash on the Wilf Campus.

I don't know for certain why this is the case, but perhaps some context on the development of the Beit Midrash at Stern College will assist in providing perspective into what our next steps should be to improve the situation.

The Wilf Campus, which is the main campus has always had a Beit Midrash. The reason for this is quite simple, this part of the university grew out of a small Yeshiva on the Lower East Side. During the school's first 10 years, the Beit Midrash was its only real facility, and a Beit Midrash was included in all the buildings that it would inhabit in the following years.

In 1928, when the Yeshiva moved uptown to the corner of 187th and Amsterdam, its new building as contained a rather small Beit Midrash on the first floor. This was probably because the College intended to expand across the street and to build a much grander Beit Midrash, leaving the smaller one for the High School. These expansion plans fell through, and it was only until the mid-1940s when the school would be able to expand its physical facilities. The Beit Midrash room within the main building was expanded to include the synagogue room next door. (I haven't been able to determine the exact date for this.) This expanded room, known as the Fischel Beit Midrash, named for the philanthropist Harry Fischel, served as the main Beit Midrash for the school until 2008.

The year 2008 witnessed the completion of the YU's newest academic building, the Glueck Center for Jewish studies. It is a 6-story building with a basement. The first two stories are occupied by a Beit Midrash, with classrooms and offices filling the upper four stories.

This is all good and well for the Men of Yeshiva University, whose campus was built and expanded around the Yeshiva that forms the core of the University (if we disregard the fact that it is legally independent of the University.)

Stern College for Women developed from a very different type of institution. The Beit Midrash or Yeshiva was and remains largely restricted to men in Jewish society. Though there are a few historical examples of women attending Batei Midrash, there were generally excluded from such activities. The movement for higher education for Jewish women developed very differently from the parallel movement for men. While the men's schools developed around the nucleus of a Yeshiva, women's schools developed out of Hebrew school teachers' training programs. The need for women to work in elementary Jewish education was felt by Jews across the religious and political spectrum.

The religious Zionist wing of the RIETS community started a school called the Hebrew Teachers Training School for Girls, or Beit Midrash la'Morot in Hebrew, in 1928¹. Pinchos Churgin from the Teachers Institute of RIETS was involved in its creation and a graduate of RIETS, Rabbi Joseph Lookstein served as principal for much of the school's life.²

For its first decade, the school met in Rabbi Lookstein's synagogue, Kehilath Jeshurun³ on the upper east side. In 1941, the school acquired a more permanent home in the lower east side at 311 East Broadway⁴. The Hebrew Teachers Training School for Girls shared a committee that administered Hebrew school teaching certificates, for which Pinchos Churgin was the chairman. Another significant scholar employed by both schools was Dr. Sidney "Simcha" Honig.

Not only was the faculty between the Teachers Institute of RIETS and the Hebrew Teachers Training School for Girls share, but the students at both schools seem to have shared a social life. The students of the Hebrew Teachers Training School for Girls posted an advertisement in the Nov 16, 1944 issue of The Commentator, inviting the Yeshiva College students to their "Annual Chanukah Affair" assuring their peers at Yeshiva College that "A Good Time Will Be Had By All."⁵

Though it had the word Beit Midrash in its Hebrew name, the Hebrew Teachers Training School for Girls did not have a traditional Beit Midrash. Its instruction was given in classrooms with set curriculums in a more rigid and structured manner. This method of instruction did not encourage the kind of independent study common in men’s education that could develop their ability to research and parse rabbinic texts on their own.

In 1953, Max Stern, the President of the board of the Hebrew Teachers Training School for Girls, merged his school into Yeshiva University. Once part of Yeshiva University, the Hebrew Teachers Training School for Girls was renamed to the Teachers Institute for Women, making its parody to the Teachers Institute for Men official. These two schools functioned somewhat differently from each other, the Teachers Institute for Men was only really attended by full time Yeshiva College students, while the Teachers Institute for Women offered night classes for Jewish women attending secular colleges in the city.

It seems reasonable to assume that the faculty from the Hebrew Teachers Training School for Girls formed the core faculty of the Judaic Studies department at Stern College for Women. I was not able to find faculty lists for either the Hebrew Teachers Training School for Girls or Stern College for Women that was close to the time of the merger. However, you do find Dr. Shlomo Wind working for the Hebrew Teachers Training School for Girls in 1944⁶, and he also appears in the 1958 yearbooks for Stern College for Women as one of the Jewish Studies faculty⁷. Shuli Berger, Yeshiva University Library’s Curator of Special Collections and Hebraica-Judaica, in a 2018 blog confirms Dr. Shlomo Wind’s continuity of work within school before and after it became part of Yeshiva University⁸.

It was until 1977 when the need for a Beit Midrash for independent study arose. However, the mid-town campus had a Beit-Midrash for close to a decade before this point. This Beit Midrash developed out of the dormitory.

It was only in 1965 that Yeshiva University acquired a permanent dormitory for Stern College for Women. Before then, the school had been leasing space in several different residential buildings in the area for out-of-town students. Initially, the out-of-town “dormitory” was on the upper west side, in the heart of a Jewish community with plenty of synagogues to attend. When YU moved the dormitory to mid-town to be closer to its classroom building, there wasn’t much of a Jewish community for the students to participate in.

The women of Stern quickly recognized this problem and advocated for the creation of a synagogue space in the new classroom building that YU was planning to build at 245 Lexington Avenue⁹. Despite the students’ request, the university administration never included such a room in the plans for the building¹⁰.

Taking the initiative themselves, the Torah Activities Committee (at the time a division of the Stern College for Women Student Council) arranged to convert room 2E on the second floor of the dormitory to be a Beit Midrash for independent prayer and study¹¹. The exact location of this Beit Midrash moved between different rooms on the second floor over the years, but it remains there to this day.

In the mid-1970s students and faculty at Stern college began to reform the Jewish studies program to provide more advanced studies. A significant part of these reforms was creating an environment for women to study with a Chavruta to practice their independent study skills and partake in a more traditional method of Torah study, historically reserved for men. The first iteration of this was fully organized by students in 1973 and was called Beit Midrash le-Banot¹². Lacking a real Beit Midrash space, the students who participated used the library¹³.

In 1976, the administration of Stern College began to formulate an advanced Jewish studies curriculum. The purpose was to provide women who had already learned the more fundamental knowledge the opportunity to advance their independent study skills in a Beit Midrash environment with independent study time and Yeshiva style lectures. The program launched in Fall 1977 with Rav Soloveitchik’s widely publicized shiur to the inaugural class of this program. Rabbi Saul Berman, one of Stern’s faculty who was deeply involved with the development of this program, recalls that the Beit Midrash space that the program initially used was located on the first floor of 253 Lexington Avenue¹⁴.

The location of the Beit Midrash in the library did not last very long. The librarians and students were frustrated by not being able to use the periodical reading room during instructional hours. By Spring 1978, the Beit Midrash was relocated¹⁵.

It seems likely that the Beit Midrash was relocated to room 619 in 245 Lexington Avenue¹⁶. The Beit Midrash would remain there until Fall 2007 when the new 7th floor Beit Midrash was opened¹⁷.

The evidence from the Observer and other published sources indicates that the roots of the 7th floor Beit Midrash on the Beren Campus lie within the Beit Midrash program that was inaugurated in 1977. Before then, the administration had no need for a Beit Midrash space, with the Brookdale Beit Midrash being created by Student Council.

This doesn’t really answer any questions about the nature of the collection within the Beit Midrash. Much of it is labeled as if it belongs to TAC, the Torah Activities Council, and it clearly lacks any permanent position for someone to curate and organize the collection.

In the 1980s, TAC seems to have been able to hire student employees to take care of the collection in the Brookdale Beit Midrash¹⁸. Perhaps this model can be copied for the current Beit Midrash to ensure that its collection is cared for and that the people who invest their time in organizing it can be properly compensated for their public service.

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1. ^ “Haynt Konferentz Vegen ‘Beis Midrash la-Moros’,” Der Morgen Zhurnal (New York, NY), Oct. 6, 1938. https://www.nli.org.il/he/newspapers/tjm/1938/10/06/01/article/27
2. ^ Jeffery Gurock, The Men and Women of Yeshiva: Higher Education, Orthodoxy, and American Judaism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), pg. 196.
3. ^ “Beis Midrash la-Moros Ofen Far Naye Talmidos,” Der Tog (New York, NY), Sept. 20, 1935. https://www.nli.org.il/he/newspapers/dertog/1935/09/20/01/article/32
4. ^ “Registratzia In Dem ‘Beis Midrash la-Moros’ Vet Zikh Onfangen Akhten Sept.,” Forverts (New York, NY), Sept. 5, 1941. https://www.nli.org.il/he/newspapers/frw/1941/09/05/01/article/76
5. ^ [Advertisement], “Beth Hamedrash Lamoroth,” The Commentator (New York, NY), Nov. 16, 1944. https://repository.yu.edu/handle/20.500.12202/5154
6. ^ [Advertisement], “Dringender Ruf Tsu Yidishe Eltern,” Der Tog (New York, NY), Jan. 28, 1944. https://www.nli.org.il/he/newspapers/dertog/1944/01/28/01/article/64.1
7. ^ Masorah 1958, (New York: Stern College for Women, 1958), pg. 13. https://archive.org/details/masora1958stern
8. ^ Shulamith Z. Berger, “The 60th Anniversary of the Pioneers of Stern College for Women: The Class of 1958,” YU News (blog), June 12, 2018. https://www.yu.edu/library/2018/06/12/the-60th-anniversary-of-the-pioneers-of-stern-college-for-women-the-class-of-1958
9. ^ [Editorial], “We Propose…” Observer, Jan. 7, 1965. https://repository.yu.edu/handle/20.500.12202/5049
10. ^ Sue Amin, “Vogel Addresses Alumni Gathering,” Observer, March 1, 1966. https://repository.yu.edu/handle/20.500.12202/5060
11. ^ [Announcement], “The Small Room 2E in the dorm . . .,” Observer, Dec. 8, 1970. https://repository.yu.edu/handle/20.500.12202/5997
12. ^ Raina Urbaitis, “Beit Midrash L’Bnot: Intensive Learning L’Shma,” Observer, Sept. 24, 1973. https://repository.yu.edu/handle/20.500.12202/6032
13. ^ It is not clear which library they were using, the old wing located on the first floor of 253 Lexington or the newer wing on the second floor of 245 Lexington. I suspect it was probably in 253 Lexington, since the official Beit Midrash program that would come towards the end of the decade used the old library in 253 Lexington.
14. ^ Saul Berman, “Forty Years Later: The Rav’s Opening Shiur at the Stern College for Women Beit Midrash,” Lehrhaus, Oct. 9, 2017. https://thelehrhaus.com/commentary/forty-years-later-the-rav%e2%80%99s-opening-shiur-at-the-stern-college-for-women-beit-midrash/
15. ^ Barbara Michael, “Bookends,” Observer, Jan. 19, 1978. https://repository.yu.edu/handle/20.500.12202/6108
16. ^ Rachel Katsman, “Where Freedom Ends,” Observer, Jan 13, 1982. https://repository.yu.edu/handle/20.500.12202/6167
17. ^ Yael Wolynetz, “Donors Back New Beit Midrash,” Observer, September 2007. https://repository.yu.edu/handle/20.500.12202/8494
18. ^ Lisa Korman, “Beit Midrash to Open Soon,” Observer, Sept. 25, 1981. https://repository.yu.edu/handle/20.500.12202/6163

Thoughts on a Speech From a Member of Zak"a

In modern day Israel, in response to the increasing amount terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians, a group of haredi civilian paramedics created a Chesed shel Emet organization to manage the identification and burial of the mutilated bodies from these attacks. As many of the attacks in the 1990s and 2000s were suicide bombings, the bodies of the victims were often in pieces and difficult to identify. 

Traditionally, a Chesed shel Emet organization manages the burial of people who's family's cannot afford their burial. The core value behind the organization is that all Jews deserve to be buried according the Jewish customs whether or not they can afford it. The innovation of Zaka was that they would specialize in collecting the body parts of the victims of gruesome terrorist attacks and also identifying who the body parts belonged to. From this the organization got its name, Zaka, which is an acronym for zihui korbanot ason, or terrorist attack victims identification. 

Zaka fills an important niche in the emergency response to terrorist attacks in the country. Generally civilian EMS are only trained to collect generally in tact corpses, while the army coroners can deal with identifying are collecting the mutilated remains of its soldiers since each soldier has a detailed medical record that can be quickly referenced for identification of the body. Zaka specializes in mangled civilian bodies who are more difficult to identify quickly since detailed medical records are harder to get on short notice. 

Zaka was born out of the haredi community's volunteer EMS service, hatzala, which means that all Zaka personnel are volunteers since the organization operates on much the same model of dispatching. 

Yesterday, on Nov. 21, 2023, the day that all the YU student organizations planned something. (and i mean all, there were like 7 events all planned at about the same time that night, it was kind of wild, but they all wanted to get events done before Thanksgiving.) A senior member of Zaka from Ashdod visited YU on his fundraising tour. Though not mentioned so directly during his talk, the money he was collecting seemed to be intended to fund mental health treatment for all the volunteers who assisted in collecting and identifying the victims of the October 7th massacres. Though I presume Zaka probably needed funding to also generally replenish their supplies that we no doubt exhausted. 

The dynamic of him fundraising felt a little uncomfortable to me, since he had to relive the horrors he witnessed while cleaning up in order to evoke our pity to donate to his organization. Of course he probably agreed out of his own free will and dedication to his noble organization, but nevertheless the dynamic seemed a little improper. The memories of the events should definitely be relayed, but they shouldn't be bought. Though I will stress that I assume the person who spoke volunteered to do this and was more than willing to relay his experiences, the principle of matter is what seems to be slightly bothering me.

I'll put my cynical criticism here in the middle, because I want to end on a more wholesome perspective. Almost all the people who I have heard discuss the current situation in the Jewish community point to a situation of great unity or achdut. However, each faction of Israeli Jewish society is optimistic that the other factions will soften their hardline stance on certain issues. When I heard from the rabbis who visited from Har Eztion, they were optimistic that the charedim would become more willing to serve in the army and support the nationalist vision of a Jewish future. The member of Zaka was himself charedi and his perspective was a little different. The charedim see their main opponents as the secular Jews who are trying to remove the religious aspects of general government policy like allowing public transportation to run on shabbat and the like. After interacting with the some of the relatives of the victims who were secular, he felt hopeful that they would adopt a more open attitude to their charedi neighbors and potentially become more connected to Orthodox Judaism. The Zaka member even requested that we try to donate a Sefer Torah to the secular kibbutsim who were attacked to assist them in the process of returning to religion. 

As part of his address, the Zaka member relayed some of his memories of what happened on October 7 and his team's involvement in the recovery of bodies. I do not remember all the details that relayed, and I don't really want to get too graphic, especially since he was clearly self censoring and not relaying the most disturbing of the details. One of the analogies he used to describe what it was like to enter the houses of the people who were murdered was that the bodies and the walls of the houses talked to you. He repeated this several times. It struck me because this is exactly how Disco Elysium portrays the experience of examining and identifying the mangled corpse of a murdered person. This Zaka member and the writers of Disco Elysium never interacted, so at that moment I knew that the Disco Elysium writers had that seen spot on. They clearly were writing from experience of what its like to examine a corpse like that. Unless I enter a profession that professionally deals with victims of murder, I will never be able to really understand what the person from Zaka or what Disco Elysium meant by the analogy. However, I suspect that when you observe a corpse in situ, exactly at is was when its life was brutally ripped from it, you can immediately spot the clues of how it happened. Whether or not your immediate conclusions of how the murder happened are correct, the bodies and the spilled blood still talk to you, they are trying to explain how it was that they ended up in this mess, but they are mute, for dead man can no longer speak, their lips are frozen. 

The next detail was one that I get very emotional thinking about. Part of Zaka's protocol is to collect all pieces of human remains, included residue of blood to be buried in the ground according to Jewish law. While they clean and collect the blood and other dismembered body parts, they also work to clean the house to restore it to a livable condition. Apparently, in one house while they were cleaning, one the Zaka team members complained, what's the point of cleaning up this house. The team leader who visited YU responded that the point was to collect the blood to bring it to kever yisrael (Jewish burial) and to allow the family to return to the house. He responded, they're all dead, there's no one to return to the house.

And if someone’s kinsman . . . comes to carry the remains out of the house, and he calls to the one at the rear of the house, “Are there any alive besides you?” the answer will be, “No, none.” And he will say, “Hush!”—so that no one may utter GOD’s name. (Amos 6:10)

A Rant on Jewish Nationalism

Nationalism began to emerge in the 19th century as a method for creating cohesive modern states. The feeling among the leadership of post revolutionary France was such that a united French national character had to be engraved upon the hearts of all residents of the newly modernized country. A significant portion of the nationalistic idea is tied the concept of nation states made up of one ethnicity or nation. Ethnic groups within multi-ethnic empires began adapting this notion of the nation state as an argument for why they should have self determination.

The impulse to break up oppressive empires was and remains laudable. Allowing territories within an empire the ability to develop democratic self-rule leads to better governance and is a much more moral method of appointing the people to serve in government. Many of the independence movements of 1848 and later rallied around an idea of nationalism as a liberating concept. All the people in this area of the empire deserve to be their own self-governing state.

Towards the 1870s, we witness the development of nationalism as a method of unifying small countries within a larger ethnic group. Italy and Germany's nationalism developed in this way after the two countries were formed out of unifying many small countries that housed people of the same ethnic group. Around the time of WWI, the Arabs considered the idea of a pan-Arab nationalism, though such a pan-Arab state never materialized. 

All these different streams of nationalism encounter a fundamental problem. There never was and never will be an ethnically homogenous country. How do ethnic minorities integrate in a Nationalism context. Especially ethnic groups that are dispersed internationally. In Europe there were Roma people and Jews living in almost every country. Does the nationalism absorb these minorities into the general nation or are they excluded legally or socially from being members of the nation of the nation state. Though there was initial optimism that these minorities would get integrated into the national identity of their respective countries. 

Democracy is of the people, by the people, and for the people, but the people are stupid. The people are highly antisemitic, and nothing united the European economic classes quite like antisemitism. A useful tool in creating unity in all kinds of contexts, it unified by excluding everyone's primary object of hatred, the Jewish community. The roots of antisemitism stretch back remarkably far, so the mere ideal of national unity was not going to destroy it. Rather the empowering of regular people to get involved in politics somewhat increased outright antisemitism, since monarchs generally discouraged messy antisemitism as a destabilizing force in pre-modern and medieval societies. The modern voters of the 19th century felt the benefit of institutional antisemitism was much better than the risk mob violence posed to the economy or general society. 

Jewish intellectuals, mainly in Eastern Europe where their marginalization from society was felt strongest, proposed a development in the concept of nationalism. What if you could develop a Jewish nation to advocate on behalf of the Jews since clearly the German, the French, and the Russian states were really failing to properly integrate their Jewish communities. (There was also a bit of anxiety over the possibility of proper integration that would lead to the complete vanishing of the Jewish people through assimilation.) A Jewish nationalism would be a modern way of connecting to Jewish identity that non-religious people could still engage with, and if successful, a Jewish national government would be able to reliably advocate for the welfare of Jewish communities abroad. Most Jews supported a territorial nationalism in the sense that the Jewish nation state would be a proper state with its own territory. Functionally speaking the Jewish communities were too scattered to have any real Jewish territory around.

The Jewish nationalist movement needed to create a shared piece of land for all the Jews to have territorial sovereignty over, the less popular ideas of Jewish autonomism that didn't believe in governing a particular territory seemed too unrealistic. To gather support and legitimacy for a Jewish land, the nationalists turned the to the historic homeland of the Jews, Palestine. Perhaps the more assimilated Jews would have read in the antisemitic magazines of the era that were calling upon Jews to return to their middle-eastern homeland, or perhaps they drew their inspiration for the messianic literature of traditional Jewish religion. But the Zionists, whether secular or religious in philosophical orientation, had their eyes set on Palestine.

In order to reclaim the land, they needed to settle it. Many of the western European Zionists treated it as a contemporary colonization project. They would move to the land as Capitalists, establishing a European Jewish bourgeoisie. These early settlers created agricultural industry that often employed native labor who had expertise in farming in the Palestinian climate. Eastern European Zionists, being more influenced by Marxist economic ideas refused to reestablish Jewish life in Palestine as a bourgeoisie owning class. They were going to only use Jewish labor, and that would mean adopting socialist and planned economy practices to ensure the stability of their small independent economic enclave within Arab Palestinian society. 

Overtime the Zionist settlement in Palestine, the yishuv hachadash, would grow in both numbers and in strength and succeed in getting the United Nations to recognize it as a sovereign nation in the 1947 Palestine partition plan. The Jewish communities globally were ecstatic. No more would the Jews be subject to the whims of nationalism regimes that marginalized them. Finally today, in 1947, Jews could be part of the world as a people with a nation state to advocate for them. The Jews living in a nation comprised entirely of their peers would be safe from antisemitism. 

This idea persists in aliyah narratives to this day. One Ra"m, speaking at the 2023 Har Etzion alumni Shabbaton in Teaneck, NJ, commented how moving to Israel was a healing process in which he shed his insecurities and biases that he gained living in galut, in exile (i.e. the diaspora). He compared growing up in Long Beach, NY, in the United States, to growing up in a home with emotionally absent parents. Upon moving to Israel, his exposure to native born Israeli Jews was healing process in which he recovered from the trauma induced by living in such a fundamentally antisemitic society. 

But there's a problem. Israel is not a utopia. Ethnic violence has raged there on and off since the British mandate. I don't need to carefully check the numbers, in Israel in the present day, a Jew is at greatest risk of dying out of antisemitism. In recent decades, Hamas and other Palestinian Islamic Jihad groups have encouraged their followers to conduct suicide bombing, to fire rockets into Israeli civilian areas to stab Jews with intent to kill in public areas. Such a level of popular violence is not seen in even the most antisemitic countries in Europe. 

The harshness of the present day violence in Israel has been overshadowed by the Holocaust. These deaths are seen as martyrs and heroes who are small sacrifices in a larger positive movement in world where the exiled Jew is reborn and brought home where he can honorably defend himself. There feels like some change in the air. The official authorities are calling the attack on October 7th, the most deadly day for Jewish people since the Holocaust. Now, I won't delude myself, the purpose of this statement is to frame Hamas and by extension the residents of Gaza as Nazis, which justifies the harsh counter offensive currently underway. Nevertheless, it opens us to realize that the country in which 1400 Jews died in one day, in what is probably best compared to a pogrom, was not Ukraine or Russia, as was the case since the days of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, until the pogrom of Kielce in 1946. Nor was it in the United States, whose dense Jewish communities rival in size the Jewish population of the state of Israel. No, it was in the haven, the refuge for the persecuted Jew, the modern State of Israel.  

Israel serves quite well as a haven for the Jews persecuted by the specter of nationalisms that marginalize the Jewish residents of their motherland. Perhaps unintentionally, the state of Israel has recklessly allowed another form of antisemitism to brew. To gain traction and legitimacy. This antisemitism is like that of the Orthodox Christian Ukrainian peasants who labored under the boot of their Polish Catholic colonizers. The distant Polish nobility had no interest in directly managing their estates in the conquered provinces. Instead they contracted Jewish notables to manage the land directly. The Arenda system, in which Jews were placed in a marginally high position of power for the first time since the Roman empire. Both the Christians and Muslims had made it illegal for Jews to own slaves in their respective territories, but the Polish crown had found a way to give the Jews slaves once again. Effectively, the Jews were a buffer that allowed the Polish nobility to distance themselves from the mistreatment of the peasants who worked their land. When the peasants revolted in 1648, they targeted the Jews who were settled in their native territories. Some of the Polish generals who were sent to quell the rebellion weren't too fond of Jews either and turned over the Jews they were supposed to be protecting to the rebellious forces of Khmelnytsky. 

The project of the Zionist colonization of Palestine has an ugly secret. It was built on displacing many of Arab residents who once occupied its territory. During the Ottoman Empire and the British Mandate, the Zionist settlers would buy the land that they settled on. They set up large funds to manage the purchase and ownership of this land. In the beginning the settlers were more than happy to higher local agricultural workers who were already familiar with best practices in the Palestinian climate. The later National Socialist settlers who believed in creating a new Jewish proletariat refused to higher Arab workers. The intended effect of this system was that it created an independent Jewish economic enclave within the British mandate. 

Practically, it broke the traditional system of leases and residency in Palestinian society. Land could change hands many times, but generally the new owners would continue to lease the land to the local peasants/farmworkers or higher them to work on the new owner's farm. By insisting on using only Jewish labor, the collectivist agricultural settlements that the Zionists created would marginalize the local peasants from the economy, depriving them of jobs and slowly displacing them as they would move to growing Arab urban areas to find better prospects. 

The next step of expulsion was in the 1948 war. Some historians argue that the violent expulsions in 1948 were part of a master plan to rid the nascent Jewish state of its Arab majority, though in practice the expulsions were carried out somewhat uncoordinated by independently acting militias and military groups. Massacres like the one at Dir Yassin scared Palestinian civilians once they realized the extent of the cruelty that Jewish nationalist para-military groups were capable of. Sometimes the Palestinians would flee of their own volition while others were actively removed by Israeli military groups. The end result of the uncoordinated operation was that by the end of the war almost 800,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes in that were located in the newly sovereign Jewish state.

Israel's ultimate preference for their absence was made clear when the new country outright refused to allow the refugees to return home, while resettling a similar number of Jewish refugees in their country. The refugee problem persists. As much as Zionists would wish it would go away and some other country to resettle the Palestinians, it won't happen. Unfortunately, the Jewish people are not the United States, we will have to face the consequences of our actions. Though some may mourn our ability to relive the mythic glorious conquests of Joshua and King David, that era is by-gone. Even the Prophets tell us outright, King David's hand were too bloody to build God's temple. In order for us to merit a peaceful existence in the land we must work out a peaceful compromise. Though we like to blame Palestinian leadership for refusing to make peace, it takes two to tango and the Likud party has been a fierce and consistent opponent of any peace negotiations since the concept was proposed.

We should not think of a peaceful compromise as a failure of Jewish strength to retake the homeland. Though our passion for justice and nationalism runs deep, our sages of old remind us, "Who is the hero? He who conquers his desires." We have to consider the peacemaker, the compromiser as the true hero. It takes much strength to be so vulnerable. Though we may think such ideas of peacemaking be altruistic and impossible, they are necessary for our survival. Either we compromise to end hostilities, or the spirit of the beleaguered Palestinians will radicalize until it destabilizes the Jewish state, threatening anyone there. We'd much rather ensure that the moderates who believe in allowing the Jews to remain in the land are in political control and not the radical antisemites who wish to expel them. 

A compromise that is either a two state solution or a one state solution will not be easy, but it is the more moral thing to do in this situation, and with God's help, the merit of righteousness will protect us. 

אם יתמהמה חכה לו כי בא יבוא לא יאחר    

A Rant on Zionism and the Current Conflict

This semester I'm taking a class with Professor Steven Fine on his research with the Arch of Titus. Since the arch itself is a rather small object, the class focuses on how the arch and its elements were understood and used throughout the lifetime of the monument, from when it was erected during the reign of the last Flavian Emperor Domitian until the present day.

We spent some time in class discussing why the arch was initially erected and used other artifacts and literary sources from the era to approximate a picture of the socio-political climate that led to the construction of the monumental arch. 

When Emperor Nero died without a successor, the Roman empire plunged into a state of chaos with three more Roman nobles attempting a failing to secure the imperial seat. The last and only successful contender was Vespasian who returned from his campaign in Judea to seize the imperial seat. Vespasian understood that his position as emperor was precarious. He was not part of the old Julio-Claudian dynasty that had ruled Rome for the past century. In an effort to legitimize his position, he turned to the old republican period for inspiration. During his day, it was considered the good-old-days of Rome. His portrait rejected the stylized youthful and divine faces of the Julio-Claudians. Vespasian had his visage sculpted in a manner reminiscent of the realist portraits of the Republican era, that honored the wisdom and humanity of Rome's nobility. 

Portraits that reminded people a prosperous by-gone age were not enough, Vespasian needed to look like the generals of the old days like Pompey and Julius Caesar who conquered vast swaths of land for the rapidly expanding empire. The problem was that by Vespasian ascent, the empire had reached its governable limits, so he turned to his successful quelling of the Jewish revolt of 66 CE.

Judea had been a Roman province for decades since Pompey annexed it over a century earlier in 63 BCE following the dissolution of the Hasmonean dynasty. The Jewish revolt was an internal revolt, a sign of unrest in an unstable empire. But the story of a costly repression of a small revolt was not one associated with glory and might. Instead Vespasian and his son Titus who lead the Roman response to the revolt portrayed it as a mighty victory against a foreign nation.

They paraded the spoils of war through Rome in a Triumphal parade just like the generals of old did when they conquered new territory. Using the spoils of war looted from the destroyed Judea, Vespasian renovated the Circus Maximus and built the Coliseum with the spoils of war. These new public works were adorned with inscriptions that boasted of the Flavian dynasty's victory over Judea. 

This tactic of portraying a revolt as a war against a foreign adversary is not at all a new rhetorical strategy for ensuring popular support for a cause. Sometimes the difference between a rebellion and a war can be quite vague. Take for instance the United States Civil War. Technically the Confederate States of America was an illegitimate rebel group within the United States that sought to break away from the country. The Confederates posed a formidable threat to the continuity of the United States and occupied close to half of the entire country's organized territory. To call the Civil War a quashing of an internal rebellion would be an understatement. 

As I write this piece, the Israel Defense Force, the Israeli army has invaded the Gaza strip. The relentless bombing of the urban areas of the territory that preceded the land invasion has likely killed 10,000 civilians. This brutal offensive was initiated in response to the bloodiest attack on Israeli territory in the countries history. On October 7th, hundreds of Hamas militants invades the area surrounding the Gaza strip and murders 1400 civilians living in the area, men women and children. They took around 200 hostages as well. 

The response from the Israeli government to this attack has pretty consistent. The Israeli government narrative is that Hamas has effectively declared war on Israel, and now Israel will retaliate with more war. The US media has caught on to this and adopted the term "Israel Hamas War" to define the current conflict. This fundamental problem with this framing is that this conflict is not exactly a war. A war is fought between two states, and a state will generally admit defeat and surrender in following the rules of war as a means of diplomacy. 

Israel is in fact quelling the rebellion of its unhappy vassal state. Though it would not entirely honest to call pre-Oct. 7th Gaza occupied territory, many Palestinian advocates refer to it as such, since Israel is able to exert significant control over what happens in the technically autonomous self-governing Palestinian territory. Hamas is more like a frustrated vassal state, rebelling against its overlord. 

Everyone knows that this is really a rebellion, since Hamas fighters will never be fully eradicated from Gaza. The attacks of Oct. 7 were just an overly successful rendition of an attack that Palestinian refugees and their descendants have been inflicting upon southern Israel since the 1950s. These incursions are not acts of war, but rather attempts of rebellion to try to somehow reclaim some amount the property that the refugees lost in the Nakba. 

The Israeli response to this feels more like the violent quelling of a rebellion, and not a war. Though some elements of expansionist Zionists in Israel may see this reoccupation of Gaza as an opportunity to build new Israeli settlements there, this war will probably not end in informal annexation of land.

The question stands about whether or not Netanyahu will benefit from the stabilizing benefits of being seen as a war hero. By painting this as a war and not a quashed rebellion, a victorious Netanyahu could strengthen his weakening grasp of Israeli politics. Or will his failure to secure his citizens from the attack of October 7th spell his downfall? Only time will tell of these things.

For the moment, I advocate for a ceasefire. The needless slaughter of Palestinian civilians is numbing to witness, just as the slaughter of Israeli civilians was one month ago. I have friends in the Israeli army who are most likely currently in Gaza and in constant danger of local insurgents killing or wounding them. A reality that I try to avoid thinking about because of how painful it is to consider. This quashing of rebellion is not worth the cost. 

The promise of Zionism was a safe haven for the Jews, where they could live without fear of antisemitism. Clearly that promise has failed to come to fruition. Some well respected Jews would advocate the extermination of Palestinians from the land. Morally speaking, their plans are abhorrent and in a perfect world they would be dismissed on such grounds. But we live in a flawed world, so I must offer a Judeo-centric critique of such a plan in hopes that it will prevent them from entertaining the thought of such monstrous violence.

Antisemitism is not a genetic condition, you cannot rid yourself of ideological threats by murdering those who believe in the ideas. Especially such a global idea as antisemitism. The Palestinian antisemites exist in a relatively unique position. Unlike most antisemites, the Jews have actually hurt them. We as a community have not ever experienced such legitimate grievances vocalized in the form of antisemitism. The only thing that remotely compares were the Ukrainian peasants who participated in the Khmelnytsky revolt in 1648. The lives of those peasants were often mismanaged by Jewish Arendars who managed the land they worked on for their Polish noble landlords who lived far away in the Polish heartlands. 

Though I am conscious of how similar my arguments sound to the Jewish assimilators of the late 19th century, who's belief that antisemitism would vanish if Jews assimilated. Perhaps the arrival of the parallel of Nazi Germany will come to disprove my beliefs. In the present I feel morally justified in advocating for the human rights of the Palestinians to be allowed to exist in a democratic country and to not be living in a situation in which they are caught in the cross-fire between two groups of elites who want to demonstrate their own military power. 

Perhaps the solution is a secular one state solution that is neither Zionist nor Palestinian nationalist. History has shown that integration breeds tolerance and is a more effective cure to bigotry that violence. However overcoming the religious-nationalist visions of the Israeli Jews and the Palestinian Muslims will be a miraculous act, more impressive than the splitting of the Red Sea.   

The Earliest History of YU

YU's history has been an integral part of how it presents itself the world since its earliest days. The first instance of deliberate history writing for the school was in 1907. An I. Cohen (not yet identified) wrote an article about RIETS in honor of its tenth anniversary. Cohen briefly describes how the school formed, before describing how it presently functioned in 1907, praising it for its great accomplishments. Though there is no reason to doubt Cohen's retelling of the events of RIETS' formation, we still need to consider the context in which this article was written.

1907 was not a good year for the young Yeshiva. Since 1905, the school had faced two publicity disasters in form of two student strikes against the policies of the administration. In both instances, the students complained about the lack of a curriculum in the school and administration's eagerness to end the stipend program that students used to feed themselves. 

The Yiddish press and a significant proportion of the dues paying members of RIETS were siding with the students. The lack of a curriculum meant that there was no explicit and clear path for students to follow that would endure their graduation. This caused many students to spend more time in school that was really necessary. The overall effect was that the Yeshiva graduated a few rabbis per year in contrast to the 90 some full time students enrolled in the school. The public along with the students were also pressuring the Yeshiva to create a more advanced secular studies program to graduate more well rounded rabbis.

Cohen's article does not address any of this controversy. Instead, he attributes the formation of the Yeshiva to the organizing of the first Roshei Yeshiva to teach there. Considering the start of the Yeshiva from the beginning of when classes began to be offered and not from how the board and funding was first organized. This focus on the development of the studies themselves as the primary focus of the history is not unusual for histories of Yeshivas, but it centers the primary mission of the Yeshiva as traditional Torah study, like they have in Europe. As Cohen moves his narrative to his present day, he praises the Yeshiva for its success in becoming a center of pure Torah study, educating many American born students in traditional old world methods of Talmud study. Even directly comparing the Yeshiva to the Yeshiva of Volozhin.

When viewed in its historical context, Cohen was arguing for keeping the Yeshiva running under the same model under which it had existed in the previous decade. This argument, being written as a history, is probably directed towards the public to encourage them to support the Yeshiva, though Cohen never makes any specific appeals for donations. Its not clear if he was directly involved in the administration. In fact Cohen's narrative lacks an important part of the messaging that the Yeshiva administration had been pushing until that point. Since 1897, the Yeshiva had been presenting itself to the American public as a school that actively educated in Torah and secular studies, seeking to educate well rounded students. By 1905 it became clear to the public that this was not really true, but it did not stop the Yeshiva administration from continuing to present itself in that way. Cohen does not include any of this language. He makes no effort to exaggerate the elementary English language classes that the school offered. He seems proud of the fact that some of the students at RIETS were also high school graduates, but college level studies seems out of the question for Cohen who clearly wants RIETS to be as traditional a Yeshiva as possible. 

Cohen's desire to keep the Yeshiva tradition had to contend against the powerful arguments coming from those desiring reform. The reformers had practical arguments for how curriculum reform would benefit the efficiency of the Yeshiva education and would train rabbis more equipped to serve American Jews. To combat this desire for change, Cohen turns to history for his argument. Presenting the history of RIETS as a trajectory pushing towards a traditional Yeshiva, a method that he argues has seen success.

Cohen's article can be found here. https://www.nli.org.il/he/newspapers/espac/1907/02/15/01/article/4

The 1905 RIETS Strike

The early histories of RIETS and Yeshiva College that were written to honor the school's 50th anniversary Jubilee in 1937 presented a simplified narrative of how strained relations between the students and administration of RIETS in the first decade of the 20th century started the school on a path towards modernization. Gilbert Klaperman's research in the late 1950s built on these earlier short histories, and he presented a story of two separate strikes, one in 1906 and another in 1908 that culminated in the consequential board meeting that propelled the school into the modern era. 

Historian's understanding of RIETS before 1915, is very spotty. There are zero surviving internal records meaning that everything is based on published material in newspapers and magazines from the era. I've been finding articles that Klaperman overlooked in his monument research. Namely Dovid Moshe Hermalin's series on the Yeshivas of New York from 1903. But just today I found a gem in the New Era Illustrated Magazine. 

I was tipped off to the existence of this article since it's cited in the endnotes on the article about RIETS in the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia. Incredibly, the magazine was digitized on google books. The article is located in the March-April issue of the 1905 New Era Illustrated Magazine. It is titled "The New York Yeshibath" written by Sampson Lederhendler. Similar to Hermalin's 1903 series, this article describes the environment of the Yeshiva and some its curriculum. Though Lederhendler is quite a bit more patronizing to the culture of the school than Hermalin, jesting that the students were, "continually swaying their bodies to and fro, as if they had discovered the secret of perpetual motion." Lederhendler's article also provides us with some breathtaking, high quality photos of the interior of the Yeshiva. 

The article really caught my attention when he mentioned that "refractory uprisings are very frequent here," going on to describe two separate instances of the students going strike. Reading this, I quickly checked to confirm that this article was in fact published in March 1905 almost a whole year before the "first" strike mentioned in the official histories. 

I needed to double check the accuracy of this claim, so I turned to the National Library of Israel's American Yiddish newspaper collection to see if I could locate some corroborating articles. 

You bet I did. Now, to be clear, I have not yet been able to reconstruct an exact timeline of how all this played out, the sources are still fairly scarce, but there is enough evidence from different sources to be reasonably confident that there was student unrest at the Yeshiva in the beginning of 1905. 

Lederhandler relays the following series of events. 

One of the Vice Presidents of the school proposed a plan that would allow the Yeshiva to save money on the student's stipends. The main purpose of these stipends to was allow the students to devote their full energies to study without having to worry about paying for meals and other basic life needs. The Yeshiva already supplied lodging and laundry for the students who needed it, but the students paid for their food out of pocket from their stipend. The Vice President's plan was to create a Kessel (a communal pot) i.e. a rudimentary food service to directly supply the students' food. Centralizing food production for all students would be cheaper than each student arranging for his own meals, allowing them to cease paying stipends. Another added benefit was that this communal meal would ensure that all the students were keeping a strict level of Kashrut and that they were reciting the proper blessings for their meals.

The students were not happy with this plan, preferring the financial flexibility that the stipends provided. On the night that this plan was to be voted on by the board and adopted, the students declared themselves on strike. The administration responded by promising to discipline the students who organized the strike and replace them with fresh immigrants from Ellis Island, even placing ads in the paper to recruit new students. The striking students threatened to physically prevent any of the directors from entering the Yeshiva building so long as they continued with their plan to do away with the stipends. Ultimately the threat of bringing all the details to the press caused the administration to relent and restore the most expensive stipends. 

This narrative brings up a few problems. Firstly, the ads in the paper should be verifiable, but I have not been able to locate such ads yet. (Now this isn't a disproof since there are still plenty of papers that have not been digitized yet from this era) Further, there is the issue of who is relaying this information to the Lederhendler, especially of the Yeshiva students agreed not to relay the details of this confrontation to the press. 

February 24, 1905, a lengthy letter to the editor was printed at the end of the Daily Jewish Herald. The letter was signed "All the Students of Yeshivas Rabbi Yitzchak Elchanan." The letter structured like the strike letters from 1906 and 1908. The letters opens with a critique of the curriculum of the Yeshiva. The students explained how the Judaic studies lacked a clear curricular system, and the secular studies barely covered elementary knowledge of the English language. The students argued that the Yeshiva had the potential to become a significant force in the global Jewish community. The talent from the students and faculty was underutilized, and if the administration could institute a well thought out curriculum, the school would be able to train the highest quality rabbis. 

The students then illustrated their more immediate fight with the administration. They explain how the administration wanted to stop paying the weekly stipend in favor of providing a communal pot for free food for the students. The students vehemently protested this change.  

On the front page of the Daily Jewish Herald February 28, 1905, the headline read, "Chaim Stiller's Tragic Death; he came to study at the Yeshiva Rabbi Yitzchak Elchanan and he was thrown to peddle with a basket to earn his daily bread; Who Is Guilty?" 

The article continues describing how Chaim Stiller, a young man in his early twenties, had spent most of his youth studying in European Yeshivas to join the rabbinate. He came to America in January 1905 to study at RIETS in an environment free from old world antisemitism. He arrived at the Yeshiva right as the disagreement over whether or not to cease providing the students with a stipend began. Without a stable source of income he had to leave the Yeshiva and took on peddling to earn enough for his basic sustenance. In late February, he was out peddling in a snowstorm and collapsed from the cold. He brought to Governor's Hospital and was pronounced dead. The Chevrah Chesed shel Emes paid for his burial. 

The Daily Jewish Herald was not happy about this situation at all. They argued that Chaim Stiller showed promise as a young scholar and should never have been abandoned to the streets by the Yeshiva. I don't know how much of Stiller's biography in this article is accurate. It's very easy for the press to exaggerate these kinds of stories. However, the paper's critique is clear, they felt that the administration of RIETS' games with the students' stipend needed to end, because the consequences would be (and already had become) dire. 

We can see from this news article in the Herald, that RIETS was withholding their student's stipends in January and February of 1905. This does not support any other details of the strike that Lederhendler described, but the basic catalyst of the strike, the withholding of the stipends certainly happened. 

On March 3, 1905, the Daily Jewish Herald published a letter to the editor from a Hillel Jablonski from Reading, PA who claimed to be a dues paying member of RIETS. Jablonski was not happy about the current state of affairs at the Yeshiva. He generally sided with students demands in their letter published on February 24. He also expressed some frustration with the dues collectors who he felt misrepresented the Yeshiva to donors and paying members, claiming that the Yeshiva offered a modern education, when the students clearly stated that it didn't.

This whole incident seems to have shaken the board of RIETS' confidence in the public image of the school. For four days, April 10 to April 13, RIETS ran an advertisement in the Daily Jewish Herald, that contained a short open letter from Rabbi Bernard Leventhal endorsing the Yeshiva. Leventhal stated that he recently visited the Yeshiva and found the students to be focused on their studies, receiving their stipend from the Yeshiva as well as getting a good education in the language of the land (English). He added that everything running properly and in order and that American Jews should not hesitate to donate to this worthy cause through the fundraisers who were travelling across the country collecting funds.