//features//
Spring 2019
Spring 2019
OU-JLIC and Yavneh:
Two Visions of the Modern Orthodox College Experience
Maya Bickel
Daniel Bonner said the community knew something was missing. Bonner (CC ‘13) served as president of the Orthodox Jewish community in 2011. During his time, Columbia’s Orthodox community was vibrant; it had around 250 active members, a board of elected student leaders, gabbais (ritual leaders who, since 2010, consisted of two men and one woman), and the support of the Kraft Center for Jewish Student Life, a multi-purpose building to use for its events and services. “You might have thought that we had everything we needed,” Bonner said, “but we felt pretty strongly that we needed an Orthodox rabbinic couple on campus to guide the community.”
Bonner was a staunch proponent of bringing the Orthodox Union’s (OU) Jewish Learning Initiative on Campus (JLIC) to Columbia. The OU-JLIC program sends Orthodox rabbinic couples to Orthodox Jewish communities at colleges across the country. The first couple was sent in 2001 to Brandeis University, and the program has since spread to more than 20 college campuses in the U.S. and Canada. An OU-JLIC couple arrived at Columbia in 2014, after Bonner had graduated.
Although JLIC couples have now become an organic part of most Orthodox Jewish communities on college campuses, they are a relatively recent addition. In the 80s and 90s, prior to the formation of the OU-JLIC, no distinct model existed for Orthodox communities on college campuses. In the 60s and 70s, however, a national student-run organization called Yavneh oversaw more than 30 communities across the U.S. and Canada. Both Yavneh and the OU-JLIC attempt to help Orthodox Jews thrive religiously on secular college campuses. However, the historic Yavneh and the OU-JLIC offer two contrasting models for Orthodox communities on college campuses, each having been shaped by the various needs facing Orthodox communities in two very different periods. One is student-led and unaffiliated with dominant religious institutions, and the other is run by the Orthodox Union, directed by professionals and led on each campus by adult rabbinic couples.
Yavneh
Benny Kraut, an American Jewish historian, documents the inception of Yavneh in his book, The Greening of American Orthodox Judaism. Kraut writes that Yavneh was founded in 1960 by Joel Levine, the president of Columbia’s Orthodox community, Rivkah Teitz (Blau), the president of Barnard’s, and two other Columbia students—Zvi Gitelman and Michael Hochstein. Kraut had been an active member of Yavneh, and his warm, personal connection to its history infuses his writing. In the 60s, Kraut recounts, a post-war boom expanded the number of American colleges, and a large Orthodox Jewish generation raised in American Jewish day schools meant that substantial numbers of Orthodox Jews began attending universities.[1]
The 1960s also saw a rejuvenated Modern Orthodoxy, which was trying to determine its relationship to modern American culture. This came at a time when American society was also undergoing important social changes. In 1958, the journal Tradition was founded as a publication for Modern Orthodox thought, and American Orthodox intellectuals began to articulate how to engage with modernity within the framework of tradition.[2] The growing number of Orthodox high school graduates now attending college reflected, shaped, and precipitated these shifts.
But life on campus was far from easy for these students. Their rigorous devotion to Jewish law required, among other things, eating kosher food, and observing the Sabbath and holidays by refraining from writing, traveling long distances, using technology, and cooking, among other things. Many of these students also participated in prayer services, and studied Jewish texts regularly. All of these integral parts of the Jewish Orthodox experience are difficult to maintain on college campuses today, but they were much more difficult in the 1950s for the first influx of observant students. For example, Blau,[3] now a professor of English at Stern College, explained that Barnard used to give exams on Shabbat and Jewish holidays, and that students were required to pay for food if they lived in the dormitory, even though no kosher food was provided.
The college experience was also difficult for Orthodox students intellectually as they grappled with the same questions of modernity and tradition facing the Orthodox intelligentsia. Students felt unprepared to answer questions regarding their practices or beliefs that arose in their classes or in conversation with fellow students. Irving (Yitz) Greenberg, a prominent Modern Orthodox rabbi who was the central adult figure during Yavneh’s first six years, said students were grappling for the first time with the serious question of “how [to] deal with intellectual and critical attitudes towards tradition.” They had also grown up attending Jewish day schools where classes in Jewish texts were mandatory, but at college there was no infrastructure to continue studying those texts.
According to Blau, Yavneh was created to serve these two main purposes: providing for the practical needs of Orthodox Jews on college campuses, and providing learning opportunities to ensure that students continued to study Torah after high school, when more difficult and dramatic questions set in. Over the course of the 1960s, Yavneh had between 35 and 45 affiliated chapters, with 1,200 to 1,400 members who paid annual dues, and many more who participated in its programs without paying for membership.[4]
Kraut contextualizes Yavneh within the changing Orthodox landscape of the 1960s. He explains that its “students envisioned and concretized new religious/intellectual possibilities in a campus culture and Orthodox world not yet responsive to their needs.”[5] Greenberg expressed the same sentiment: “Yavneh’s main contribution,” he said, “was to affirm the college experience, and say you're not going to stay Jewish by staying sheltered, but rather by lifting your religious understanding so it can deal with a more sophisticated and more universal culture.”
A New Modern Orthodoxy
By the end of the 70s, times had changed. Yavneh was difficult to sustain as an institution, since it had no independent financial base, student continuity, or professional leadership.[6] The increasing number of Orthodox students also meant students were not as isolated, and that universities and Hillels were much more receptive to their needs.[7]
The other major shift, though, was within the Orthodox community. While the Modern Orthodoxy of the 60s sought, or even embraced, many aspects of intellectual and cultural modernity, the Orthodox right expressed a much greater degree of apprehension. In the 70s, Modern Orthodoxy shifted towards the Orthodox right’s more conservative approach.[8]
Prior to this shift, in the 1950s and 1960s Modern Orthodoxy tolerated discussion on a broad range of intellectual and halakhic questions. The prominent rabbi Emanuel Rackman advocated for full cooperation with non-Orthodox rabbis, and even put forward a plan in 1955 to create a beit din [Jewish legal court] recognized by the assemblies of the Orthodox and Conservative rabbis.[9] On an intellectual note, in 1966, Greenberg called for a more open approach to biblical criticism.[10] Kraut illustrates that while both of these positions elicited strong reactions from other figures in Modern Orthodoxy, Greenberg and Rackman “were not yet marginalized to the extent of being dismissed from the modern Orthodox consensus.”[11] The Modern Orthodoxy of the 70s was not as tolerant.
Orthodoxy's shift to the right is well documented in a wide range of articles and books, including sociological studies like Samuel Heilman’s Sliding to the Right: the Contest for the Future of American Jewish Orthodoxy,[12] which focused on New York City, and Chaim Waxman’s article “The Haredization of American Orthodox Jewry.” Waxman opens his article by proclaiming, “Almost every observer of contemporary American Orthodoxy has been struck by its shift to the right.”[13]
Kraut characterizes this national rightward shift in the 1970s as a backlash to the perceived lawlessness and promiscuity of the 1960s. The 1970s witnessed the election of Richard Nixon, then the Reagan revolution, and the increased influence of Evangelical Christians in politics. The national wave of increased conservativism strengthened the Orthodox Jewish right as well. The radical nature of the countercultural movement in the 60s also confirmed to the right that modernity had nothing useful to offer religious Jews.[14] This bolstered its already strong sense of itself as the sole authority within religious Judaism and the only authentic way to practice Judaism.[15]
Many members of Modern Orthodoxy were drawn toward the right, including college students. As such, fewer college students were drawn to Yavneh and those that were had different interests. “The intellectual questioning and exploration of Judaism in a modern context, a fundamental raison d'être of Yavneh and perhaps the hallmark of its early ideals, was muted in the Yavneh of the 1970s,” writes Kraut.[16] Its membership declined precipitously and its major donors lost interest.[17]
The Orthodox right’s pull on Modern Orthodoxy, and by extension on Modern Orthodox college students, has continued since the 1970s. In his article Waxman points to the increasing stringency and conservatism of Modern Orthodoxy, particularly Modern Orthodox institutions like “the Orthodox Union, the Young Israel movement, and other major bastions of modern Orthodoxy.”[18]
OU-JLIC
In the 1990s, Menachem Schrader, who moved to Israel in 1981, was a Rabbi at Yeshivat Hamivtar, a now defunct men’s yeshiva in the West Bank settlement of Efrat. Schrader began hearing from the American men who came to study that it was difficult for them to remain religiously observant Jews at their colleges. “I became especially sensitive to a phenomenon where we were receiving a lot of students from secular colleges—sometimes before, sometimes in the middle, sometimes after [their four years of college]—and of there being no real basis for Torah—certainly not [the] study [of Torah] and sometimes not even observance,” he said.
After a number of years brainstorming how to best provide for Orthodox communities, Schrader developed the idea to send a Torah educator couple to help lead students in their communities. He reached out to the Orthodox Union and to Hillel, which both expressed interest, although neither could commit funding. Schrader found a donor in 2000, and after consultation with Hillel, placed the first couple at Brandeis University.
College: a Disaster Area?
As the primary intellectual influence on Yavneh in its first years, Greenberg was heavily involved in shaping its embrace of secular knowledge.[19] In an article he composed in 1968 titled “Jewish Survival on the College Campus,” he writes, “college is a disaster area for Judaism, Jewish loyalty and Jewish identity.”[20] Kraut quotes this article in his book, but I was surprised Greenberg still views the college campus in this way more than 50 years since writing the article. In the article, though, Greenberg clarifies that the challenge in college lies primarily in the failures of Jewish education.
Schrader, like Greenberg, views college as a necessarily challenging experience for Orthodox Jews. However, for him, the main problem lies in the secular nature of college itself. I met him at the OU’s building downtown, and we sat in a conference room that OU employees were cleaning up from a workshop they hosted for Orthodox high school principals. Schrader explained to me that being a religious Jew at a secular college is like being a lawyer and a doctor: almost impossible to do both at once. “What is your college experience going to be like? Is it going to be an experience of Columbia/Barnard or is it going to be the experience of a Torah Jew?” he asked.
Not all Orthodox college students feel that college is a “disaster area” for Jews, or that there is an inherent contradiction between their Jewish experience and their college experience. Many college students attend college primarily for the degree, especially those in more professionalized fields, and may never take classes that challenge their faith. For those students who do take religious classes or other humanities classes, or for those who attend university for a more diverse social and cultural experience, their perspectives are not what student perspectives were in the 60s.
Bonner said he never felt any conflict between the two experiences. “Columbia was the perfect place to feel the full range of the university while always knowing you could return [to the religious community],“ he said. As a Modern Orthodox college student myself, it felt strangely dissonant to hear Greenberg and Schrader talk about the extreme difficulties of the college experience and not identify with those challenges at all.
This is not to say that Greenberg and Schrader’s concerns are unreasonable; there are plenty of Orthodox students who stop identifying and practicing as Orthodox Jews while at college, and many others who feel they could be in a more spiritually supportive environment. However, their sweeping characterizations of the Orthodox experience feel exaggerated.
Despite Greenberg’s initial position about the college campus (and by extension Jewish education), his solution, and Yavneh’s, differs from the OU’s. ”What Yavneh showed me is it didn't have to be a disaster; it could be an upgrade. [The college experience] helped them upgrade their own religious understanding, and upgrade their ability to handle questions and their ability to think more ethically and more universally,” he told me. Yavneh, for Greenberg, was an ideal model of Jewish education.
Approaches to the Religious Experience of College
Yavneh’s first national constitution listed the five main goals to which all its affiliated chapters were committed: Jewish education, Jewish observance, communication,[21] Jewish unity, and community. The one that bears the most scrutiny is communication, which Kraut explains as a commitment “to advance the intellectual dialogue between Judaism and Western culture. In the process, they would show that the Orthodox Jew has a legitimate mutually-enriching place in the world of secular learning.”[22]
On its website, the OU-JLIC’s has a mission statement and five hallmarks of their methodology. The five hallmarks are relationship building, Jewish learning programs and activities, infrastructure, modeling, and student leadership. No mention is made of secular knowledge within the methodology section, but the mission statement addresses it by stating that the educators help students “balance their Jewish commitments with their desire to engage the secular world.”
Understandably, both lists share commitments to Jewish textual learning, and Jewish observance and communal life. However, where one embraces as its primary objective a desire to promote “intellectual dialogue between Judaism and Western culture,” the other focuses primarily on internal Jewish infrastructure, while mentioning a “balance” between religious commitment and secular engagements.
The OU-JLIC’s more modest articulation of its engagement with Western (or secular) culture is not surprising given its affiliation with the Orthodox Union. The approach is also evident in the makeup of the educator couples. Out of 43 educators listed on the website, 23 went to an Orthodox Jewish institution for their undergraduate degrees. The majority of them attended Yeshiva University, but some attended Touro or other institutions. Seven educators got their undergraduate degree abroad (most in Israel, but some from England). Only 12 educators attended a university like the ones their students attend.[23]
Student Leadership
Yavneh and the OU-JLIC also offer two different models for student leadership in Orthodox communities.
Yavneh had two primary positions. The first was that it was an intellectual organization (and not a social one) and the second was that it was “the only national, independent Jewish student organization free from all adult supervision and control.” [24] Even though Yavneh relied on Jewish institutions for financial support, it repeatedly rebuffed attempts by the Orthodox Union to have it become an OU project. [25] That being said, the OU was very supportive of Yavneh and provided free office space, miscellaneous supplies, and financial assistance. [26]
Yavneh’s leadership consisted of a National Executive Board (NEB) composed of a national president, four vice-presidents, two secretaries, and one national treasurer (this structure changed somewhat over the years). The establishment of this board was also an acknowledgement that the students needed some guidance that only adults could provide.[27] The NEB communicated regularly with local campus chapters, offering assistance and keeping them up to date about Yavneh activities across the country. [28]
Yavneh also established a National Advisory Board of prominent rabbis and laymen who would help raise funds, increase Yavneh’s standing and legitimacy in the Orthodox world, and offer advice to improve life on campus. Irving Greenberg was the first Advisory Board chair, and others included Rabbis Aharon Lichtenstein and Norman Lamm, although not all of them were as involved as Greenberg. [29]
Four of the first five national presidents were Columbia students and in the first six years, the Columbia and Barnard chapters of Yavneh were the strongest. Most of these presidents were the primary proponents of Yavneh’s focus on the integration of Judaism with secular Western thought. [30] They (and the subsequent NEBs) organized annual conventions with lectures from the foremost Modern Orthodox rabbis and leaders on topics ranging from Rabbi Aaron Soloveitchik’s 1963 “Must Orthodoxy Isolate Itself Within the Jewish People?” to Rabbi Nisson Schulman’s “Jews in Non-Jewish Armies” in 1968, and a debate in 1969 between Greenberg and Lichtenstein on the issue of church and state separation in Israel.[31]
Yavneh mandated that each chapter conduct at least one weekly shiur, one lecture per month, and one large function per semester. [32] At Columbia’s Yavneh chapter, for example, in the early 1960s there was a lecture series on the relationship between Greek and rabbinic thought and another one on principles of poetry and the Talmud.[33]
Financial and administrative difficulties combined with much lower membership led to Yavneh’s demise in 1980.[34] Columbia’s Orthodox community remained robust and active and it even retained the name Yavneh after the national organization disbanded.
When Bonner and a number of other student leaders advocated for bringing the OU-JLIC to Columbia, student leadership was strong. Still, those who wanted an OU-JLIC couple thought that “full time attention to the Orthodox community would help students in a way that student leadership, for all its strength, couldn’t necessarily,” explained Bonner.
The original mission of the OU-JLIC program was for the couples placed in each community to provide their own educational programming and support that of the students, but it has since adopted many more responsibilities. Schrader said that they realized that “community building is really what it is all about.” “The experience of Torah observance is a communal experience, so you need a community, and the community usually requires formal leadership. Students can have their own formal leadership in terms of their organization but you need formal religious leadership as well,” he explained.
Noam Friedman, Columbia’s JLIC rabbi, sat down to speak with me on the third floor of the Kraft Center, which houses the offices of Hillel’s employees. He first joined the community as a rabbinic intern in 2013, and then stayed on as the JLIC rabbi in 2014. Friedman notes that at some campuses, JLIC had to build up communities from scratch. At Columbia, by contrast, “all the pieces of basic infrastructure existed, and in many ways it was an opportunity to say rather than have to build things from scratch, how do we best integrate with what exists already, and how do we provide more, how do we add value to the community,” he said.
The current Yavneh at Columbia has an elected executive board, consisting of a president and five vice presidents (social, education, Shabbat/holidays, chesed (volunteering), communications). It also has three gabbais who appoint their successors each year. Yavneh board runs most aspects of the community; they put on programming like the end of semester dinner, game nights, guest lecturers and weekly student lectures. The three gabbais are in charge of organizing the weekly, Shabbat, and holiday prayer services.
Friedman assists the student leaders in all aspects of their leadership, and offers important logistical guidance and communal support. He and his wife, Shiffy Friedman, each lead at least one weekly shiur, give a communal lecture a few times a semester, and help organize and plan the weekly educational programs led by students.
However, when it comes to questions pertaining to Jewish law, the OU-JLIC’s role is more complicated.
“I don’t see myself as the leader of the community. I see myself as a leader. Yavneh board—they are the leaders. I am there to help and support. It’s not a shul [synagogue] where there is a board and there is a rabbi,” said Friedman.
According to Schrader, “the decision to what extent the OU-JLIC couple should be involved in halakhic decisions is a student decision everywhere.” And students do regularly ask the OU-JLIC educator halakhic questions. “Students want that [religious guidance], because you are dealing with students who are committed to being Orthodox, and the Orthodox follow halakha and rabbanim [rabbis] are usually the ones who decide the halakha,” said Schrader.
Halakhic guidance is crucial in an Orthodox context. However, Orthodox students in campus communities come from a range of Orthodox backgrounds that may not necessarily align with the background of the educators. A Columbia student who served a leadership position in Yavneh but requested to remain anonymous said, “what is hard for me is when it feels like a decision is getting made along the lines of the OU-JLIC hashkafa [philosophy], certainly the OU hashkafa, and is potentially ignoring a large number of people in the community who would feel more included or more accepted if the decision were swung slightly more to the left.”
Although some students may feel this way at Columbia, each couple strikes a different dynamic with its campus community, and the OU does not lay out strict policies for all campuses to follow. “They do a good job of supporting us but recognizing that each campus is unique and people on the ground know it best,” said Friedman. Friedman explained that he does occasionally turn to Schrader for guidance, but at his own discretion.
Looking Ahead
OU-JLIC provides an important service and support system to all the communities it serves. In some cases, specifically in communities that are (or were) smaller than Columbia’s, the program has considerably strengthened the communities. In UCLA, for example, Schrader said “we sent a couple there. By November there was a Friday night minyan, by February there was a Shabbat morning minyan, by the next year there was a daily minyan and suddenly you have an Orthodox community on campus.”
Schrader hopes the OU-JLIC will continue to bring couples to universities that have an Orthodox Jewish population, and that the program is also looking to expand into community colleges, which many Orthodox students attend.
The OU-JLIC’s success in spreading to so many campuses is generating some backlash within the Orthodox community. “We are part of the OU and there was concern that it looks like we are promoting students to go to secular campuses,” said Schrader. “That is not the JLIC’s intent nor is it the OU’s intent. So in order to dispel that implication we gave YU [Yeshiva University] and Touro the opportunity to publicize their colleges [in the OU-JLIC 2018 college guidebook],” Schrader explained.
In his conversation with me, Greenberg noted the disparity between the background of Orthodox college students and OU-JLIC educators, and sees an impending problem with recruitment of the latter. “This is the paradox. The JLIC created college programs and groups and social events, but it needed a more open rabbi, and not every yeshiva can generate rabbis who can handle it. Most of the rabbis and couples that they were able to recruit came from more liberal Orthodox backgrounds, because YU was becoming more and more traditional, and its students were less and less comfortable working on a college campus. From the [Orthodox] Union’s point of view, they were more and more anxious because the couples were typically more liberal and more open and more affirmative of gentile culture than the Union was comfortable with,” he explained. He does not know how the program will continue to attract educators who both meet its standards and are willing to live and work on a college campus.
But there may be less of a disconnect between the students and educators than Greenberg envisions. A sizeable number of students grow up in Jewish day schools, attend a year or two at a seminary in Israel, and appreciate a more traditional, immersive Orthodox institutional experience led by a familiar rabbinic leader. The more expansive roles of the OU-JLIC take an enormous burden off students, allowing them to thrive religiously and intellectually without worrying about basic infrastructural and spiritual needs.
However, studying in such an intellectual climate like Columbia’s, it can feel demoralizing not to find any mention of intellectual inquiry in the mission statement of one’s religious community. For those who do feel the lack of institutional and communal fostering of invigorating, intellectual dialogue between Jewish tradition and secular culture, Yavneh offers a hopeful model for what Modern Orthodox students are capable of creating.
Bonner was a staunch proponent of bringing the Orthodox Union’s (OU) Jewish Learning Initiative on Campus (JLIC) to Columbia. The OU-JLIC program sends Orthodox rabbinic couples to Orthodox Jewish communities at colleges across the country. The first couple was sent in 2001 to Brandeis University, and the program has since spread to more than 20 college campuses in the U.S. and Canada. An OU-JLIC couple arrived at Columbia in 2014, after Bonner had graduated.
Although JLIC couples have now become an organic part of most Orthodox Jewish communities on college campuses, they are a relatively recent addition. In the 80s and 90s, prior to the formation of the OU-JLIC, no distinct model existed for Orthodox communities on college campuses. In the 60s and 70s, however, a national student-run organization called Yavneh oversaw more than 30 communities across the U.S. and Canada. Both Yavneh and the OU-JLIC attempt to help Orthodox Jews thrive religiously on secular college campuses. However, the historic Yavneh and the OU-JLIC offer two contrasting models for Orthodox communities on college campuses, each having been shaped by the various needs facing Orthodox communities in two very different periods. One is student-led and unaffiliated with dominant religious institutions, and the other is run by the Orthodox Union, directed by professionals and led on each campus by adult rabbinic couples.
Yavneh
Benny Kraut, an American Jewish historian, documents the inception of Yavneh in his book, The Greening of American Orthodox Judaism. Kraut writes that Yavneh was founded in 1960 by Joel Levine, the president of Columbia’s Orthodox community, Rivkah Teitz (Blau), the president of Barnard’s, and two other Columbia students—Zvi Gitelman and Michael Hochstein. Kraut had been an active member of Yavneh, and his warm, personal connection to its history infuses his writing. In the 60s, Kraut recounts, a post-war boom expanded the number of American colleges, and a large Orthodox Jewish generation raised in American Jewish day schools meant that substantial numbers of Orthodox Jews began attending universities.[1]
The 1960s also saw a rejuvenated Modern Orthodoxy, which was trying to determine its relationship to modern American culture. This came at a time when American society was also undergoing important social changes. In 1958, the journal Tradition was founded as a publication for Modern Orthodox thought, and American Orthodox intellectuals began to articulate how to engage with modernity within the framework of tradition.[2] The growing number of Orthodox high school graduates now attending college reflected, shaped, and precipitated these shifts.
But life on campus was far from easy for these students. Their rigorous devotion to Jewish law required, among other things, eating kosher food, and observing the Sabbath and holidays by refraining from writing, traveling long distances, using technology, and cooking, among other things. Many of these students also participated in prayer services, and studied Jewish texts regularly. All of these integral parts of the Jewish Orthodox experience are difficult to maintain on college campuses today, but they were much more difficult in the 1950s for the first influx of observant students. For example, Blau,[3] now a professor of English at Stern College, explained that Barnard used to give exams on Shabbat and Jewish holidays, and that students were required to pay for food if they lived in the dormitory, even though no kosher food was provided.
The college experience was also difficult for Orthodox students intellectually as they grappled with the same questions of modernity and tradition facing the Orthodox intelligentsia. Students felt unprepared to answer questions regarding their practices or beliefs that arose in their classes or in conversation with fellow students. Irving (Yitz) Greenberg, a prominent Modern Orthodox rabbi who was the central adult figure during Yavneh’s first six years, said students were grappling for the first time with the serious question of “how [to] deal with intellectual and critical attitudes towards tradition.” They had also grown up attending Jewish day schools where classes in Jewish texts were mandatory, but at college there was no infrastructure to continue studying those texts.
According to Blau, Yavneh was created to serve these two main purposes: providing for the practical needs of Orthodox Jews on college campuses, and providing learning opportunities to ensure that students continued to study Torah after high school, when more difficult and dramatic questions set in. Over the course of the 1960s, Yavneh had between 35 and 45 affiliated chapters, with 1,200 to 1,400 members who paid annual dues, and many more who participated in its programs without paying for membership.[4]
Kraut contextualizes Yavneh within the changing Orthodox landscape of the 1960s. He explains that its “students envisioned and concretized new religious/intellectual possibilities in a campus culture and Orthodox world not yet responsive to their needs.”[5] Greenberg expressed the same sentiment: “Yavneh’s main contribution,” he said, “was to affirm the college experience, and say you're not going to stay Jewish by staying sheltered, but rather by lifting your religious understanding so it can deal with a more sophisticated and more universal culture.”
A New Modern Orthodoxy
By the end of the 70s, times had changed. Yavneh was difficult to sustain as an institution, since it had no independent financial base, student continuity, or professional leadership.[6] The increasing number of Orthodox students also meant students were not as isolated, and that universities and Hillels were much more receptive to their needs.[7]
The other major shift, though, was within the Orthodox community. While the Modern Orthodoxy of the 60s sought, or even embraced, many aspects of intellectual and cultural modernity, the Orthodox right expressed a much greater degree of apprehension. In the 70s, Modern Orthodoxy shifted towards the Orthodox right’s more conservative approach.[8]
Prior to this shift, in the 1950s and 1960s Modern Orthodoxy tolerated discussion on a broad range of intellectual and halakhic questions. The prominent rabbi Emanuel Rackman advocated for full cooperation with non-Orthodox rabbis, and even put forward a plan in 1955 to create a beit din [Jewish legal court] recognized by the assemblies of the Orthodox and Conservative rabbis.[9] On an intellectual note, in 1966, Greenberg called for a more open approach to biblical criticism.[10] Kraut illustrates that while both of these positions elicited strong reactions from other figures in Modern Orthodoxy, Greenberg and Rackman “were not yet marginalized to the extent of being dismissed from the modern Orthodox consensus.”[11] The Modern Orthodoxy of the 70s was not as tolerant.
Orthodoxy's shift to the right is well documented in a wide range of articles and books, including sociological studies like Samuel Heilman’s Sliding to the Right: the Contest for the Future of American Jewish Orthodoxy,[12] which focused on New York City, and Chaim Waxman’s article “The Haredization of American Orthodox Jewry.” Waxman opens his article by proclaiming, “Almost every observer of contemporary American Orthodoxy has been struck by its shift to the right.”[13]
Kraut characterizes this national rightward shift in the 1970s as a backlash to the perceived lawlessness and promiscuity of the 1960s. The 1970s witnessed the election of Richard Nixon, then the Reagan revolution, and the increased influence of Evangelical Christians in politics. The national wave of increased conservativism strengthened the Orthodox Jewish right as well. The radical nature of the countercultural movement in the 60s also confirmed to the right that modernity had nothing useful to offer religious Jews.[14] This bolstered its already strong sense of itself as the sole authority within religious Judaism and the only authentic way to practice Judaism.[15]
Many members of Modern Orthodoxy were drawn toward the right, including college students. As such, fewer college students were drawn to Yavneh and those that were had different interests. “The intellectual questioning and exploration of Judaism in a modern context, a fundamental raison d'être of Yavneh and perhaps the hallmark of its early ideals, was muted in the Yavneh of the 1970s,” writes Kraut.[16] Its membership declined precipitously and its major donors lost interest.[17]
The Orthodox right’s pull on Modern Orthodoxy, and by extension on Modern Orthodox college students, has continued since the 1970s. In his article Waxman points to the increasing stringency and conservatism of Modern Orthodoxy, particularly Modern Orthodox institutions like “the Orthodox Union, the Young Israel movement, and other major bastions of modern Orthodoxy.”[18]
OU-JLIC
In the 1990s, Menachem Schrader, who moved to Israel in 1981, was a Rabbi at Yeshivat Hamivtar, a now defunct men’s yeshiva in the West Bank settlement of Efrat. Schrader began hearing from the American men who came to study that it was difficult for them to remain religiously observant Jews at their colleges. “I became especially sensitive to a phenomenon where we were receiving a lot of students from secular colleges—sometimes before, sometimes in the middle, sometimes after [their four years of college]—and of there being no real basis for Torah—certainly not [the] study [of Torah] and sometimes not even observance,” he said.
After a number of years brainstorming how to best provide for Orthodox communities, Schrader developed the idea to send a Torah educator couple to help lead students in their communities. He reached out to the Orthodox Union and to Hillel, which both expressed interest, although neither could commit funding. Schrader found a donor in 2000, and after consultation with Hillel, placed the first couple at Brandeis University.
College: a Disaster Area?
As the primary intellectual influence on Yavneh in its first years, Greenberg was heavily involved in shaping its embrace of secular knowledge.[19] In an article he composed in 1968 titled “Jewish Survival on the College Campus,” he writes, “college is a disaster area for Judaism, Jewish loyalty and Jewish identity.”[20] Kraut quotes this article in his book, but I was surprised Greenberg still views the college campus in this way more than 50 years since writing the article. In the article, though, Greenberg clarifies that the challenge in college lies primarily in the failures of Jewish education.
Schrader, like Greenberg, views college as a necessarily challenging experience for Orthodox Jews. However, for him, the main problem lies in the secular nature of college itself. I met him at the OU’s building downtown, and we sat in a conference room that OU employees were cleaning up from a workshop they hosted for Orthodox high school principals. Schrader explained to me that being a religious Jew at a secular college is like being a lawyer and a doctor: almost impossible to do both at once. “What is your college experience going to be like? Is it going to be an experience of Columbia/Barnard or is it going to be the experience of a Torah Jew?” he asked.
Not all Orthodox college students feel that college is a “disaster area” for Jews, or that there is an inherent contradiction between their Jewish experience and their college experience. Many college students attend college primarily for the degree, especially those in more professionalized fields, and may never take classes that challenge their faith. For those students who do take religious classes or other humanities classes, or for those who attend university for a more diverse social and cultural experience, their perspectives are not what student perspectives were in the 60s.
Bonner said he never felt any conflict between the two experiences. “Columbia was the perfect place to feel the full range of the university while always knowing you could return [to the religious community],“ he said. As a Modern Orthodox college student myself, it felt strangely dissonant to hear Greenberg and Schrader talk about the extreme difficulties of the college experience and not identify with those challenges at all.
This is not to say that Greenberg and Schrader’s concerns are unreasonable; there are plenty of Orthodox students who stop identifying and practicing as Orthodox Jews while at college, and many others who feel they could be in a more spiritually supportive environment. However, their sweeping characterizations of the Orthodox experience feel exaggerated.
Despite Greenberg’s initial position about the college campus (and by extension Jewish education), his solution, and Yavneh’s, differs from the OU’s. ”What Yavneh showed me is it didn't have to be a disaster; it could be an upgrade. [The college experience] helped them upgrade their own religious understanding, and upgrade their ability to handle questions and their ability to think more ethically and more universally,” he told me. Yavneh, for Greenberg, was an ideal model of Jewish education.
Approaches to the Religious Experience of College
Yavneh’s first national constitution listed the five main goals to which all its affiliated chapters were committed: Jewish education, Jewish observance, communication,[21] Jewish unity, and community. The one that bears the most scrutiny is communication, which Kraut explains as a commitment “to advance the intellectual dialogue between Judaism and Western culture. In the process, they would show that the Orthodox Jew has a legitimate mutually-enriching place in the world of secular learning.”[22]
On its website, the OU-JLIC’s has a mission statement and five hallmarks of their methodology. The five hallmarks are relationship building, Jewish learning programs and activities, infrastructure, modeling, and student leadership. No mention is made of secular knowledge within the methodology section, but the mission statement addresses it by stating that the educators help students “balance their Jewish commitments with their desire to engage the secular world.”
Understandably, both lists share commitments to Jewish textual learning, and Jewish observance and communal life. However, where one embraces as its primary objective a desire to promote “intellectual dialogue between Judaism and Western culture,” the other focuses primarily on internal Jewish infrastructure, while mentioning a “balance” between religious commitment and secular engagements.
The OU-JLIC’s more modest articulation of its engagement with Western (or secular) culture is not surprising given its affiliation with the Orthodox Union. The approach is also evident in the makeup of the educator couples. Out of 43 educators listed on the website, 23 went to an Orthodox Jewish institution for their undergraduate degrees. The majority of them attended Yeshiva University, but some attended Touro or other institutions. Seven educators got their undergraduate degree abroad (most in Israel, but some from England). Only 12 educators attended a university like the ones their students attend.[23]
Student Leadership
Yavneh and the OU-JLIC also offer two different models for student leadership in Orthodox communities.
Yavneh had two primary positions. The first was that it was an intellectual organization (and not a social one) and the second was that it was “the only national, independent Jewish student organization free from all adult supervision and control.” [24] Even though Yavneh relied on Jewish institutions for financial support, it repeatedly rebuffed attempts by the Orthodox Union to have it become an OU project. [25] That being said, the OU was very supportive of Yavneh and provided free office space, miscellaneous supplies, and financial assistance. [26]
Yavneh’s leadership consisted of a National Executive Board (NEB) composed of a national president, four vice-presidents, two secretaries, and one national treasurer (this structure changed somewhat over the years). The establishment of this board was also an acknowledgement that the students needed some guidance that only adults could provide.[27] The NEB communicated regularly with local campus chapters, offering assistance and keeping them up to date about Yavneh activities across the country. [28]
Yavneh also established a National Advisory Board of prominent rabbis and laymen who would help raise funds, increase Yavneh’s standing and legitimacy in the Orthodox world, and offer advice to improve life on campus. Irving Greenberg was the first Advisory Board chair, and others included Rabbis Aharon Lichtenstein and Norman Lamm, although not all of them were as involved as Greenberg. [29]
Four of the first five national presidents were Columbia students and in the first six years, the Columbia and Barnard chapters of Yavneh were the strongest. Most of these presidents were the primary proponents of Yavneh’s focus on the integration of Judaism with secular Western thought. [30] They (and the subsequent NEBs) organized annual conventions with lectures from the foremost Modern Orthodox rabbis and leaders on topics ranging from Rabbi Aaron Soloveitchik’s 1963 “Must Orthodoxy Isolate Itself Within the Jewish People?” to Rabbi Nisson Schulman’s “Jews in Non-Jewish Armies” in 1968, and a debate in 1969 between Greenberg and Lichtenstein on the issue of church and state separation in Israel.[31]
Yavneh mandated that each chapter conduct at least one weekly shiur, one lecture per month, and one large function per semester. [32] At Columbia’s Yavneh chapter, for example, in the early 1960s there was a lecture series on the relationship between Greek and rabbinic thought and another one on principles of poetry and the Talmud.[33]
Financial and administrative difficulties combined with much lower membership led to Yavneh’s demise in 1980.[34] Columbia’s Orthodox community remained robust and active and it even retained the name Yavneh after the national organization disbanded.
When Bonner and a number of other student leaders advocated for bringing the OU-JLIC to Columbia, student leadership was strong. Still, those who wanted an OU-JLIC couple thought that “full time attention to the Orthodox community would help students in a way that student leadership, for all its strength, couldn’t necessarily,” explained Bonner.
The original mission of the OU-JLIC program was for the couples placed in each community to provide their own educational programming and support that of the students, but it has since adopted many more responsibilities. Schrader said that they realized that “community building is really what it is all about.” “The experience of Torah observance is a communal experience, so you need a community, and the community usually requires formal leadership. Students can have their own formal leadership in terms of their organization but you need formal religious leadership as well,” he explained.
Noam Friedman, Columbia’s JLIC rabbi, sat down to speak with me on the third floor of the Kraft Center, which houses the offices of Hillel’s employees. He first joined the community as a rabbinic intern in 2013, and then stayed on as the JLIC rabbi in 2014. Friedman notes that at some campuses, JLIC had to build up communities from scratch. At Columbia, by contrast, “all the pieces of basic infrastructure existed, and in many ways it was an opportunity to say rather than have to build things from scratch, how do we best integrate with what exists already, and how do we provide more, how do we add value to the community,” he said.
The current Yavneh at Columbia has an elected executive board, consisting of a president and five vice presidents (social, education, Shabbat/holidays, chesed (volunteering), communications). It also has three gabbais who appoint their successors each year. Yavneh board runs most aspects of the community; they put on programming like the end of semester dinner, game nights, guest lecturers and weekly student lectures. The three gabbais are in charge of organizing the weekly, Shabbat, and holiday prayer services.
Friedman assists the student leaders in all aspects of their leadership, and offers important logistical guidance and communal support. He and his wife, Shiffy Friedman, each lead at least one weekly shiur, give a communal lecture a few times a semester, and help organize and plan the weekly educational programs led by students.
However, when it comes to questions pertaining to Jewish law, the OU-JLIC’s role is more complicated.
“I don’t see myself as the leader of the community. I see myself as a leader. Yavneh board—they are the leaders. I am there to help and support. It’s not a shul [synagogue] where there is a board and there is a rabbi,” said Friedman.
According to Schrader, “the decision to what extent the OU-JLIC couple should be involved in halakhic decisions is a student decision everywhere.” And students do regularly ask the OU-JLIC educator halakhic questions. “Students want that [religious guidance], because you are dealing with students who are committed to being Orthodox, and the Orthodox follow halakha and rabbanim [rabbis] are usually the ones who decide the halakha,” said Schrader.
Halakhic guidance is crucial in an Orthodox context. However, Orthodox students in campus communities come from a range of Orthodox backgrounds that may not necessarily align with the background of the educators. A Columbia student who served a leadership position in Yavneh but requested to remain anonymous said, “what is hard for me is when it feels like a decision is getting made along the lines of the OU-JLIC hashkafa [philosophy], certainly the OU hashkafa, and is potentially ignoring a large number of people in the community who would feel more included or more accepted if the decision were swung slightly more to the left.”
Although some students may feel this way at Columbia, each couple strikes a different dynamic with its campus community, and the OU does not lay out strict policies for all campuses to follow. “They do a good job of supporting us but recognizing that each campus is unique and people on the ground know it best,” said Friedman. Friedman explained that he does occasionally turn to Schrader for guidance, but at his own discretion.
Looking Ahead
OU-JLIC provides an important service and support system to all the communities it serves. In some cases, specifically in communities that are (or were) smaller than Columbia’s, the program has considerably strengthened the communities. In UCLA, for example, Schrader said “we sent a couple there. By November there was a Friday night minyan, by February there was a Shabbat morning minyan, by the next year there was a daily minyan and suddenly you have an Orthodox community on campus.”
Schrader hopes the OU-JLIC will continue to bring couples to universities that have an Orthodox Jewish population, and that the program is also looking to expand into community colleges, which many Orthodox students attend.
The OU-JLIC’s success in spreading to so many campuses is generating some backlash within the Orthodox community. “We are part of the OU and there was concern that it looks like we are promoting students to go to secular campuses,” said Schrader. “That is not the JLIC’s intent nor is it the OU’s intent. So in order to dispel that implication we gave YU [Yeshiva University] and Touro the opportunity to publicize their colleges [in the OU-JLIC 2018 college guidebook],” Schrader explained.
In his conversation with me, Greenberg noted the disparity between the background of Orthodox college students and OU-JLIC educators, and sees an impending problem with recruitment of the latter. “This is the paradox. The JLIC created college programs and groups and social events, but it needed a more open rabbi, and not every yeshiva can generate rabbis who can handle it. Most of the rabbis and couples that they were able to recruit came from more liberal Orthodox backgrounds, because YU was becoming more and more traditional, and its students were less and less comfortable working on a college campus. From the [Orthodox] Union’s point of view, they were more and more anxious because the couples were typically more liberal and more open and more affirmative of gentile culture than the Union was comfortable with,” he explained. He does not know how the program will continue to attract educators who both meet its standards and are willing to live and work on a college campus.
But there may be less of a disconnect between the students and educators than Greenberg envisions. A sizeable number of students grow up in Jewish day schools, attend a year or two at a seminary in Israel, and appreciate a more traditional, immersive Orthodox institutional experience led by a familiar rabbinic leader. The more expansive roles of the OU-JLIC take an enormous burden off students, allowing them to thrive religiously and intellectually without worrying about basic infrastructural and spiritual needs.
However, studying in such an intellectual climate like Columbia’s, it can feel demoralizing not to find any mention of intellectual inquiry in the mission statement of one’s religious community. For those who do feel the lack of institutional and communal fostering of invigorating, intellectual dialogue between Jewish tradition and secular culture, Yavneh offers a hopeful model for what Modern Orthodox students are capable of creating.
[1] Benny Kraut, The Greening of American Orthodox Judaism: Yavneh in the Nineteen Sixties, (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2011), 21.
[2] Ibid., 3.
[3] Throughout the article I will not be using honorific titles after people are introduced.
[4] Ibid., 26.
[5] Ibid., 155.
[6] Ibid., 156.
[7] Ibid., 159.
[8] Ibid., 162.
[9] David Singer, “Emanuel Rackman,” (Modern Judaism, 2008).
[10] David Singer, “Debating Modern Orthodoxy at Yeshiva College: The Greenberg-Lichtenstein Exchange of 1966,” (Modern Judaism, 2006), 114.
[11] Ibid., 9.
[12] Samuel Heilman, Sliding to the Right: The Contest for the Future of American Jewish Orthodoxy, (Berkeley, 2006) as qtd. in Kraut, 7.
[13] Chaim Waxman, “The Haredization of American Orthodox Jewry,” (Jerusalem Letter, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 1998), 1.
[14] Kraut, 163.
[15] Ibid., 162.
[16] Ibid., 164.
[17] Ibid., 157, 158.
[18] Waxman, 2.
[19] Kraut, 39.
[20] Irving Greenberg, “Jewish Survival on the College Campus,” (Judaism 1968), as qtd. in Kraut, 15.
[21] This goal was removed from later iterations of the constitution in the early 70s (Kraut, 27).
[22] Kraut, 26, 27.
[23] I could not determine where one of the educators received her degree.
[24] Kraut, 28.
[25] Ibid., 30.
[26] Ibid., 31.
[27] Ibid., 32.
[28] Ibid., 21.
[29] Ibid., 32.
[30] Ibid., 35.
[31] Ibid., 42, 48, 49.
[32] Ibid., 42.
[33] Ibid., 45.
[34] Ibid., 157-159.
[2] Ibid., 3.
[3] Throughout the article I will not be using honorific titles after people are introduced.
[4] Ibid., 26.
[5] Ibid., 155.
[6] Ibid., 156.
[7] Ibid., 159.
[8] Ibid., 162.
[9] David Singer, “Emanuel Rackman,” (Modern Judaism, 2008).
[10] David Singer, “Debating Modern Orthodoxy at Yeshiva College: The Greenberg-Lichtenstein Exchange of 1966,” (Modern Judaism, 2006), 114.
[11] Ibid., 9.
[12] Samuel Heilman, Sliding to the Right: The Contest for the Future of American Jewish Orthodoxy, (Berkeley, 2006) as qtd. in Kraut, 7.
[13] Chaim Waxman, “The Haredization of American Orthodox Jewry,” (Jerusalem Letter, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 1998), 1.
[14] Kraut, 163.
[15] Ibid., 162.
[16] Ibid., 164.
[17] Ibid., 157, 158.
[18] Waxman, 2.
[19] Kraut, 39.
[20] Irving Greenberg, “Jewish Survival on the College Campus,” (Judaism 1968), as qtd. in Kraut, 15.
[21] This goal was removed from later iterations of the constitution in the early 70s (Kraut, 27).
[22] Kraut, 26, 27.
[23] I could not determine where one of the educators received her degree.
[24] Kraut, 28.
[25] Ibid., 30.
[26] Ibid., 31.
[27] Ibid., 32.
[28] Ibid., 21.
[29] Ibid., 32.
[30] Ibid., 35.
[31] Ibid., 42, 48, 49.
[32] Ibid., 42.
[33] Ibid., 45.
[34] Ibid., 157-159.
//MAYA BICKEL is a sophomore in Columbia College and Deputy Features Editor of The Current. She can be reached at mb4227@columbia.edu.
Photo courtesy of Benny Kraut, The Greening of American Orthodoxy: Yavneh in the 1960s.
Photo courtesy of Benny Kraut, The Greening of American Orthodoxy: Yavneh in the 1960s.