Yeshiva College has also changed along with the broader landscape of higher education. We still have impressively bright, industrious, passionate students. But as the culture of the mid-twentieth century was replaced by that of the[…]
Modern Orthodoxy is hard to understand and harder to live. Orthodoxy is a set of views and behaviors that is governed by precedent and authority. It is most comfortable with stasis. Change irritates the system,[…]
I think a schism in American Modern Orthodoxy will have grave consequences both practically AND ideologically for both conservative and liberal sides of the community. Not only because we’re already enmeshed in the same schools[…]
To understand modern Orthodoxy, we must view “Orthodoxy” within its larger social, economic, and cultural contexts. For example, if you read modern Orthodox Jews’ disinvestment from American citizenship as being, at best, a manifestation of[…]
Despite Rabbi Lamm’s eloquent and intellectually sophisticated elucidations of the Modern Orthodox world view, Modern Orthodoxy has failed to attract as many adherents as ultra-Orthodoxy—the American ultra-Orthodox population is currently twice as large as (and[…]
The overpriced balloon of the Modern Orthodox experience rests on three core flaws: Jewish organizations are too top heavy, with too many positions filled by wives and cronies, and with amply-paid rabbis who are out[…]
It seems kind of obvious that, if there is a denominational shakeup and a reclassification of the religious-behavioral map, there is an emerging denomination that constitutes a hybrid of conservative Conservatives, the Open Orthodox, and[…]
The Rav’s words have been traditionally understood as an affirmation of the world-view of Brisk in which he was educated. But they are also of a piece with Sarton’s early-twentieth-century approach to studying great men[…]
Yeshiva University faces many challenges, some reflective of broader societal trends and some of its own making. But at an intellectual level, the religious leadership of an institution whose motto is “Torah U’Madda” has frozen[…]
Today’s Centrist Orthodox world–the world of Yeshiva University, the world that produces the overwhelming majority of the Modern Orthodox world’s rabbis and Torah teachers–would generally be comfortable with an academic approach to Jewish history. Normative[…]