2008 Woodie Awards
The Way We Were: Yeshiva College 1959-1963
Barry J. Konovitch
Issue date: 12/6/04 Section: YUdaica
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We were students at Yeshiva College at a moment of significant political and cultural transition in American Life. It was 1959, and the "beat generation" was coming to an end, soon to be replaced by the "hippie" generation of the late 1960's molded by the Vietnam War.
We frequented the coffee shops in "the Village" and the second hand book shops on 4th Avenue, looking for every book that Professor Leo Taubes [Ed: Prof. Taubes served in the Yeshiva College English department for 42 years until his retirement in 2002] casually mentioned in his English literature class. It was his first year at the college as well as ours; we were impressionable freshman and we hung on his every word. Occasionally he would "beg" a cigarette, and smoke would wreath the latest "Taubes idea" still hanging in the air. He wasn't much older than we were and we considered him one of our generation. He spoke to us as equals; he was literate, erudite and clear. He was one of those teachers who make an impression and is always remembered.
The student body was split along religious and cultural lines. We were the "T.I. [Teacher's Institute] boys" who explored the full range of Jewish thought from literature to philosophy to "Tanach" to "Talmud." Opposite us in the student body were the "RIETS [Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary] boys," who confined their textual study to Talmud and whose intellectual curiosity, at least in our eyes, was also confined to the "daled amot" of the "Beit Midrash." Other divisions existed drawn by our academic pursuits. The pre-med and science boys were different from us, the liberal arts majors. We considered ourselves superior; we dealt with ideas, they dealt with facts and figures. They would fix the world; we would change it.
The pre-meds didn't have much time for anything other than organic chemistry and biology, much to the chagrin of Dr. Hyman Greenstein, director of T.I. But he was a kind and beautiful man who understood the academic realities, and always empathized with our overworked science majors. For those of us who paid attention, T.I. was a source of great Jewish scholarship. Professor Lief was the soft spoken editor of Hadoar. Dr. Norman Lamm was the newly minted Ph.D. who taught philosophy. Rabbi Shimon Romm was our brilliant Talmudist. The list included many luminaries of Jewish learning and culture.
T.I. was the address for the progressive, Zionist, liberal, Modern Orthodox, future leaders of the Jewish community. We looked upon the RIETS students as the center of pre-W.W.II. European style Yeshiva life, transplanted to the United States but out of touch with the reality of contemporary American life.
In addition, the student's life of the Parker Dormitory boys was different from the commuters. From the outer reaches of the Bronx, it took me two buses and a free transfer to reach Washington Heights. Pelham Parkway was as close as you could get to suburbia, but we paid for the privilege with the long ride down Fordham road, up University and across the old George Washington Bridge. It was certainly better than our MTA days when it took six train transfers to go from the Yeshiva station on the IRT [Ed: Interborough Rapid Transit Subway, or IRT, was the first subway company in New York City] all the way to Pelham Parkway. (I was always so proud and excited to see "Yeshiva University" inscribed in yellow mosaic on the subway wall.) Why, you ask, didn't we take the shorter and faster bus? Because we had a free train pass; the bus cost good money. Bus passes came later.
By our senior year many of us were licensed to drive, and a few of us were lucky to have access to a car. My dad presented me with his old Oldsmobile newly repainted battleship grey and it quickly became the transportation of choice for the fencing épeé team. The "grey ghost" (as we referred to it) traveled around the metropolitan area transporting Yeshiva "Taubermen" to the far reaches of New Jersey, Brooklyn, and Manhattan.
We looked askance on the dormitory residents who came from such far away and snooty places such as Connecticut and Massachusetts. We were New Yorkers, the real McCoy, and I was from the Bronx, home of the Yankees and the Salanter Yeshiva gang who knew how to manufacture a "zip gun" and how to deal with the local Italian toughs.
Looking back on those years I realize that the Orthodox movement was slowly but surely radicalizing to the right, a reaction to the rest of the Jewish community which was moving to the liberal left. We thought of ourselves as the "center" in the spectrum of Jewish religious life, even though the term "centrist" only came into use decades later. When Rabbi Lamm suggested the term to identify the Yeshiva philosophy, the center had already dropped away. There was no longer a center, only an extreme right and left.
I wonder if we can still recognize the religious life at Yeshiva College which in our day was characterized by open mindedness and tolerance.
Nowhere else was our Yeshiva life represented so sharply and clearly than in the lecture room of Rabbi Irving Greenberg, in later years called "Yitz" by his students and colleagues. He effectively synthesized the Yeshiva motto of "Torah and Madda." His command of all academic disciplines from philosophy to literature to art to history superbly equipped him to influence young minds.
Dr. Alexander Litman was the "enfant terrible" of the faculty. He challenged our assumptions in the first course we ever took in Greek Philosophy. Poorly thought out answers to his sharp Socratic questions were dismissed as "sub-gartelian" (below the "gartel") logic. His sharpest critique was always reserved for the "common traitor," as he labeled the Yeshiva newspaper, The Commentator, and its censored editorials.
Yeshiva sports life centered around the basketball team that occasionally made it to Madison Square Garden. But for the rest of us who didn't have the time to invest in long practices, and who resented playing in the basement of the main building where any shot from beyond the foul line had to follow a straight line trajectory due to a fifteen foot high ceiling, other teams offered a good alternative. I can only remember a tennis team and a fencing team; we chose the fencing team.
Coach Arthur Tauber was as handsome and swashbuckling as Zorro himself. With his pencil mustache and lighting quick sword arm, he could easily have taken his place on the silver screen. He was the greatest fencer in the history of New York University where the greatest teams garnered the collegiate championships year after year. He went on to coach the Pan American team and the Olympics and eventually agreed to coach at Yeshiva.
Twice a week, down in the smelly dank basement of the main building we went for our dose of Tauber torture. Advance and retreat; lunge and back. He drilled us until we were so "charley horse'd" that we couldn't walk the steps for two days. But he created champions. In 1962 I was privileged to captain the team that presented Coach Tauber with his 100th victory. A presentation gold foil marked the occasion and the picture appeared front page in The Commentator. Several of us went on to be designated as Yeshiva all stars selected by the editors of The Commentator.
We fenced some of the finest teams in the New York area, but we delighted in whipping the blue bloods at Columbia University. Even the cadets at West Point got "the point."
I look back on my days at Yeshiva College, with great fondness and nostalgia. The heady intellectual atmosphere, the camaraderie, the idealism, were a wonder to behold. I am forever grateful that my formative years were spent at 186th street and Amsterdam Avenue, an address forever etched in my memory.
Rabbi Barry J. Konovitch, YC'63, RIETS' 67, is the rabbi of the Aventura Turnberry Jewish Center in North Miami Beach, Florida. As an amateur Biblical Archaeologist he studied archaeology at the Hebrew University with the late Yigal Yadin and participated in many excavations including the first excavations of Masada. Rabbi Konovitch is also the author of two books; From Idealism to Realism and Rabbi in the Strike Zone (KTAV, N.Y.).
We frequented the coffee shops in "the Village" and the second hand book shops on 4th Avenue, looking for every book that Professor Leo Taubes [Ed: Prof. Taubes served in the Yeshiva College English department for 42 years until his retirement in 2002] casually mentioned in his English literature class. It was his first year at the college as well as ours; we were impressionable freshman and we hung on his every word. Occasionally he would "beg" a cigarette, and smoke would wreath the latest "Taubes idea" still hanging in the air. He wasn't much older than we were and we considered him one of our generation. He spoke to us as equals; he was literate, erudite and clear. He was one of those teachers who make an impression and is always remembered.
The student body was split along religious and cultural lines. We were the "T.I. [Teacher's Institute] boys" who explored the full range of Jewish thought from literature to philosophy to "Tanach" to "Talmud." Opposite us in the student body were the "RIETS [Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary] boys," who confined their textual study to Talmud and whose intellectual curiosity, at least in our eyes, was also confined to the "daled amot" of the "Beit Midrash." Other divisions existed drawn by our academic pursuits. The pre-med and science boys were different from us, the liberal arts majors. We considered ourselves superior; we dealt with ideas, they dealt with facts and figures. They would fix the world; we would change it.
The pre-meds didn't have much time for anything other than organic chemistry and biology, much to the chagrin of Dr. Hyman Greenstein, director of T.I. But he was a kind and beautiful man who understood the academic realities, and always empathized with our overworked science majors. For those of us who paid attention, T.I. was a source of great Jewish scholarship. Professor Lief was the soft spoken editor of Hadoar. Dr. Norman Lamm was the newly minted Ph.D. who taught philosophy. Rabbi Shimon Romm was our brilliant Talmudist. The list included many luminaries of Jewish learning and culture.
T.I. was the address for the progressive, Zionist, liberal, Modern Orthodox, future leaders of the Jewish community. We looked upon the RIETS students as the center of pre-W.W.II. European style Yeshiva life, transplanted to the United States but out of touch with the reality of contemporary American life.
In addition, the student's life of the Parker Dormitory boys was different from the commuters. From the outer reaches of the Bronx, it took me two buses and a free transfer to reach Washington Heights. Pelham Parkway was as close as you could get to suburbia, but we paid for the privilege with the long ride down Fordham road, up University and across the old George Washington Bridge. It was certainly better than our MTA days when it took six train transfers to go from the Yeshiva station on the IRT [Ed: Interborough Rapid Transit Subway, or IRT, was the first subway company in New York City] all the way to Pelham Parkway. (I was always so proud and excited to see "Yeshiva University" inscribed in yellow mosaic on the subway wall.) Why, you ask, didn't we take the shorter and faster bus? Because we had a free train pass; the bus cost good money. Bus passes came later.
By our senior year many of us were licensed to drive, and a few of us were lucky to have access to a car. My dad presented me with his old Oldsmobile newly repainted battleship grey and it quickly became the transportation of choice for the fencing épeé team. The "grey ghost" (as we referred to it) traveled around the metropolitan area transporting Yeshiva "Taubermen" to the far reaches of New Jersey, Brooklyn, and Manhattan.
We looked askance on the dormitory residents who came from such far away and snooty places such as Connecticut and Massachusetts. We were New Yorkers, the real McCoy, and I was from the Bronx, home of the Yankees and the Salanter Yeshiva gang who knew how to manufacture a "zip gun" and how to deal with the local Italian toughs.
Looking back on those years I realize that the Orthodox movement was slowly but surely radicalizing to the right, a reaction to the rest of the Jewish community which was moving to the liberal left. We thought of ourselves as the "center" in the spectrum of Jewish religious life, even though the term "centrist" only came into use decades later. When Rabbi Lamm suggested the term to identify the Yeshiva philosophy, the center had already dropped away. There was no longer a center, only an extreme right and left.
I wonder if we can still recognize the religious life at Yeshiva College which in our day was characterized by open mindedness and tolerance.
Nowhere else was our Yeshiva life represented so sharply and clearly than in the lecture room of Rabbi Irving Greenberg, in later years called "Yitz" by his students and colleagues. He effectively synthesized the Yeshiva motto of "Torah and Madda." His command of all academic disciplines from philosophy to literature to art to history superbly equipped him to influence young minds.
Dr. Alexander Litman was the "enfant terrible" of the faculty. He challenged our assumptions in the first course we ever took in Greek Philosophy. Poorly thought out answers to his sharp Socratic questions were dismissed as "sub-gartelian" (below the "gartel") logic. His sharpest critique was always reserved for the "common traitor," as he labeled the Yeshiva newspaper, The Commentator, and its censored editorials.
Yeshiva sports life centered around the basketball team that occasionally made it to Madison Square Garden. But for the rest of us who didn't have the time to invest in long practices, and who resented playing in the basement of the main building where any shot from beyond the foul line had to follow a straight line trajectory due to a fifteen foot high ceiling, other teams offered a good alternative. I can only remember a tennis team and a fencing team; we chose the fencing team.
Coach Arthur Tauber was as handsome and swashbuckling as Zorro himself. With his pencil mustache and lighting quick sword arm, he could easily have taken his place on the silver screen. He was the greatest fencer in the history of New York University where the greatest teams garnered the collegiate championships year after year. He went on to coach the Pan American team and the Olympics and eventually agreed to coach at Yeshiva.
Twice a week, down in the smelly dank basement of the main building we went for our dose of Tauber torture. Advance and retreat; lunge and back. He drilled us until we were so "charley horse'd" that we couldn't walk the steps for two days. But he created champions. In 1962 I was privileged to captain the team that presented Coach Tauber with his 100th victory. A presentation gold foil marked the occasion and the picture appeared front page in The Commentator. Several of us went on to be designated as Yeshiva all stars selected by the editors of The Commentator.
We fenced some of the finest teams in the New York area, but we delighted in whipping the blue bloods at Columbia University. Even the cadets at West Point got "the point."
I look back on my days at Yeshiva College, with great fondness and nostalgia. The heady intellectual atmosphere, the camaraderie, the idealism, were a wonder to behold. I am forever grateful that my formative years were spent at 186th street and Amsterdam Avenue, an address forever etched in my memory.
Rabbi Barry J. Konovitch, YC'63, RIETS' 67, is the rabbi of the Aventura Turnberry Jewish Center in North Miami Beach, Florida. As an amateur Biblical Archaeologist he studied archaeology at the Hebrew University with the late Yigal Yadin and participated in many excavations including the first excavations of Masada. Rabbi Konovitch is also the author of two books; From Idealism to Realism and Rabbi in the Strike Zone (KTAV, N.Y.).