2008 Woodie Awards
Transformations
Ruth A. Bevan
Issue date: 4/18/05 Section: YUdaica
- Page 1 of 1
Before the earth was created, God dreamed about building a very special place indeed on earth. This very special place would be called Yeshiva University. It would be nestled in Washington Heights overlooking the East River where the captain on the Circle Line circling Manhattan each and every day would point out to his passengers the golden Byzantine dome designating this very special place. The sun would shine. All would be well.
There would be so many yarmulkes swirling a top Jewish heads attached to Jewish bodies frantically scurrying to and fro that, in their knitted and woven mass, they would appear like a magical flying carpet with fringes over Amsterdam Avenue in these Washington Heights. This magical flying carpet would carry mitzvoth and brachot near and far. Awe-inspiring!
The plan was laid. It included even a kosher pizzeria. Eventually, hopefully, a Chinese restaurant. Or, at least, a sushi counter.
And then the earth was born. It wasn't exactly according to plan but close enough. As for the very special place in Washington Heights, the pizza could have less sauce and more cheese. Sometimes the Circle Line skipped a beat. The magic carpet got weighted down - too many responsibilities! But carried on. Furst Hall, adorned in kindergarten pastels, throbbed with activity both intellectual and bureaucratic. An unhappy mix!
The garage on Amsterdam Avenue housed the library. Next door thespians performed on a make-shift stage. Morg and Rubin dorms sported a lawn, now forgotten, where every year commencement took place under the grueling summer sun, over the years bleaching the colorful academic robes of faculty. Years later commencement exercises moved to Madison Square Garden. Its air conditioned theater gave younger faculty the color edge. Their robes did not bleach out. On the lawn, parents came to glow with pride, to shake hands with esteemed faculty, to enjoy afternoon tea and to wonder at this special place specially created in Washington Heights. The sun shone, as planned. And all seemed well.
In Madison Square Garden parents disappeared unseen in the crowd while faculty, equally unseen, wondered how they slipped through the cracks of official, that is to say, bureaucratic self-congratulatory recognition of bureaucratic accomplishments at commencement ceremonies, meant, after all, for faculty and students, at this very special place. Even those with unbleached academic robes wondered why they felt so blanched. A cloud eclipsed the sun.
During the days of the great lawn, where students played soccer, where bare feet greeted the springtime earth, where the sun shone on commencement, my path wound its way to Yeshiva College. I was twenty-six, still in graduate school and trying to get the hang of New York City after studying in Europe for two years. New Yorkers told me I had an accent; one cabbie asked me where I learned to speak English so good. In Boston, I replied. He seemed satisfied with that. To my relief no question about my supposed accent cropped up at Yeshiva, since virtually everyone there at that time had an accent.
Dean Isaac Bacon, a gentle, gracious man, spoke with a German accent from Prague. President Samuel Belkin, the rabbis, all of them brought the Old World to Washington Heights.
Even the seemingly sole American-born administrator, Morris Silverman, the punctilious Registrar, spoke with an accent, albeit one from Brooklyn.
In these years immediately after JFK's assassination, when young Americans, in particular, remained determined to keep alive the Kennedy Peace Corps vision, Yeshiva College students remained determined to make it in America. These were first generation Americans, at best. A few had been transported in the womb from DP camps in war-ravaged Europe to this New World. More than their edges were rough. Middle class mores remained beyond reach. They spoke with the mainly East European accents of their immigrant families and reflected their families' belief that the world at large worked against them as Jews. These same families feared that New York's first Jewish mayor, Abraham Beame, would spell disaster for all Jews everywhere. What if he makes a mistake? They'll take it out on the Jews. You'll see!
For this generation of students Yeshiva University appeared like a mythical kingdom. Where in Europe did such a place exist? How many of their parents had been able even to dream about going to college? Now these, their children, read old English literary texts, dissected frogs in the biology lab and put on plays under the spirited direction of that new, young speech professor. What kind of a name is Beukas? Moreover, a young woman now taught them political science. What kind of a science is that? What kind of a name is Bevan?
Studying politics in their minds meant finding out how to survive in a world where other people, non-Jews, exercised power. And for a woman to teach political science at that time meant teaching how men use power. Women voted, but that pretty much covered it. No one thought of women as powerful. Women in political science graduate schools lacked visibility as a tiny minority. After giving my very first paper at the American Political Science Association meetings in 1969, a male member of the audience remarked that I was a "rare bird on the lecture platform." So here we now were, YC students and I, studying about the world of power, our other.
At best five years separated me in age from my oldest student. I called everyone, Mister, to create distance. In our own separate ways we all were struggling to find our voice. Being heard was another matter. We lived rich interior lives. In those vibrant interior spaces doors miraculously opened; drawers revealed their contents -- like the drawer of my classroom desk that I opened to search for chalk only to find a hidden message. Dr. Bevan, I love you!
A stately group of full professors stood at the College's helm - David Fleisher (English), Arthur Tauber (Speech), Irving Linn (English), Joseph Dunner (Political Science), and Samuel Goldberg (Sociology). Louis Feldman was an up-and-coming young Classics professor. They all came dressed in suit and tie and created an air of authority wherever they went. (Most of my early students also dressed in suits - black suits and black hats.) Faculty meetings took place evenings in Furst 535 behind closed doors. The Commentator reporters waited outside for the scoop of the day.
Gravity found its center in R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, whom everyone called the Rav. Berlin educated, he incorporated Torah u-Madda. His aura gave life and distinction to the campus. Students, faculty, anybody and everybody packed into Lamport Auditorium of the Byzantine building for the Rav's annual Yahrzeit shiur. Nervous excitement filled the air of the vaulted auditorium as everyone awaited "The Entry." Some, seated in pairs, contested points of text, lifting their yarmulkes and replacing them on their heads in a twirling gesture of intellectual exasperation. Others sat passively, waiting to be stimulated. The Rav entered to a reverential standing audience. And, in his quietly measured voice, began his shiur, sitting at a table on the stage. To hear his wisdom in his inwardly resonating voice against the handicap of poor acoustics in the auditorium, the entire audience became one gigantic ear bent as far forward as possible to catch the vibrating sound waves.
In May 1967 Yeshiva College in effect closed. Israel was under attack. Students volunteered. Joseph Dunner, head of the Political Science Department and my husband, departed for Israel along with students. After the war we journeyed to the newly liberated Mt. Scopus. Israel had turned a corner in its modern existence.
The pressures of war in the Middle East defined our lives. We lived with a sense of constant emergency. For the post-Holocaust generation of Jews this war extended the threat of the Holocaust. It meant the Holocaust had not ended. Only one phase of it had terminated. Racial unrest in New York City that produced a new outcropping of anti-Semitism brought the sense of a two-front war. In those days political science classes and offices were on the fifth floor of what I still call the Byzantine building - Muss. In those days, too, we had several former Israeli army "graduates." In my classroom we had two exit doors - one in the front and one in the back. From a military point -of-view, these double doors posed defense problems. Fearful of a neighborhood possibly besieged by anti-Semitic ideological "gangs," these Israelis organized a defense system of my classroom. And so we lived for some years.
And then came the Jewish Defense League (JDL). At first it appeared reasonable before it got out of hand. "Never again" is a credible post-Holocaust objective and self defense certainly a human right. But the JDL became dysfunctional. Some students of mine got arrested and, deserted by JDL leadership, called desperately for help. One mindlessly asked me during such a telephone call if I had a picture of the Titus Arch in Rome of which I had spoken in class on which is depicted the Roman enslavement of Jews with the caption, "Judea capta." "Why do you want it?" I asked. "To show the Judge how persecuted Jews have been throughout history," he replied. "That does not justify your defacing United Nations property," I answered.
The Vietnam War invaded Yeshiva College. Students wanted a piece of the action but did not know how to achieve it. A major debate was staged on the pros and cons of the war. Some students wore armbands and headbands signifying protest. Others watched others protest on TV. The RIETS enrollment swelled as students sought refuge from the draft. Moshe Dayan waded through the swamps of South Vietnam to show solidarity with America. Rebellious students desired to ape Columbia University by sitting in on President Belkin's office for a brief sit-down. Demands for New Left student democracy arose! The University Senate was created to give students a voice in decision-making. Faculty meetings went into suspended animation.
Belfer Hall was built. Then the Library. The theater in the garage moved to Schottenstein. Rubin lost its lawn to a gym with an indoor swimming pool. Rumors abounded of transporting YC and Stern to a bucolic campus in New Jersey.
Returning one fall, I noticed a snazzy yellow lotus parked by Furst Hall. The neighborhood now being Dominican, it was unlikely that the owner of the lotus came from the neighborhood. Even the resident drug dealers weren't that flamboyant! The truth uncovered revealed a YC student owner. He wore no black suit and hat but Bermuda shorts with an emblazoned T-shirt and a knitted yarmulke. He had spent the summer in Israel, planned to return for the winter break and otherwise lived in the Five Towns.
A new crop of young professors replaced the former stately elite. Those of us who were "mid-generation" now had to take up the leadership slack. Some heroically fought the union battle that the Supreme Court squashed. I would like herewith to remember the gentle but perseverant professor of physics, Ralph Berens, who devoted himself to the cause of faculty rights and of justice. I would also like to recognize the unstinting devotion to the faculty cause of Prof. Manfred Weidhorn. In the Supreme Court's brief only Justice Brennan's dissent got the issue on the nose. Didn't matter; it was a done deal. That did not make the faculty's cause any less valid or any less urgent. We suffered. Some of us left, as I did shortly before the decision was rendered. My husband and I packed all our belongings and moved to the Stanford area of California where I had a position at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. We did not expect to return.
Then our dreams of a new life collapsed. My husband, who had undergone an unexpected cancer operation shortly before our departure, required chemotherapy treatment that specialists in California did not administer. I urged our return. I had taken a leave from Yeshiva, so I was able to reconnect.
On the one hand, that was for me a fatal professional step. On the other hand, it produced its own rewards. What I sacrificed in professional advantages I gained in rich student associations. Students close to my heart can not be enumerated here. They know who they are and how grateful I am for their involvement in my life and in that of my husband's. An active Zionist since his Blauweiss days in Germany, my husband had created the Yeshiva College Political Science Department in 1964 as a Department devoted to Israel and to Jewish well-being, to activism. Elected to the German Reichstag, blacklisted by Hitler and escaping Germany in the dead of night with only a backpack, a member of Patton's occupation army in Germany after World War II (court-martialed for countermanding Patton's order to send all Jews back to their East European countries of origin - where Communism awaited them, and saved by President Harry Truman from this court martial), my husband well understood politics and the need for political activism to protect ones rights. That was the tradition he inspired and carried on at Yeshiva College. How many students he touched in the process! How many students touched us as we worked together! I would like herewith to remember an Israeli-born student very dear to both my husband and to me, Yaacov Pollack, who passed away last year, and his beloved wife, Patti, who continues residence in Cleveland, Ohio. I shall never forget their faithfulness, and I hope to do honor to their devotion.
In the 80s we had a particularly active program, emphasizing leadership training and involvement in active politics. Accents had largely disappeared on the Yeshiva campus. We now dealt with second - and third-generation American Orthodox Jews who felt as entitled as any other American citizen to basic rights and to expectations about the good life. Oddly enough, my accent now stood out. It became a matter of curiosity. One foreign student told me, "you pronounce whole words!" Professor Linn of the English Department, in his declining years, speculated suddenly, breaking ranks with the silence of all those years that he thought he traced my accent back to the Mississippi Delta, which, as someone born and bred in Massachusetts, I knew little about even from books! The yellow lotus became common place as Orthodox families moved into middle and upper middle class America. Yeshiva College no longer represented a fantasy kingdom but reflected the arrival of American Orthodox Jews in American society, both economically and in terms of power.
No Yeshiva student today assumes he has no power potential. No Yeshiva student, or, probably, his/her parents, would question the viability of a Jewish political candidate or the wisdom of electing a Jew. Since the days of my arrival at the age of twenty-six, Yeshiva has undergone its own Americanization. It has arrived. We have students who are in public office. Our present American Ambassador to Israel (and before that Ambassador to Egypt), Daniel Kurtzer, was a political science major and later dean of YC. We now have students contemplating campaign management positions or running for elected office.
The intifada notwithstanding, Israel remains safe. We worry less about Israel's survival than about Israel's security.
Success on the home-front and on the Israel-front brings with it complacency. We lost our edge of difference and insecurity; our accents gave way to hip. We don't feel the same need for activism as we loll in front of the TV and otherwise enjoy the good life.
Cell phones, iPods, laptops and Walkmen give us the illusion of a qualitatively better life and thus, by false deduction, of a more secure life.
And the captain of the Circle Line pointed out to the passengers the golden Byzantine dome that signified Yeshiva College. And he swept his finger in the air from the golden dome to the Belfer Building skyscraper to the dormitories, Revaya and Time Out. And a great wind stirred the waters, causing the Circle Line to sway back and forth.
The passengers grew anxious. Objects fell about the gyrating ship. Overhead, students walked about Amsterdam Avenue, holding onto their kippot in the curling wind, but otherwise oblivious to the waters below. Tomorrow would begin the weekend; they would retreat to their homes. Out-of-towners and foreign students would find a weekend haven. God looked upon his very special creation quizzically.
Dr. Ruth A. Bevan is the David W. Petegorsky Professor of Political Science at Yeshiva College and the Director of the Rabbi Arthur Schneier Center for International Affairs at Yeshiva University.
There would be so many yarmulkes swirling a top Jewish heads attached to Jewish bodies frantically scurrying to and fro that, in their knitted and woven mass, they would appear like a magical flying carpet with fringes over Amsterdam Avenue in these Washington Heights. This magical flying carpet would carry mitzvoth and brachot near and far. Awe-inspiring!
The plan was laid. It included even a kosher pizzeria. Eventually, hopefully, a Chinese restaurant. Or, at least, a sushi counter.
And then the earth was born. It wasn't exactly according to plan but close enough. As for the very special place in Washington Heights, the pizza could have less sauce and more cheese. Sometimes the Circle Line skipped a beat. The magic carpet got weighted down - too many responsibilities! But carried on. Furst Hall, adorned in kindergarten pastels, throbbed with activity both intellectual and bureaucratic. An unhappy mix!
The garage on Amsterdam Avenue housed the library. Next door thespians performed on a make-shift stage. Morg and Rubin dorms sported a lawn, now forgotten, where every year commencement took place under the grueling summer sun, over the years bleaching the colorful academic robes of faculty. Years later commencement exercises moved to Madison Square Garden. Its air conditioned theater gave younger faculty the color edge. Their robes did not bleach out. On the lawn, parents came to glow with pride, to shake hands with esteemed faculty, to enjoy afternoon tea and to wonder at this special place specially created in Washington Heights. The sun shone, as planned. And all seemed well.
In Madison Square Garden parents disappeared unseen in the crowd while faculty, equally unseen, wondered how they slipped through the cracks of official, that is to say, bureaucratic self-congratulatory recognition of bureaucratic accomplishments at commencement ceremonies, meant, after all, for faculty and students, at this very special place. Even those with unbleached academic robes wondered why they felt so blanched. A cloud eclipsed the sun.
During the days of the great lawn, where students played soccer, where bare feet greeted the springtime earth, where the sun shone on commencement, my path wound its way to Yeshiva College. I was twenty-six, still in graduate school and trying to get the hang of New York City after studying in Europe for two years. New Yorkers told me I had an accent; one cabbie asked me where I learned to speak English so good. In Boston, I replied. He seemed satisfied with that. To my relief no question about my supposed accent cropped up at Yeshiva, since virtually everyone there at that time had an accent.
Dean Isaac Bacon, a gentle, gracious man, spoke with a German accent from Prague. President Samuel Belkin, the rabbis, all of them brought the Old World to Washington Heights.
Even the seemingly sole American-born administrator, Morris Silverman, the punctilious Registrar, spoke with an accent, albeit one from Brooklyn.
In these years immediately after JFK's assassination, when young Americans, in particular, remained determined to keep alive the Kennedy Peace Corps vision, Yeshiva College students remained determined to make it in America. These were first generation Americans, at best. A few had been transported in the womb from DP camps in war-ravaged Europe to this New World. More than their edges were rough. Middle class mores remained beyond reach. They spoke with the mainly East European accents of their immigrant families and reflected their families' belief that the world at large worked against them as Jews. These same families feared that New York's first Jewish mayor, Abraham Beame, would spell disaster for all Jews everywhere. What if he makes a mistake? They'll take it out on the Jews. You'll see!
For this generation of students Yeshiva University appeared like a mythical kingdom. Where in Europe did such a place exist? How many of their parents had been able even to dream about going to college? Now these, their children, read old English literary texts, dissected frogs in the biology lab and put on plays under the spirited direction of that new, young speech professor. What kind of a name is Beukas? Moreover, a young woman now taught them political science. What kind of a science is that? What kind of a name is Bevan?
Studying politics in their minds meant finding out how to survive in a world where other people, non-Jews, exercised power. And for a woman to teach political science at that time meant teaching how men use power. Women voted, but that pretty much covered it. No one thought of women as powerful. Women in political science graduate schools lacked visibility as a tiny minority. After giving my very first paper at the American Political Science Association meetings in 1969, a male member of the audience remarked that I was a "rare bird on the lecture platform." So here we now were, YC students and I, studying about the world of power, our other.
At best five years separated me in age from my oldest student. I called everyone, Mister, to create distance. In our own separate ways we all were struggling to find our voice. Being heard was another matter. We lived rich interior lives. In those vibrant interior spaces doors miraculously opened; drawers revealed their contents -- like the drawer of my classroom desk that I opened to search for chalk only to find a hidden message. Dr. Bevan, I love you!
A stately group of full professors stood at the College's helm - David Fleisher (English), Arthur Tauber (Speech), Irving Linn (English), Joseph Dunner (Political Science), and Samuel Goldberg (Sociology). Louis Feldman was an up-and-coming young Classics professor. They all came dressed in suit and tie and created an air of authority wherever they went. (Most of my early students also dressed in suits - black suits and black hats.) Faculty meetings took place evenings in Furst 535 behind closed doors. The Commentator reporters waited outside for the scoop of the day.
Gravity found its center in R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, whom everyone called the Rav. Berlin educated, he incorporated Torah u-Madda. His aura gave life and distinction to the campus. Students, faculty, anybody and everybody packed into Lamport Auditorium of the Byzantine building for the Rav's annual Yahrzeit shiur. Nervous excitement filled the air of the vaulted auditorium as everyone awaited "The Entry." Some, seated in pairs, contested points of text, lifting their yarmulkes and replacing them on their heads in a twirling gesture of intellectual exasperation. Others sat passively, waiting to be stimulated. The Rav entered to a reverential standing audience. And, in his quietly measured voice, began his shiur, sitting at a table on the stage. To hear his wisdom in his inwardly resonating voice against the handicap of poor acoustics in the auditorium, the entire audience became one gigantic ear bent as far forward as possible to catch the vibrating sound waves.
In May 1967 Yeshiva College in effect closed. Israel was under attack. Students volunteered. Joseph Dunner, head of the Political Science Department and my husband, departed for Israel along with students. After the war we journeyed to the newly liberated Mt. Scopus. Israel had turned a corner in its modern existence.
The pressures of war in the Middle East defined our lives. We lived with a sense of constant emergency. For the post-Holocaust generation of Jews this war extended the threat of the Holocaust. It meant the Holocaust had not ended. Only one phase of it had terminated. Racial unrest in New York City that produced a new outcropping of anti-Semitism brought the sense of a two-front war. In those days political science classes and offices were on the fifth floor of what I still call the Byzantine building - Muss. In those days, too, we had several former Israeli army "graduates." In my classroom we had two exit doors - one in the front and one in the back. From a military point -of-view, these double doors posed defense problems. Fearful of a neighborhood possibly besieged by anti-Semitic ideological "gangs," these Israelis organized a defense system of my classroom. And so we lived for some years.
And then came the Jewish Defense League (JDL). At first it appeared reasonable before it got out of hand. "Never again" is a credible post-Holocaust objective and self defense certainly a human right. But the JDL became dysfunctional. Some students of mine got arrested and, deserted by JDL leadership, called desperately for help. One mindlessly asked me during such a telephone call if I had a picture of the Titus Arch in Rome of which I had spoken in class on which is depicted the Roman enslavement of Jews with the caption, "Judea capta." "Why do you want it?" I asked. "To show the Judge how persecuted Jews have been throughout history," he replied. "That does not justify your defacing United Nations property," I answered.
The Vietnam War invaded Yeshiva College. Students wanted a piece of the action but did not know how to achieve it. A major debate was staged on the pros and cons of the war. Some students wore armbands and headbands signifying protest. Others watched others protest on TV. The RIETS enrollment swelled as students sought refuge from the draft. Moshe Dayan waded through the swamps of South Vietnam to show solidarity with America. Rebellious students desired to ape Columbia University by sitting in on President Belkin's office for a brief sit-down. Demands for New Left student democracy arose! The University Senate was created to give students a voice in decision-making. Faculty meetings went into suspended animation.
Belfer Hall was built. Then the Library. The theater in the garage moved to Schottenstein. Rubin lost its lawn to a gym with an indoor swimming pool. Rumors abounded of transporting YC and Stern to a bucolic campus in New Jersey.
Returning one fall, I noticed a snazzy yellow lotus parked by Furst Hall. The neighborhood now being Dominican, it was unlikely that the owner of the lotus came from the neighborhood. Even the resident drug dealers weren't that flamboyant! The truth uncovered revealed a YC student owner. He wore no black suit and hat but Bermuda shorts with an emblazoned T-shirt and a knitted yarmulke. He had spent the summer in Israel, planned to return for the winter break and otherwise lived in the Five Towns.
A new crop of young professors replaced the former stately elite. Those of us who were "mid-generation" now had to take up the leadership slack. Some heroically fought the union battle that the Supreme Court squashed. I would like herewith to remember the gentle but perseverant professor of physics, Ralph Berens, who devoted himself to the cause of faculty rights and of justice. I would also like to recognize the unstinting devotion to the faculty cause of Prof. Manfred Weidhorn. In the Supreme Court's brief only Justice Brennan's dissent got the issue on the nose. Didn't matter; it was a done deal. That did not make the faculty's cause any less valid or any less urgent. We suffered. Some of us left, as I did shortly before the decision was rendered. My husband and I packed all our belongings and moved to the Stanford area of California where I had a position at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. We did not expect to return.
Then our dreams of a new life collapsed. My husband, who had undergone an unexpected cancer operation shortly before our departure, required chemotherapy treatment that specialists in California did not administer. I urged our return. I had taken a leave from Yeshiva, so I was able to reconnect.
On the one hand, that was for me a fatal professional step. On the other hand, it produced its own rewards. What I sacrificed in professional advantages I gained in rich student associations. Students close to my heart can not be enumerated here. They know who they are and how grateful I am for their involvement in my life and in that of my husband's. An active Zionist since his Blauweiss days in Germany, my husband had created the Yeshiva College Political Science Department in 1964 as a Department devoted to Israel and to Jewish well-being, to activism. Elected to the German Reichstag, blacklisted by Hitler and escaping Germany in the dead of night with only a backpack, a member of Patton's occupation army in Germany after World War II (court-martialed for countermanding Patton's order to send all Jews back to their East European countries of origin - where Communism awaited them, and saved by President Harry Truman from this court martial), my husband well understood politics and the need for political activism to protect ones rights. That was the tradition he inspired and carried on at Yeshiva College. How many students he touched in the process! How many students touched us as we worked together! I would like herewith to remember an Israeli-born student very dear to both my husband and to me, Yaacov Pollack, who passed away last year, and his beloved wife, Patti, who continues residence in Cleveland, Ohio. I shall never forget their faithfulness, and I hope to do honor to their devotion.
In the 80s we had a particularly active program, emphasizing leadership training and involvement in active politics. Accents had largely disappeared on the Yeshiva campus. We now dealt with second - and third-generation American Orthodox Jews who felt as entitled as any other American citizen to basic rights and to expectations about the good life. Oddly enough, my accent now stood out. It became a matter of curiosity. One foreign student told me, "you pronounce whole words!" Professor Linn of the English Department, in his declining years, speculated suddenly, breaking ranks with the silence of all those years that he thought he traced my accent back to the Mississippi Delta, which, as someone born and bred in Massachusetts, I knew little about even from books! The yellow lotus became common place as Orthodox families moved into middle and upper middle class America. Yeshiva College no longer represented a fantasy kingdom but reflected the arrival of American Orthodox Jews in American society, both economically and in terms of power.
No Yeshiva student today assumes he has no power potential. No Yeshiva student, or, probably, his/her parents, would question the viability of a Jewish political candidate or the wisdom of electing a Jew. Since the days of my arrival at the age of twenty-six, Yeshiva has undergone its own Americanization. It has arrived. We have students who are in public office. Our present American Ambassador to Israel (and before that Ambassador to Egypt), Daniel Kurtzer, was a political science major and later dean of YC. We now have students contemplating campaign management positions or running for elected office.
The intifada notwithstanding, Israel remains safe. We worry less about Israel's survival than about Israel's security.
Success on the home-front and on the Israel-front brings with it complacency. We lost our edge of difference and insecurity; our accents gave way to hip. We don't feel the same need for activism as we loll in front of the TV and otherwise enjoy the good life.
Cell phones, iPods, laptops and Walkmen give us the illusion of a qualitatively better life and thus, by false deduction, of a more secure life.
And the captain of the Circle Line pointed out to the passengers the golden Byzantine dome that signified Yeshiva College. And he swept his finger in the air from the golden dome to the Belfer Building skyscraper to the dormitories, Revaya and Time Out. And a great wind stirred the waters, causing the Circle Line to sway back and forth.
The passengers grew anxious. Objects fell about the gyrating ship. Overhead, students walked about Amsterdam Avenue, holding onto their kippot in the curling wind, but otherwise oblivious to the waters below. Tomorrow would begin the weekend; they would retreat to their homes. Out-of-towners and foreign students would find a weekend haven. God looked upon his very special creation quizzically.
Dr. Ruth A. Bevan is the David W. Petegorsky Professor of Political Science at Yeshiva College and the Director of the Rabbi Arthur Schneier Center for International Affairs at Yeshiva University.