From The Editor’s Desk

By Zack Streit

In this year’s Book Project text, The Plague, Nobel Prize-winner Albert Camus tells an unnerving tale about a plague that ravages Oran, a small coastal town in North Africa.  Although much of the book is devoted to scrutinizing the inexorable physical and emotional suffering engendered by the epidemic, Camus also makes some intriguing points on human nature. 

Early on in the novel, the myopic nature of the townspeople – who are able to go about their everyday tasks unfazed by the stockpiles of dead rats lining the streets and gutters – becomes self-evident.  But are we really to believe that the Oranians couldn’t predict what was about to happen?  Was it really so hard for them to picture themselves afflicted by the same mysterious force which generated sidewalk graves for hoards of rats?  The answer is an unequivocal yes.  And, unfortunately, those ill-fated citizens are not the only ones who choose to close their eyes to things around them. 

Here too, at Yeshiva, we have also contracted a nasty habit of blind-eyeing the seeds of future problems, and like the plague in the city Oran, our blindness could eventually rip apart the very fabric over of our university.  We choose to ignore problems, hoping that they will magically vanish.  If they don’t, then we wait until they become cataclysmic before dealing with them.  This modus operendi has hurt us in the past.  If we leave it unchecked, it will continue to stab at us in the future.

Many of you probably don’t know that a tenured undergraduate faculty member, Dr. Ellen Schrecker, and two of her Stern colleagues, Professors Judith Neaman and Carol Silver signed a July 17th advertisement that ran on page A13 of the New York Times, calling for “our government to make continued aid (to Israel) conditional on Israeli acceptance of an internationally agreed two-state settlement.”  Translation: Israel must immediately accept a Palestinian State or forego billions of American dollars.

Now, I know that Dr. Schrecker, as well as the others, did not sign the advertisements as representatives of Yeshiva.  And I also know that the ad didn’t even include the customary honorifics conferred upon those with PhDs.  And I am not going to waste your time telling you what I think of the ad’s content. 

But I am concerned that Dr. Schrecker, in signing the ad, demonstrated unabashed indifference toward offending a majority of the students on campus.  I am not suggesting that she, or others, should be compelled to subscribe to a collective, Anthem-like doctrine; we are all entitled to our opinions.  But it should be considered inexcusable to champion a cause in the Nation’s Paper of Repute that shows complete irreverence to the body that this university is built around. 

What really bothers me about all this though is not the egregious lack of respect exhibited, but what our reaction will look like.  Assuming that there is a concerted response, I fear that it will manifest itself in an ephemeral fit of discursive pro-Israel slogan chanting, followed by us dismissing the issue in the grounds that it is isolated and devoid of lasting corollaries.  In the heat of the moment, we probably will not declare that, by the very same logic, female faculty members should no longer conform to the dress standards they have adopted out of respect for our institution.  After all, if the only reason they dress “modestly” is out of respect for our beliefs and a distinguished member of the faculty begins shows that such a respect is indeed irrelevant, what’s to stop others from joining in her charge?

Furthermore, as a tenured professor, Dr. Schrecker sits on faculty search committees responsible for selecting the next wave of educators.  But we probably also won’t hear people mentioning the imminent danger of her appointing future professors of similar mindsets?   And we will probably also overlook voicing the more general question of whether certain faculty predispositions, like Dr. Schrecker’s, could prove harmful?

In fact, our response to this issue will probably have a lot in common with something that took place on campus just a while back.                

A number of years ago, several Roshei Yeshiva issued vociferous condemnations when a gay club at Cardozo requested a weekly, on-campus meeting room.  But, because a that-will-never-happen-here mindset crept in, the furor quickly died down.  The Roshei Yeshiva neither impelled the president to hammer out a policy on the prickly issue nor encouraged students to grapple with an issue that might soon be staring them in the face.  In typical Yeshiva fashion, we tucked the issue under a rug, and dismissed it as something that could never plague us here.  Wrong again.

After a four year of battle over Einstein’s housing policy, Yeshiva quietly changed its housing policy to avert a trial in the lawsuit brought by two lesbian students crying discrimination.  Now Einstein’s housing policy allows for anyone to cohabit in their living quarters.  And guess who’s going to have to deal with this problem next?

Rabbi Lamm contends that “This will never be a problem on the Wilf Campus.” I disagree.  There are gay students on this campus.  They go to class with us, and they live with us.  Although they are neither vying for married, undergraduate housing nor RIETS housing, this under-the-table settlement might just supply them with the necessary confidence to begin fighting what is sure to be an uphill battle. 

Unfortunately, I think that most students on this campus have blithely embraced the injurious position of the Roshei Yeshiva.  That is, shrug off an issue that isn’t immediately threatening.  But how could we fall prey to believing that problems just evaporate?  Why aren’t we angry with our Rebbeim for not following through?

So we find ourselves at a crossroads again: we can either begin to uproot the constant knee-jerking that pervades Yeshiva, accept these and other issues as forthcoming, and spark discussions both individually and en masse; or we can simply turn the other cheek, like the Oranians did, and go about our business.  Camus made certain of their fate.  The only question is – what of ours?