YU Students’ Engagement with the Crises of Their Times: A Story of Apathy and Protests, As Told by The Commentator and The Observer, 1954-1971 Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements of the Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein Honors Program Yeshiva College Yeshiva University July 2019 Benjamin Koslowe Mentor: Professor Jeffrey S. Gurock, Jewish History This page intentionally left blank. Table of Contents Acknowledgments............................................................................................................... ii Introduction ..........................................................................................................................1 The Early Years (1954-1965) ..............................................................................................4 The Vietnam War Intensifies (Late 1965-1967) ................................................................10 The Tumultuous Years: A General Survey (1968-1969) ...................................................17 Yeshiva College Fights for a University Senate (1968-1969) ...........................................27 The Great Building Saga (1968-1970) ...............................................................................31 The Later Protest Years (1970-1971) ................................................................................40 Conclusion .........................................................................................................................47 i Acknowledgments In many ways, this thesis began in late 2017 in Yeshiva University’s Mendel Gottesman Library. That fall semester, I was a section editor on The Commentator, and the editor-in- chief assigned me the task of finding old newspaper archives to reprint for the “From the Archives” column. Soon enough, I found myself time and again completely and utterly immersed in endlessly fascinating old microfilm reels and reference binders, losing sense of time and space as I devoured article upon article written by Yeshiva University undergraduates over the decades. I was amazed both by the intensely honest and thoughtful account of institutional history that the archives offered, as well as by the remarkable sense in which the tone and topics that packed The Commentator’s pages in those bygone years have in many ways not changed. It was not long before it struck me that I must dedicate my senior thesis to The Commentator’s archives. It is said that there is nothing new under the sun, and in fact, initial research quickly revealed that mine would not be the first such senior thesis—Zev Eleff, who graduated Yeshiva College in 2009, wrote a thesis titled “Freedom and Responsibility: Censorship at Yeshiva College in the Early History of The Commentator, 1935-1958.” After several emails and brainstorming sessions with various individuals, including my thesis mentor, Professor Jeffrey Gurock, I decided that I would focus my thesis on the years 1954-1971, more or less picking up where Eleff left off. Like Eleff’s thesis, this paper extensively footnotes articles from The Commentator, as well as other newspapers and books. In general, references of works in this paper include any and all attributable authors; when footnoted references do not indicate any author, it is typically because the relevant article was published by an editorial board without using a byline. The designs of this thesis and Eleff’s thesis differ in two essential respects. First, whereas Eleff’s thesis uses only The Commentator as its primary source, this thesis uses The Observer, the independent student newspaper that was founded by Stern College for Women students in 1958, as well. As The Commentator historically focused on the Yeshiva College student body, investigating The Observer, which historically was written by and about Stern College students, was deemed essential for as comprehensive an understanding as possible of all Yeshiva University undergraduates. Second, unlike Eleff’s thesis that is composed of sections that focus on distinct episodes in YU’s and The Commentator’s histories, this thesis is mostly divided into sections that each assess broad spans of history, with only two sections (“Yeshiva College Fights for a University Senate” and “The Great Building Saga”) dedicated to specific, contained episodes. This thesis would not have been possible without YU’s reference librarians, who time and again graciously retrieved archival binders and microfilms for me to use for my research. I also owe special thanks to Zev Eleff, who, in addition to writing an insightful and relevant thesis, met with me personally last June, and who informed me that there exist digital copies of Commentator archives that were scanned as part of a project commissioned by Pearl Berger, dean of libraries at Yeshiva University. I am thankful as well to my friend and retrophile Doniel Weinreich, who just this past semester used YU’s antiquated microfilm machines to create digital scans of The Observer’s archives. Without ii access to either of these digital collections, my research would have been exponentially more tedious and time-consuming. Professor Gurock offered his mentorship immediately after I posed my idea to him, and he met with me several times this past year to help me develop my proposal, design my research, and edit my drafts. I appreciated his astute perspective and blunt reactions, both of which helped me craft a thesis paper with which I could be satisfied. Many of my friends and family members offered helpful advice and encouragement along the way. I am especially thankful to my grandmother Patricia “Nona” Koslowe, who took an active interest in this thesis, and even meticulously read through and offered her suggestions on my first draft. I am also grateful to my brother Hillel, who offered his sharp eyes for a helpful copy edit of my final draft. Among many exhilarating aspects of conducting research, I particularly enjoyed reaching out to former students who were involved in some of those incidents that I profile in this paper. My prepared response to all of their inevitable courteous requests for me to share my completed thesis with them was, “Thank you! I think you will be among 15 or so individuals who actually read this paper.” Most of my interviewees just laughed, but one former student, who graduated Stern College in 1969, offered a perspective that I found poignant and memorable as I was writing this paper: “Hey, you never know. Maybe one day, 50 years from now, you’ll get an email out of the blue from a Yeshiva University student looking to hear your take on what the place was like in 2019.” As much as this thesis offers, it should also shed light on just how much more of a story there remains to be told in the myriad pages of old YU student newspapers that sit mostly untouched in the reference sections of YU’s libraries. I sincerely hope that YU will soon follow in the path of other elite institutions of higher learning and digitize all of the archives of its undergraduate student newspapers. Still, even before that long overdue digitization project commences, I am sure that other students will dive deep into the limitedly accessible Commentator and Observer archives. I would be more than happy to help in those efforts and return once again to the amazing world of YU history. Benjamin Koslowe Alon Shevut July 2019 iii “The Great Debate on The American Policy in Viet Nam,” Hosted in Furst Hall (Courtesy The Commentator, December 2, 1965, p. 1) iv Yeshiva Students Protest for Soviet Jewry (Courtesy The Observer, May 2, 1966, p. 1) v Yeshiva College Fights for a University Senate (Courtesy The Commentator, March 5, 1969, p. 1) vi The Great Building Saga (Courtesy The Observer, October 17, 1968, p. 2) vii RIETS Students Protest “Secularization” (Courtesy The Commentator, April 15, 1970, p. 1) viii Introduction Students enrolled at Yeshiva University have always straddled the line between the institution’s dual mission that values the integration or harmonization of both religious and secular values. This thesis uses Yeshiva University’s college newspapers, The Commentator and The Observer, with a focus on a specific period of time in history and its associated national crises, as test cases to evaluate the extent to which Yeshiva University students have identified with and subscribed to the institution’s nuanced missions, and how their views compared with other college students when significant national issues took place. Given Yeshiva students’ nuanced approach to the world around them, it is intriguing to explore how deeply engaged they have been towards crucial national events that were not ipso facto Jewish. Moreover, it is important to determine how similar or different has been their worldview from that of other American college students, Jewish and non-Jewish. Such a study helps reveal the extent to which Yeshiva students perceived themselves and acted as if they were in a religious cloister disengaged from wider societal issues, or rather engaged with the crises of their times. A good lens for studying Yeshiva University students is the period of 1954-1971, when the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War roiled America. In 1954, the United States Supreme Court, through the monumental decision in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, declared state-sponsored public-school segregation to be unconstitutional. This landmark decision paved the way for massive legislative and social gains in America for the civil rights movement during the mid-1950s