D.C. Retreat Capstones Jewish Ideas and American Democracy Course
While most students were recovering from three days of Yom Tov, moving out of their dorms and beginning their summer vacations, a group of students from Stern College for Women and Yeshiva College departed the Wilf Campus on May 29 to begin their journey to Washington, D.C. The trip, an intellectual retreat sponsored by YU’s Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought, served as the capstone seminar of the “Jewish Ideas and American Democracy” class that most of the trip participants had taken in pervious semesters. Students prepared for the trip with supplemental readings and essay questions designed to evoke reflections on the major themes of the class, such as the interplay between religion and state in America, as well as important issues facing the United States today. Read the rest of this entry…
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Investigating Landmark Supreme Court Decision, Elie Friedman Publishes Findings on 1967 Academic Freedom Case
It was an issue of academic freedom, cultural change and personal integrity—but Elie Friedman, then a history student at Yeshiva College, needed to know more.
Elie Friedman
He originally came across the January 1967 Supreme Court case while looking through years of The New York Times back issues for Dr. Ellen Schrecker, professor of American history at Yeshiva College. Schrecker was working on the most recent of her many books, The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on American Freedom, and the End of the American University, and Friedman, who had just finished his freshman year, was her research assistant. His mission: to seek out and analyze articles that tracked the battle for academic freedom in universities across America over the course of months and years during the 60s and 70s.
“It was a first-hand introduction to history, not just reading about it in books,” said Friedman, a native of Teaneck, NJ. “I was reading newspapers from 40 to 50 years ago day by day, the same way I read newspapers today.”
But one front-page Times article stopped him in his tracks. Read the rest of this entry…
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