In State of the University Address, President Joel Recounts Progress, Outlines Challenges and Articulates Renewed Vision for the Future
In his first State of the University address, Yeshiva University President Richard M. Joel announced on September 12 that he would accept the Board of Trustees’ offer to extend his term until June 2018 for a planned 15 years in office and outlined his vision for a united and prosperous University, both as an academic and as a communal institution.
“It is here, in this complex and special space, that we can see our future,” said the president before hundreds of alumni, students, faculty and staff in the Gottesman Library Heights Lounge on the Wilf Campus. Hundreds more watched the streaming broadcast of the address online. “If I listen carefully, I hear the murmurings of a consecrated conversation taking place here—a conversation between Torah and the world, between tradition and modernity, between the sacred contents of this beautiful bastion of wisdom and the wide world around it so desperately yearning for the dissemination of those contents.” Read the rest of this entry…
Einstein Researchers Forge a Unique Collaboration in Nigeria
The challenges of conducting research in a developing nation can be numerous — from political instability that can delays projects for months to collaborators who can only use Internet at night or frequent lack of electricity that can last days. In spite of such challenges, Einstein researchers Drs. David Lounsbury, Ilir Agalliu and Adebola Adedimeji have focused on the benefits that an international collaboration can offer as they embark on a unique research project in Nigeria.
Before coming to Einstein in 2008, Lounsbury, assistant professor of epidemiology & population health and of family and social medicine, had the opportunity to meet Dr. Chioma Asuzu, a clinical psycho-oncologist from the University College Hospital (UCH) in Ibadan, Nigeria. Read the rest of this entry…
Newly Tenured Undergraduate Faculty Represents Expertise in Multiple Fields
Dr. Naomi Grunhaus, a scholar of Biblical exegesis, researches the incorporation of rabbinic traditions in the linguistic works of Jonah Ibn Janah and Radak. Dr. Bruno Galantucci, a cognitive scientist, designs experiments to study how humans establish and develop novel forms of communication. And Dr. Tamar Avnet, a marketing and consumer behavior expert, investigates how people use and rely on their feelings and emotions to help them make purchasing decisions.
Dr. Naomi Grunhaus
They are three of 12 professors who have been newly promoted and tenured at Yeshiva University. Grunhaus is now an associate professor of Bible at Stern College for Women. Galantucci has been promoted to associate professor of psychology at Yeshiva College. And Avnet has become an associate professor of marketing at the Sy Syms School of Business.
YU confers tenure based on faculty members’ teaching, research, publication and service to their departments and the University as a whole. The award of tenure includes promotion from assistant to associate professor. The faculty who were granted tenure this year represents expertise in eight fields of study: economics, psychology, biology, chemistry, French, marketing and management, neuroscience, and academic Jewish studies. Read the rest of this entry…
Jeffrey Gurock on New York City’s Ever Changing Jewish Landscape
In the early part of the 20th century, Jewish identity was in the streets and the air of New York City—nearly one in four New Yorkers was Jewish.
After decades of declining numbers, the Jewish population in the city has begun to grow once again—for the first time in 50 years—to nearly 1.1 million. Dr. Jeffrey S. Gurock, Libby M. Klaperman Professor of Jewish History at Yeshiva University, shared his thoughts on New York’s ever changing Jewish landscape in the latest issue of Segula Magazine: Read the rest of this entry…
Yeshiva University Scholars Reflect on the Daf Yomi Phenomenon
Last night some 90,000 people gathered at the MetLife stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey for a ceremony celebrating the 12th completion of the daily reading of the Talmud (Siyum ha-Shas). The event followed similar ceremonies, in Jerusalem,Tel Aviv, Bnei Brak, London, Melbourne, and other cities and communities around the world, in which thousands more participated in person or via closed-circuit TV.
Tens of thousands celebrated the conclusion of the a seven-and-a-half-year Daf Yomi cycle on August 1.
These events honor the conclusion and re-commencement of a seven-and-a-half-year cycle in which people—individually, with partners, or in groups—learn a folio page (two facing pages) of the Babylonian Talmud each day in a tradition known as daf yomi, “a page a day.”
The tradition was established by Rabbi Meir Shapiro, the Hasidic rebbe of Lublin. Rabbi Shapiro proposed the idea to the Agudath Israel convention in Vienna in August, 1923, and the enterprise was launched with much fanfare the following Rosh Hashanah. Over the course of the 12 cycles completed thus far, the number of learners has burgeoned to many tens of thousands around the world.
To mark the occasion, Jewish Ideas Daily invited several prominent thinkers, including Yeshiva University’s Rabbi Dr. Jacob J. Schacter and Moshe Sokolow to reflect on the phenomenon of daf yomi and their own engagement with the practice. Read the rest of this entry…
Vice Presidential Candidates and American Politics: Four Questions with Joseph Luders
Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, is close to selecting his vice presidential running mate. According to several news reports, the short list includes Ohio Senator Rob Portman, former Minnesota Goverenor Tim Pawlenty, and Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal. But how important is this choice?
Dr. Joseph Luders, is the David and Ruth Gottesman Chair in Political Science at YU.
YUNews spoke with Dr. Joseph Luders, Yeshiva University’s David and Ruth Gottesman Chair in Political Science, about what factors presidential candidates consider in choosing a running mate, the impact a vice presidential nominee can have on a campaign, and how all of it plays out in the 2012 election. Read the rest of this entry…
Amish Khalfan: The Underlying Beauty in the Physics of Particles
Imagine, as best you can, a physicist entering an apartment in which a delightful party is being held.
Prof. Amish Khalfan
The physicist notices some people on one side of the living room drinking fine wine and eating expensive cheese. Near the middle of the room, he hears a few others musing over the current bleak state of affairs of our world. And so here is this rather shy and detached theoretical physicist who finds himself in seemingly uncharted territory. He has worked alone for the better part of his life tackling the deep mysteries of nature and here he stands among laughter, noise and, well, fun. The physicist decides to take action. He walks by everyone and heads for the back wall. It is there that he has laid his eyes upon some books placed neatly on a worn shelf. Our physicist discovers that he is able to move through the crowd with relative ease and quickness. He meanders through and passes by rather unnoticed. It’s as if he is free, in the sense that he has no one with whom to interact and deter him from his destination. Read the rest of this entry…
Einstein Faculty React to Historic Supreme Court Ruling on Affordable Care Act
Reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling concerning the Affordable Care Act has been swift. The high court’s ruling to largely uphold the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has significant implications for patients, medical schools and academic medical centers. Read the rest of this entry…
Dr. Matthew Miller and Students Bring Yiddish Translation to Whitman Archive
In his celebrated poem “To You,” Walt Whitman wrote, “None have understood you, but I understand you.” The line, an example of Whitman’s trademark empathy with America’s culturally diverse working class, has hit home for countless readers over the years. For a group of early 20th-century Jewish immigrants, however, Whitman’s understanding became the inspiration for a new fusion of American and Yiddish literature—a body of work Dr. Matthew Miller, assistant professor of English at Yeshiva University’s Stern College for Women, is hoping to bring to light.
In 1940, the Yiddish-American poet Louis Miller wrote a Yiddish translation of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, which he titled Lider: fun bukh: bleter groz. Yiddish writers had already published a number of American authors in translation, but Whitman’s work was a popular subject for translation and literary criticism alike. Read the rest of this entry…
