The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Yeshiva Girls Gone Wild

Posted on | December 12, 2011 | 5 Comments

You know you’re reading bad porn when you get lines like this:

After all of our secret rendezvouses, I’m still not used to seeing him without his yarmulke on, but this time it’s somewhat of a comfort.

Sweetheart: “Rendezvouses“? I’d expel you for bad grammar.

This anonymous article in the Yeshiva University Beacon has caused a huge media controversy:

Jewish University, School Newspaper
Cut Ties Over Controversial Sex Column

Fox News

Essay Sparks Campus Uproar
Wall Street Journal

Editor of Yeshiva University
paper The Beacon resigns
amid outrage over sex essay

NY Daily News

Orthodox Jewish Student’s
Tale of Premarital Sex,
Real or Not, Roils Campus

New York Times

Yeshiva University paper
sex story creates uproar

Jerusalem Post

It’s a shanda! Beth Mandel sent out a link on Twitter to an article at the official Yeshiva newspaper, The Commentator:

This wasn’t censorship — at all. The administration did not take the article down, or demand that it be taken down. As more and more informed reports emerged, we learned that the Stern College for Women Student Council (SCWSC), responding to clearly demonstrated student opinion, asked the Beacon editorship to remove the article. By and large, the student body that the Beacon seeks to represent felt that the Beacon actually misrepresented them and so wanted the story gone. Therefore, it probably would have been unreasonable to think that any national coverage would result from the meeting, as removing the story was only acceding to the requests of the online paper’s constituents.

Background: Stern College is the women’s school at Yeshiva, which takes Orthodox Jewish religion seriously, and the Beacon received some funding from Stern College. Furthermore, as Commentator editor Benjamin Abramowitz explains, evidently the editors of the Beacon were the ones who tipped off the national media to the controversy. Abramowitz links a Jewish blogger’s commentary:

[A] lot of students responded [to the Beacon article] by saying, in effect: This is not what we choose to represent us. This is not what we want people to think when they hear the words Yeshiva University. This is not what we want people to think when they hear the words observant Jew. This is not what or who defines us and we don’t want it up there for people to think this is what defines us.
But the editors of the paper said: Your opinions be damned and your reactions be damned. . . . We have free speech and we’re not afraid to use it. And we don’t care if this becomes . . . a scandal dragged across the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and so on; we don’t care if we make Yeshiva University out to be some sort of evil overarching censorship committee. We only care about ourselves and the fact that we should have the right so say what we want.

That is to say, the Beacon editors are selfish, self-aggrandizing and self-indulgent, indifferent to the reputation, opinions and best interests of the community they are supposed to represent.

In a word, they’re brats.

If the student editors wanted to publish that stuff, they could have dropped out of Yeshiva and enrolled in some other school. Instead — brats that they are — they were in effect attempting to subvert the entire meaning and mission of their religious university.

Also: The plural of “rendezvous” is the same as the singular.

Expel the grammar-deficient brats!

UPDATE: The anonymous Yeshiva girl probably doesn’t realize they already wrote a country-and-western song about her:

Talk was small, when they talked at all.
They both knew what they wanted.
There was no need to talk about it.
They were old enough to scope it out and keep it loose.
She said, “You don’t look like my type,
But I guess you’ll do.”
Third-rate romance, low-rent rendezvous.

Comments

5 Responses to “Yeshiva Girls Gone Wild”

  1. Bob Belvedere
    December 12th, 2011 @ 1:33 pm

    Oy!

  2. JeffS
    December 12th, 2011 @ 5:19 pm

    You rightly point out that the Beacon editors are illiterate brats.  They most certainly are.

    But inquiring minds want to know, how is it that you can tell the difference between good and bad porn?

    More importantly, what is your definition of good porn?

  3. Joe
    December 12th, 2011 @ 8:22 pm

    It is not great literature, but a lot of girls have been in her place.  Doesn’t the bible say “He won’t buy the cow if you give him the milk for free?” 

  4. nottd
    December 13th, 2011 @ 4:04 pm

    At first I misread the name of the paper as “The Bacon”.  now that would stir up some controversy at shule.

  5. nottd
    December 13th, 2011 @ 4:09 pm

    Oh, and the song was written and performed first by the Amazing Rhythm  Aces, so don’t bother with Kershaw’s lame take.