How American Orthodoxy Turned against Social Dancing

Until the 1960s, it was quite common for Orthodox synagogues in the U.S. to hold regular social events featuring mixed dancing, often with tacit approval from their clergymen. By the 1980s, such gatherings had disappeared even from Modern Orthodox synagogues as rabbis reasserted the halakhic prohibitions on social dancing and on public physical contact between the sexes in general. Zev Eleff seeks to explain this transformation:

Some point out that the generation [of congregants] that halted social dancing [comprised] the first graduates of Orthodox day schools. These women and men were more Jewishly literate than their parents and helped “slide” their community to the “right” [to use one sociologist’s memorable formulation]. Others maintain that [the shift in attitudes] was the result of the influence of a more rigid crop of rabbis who had immigrated to the United States directly before and after the Holocaust.

Both points are valid and contributed to the transformation of Orthodox youth culture. But another explanation should also be added, one that takes into consideration the broader scene of American religion. In the heat of the so-called sexual revolution of the 1960s, a number of conservative religious communities redrew their red lines. Consider the situation at faith-based colleges. In this turbulent decade, for example, Gordon College in Boston banned social dancing. . . . In another instance, one suitor wrote to his girlfriend at the Presbyterian-affiliated Hanover College in Indiana that he was “sorry to hear that your mother frowns on the hop.”

The same was true of the leading Orthodox college in New York. In 1960, the Yeshiva College student newspaper polled undergraduates on their religious punctiliousness. Sixty percent . . . . admitted, despite Jewish law’s proscription against it, to having regular “physical contact with girls.” In response to the startling figure, the editors lamented that a “majority of the Yeshiva boys apparently have not the slightest appreciation of what Orthodox Judaism fully entails.”

Read more at University of Nebraska Press Blog

More about: American Judaism, Halakhah, History & Ideas, Modern Orthodoxy, Orthodoxy, Sexual revolution, Yeshiva University

 

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society