Yeshiva University’s inexcusable surrender
The prohibition against the homosexual act is clearly stated in the Torah. While that does not mandate ostracizing anyone, allowing an LGBT club is tantamount to approval of a way of life that is forbidden.
On Thursday, Yeshiva University (YU) caved to leftist lawfare and will now permit an LGBT club to operate on campus. I am not surprised – nor should anyone else be who has followed developments at YU in recent years.
After all:
• From 2008-2021, YU employed a transgender professor.
• It currently employs a Bible(!) professor who has publicly advocated that we ignore Judaism’s stance on homosexual “marriage.”
• In 2022, its social work graduate school held a pro-abortion event.
• That same year, it featured a lecture by a female Reform "rabbi."
In short, either YU lacks principles or, to borrow a line from President Theodore Roosevelt, it has the backbone of a chocolate eclair. Most likely, a combination of both.
YU’s surrender to students who demanded an LGBT club on campus is particularly inexcusable in the wake of Donald Trump’s victory in November and the concomitant cultural shift to the right. For the first time in decades, the LGBT movement is on the defensive. The federal government officially recognizes only two genders now and is pulling funding from any university that allows cross-dressing male students to play in female sports.
Even before Trump’s victory, the LGBT movement had suffered a setback with support for homosexual “marriage” in 2024 declining for the first time since 2015, according to mainstream news reports. Had YU continued battling the radical LGBT activists demanding a club, it very likely would have won in the Supreme Court considering the court’s 6-3 conservative majority.
Instead of fighting, though – instead of making a kiddush Hashem (sanctification of G-d's Name) before Christian and conservative America – it decided to make a chillul Hashem (Desecration of His Name). It decided to please the forces attacking Biblical morality rather than those defending it. Just as the LGBT movement was beginning to suffer losses on the cultural battlefield, YU decided to throw it a lifeline and give it a stunning victory and fresh impetus to fight further.
I don’t mean to give the impression that YU is entirely spineless. It is not. When it comes to the “far right,” it can be intransigent. For years now, it has refused to allow me to sell books by Rabbi Meir Kahane, z"l, even religious ones, at its annual Seforim (Book) Sale. You would think that October 7 might have softened its stance. But you would be wrong. YU is so angry that I protested its decision to ban Rabbi Kahane’s books from the Seforim Sale in 2016 (the same year it sold books by Mordechai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism) that it won’t permit me to sell any books at the sale anymore.
If YU is going to ban books from the sale, you would think it would at least explain and permit an appeal of its decision. And surely, you would think, its decision-making process would be transparent since we all know that transparency is the hallmark of liberal institutions. But you would be wrong again. YU bans books without explanation, and the names of the people doing the banning are unknown.
I have appealed YU’s decision in the most respectful of tones many times. I have gotten nowhere. And when I distributed flyers on campus last year publicizing the university’s decision, YU reacted by banning me from campus.
I once liked Yeshiva University. I was frustrated by some of the close-mindedness I had experienced growing up in black-hat (haredi, non- Zionist) schools and found YU to be a breath of fresh air when I arrived on campus in 2002. But it turns out that YU is just as close-minded as the black-hat world. The only difference is that the black-hat world is intolerant of ideas it considers spiritually dangerous. YU is intolerant of ideas that violate the post-modern liberal ethos.
So Kahane? Absolutely forbidden. The LGBT agenda? Come right on in.
