News Brief

Jewish learning,furthermore, has been studied until now as an isolated field a sort of “Jewish antiquities,” almost as a former culture; in Yeshiva College,the aspects of Jewish culture and the Jewish contributions to the life and thought of the ages assume a living shape and a continuous significance.Jewish contributions to mathematics, for example,are no longer ignored or studied as a special abstruse subject,but become part of the study of the history and development of that science The influence of the Bible upon English literature and the English language,its diction,its images,its subjects,becomes an integral part of the college work in English.The Greek of the Septuagint is a phase in the field of Greek studies.The judgments and misjudgments,the understandings and misunderstandings,the general integration of Hellenistic and Jewish thought andn history are surveyed as a part of both Jewish and classical culture,so that the whole becomes,beyond mere archeological interest,subject for the Yeshiva College student with significance applicable to life and thought today-so that in time Yeshive studies will come to be,not the isolated survey of statistically presented activivties and attutudes, but the consideration of a dynamic spirit and a point of view in the various fields of human understanding.No friend of the true and abiding values of humanity could view with anything but great apprehension the possibility of the submerging of the spiritual Jewish life in this land,and the loss of those qualities that have characterized Israel through the ages steadfastness and devotion to his ideals,and readiness to sacrifice for the things he considers holy ,for the higher values of the spirit.

In America the Jewish community,for some time the most thriving and free Jewish community in the world,and until recently a haven for the oppressed Jews of other lands,have begun to recognize its responsibility for the continuance of the fundamentai Jewish values of faith and culture,for the maintaining of the Jewish spiritual standards,as one of teh contributing forces in the development of American life.It is in this direction,and with this arm,that the work of Yeshive College was unaugurated,and is now widened ,to extend to a chosen body of mentally equipped and spiritually inclined students the opportunity of developing an attitude of cultural and spiritual harmony,with which to face the problems of American life,and to bring into the complex aspects and values of American civilization,with renewed vitality the contribution of the Jewish steadfastness and faith of teh Jewish culture and point of view,to increase in their measure the many-sided wisdom and spiritnai strength and devotion to ideals that should be the mark of America’s progress in the world.