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YU Drops Newspaper Over Essay on Sex

First-person account of hotel encounter was too much for school

by
Marc Tracy
December 08, 2011

A relatively new, online-only newspaper at Yeshiva University just lost its funding and official affiliation due to its refusal to refrain from publishing an Orthodox woman’s first-person, anonymous account of a sexual encounter, New Voices reports. The article can be read here (after all, YU no longer has control). What’s interesting is that, by general-readership standards (to say nothing of Internet ones), it is positively chaste: “Between the fumbling, the pain, the pleasure, I convince myself that I’ve learned how to make love,” is as racy as it gets.

“If we put the article back online as it was, they couldn’t keep us as a publication,” the editors were reportedly told. The publication is the YU Beacon; formerly known as “An Official Publication of Yeshiva University Students,” it now bills itself “A Voice of Yeshiva University Students.” The good news is they say their costs run only to $500 per semester; interested “contributors” can email Simi Lampert.

Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.