Saying It Like It Is

Many years ago, a relative gave me a gift of several hundred issues of Agudath Israel of America’s erstwhile monthly magazine, the Jewish Observer (JO). Since then, these issues have sat in a box in a basement closet, largely unread. But from time to time over the years, I’ve taken a few of them out to enjoy.

I recently had occasion to do so again, and was struck, as I am each time I read one of those back issues, by just how much things have changed in the frum community over the many decades since the JO began publication in the 1960s. I’m certain that an enterprising sociology major has enough material in the JO oeuvre for a fine doctoral thesis on the topic.

This much is clear from even a casual perusal: We’re a lot more frum than we once were. Pictures of a beis medrash scene in a yeshivah gedolah from those days feature a look that has disappeared in the current iteration of those very same institutions, with some boys sporting colored shirts and funny-looking hats and somewhat longer hair. And it’s not that the rebbeim were different looking, too; they looked quite the same then as they do now.

Then there are the occasional pictures of women, and the article titles and cultural references that are now not deemed “frum enough” to mention.