for your reading

this is an article i wrote a while ago, some names have been changed, bla bla...  sorry if it sucks.

A Jew Year’s Party

            Thursday night at Desmond’s Tavern in Manhattan:  the bar is packed and live music is blaring from the stage.  About a hundred students fill the place, dancing, drinking; their conversations throb in the lulls between the music.  This scene would be typical for any bar on a Thursday night except for one difference: the guys’ heads are mostly covered by yarmulkes and the girls are dressed according to the laws of Tzniut, or modesty.

            “Where else can I meet people?” asks Jessica Moore, a senior at Stern College.  “There’s nowhere for Modern Orthodox Jews to hang out anymore.”

            The problem cited by many of these students is that they have nowhere else to go.  “Restaurants close at ten,” says Andrea Miller, a Washington Heights resident, “movies get expensive, and you can’t talk in the theater.  No one wants to hang out in someone’s apartment all night.  If you want to be with a crowd, a bar is the easiest place to go.”

            All over New York City, it has become a quai-normalcy for religious Jews to go to bars on a regular basis.  “I can’t understand it, “ says Bobby Katz, father of three college students.  “When we were in college, bars were not a regular hangout.  It was virtually unheard of.”

            Much of the shock in regards to barhopping is the fact that Rambam (Maimonides), a highly influential scholar on Jewish thought, stated that Jews should not spend their time in establishments that play music and serve alcohol.

            “During my year in Israel, “ says Rebecca Steltzer, a recent graduate of the College of Staten Island, “we were forbidden to enter bars.  The rabbis would come to town and look around to check up on us.  But now, my friends and I go out regularly.”

            This phenomenon has spread to such an extent that a public New Year’s Eve party was hosted by and thrown specifically for religious Jews. It pulled in about four hundred people, mostly young recent graduates living on the Upper West Side.   Seth and Isaac Galena, brothers who run the Bangitout.com website, rented out a facility at 21 Waverly Place, near Washington Square Park, featuring an open bar all night for a twenty-five dollar cover.

            “The turn out was awesome,” says an attendee.  “Last year the party was in their apartment, but this year it was so over-populated that there just wasn’t enough room at their place.”

            This state of affairs has served to widen the gulf within the Modern Orthodox world.  Young people who want to meet have very few options in the Orthodox Jewish world.  Primarily they get set up either by friends or professional Shadchanim, people who make a career out of setting up couples for marriage.  Those farther to the right rely on shidduchim, arranged dates, to meet people of the opposite sex, while those closer to the middle or left look to meet people on their own.  “It’s just wrong,” avers Tova Klein, mother of a college student.  “We used to go out in groups of guys and girls and people would just meet through their friends, date, and get married.”

            That’s not a viable option for many these days, as mixers are thought of as either not religious enough for people to go to or ‘cheesy’.  “Each time that we try to conduct a mixer,” says a rabbi at Yeshiva University, “not attending it becomes a new religious standard.  We’re leaving people with nowhere safe to get together.  We’re driving young people into lonely futures.”

            “I can’t fathom how someone who claims to be frum (religious) can sit in a bar,” says Yael Gruenbaum, a recent college graduate.  “It goes against everything we believe in.  It’s totally against Halacha and as a result of that, I tend to think poorly of them.”

            “It’s a tricky line,” says Ms. Moore.  “I want to meet people, but then I have to worry about the reputation I’ll have for hanging out in a bar with guys.  Then again, if I don’t go to the bars, I won’t meet anyone, because I would never go to a Shadchan.”

            “It’s tough,” says Baruch Kleinfeld, a rabbinical student.  “I have a bunch of friends who go out to bars regularly.  I see the effect that it has on them, and it worries me.  I also see that they otherwise wouldn’t have much of a social life, because I see how hard it is for all of my friends, no mater where they are, to meet people.”

            Some propose creating a place for this highly specific social group to mingle.  “Why doesn’t someone create a place,” asks Tova Klein, “where kids can go, hang out, and talk, without the alcohol and the negative atmosphere that a bar promotes?”

            There was such a place last year on the Yeshiva University main campus.  Kaffeine, a kosher dairy café, opened with a promise of late hours and fast food to huge crowds.  “Kaffeine could have made a killing up here,” says Kleinfeld.  “They shot themselves in the foot with their bad service and by letting the place go to pot.  When they opened, it was an answer to everyone’s prayers, and now that it’s gone, there’s nothing to take over.”

            “We were more likely to hang out at Kaffeine than to go to a bar,” says Miller, “because it was closer and the food was kosher.  Going to a bar means traveling across town there and back.  It really is a pain.  Still, it’s better to travel and do something than sit at home staring at the walls every night.”

            “I would rather we hang out in other places,” says Steltzer.  “The idea that going to a bar flies in the face of traditional Orthodoxy is not easy to take or ignore.   I don’t feel so good about it, and I think most of my friends don’t, either.  We’ll sometimes go to a pool hall instead, but the truth is that most of them also serve alcohol, so it’s not much of a change of atmosphere.”

            No one seems to be happy with the current situation, but there are no easy answers either.  This situation has been termed a crisis by various rabbis and community leaders, yet they haven’t proposed a feasible solution to it.  “It’s nice to say that we should all go to shadchanim,” says Moore, “but it’s just not going to happen.  In the meantime, we’ll keep fighting through the masses of people, trying to find the one in all those thousands we can live with.”