From Questions to Community
Student Journalism and Jewish Tradition
With Passover around the corner, it seems all too easy to get lost in the cleaning, kashering, shopping, cooking, and hosting. Yet, when my family and I sit down to our seder (a combination of ritual theater and a festive meal) on the first night of the holiday, the labor-intensive preparations fade into the background, as we relive the Jewish story of the Exodus from slavery to freedom—a story with inevitable resonances in the present day. Indeed, the holiday’s dramatic retelling of that story is so powerful that American Jews participate in Passover seders at higher rates than they do any other Jewish ritual.1 The Haggadah, the text that serves as our centuries-old guide to the seder, foregrounds the asking of questions, staging the retelling of the Exodus story as an intergenerational dialogue. It does so in part by introducing four “sons,” fictionalized composites of children with different characters, temperaments, and perspectives on tradition. Drawing upon four separate allusions to such intergenerational dialogues in the Torah,2 the Haggadah offers guidance about how to tailor the story of the Exodus to each of these four children. For each of them and for all of us, the rituals and symbols of the seder unfold as a scaffold for keeping the tradition alive.
The question-and-answer format of the Haggadah is an extension of the question-asking that is embedded in virtually all Jewish learning, most notably the shakla ve-tarya, the give-and-take argumentation, of the Talmud. In an earlier essay, I suggested ways in which this habit of asking questions might inform and affect students’ educational experiences, from the humanities classroom to the science lab.3 Students who have learned the habits of questioning and logical argumentation from a young age cannot help but apply the same habits when they read, discuss, observe, and think.
I thought again about the habit of asking questions in education during my recent conversation with Hadassah Reich and Shira Kramer, the editors of Yeshiva University’s two student newspapers, The Commentator and The YU Observer, respectively. As Reich explained, the role of journalist and editor is “[looking] at the world around you, being curious about it, asking questions, and seeking answers.” Especially against the backdrop of Passover, this commitment to asking questions illuminates another way in which Jewish life and a college education can overlap and reinforce one another: journalists and reporters ask questions on a range of topics on behalf of their readership and seek to offer reliable, trustworthy answers.
While the student newspapers are not officially affiliated with Yeshiva University—this is necessary to preserve journalistic independence—they play an important role in the undergraduate community. They help to foster an environment of transparency and communication between students, faculty, and administrators, and they offer a snapshot of what students are thinking, hoping, or worrying about at any given moment. Beyond that, the newspapers offer important educational opportunities, as students learn about principles such as objectivity and bias, develop techniques of interviewing and research, and gain writing skills that, in turn, help them cultivate their own voices, perspectives, and ideas.
For both Kramer and Reich, these processes began long before they came to college. Kramer is the daughter of a journalist, so participation in journalism came naturally. She served as editor of the newspapers in both middle and high school. While she is planning a career as a lawyer, her major is in English with a concentration in journalism, and her work as an editor of The YU Observer—a role she took on almost immediately after transferring to YU from the University of Maryland—has been essential in helping her construct her outlook on life. Throughout our conversation Kramer returned to the theme of finding the good that exists around her: “The main thing I think about is that if we’re criticizing something, it should only be in order to promote goodness within the university or whatever we’re writing about.” While criticism can and should be unflinchingly objective, the notion that it should be informed and shaped by a constructive intention has a palpable impact on Kramer’s work.4
Reich, only the second woman to serve as Editor in Chief of The Commentator since its founding in 1935, was inspired to become involved in journalism by her older sister, who worked on her high school newspaper, but Reich also cites numerous students at YU who mentored her at The Commentator. She describes the process of writing about her world as more than simply a way of reporting on others—as with Kramer, it helped to shape Reich’s outlook. Initially, it helped her through the adjustment period when she started college; writing for the newspaper prompted her to “uncover hidden gems,” as, for example, when she interviewed the librarians at the Hedi Steinberg Library toward the beginning of her college career.5 “It enabled me to hunt for things that were really positive.”
Beyond finding those positive aspects of her environment, the act of writing helped Reich shape herself and discover her own voice. It became a means to work out her own ideas and find her place in her world: “I was able to understand the people around me by interviewing them.” Kramer, too, has learned from her experience on the newspaper, especially in her year as Editor-in-Chief. She told me that she initially “made the mistake of trying to hold all the responsibility. I didn’t know when to delegate and let go.” By trusting the wider staff, she learned important lessons about collaboration and leadership.
The Commentator and The YU Observer diverge in their scope and goals. While The Commentator includes both investigative reporting and opinion pieces, The YU Observer does not have a news section. In both types of journalism, however, Reich and Kramer discern an opportunity to help sustain a sense of community on campus—a point that Reich emphasized in an editorial published in August 2025, in her first issue as Editor in Chief. Having described the role of The Commentator as “reporting responsibly, investigating thoroughly, and acting as a platform for student voices,” she explained that this mission is vital because “sharing the news and highlighting student opinions creates a well-informed community, one that fosters meaningful discourse and is equipped with agency.”6 The building of community works only when the newspapers foster credibility and trust on the part of the student body. Such trust is hard to come by in broader society during the social media age, when a shared commitment to the pursuit of truth has declined, when many news outlets have blurred the line between reporting and opinion, and consumers of the news have become lost in their own algorithm-driven echo chambers. Reich invokes Yeshiva University’s core value of emet, the pursuit of truth, casting her efforts to discover truth through journalism as rooted in Jewish tradition.
When I asked Reich and Kramer about the erosion of trust in journalism, they acknowledged that their newspapers are insulated in some ways from the negative effects of social media and attacks on the press in wider society. They continue to view their newspapers as places where divergent voices can come together, meet one another, and learn and grow together. They insist upon a journalism that incorporates respectful, reasoned disagreement. Just as the Passover seder provides space for different “sons” to ask questions in ways that reflect their perspectives and temperaments, the student newspapers create an environment for questions and dialogue. Rather than creating a false homogeneity or pushing a single view, the newspapers insist that heterogeneous perspectives must continue to exist alongside and engage with one another.
Toward the end of our conversation, Reich articulated another purpose of her journalism that evoked the Passover seder—namely, the recording of history:
We don’t always think about this in the present moment, but the newspapers are creating a history. We’re chronicling things as they are happening. I’ve spent so many hours looking at The Commentator’s archives and reading what was happening 20, 30, almost 100 years ago. It gives you a picture of what the student body cared about, which informs our understanding today. I’m really inspired by that—when I think about writing an article, I think about how it’s not just something for students to read today, but it’s something for the recorded history.
Reich is aware that The Commentator is contributing to the archives of the university, and, more broadly, the voices of all the student journalists who write for it will form part of the archives of the Jewish people.
When I started my conversation with Reich and Kramer, we joked about how the tables had turned—normally it is they who send questions to me, looking for answers about decisions that I have made or some of the many factors affecting their experience. “I am not a journalist,” I said, but I would do my best to interview them. At the end of our conversation, Reich corrected me, noting that everyone can and should be a journalist: “Being a journalist is just being curious about the world that you live in.”
Pew Research Center, “Jewish Americans in 2020,” section on “Jewish Practices and Customs,” Report published May 11, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/05/11/jewish-practices-and-customs/.
These four accounts are laid out, for example, in Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Jonathan Sacks Haggadah, Magid, The Four Sons I, https://www.sefaria.org/The_Jonathan_Sacks_Haggadah%2C_Magid%2C_The_Four_Sons.1.1?lang=bi&p2=Exodus.12.26-27&lang2=bi&aliyot2=0.
See my earlier post, “Academic Questions,” https://rebeccacypess.substack.com/p/academic-questions.
See Kramer’s statement of purpose as editor in chief in Shira Kramer, “By the Students, for the Students: My Commitment to You,” The YU Observer (May 19, 2025), https://yuobserver.org/2025/05/by-the-students-for-the-students-my-promise-to-you/.
Hadassah Reich, “Getting to Know the Stern Library Staff, Part I,” The Commentator (December 26, 2023), https://yucommentator.org/2023/12/getting-to-know-the-stern-library-staff-part-i/.
Hadassah Reich, “Our Time on the Hill,” The Commentator (August 26, 2025), https://yucommentator.org/2025/08/our-time-on-the-hill/.