The Young Men’s and Women’s Hebrew Association on 92nd Street and Lexington Avenue in New York City, commonly called the “92nd Street Y,” is an improbable collection of enterprises embracing, in addition to the famous Poetry Center and its chamber and concert music recitals, the usual community center program, an extensive social and club program for high school boys and girls, the Dance Center, a dance school, a music school, a troupe of children’s entertainers called “The Merry-Go-Rounders,” a neighborhood old folks’ club, classes in Americanization for immigrants, and an adult education center. In one month the Kaufmann Auditorium, one of the Y’s public halls, offered Stephen Spender reading from his poems; Nora Kaye as part of the Dance Laboratory conducted by Walter Terry; Vera Zorina the ballerina, reading Ronsard’s poetry in the original with the Pro Musica Antiqua ensemble; Professor Sidney Hook and Rabbi Leo Jung discussing “Is There a Secular Jew?”; The Dybbuk, a film; an exhibition of paintings by the Manhattan Gallery Group; the Dance Drama Company; Rosalyn Tureck, the pianist, in an all-Bach recital; a concert reading of Death of a Salesman, introduced and directed by Arthur Miller; and three plays for children.
The range of activities of the largest and oldest Jewish community center in the United States has reflected the changing needs and tastes of New York’s Jews over the past eighty years. The Y opened its first modest quarters, consisting of club rooms and a library, in a rented apartment at 112 West 21st Street in September 1874. Every few years it moved from one three or four-room apartment over a bakery or dry-cleaning establishment to another, but always keeping to the center of Manhattan. The Y’s first location of any permanence was a three-story house at 65th Street and Lexington Avenue. A photograph shows a plain, narrow, weathered front with the letters “YMHA” shakily whitewashed on the wall to the left of the entry. In the 80’s, with the influx of East European Jews, it opened a branch on East Broadway for teaching English and “Americanization.” In 1889 this branch expanded into an independent center calling itself the Educational Alliance-destined to become a famous East Side institution. The Y, however, continued to maintain its own orientation program for immigrants, and does so to this day.
The Y came to its present corner in 1900, when Jacob H. Schiff donated the site and the four-story structure then on it. The building that stands there now owes its existence largely to the efforts of a former president, Judge Joseph M. Proskauer (also a former president of the American Jewish Committee), who in 1929 rounded up two million dollars in a matter of weeks, began construction that same year, and saw the new building opened in 1930.
The institution had all along been a center for men. During the last war, however, the YMHA played host to the YWHA, whose building on 110th Street was taken over by the army. The merger, originally temporary, worked so well that it was made permanent in 1945, at which time the 92nd Street Y was renamed the “Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association.” Now even the pool and gyms are run on a co-ed basis.
The Y in all its branching activities is presided over by Jack Nadel, executive director since 1922. Mr. Nadel came to work fifty years ago as a pin-boy at the institution he now directs, and has held every post, from dramatics instructor to club director, in Y administration. (Incidentally, he founded and directed an employment service—now the Federation Employment Service—but, understandably enough, has never been able to find time to take advantage of his membership in the bar.) In a year or two he intends to retire and devote himself to writing the story of his long association with the Y.
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I was introduced to the Y by Mr. Carl Urbont, its assistant director, whose broad shoulders and benevolent manner give him the aspect of an athletic cherub. Mr. Urbont, who is in his thirties, served in Morocco during World War II; he traces his interest in social work to a wartime effort to obtain medical supplies and clothing from America for the forty babies born every month in the mellah of Marrakech. A graduate of the New York School of Social Work after the war, he worked in an East Side settlement house, then overseas for the Joint Distribution Committee, and came to the Y in 1950.
Mr. Urbont guided me through the Y, beginning with the five dormitory floors at the top of the building, where rooms are rented to foreign students, newcomers to the city looking for jobs, and other such individuals. Unlike most Y’s, however, the 92nd Street center does not provide transient accommodations. The athletic facilities occupy the two floors immediately below. Here are two gyms, locker-rooms with showers, and a row of four-wall handball courts with galleries for spectators. The Y is a member of the American Amateur Athletic Union, competes with other organizations in all sports, and enters its athletes in the Olympic tryouts. On weekdays, when most of the younger membership is in school, the gyms are used by adults and neighborhood children. The nearby Lycée Française sends its physical-training classes to them—one often meets crowds of French-speaking schoolboys in the corridors. The rest contain classrooms, offices, an auditorium, a gallery, and several lounges.
On the ground floor, the big lobby giving on Lexington Avenue is painted a dull cream, its high oak-beamed ceiling fading to a baronial (or perhaps institutional) dimness. A brass Star of David frames the clock over the elevator doors, and brass plaques stud the walls, one honoring Judge Proskauer, another listing Y members who died in the war. To the left as one enters, glass-paneled doors open on the much frequented Warburg Lounge, full of sofas, easy chairs, a television set, and a case of athletic trophies. To the right is the administration counter, looking like a hotel desk with its files and pigeon-holes. On Sundays it is besieged by teen-agers with dues to pay or forms to fill out. Sunday is the Y’s busiest day, with four to five thousand visitors and members descending on the 92nd Street building from every part of the city, by subway, bus, taxi, and car. The lobby fills up with a dense crowd of chattering and laughing youngsters, who after a while drift away to meetings and activities.
The younger generation dominates the Y’s program. Reaching far out of its own neighborhood to gather together young people from every section and area, the Y has long since taken on many of the aspects of a city center. The Sunday program for adolescents consists of athletics in the gym or pool, club meetings, and, late in the day, dances for the different age groups. In between, the members drift through the lounges, lobbies, cafeteria, bowling alley, game rooms, and library. Although the purpose of these activities is austerely stated in the Y’s constitution as “the improvement of the mental, moral, spiritual, cultural, social and physical condition of young men and young women and the fostering of Judaism,” the atmosphere is warm, sociable, and relaxed, and there are few external signs of control or restriction.
During the hours from five to seven the Y gradually changes from a youth center, a hive of adolescent noise and callow horseplay, to a semi-educational haunt for artists, music lovers, and students—a center for the ever-growing host of those in dogged pursuit of culture. Knots of people gather to inspect the long row of posters announcing cultural events. Young men in their twenties, books under their arms, slip through the crowd to wait for the evening’s concert in the seclusion of the Kaufmann Art Gallery. The Saidenberg Little Symphony plays Bach in the auditorium on the main floor while the jukebox in the basement cafeteria grinds out “Dim, Dim the Lights” and “Papa Loves Mambo,” for a leftover group of teen-agers.
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One Sunday I visited one of the Y’s youth clubs, a group of fifteen-year-old boys called the Warriors. They met in one of the classrooms under the supervision of their adult leader, Mr. Murray Sollender. The Warriors had been organized about a year before. Dues were fifty cents a week; most of the boys paid under protest. When the collection was announced one boy left the room, indifferent to the boos and jeers that followed him. The main item of business was planning a party for the Junior Exotics, a girls’ club. The soft drinks presented a problem. Should they be got in large or small bottles? What would they cost? How would they be transported? How could they be kept cool? Every time the meeting tied itself up, Mr. Sollender intervened, changed the subject for a while, and then returned to it.
He suggested to the boys that they get potato chips, candy, and even party decorations. The Warriors didn’t seem to want to bother that much, but when it was pointed out to them that the Junior Exotics might reciprocate if the Warriors’ party was successful, the boys agreed. “After all,” one said, “this is our first social and we want to make a good impression.” The choice of dance records was another problem. Harry, clearly the expert, offered his collection of records, and recommended numbers that would encourage slow, close dancing. However, the vote was for variety and Harry was asked to bring lindies, mambos, and tangos as well.
Most of the clubs have fanciful names: Panthers, Dynamos, Irresistibles, Intellects, Exotics, Charms, Epicureans, Jolies, Loreleis, Imperial Aces, Samsons, and Athenas. Also: Live Y’ers, Confuseds, Innocence, Pending, Vixens, and Canadian Club Still others contain apparently local allusions: Usacs, Loracs, Warocs, Protons, Nonemes, Alspays.
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The Y’s new members are received by Mrs. Florence Arginteanu, or one of her assistants, in the forbiddingly named Intake Department. In 1953-54 Mrs. Arginteanu’s department interviewed 2,700 applicants, who checked their interests and hobbies on form cards that ranged from cartooning through bicycling to mountain climbing. Often whole youth clubs transplant themselves from their own neighborhoods to the Y. Recently a boys’ club from the Parkchester section of the Bronx came to the Y, following the advice of a father who was an alumnus of the institution. Often scouts from youth clubs come in to “case” the place and report back to their organizations. The task of fitting a new member of the Y into one of the clubs is delicate, for he must be voted in by the club members. The usual strategy is to turn the prospective member loose in the gym and classrooms until he makes friends and is asked to join a club. He usually does not have to wait more than a few weeks.
According to the staff, the young people’s reasons for joining have mostly to do with needing “wholesome Jewish companionship.” The teen-agers themselves put this with a somewhat different emphasis: girls say they are interested in boys; boys say they are interested in girls and sports. Marriages between members are frequent, as everybody tells you.
The triumph of this side of the Y’s activities is the Sunday night dance, the great occasion of the week for teen-agers. The lights are dimmed in the immense auditorium and recorded dance music is piped through a loudspeaker. Boys and girls pour in until the place becomes a vast mass of couples scarcely able to move, much less dance. A few jitter-buggers go into an adjoining room kept clear for them.
The girls have a standard uniform for these dances: sweater, skirt, and flat-heeled shoes. The variations are small: fur collars on the sweaters, or little necklaces of pearls or gold chain. The boys are costumed more variously. Those with duck-tail haircuts favor pegged trousers and leather jackets. Many boys wear sports shirts in peach, orange, or blue pastels. A few appear in conventional suits, white shirts, and ties. A handful have even adopted the Madison Avenue look, narrow-lapeled gray or blue suit, short haircut, and even, in extreme cases, a pipe, generally unlit.
The official purpose of the youth program, to help members become “valuable Jewish citizens,” is not strongly insisted on. Opportunities to absorb Judaism are offered but, as a fifteen-year-old member of several years’ standing told me, “They don’t bother you with religion.” Club meetings rank far behind basketball, pool, and dancing in popularity. On the whole, the Y offers young people a chance to do the things they like. Sam Levenson put it this way in reminiscing about his own Y days: “Playing baseball on the streets was for bums, but playing baseball at the Y was Jewish.”
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In the somewhat dingy basement cafeteria, the diner is confronted with two trays for silverware, one marked “Meat” and the other “Dairy.” The meat counter serves delicatessen sandwiches certified as absolutely kosher; there is a separate counter for dairy. Signs ask patrons to sit on the side of the cafeteria facing the counter where they have bought their meals. In spite of that, however, people often share meat and dairy meals at the same table.
Jewish holidays are observed on the traditional two-day schedule. Like the kosher kitchen, this may be a matter of little importance to many Y members who are Reform or secularist Jews. But, as one director explained, as a community institution the Y operates on the principle of inclusion.
Y officials estimate that attendance in the adult education classes is about 88 per cent Jewish; in children’s classes, about 95 per cent; in the teen-age clubs, 98 per cent; at concerts, 75 per cent; at dance and poetry events, only 50 per cent. The old folks’ club, since the Y is close to the heart of Yorkville, a German section, happens to be about 50 per cent non-Jewish. Shouts of “Achtung” generally ring out during their surprisingly lively dancing sessions.
About a third of the Y’s budget is contributed by the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies. The rest comes from fees, and almost none of the activities is free. “When a member pays for an activity,” explained Mr. Urbont, “it forms a psychological bond that links the person and the program in which he participates. Also, like any other contribution, the fee is a fulfillment of the member’s responsibility to support communal activities.” The Board of Directors will occasionally make up a deficit or subsidize a particular program.
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The Y’s Cultural and Educational Department is a realm of its own. It is easily the most active center of the arts in New York City, offering classes in literature, public performances in music, dance, and drama, and art exhibitions. Almost unique among such programs, it pays its way. The program is entirely professional. The performers in the Kaufmann Auditorium are usually well-known and often great figures. The various concert series offered in the Kaufmann auditorium—incidentally, acoustically one of the finest chambers in the country—has been rated by many serious music lovers to be far superior fare to that offered by Carnegie Hall or Town Hall. In each of the arts the Y draws a small but devoted audience such as will attend a subscription series of Beethoven piano sonatas; concerts of medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque music; or a reading of Moby Dick. During the great blizzard of 1947, when neither subway trains nor street traffic were moving in New York, a standing-room audience appeared for a recital by the Budapest String Quartet, and three hundred people came to hear Stephen Spender read his poems.
The Cultural and Educational Department’s offerings are not limited to the arts. Classes in philosophy, psychology, and Jewish subjects, as well as lectures on social and political problems, are a staple part of its program. In this respect, the Y resembles closely such projects as the New School and the evening and extension classes of the city colleges. During World War II there was an exceptionally large number of pupils for the citizenship and Americanization classes, many of them European doctors being coached for American medical boards.
About a fifth of the educational program is devoted to specifically Jewish studies: like Yiddish, Hebrew, Jewish history, Jewish music, and Jewish folk dancing. The problems besetting Jews in the contemporary world are favorite subjects for evening lectures. Typical titles are: “The American Character and Anti-Semitism,” “Should Jews Assimilate Through Intermarriage?” “Are the Jews Still in Exile?” and “Sexual Problems in the Light of Jewish Tradition.”
The Y’s most ambitious Jewish course is a two-year history of Jewish civilization, described in the Bulletin of Educational Activities as follows: “The aim of this course is to give an over-all picture of the development of Jewish Civilization from its earliest beginnings to the present day, with particular attention to original sources.” In celebration of the American Jewish Tercentenary, the Educational Department sponsored a “Jewish Omnibus Series” including readings, films, programs of folk music, and lectures.
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The Y’s classes (which are to be distinguished from its lecture series) meet for two hours once a week, twelve to fifteen times a semester; they cost from ten to forty dollars. There are special rates for husbands and wives attending the same class. Of the 1,823 students registered in 1952-53, 1,100 were between twenty and forty. There were about two and a half times as many women as men. The largest single group described themselves as “office workers.” Other well-represented occupations were “housewife,” “teacher,” “salesman,” and “writer.” There were thirty-one physicians, twenty-seven engineers, nine lawyers, and one policewoman. About a third had had some college education, the majority of these being graduates, and 136 had had a year or more of graduate work.
The motives that bring people to the Y’s classes are extremely varied. A young woman who had been an English major at Vassar, and now works as an editor for a woman’s magazine, regarded the poetry course as a continuation of her college work. One undergraduate found in the poetry class the recognition he could not gain at New York University for his favorite writer, Gertrude Stein. Few of the students, it is safe to say, attend the classes for purely social reasons.
In his history of the Educational Department, Dr. William Kolodney, the director, explains the aims of the courses. “The story of modern man’s attempt to fill his free time is familiar,” he says. “Unlike other fields, the arts give every person the opportunity for creative experience, and no joy is greater than the joy of the creator. The child who makes a rag doll and the adult who makes a simple vase, paints a familiar landscape, or writes a lyric poem—all share this creative experience.”
As part of its program of offering “every person the opportunity for creative experience,” the Y runs the busiest children’s school of dancing in the city, and an important national dance center. In the school are four hundred children, from three upward. On weekday afternoons, tiny, barefoot, pony-tailed girls in leotards scamper through the halls. In the evening, about one hundred and fifty adults take courses in ballroom and modern dancing. Mr. Fred Berk, a specialist in Jewish folk dance, teaches Arabic, Yemenite, Eastern European, and Israeli dances. There are fifteen hundred dance students, and forty instructors.
The Y has a special standing among followers of modern dance. Dr. Kolodney became interested in modern dance for the Y in 1935 when he became aware of the special devotion of its fans and their loyalty as an audience. Most of the leaders of modern dance, including Martha Graham, Janet Collins, Pearl Primus, Valerie Bettis, Charles Weidman, Jose Limon, Hanya Holm, and Doris Humphrey, present director of the Dance Center, have taught or performed at the Y. Dr. Kolodney has firmly defended the “recreational” character of the dance program. He allows only two classes for professionals. One, in advanced choreography, is given in the afternoon, when classroom space is not at a premium. The other is a seminar and workshop for settlement house dance teachers, a concession which Dr. Kolodney feels is justified in terms of its ultimate recreational results.
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The Poetry Center is an outgrowth of Dr. Kolodney’s own interest in poetry. After coming to the Y he taught a poetry class for a short while himself, and then in 1935 established the Poetry Center with Mr. Norman MacLeod as first director. “The Poetry Center,” he wrote, “was started to meet the needs of the very few persons in New York to whom poetry offers the theological, the ethical, and the aesthetic equivalents of traditional religion.”
In its first phase, the Poetry Center conducted Small classes in the writing and interpretation of poetry and staged readings in the Kaufmann Art Gallery, which was at that time a lounge with a capacity of about one hundred fifty. Then Mr. MacLeod introduced the practice of bringing poets to the Y to read from their own works. Experiments combining poetry with film, music, and dance were attempted with varying success. One, a Poet’s Theater for presentation of verse plays, was inaugurated as a two-year experimental venture, but was abandoned after a single performance.
The Poetry Center began its rapid growth in 1949, when a series of readings by some of the world’s foremost poets was announced. Two hundred and fifty subscribers paid ten dollars for admission to the entire series, and attendance at individual events jumped from seventy-five to between four hundred and eight hundred and fifty. Next year, when the number of subscribers rose to seven hundred and ten, the readings were moved from the lounge to the Kaufmann Auditorium, which holds more than eight hundred. Today this auditorium is often filled, and some of the events are held to standing room. In 1953-54, the Center showed a profit of $5,000-from poetry!
The Poetry Center has had nearly all the important poets of England and America, including T. S. Eliot, the late Wallace Stevens, Osbert and Edith Sitwell, Robert Frost, Stephen Spender, Herbert Read, Marianne Moore, the late Dylan Thomas, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Mark Van Doren, Richard Eberhart, Karl Jay Shapiro, William Carlos Williams, Randall Jarrell, and Ogden Nash. The three most popular, in order, are Eliot, the Sitwells, and Robert Frost. Eliot’s trips to the United States always include two public stops: Harvard and the 92nd Street Y. The poets are protected from intellectual bobby-soxers seeking autographs by an arrangement which permits them, after their stint is done, to sign copies of their works and exchange remarks with buyers from behind a large table in the lounge. The Center’s original scope is often stretched to include prose writers like Joyce Cary, Truman Capote, and Arthur Miller, and representatives of other media like Maya Deren and Charles Laughton. Jacques Maritain appeared to a jammed audience.
There is no doubt that one of the special attractions of the Poetry Center for the young men and women devoted to it is the chance it affords them to be in the living presence of the great. In the lobby of the auditorium, before a reading program, one hears them talk about the poets they will be seeing in a few minutes with high, almost breathless anticipation. Inside, they may often be seen quite literally on the edges of their seats, in a sort of unconscious straining to make contact with Eliot or the Sitwells or Capote. As one boy put it, “This is a wonderful way to meet the immortals of our time, to see them as human beings. Where else could you do this?” A young lady compared the Poetry Center with some of the adult education classes in poetry appreciation given throughout the city. “Here we don’t just read the poetry or talk about it endlessly. We actually are listening to, looking at, the artists.”
Reading poetry aloud was undoubtedly revived in our time by the Y. Norman MacLeod, the Y’s first Poetry Center director, now conducts a poetry center in San Francisco. The Museum of Modern Art has staged poetry readings modeled on those at the Y. The Y itself sponsors a radio program of poetry readings, “Anthology,” which is heard over NBC on Sunday afternoons. Miss Elizabeth Kray, the Center’s assistant director, told me that universities and community centers all over the country often write to the Y to ask how they can attract poets and organize reading programs of their own. When Dr. Kolodney joined the Y the cultural program was judged by attendance and was specifically Jewish. The new program he inaugurated in 1935, on the other hand, “. . . set out to meet the intellectual and spiritual needs of that element of the population which found its recreation primarily in the world of ideas and in the practice and appreciation of the arts beyond the folk level.”
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Dr. Kolodney’s reorganization met considerable opposition from the Y’s Board of Directors. Many felt that the Y should not support non-sectarian activities; this is a point that is still hotly contested nationally today, and has been the subject of a number of serious controversies. But Dr. Kolodney argued that if the Y limited its scope to Jewish material, it would fail to reach the large number of Jews who were interested in culture generally rather than in Jewish culture alone. Furthermore, he pointed out that learning and intellectual discussion in themselves have been traditional forms of recreation among Jews. “A program of recreation through the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake and particularly through the arts as a means of appreciation is,” he argued, “in a sense a continuation of the Jewish religious tradition.”
He offered the example of a typical poetry class conducted by Kimon Friar, a former director of the Poetry Center. The class would meet at 8:40 in the evening, carry on a heated discussion about T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and kindred subjects until the Y closed at 11:30, and then adjourn to a nearby restaurant where the conversation usually ended at about one in the morning. This sort of activity, said Dr. Kolodney, is typically Jewish, even though Mr. Friar and the restaurant were both Greek.
The Board of Directors also feared the establishment of a “little college” at the Y, the kind of thing that had developed at the Chicago YMCA, whose program of accredited courses became Roosevelt College. Dr. Kolodney assured the Board that he did not intend to establish a school, but to use education as a means of recreation only—perhaps the present-day equivalent of Torah l’shma.
Because he wants to keep the courses recreational, giving everyone a chance to talk up, Dr. Kolodney has consistently tried to turn lectures into seminars; seminars involve the whole student in a recreational experience, he feels. The group of seminars inaugurated in his first year at the Y marked for Dr. Kolodney the “golden age” of the educational program. (It lasted only three years, ending when it lost the subsidy it required.) Dr. Kolodney gathered a group of scholars in various fields, including Sidney Hook, Ernest Nagel, Alfred Tarski (philosophers), Alexander Lesser (anthropologist), Meyer Schapiro (professor of fine arts), Otto Klineberg (psychologist), and Davis S. Nathan (mathematician), and matched them with a selected group of adult students who had studied liberal arts in college. The latter were chosen by interview and had to agree to spend six hours a week reading for the course, and to write a paper every two weeks. The classes, which had twelve students each, were conducted, says Dr. Kolodney, by a method “more Socratic than Socrates.” He regards these seminars as valuable examples of intellectual activity for recreation. “As a rule,” Professor Hook once wrote, “the seminars were so exciting intellectually that the individuals enrolled in them often claimed that it was the high point of the week, and all their free time during the week was spent in preparation for those two hours. I am confident that those who gave the seminars learned as much from them as those who took the seminars. At least I did.”
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The education department’s office on the second floor of the Y has a row of desks, set end to end, on which are signs reading “Information,” “Registration,” “Tickets,” and “Tuition Fees.” The staff works busily but casually amid a clutter of telephones, thermos bottles, staplers, postal scales, typewriters, schedules, and other articles more or less necessary to the complicated operation of this department. One corner has a large and busy switchboard. The bulletin board listing current events, the day I was there, displayed the names of Max Lerner, Wallace Stevens, Henry Raphael Gold, Amedée Ozenfant, Louis MacNeice, Dimitri Mitropoulis, Andre Eglevsky, Mieczyalaw Horszowski, E. E. Cummings, the New York Woodwind Orchestra, and the Budapest String Quartet. Photographs of T. S. Eliot, the Sit-wells, Frost, and MacNeice were on the wall.
Dr. Kolodney’s walnut-paneled office, with its soft carpeting, bookshelves, comfortable couch, recessed lighting, and massive glass-topped walnut desk, is spacious and pleasant. The prosperous atmosphere of the office is not misleading. The department has an annual budget of about $200,000, enough to run a small college, almost all of which comes from fees.
Dr. Kolodney is a small, relaxed man in his fifties whose white hair, rimless glasses, and the tweed suit he usually wears give him a gentle professorial air. It is as if he were an academic visitor in his own glamorous office. On his desk I noticed a copy of the Shakespeare Newsletter and an edition of Randall Jarrell’s Poetry and the Age.
Dr. Kolodney was born in Mottele, a town near Minsk, and is proud of being a fellow townsman of Chaim Weizmann. He came to the United States at the age of four, grew up in New York City, and was graduated from the Teachers’ Institute of the Jewish Theological Seminary. After teaching Hebrew for a time, he served in an extension program in New York City supervised by Dr. Samson Benderly, whom he and others call the father of American Jewish education. It was the aim of this program to interest Jewish children in the public schools in Judaism. Working with the students during after-school hours, Dr. Kolodney organized plays, poetry readings, and holiday celebrations with some sort of Jewish content. Here, he told me, he first learned how the secular arts might be used to bring one into an affiliation with Jewish life. After this work he joined the Pittsburgh Y, then the largest in the country, as Educational Director, and after organizing a cultural-educational program there which is still flourishing, came to the 92nd Street Y in 1934.
A recent visitor heard him explain the rationale of the Y’s cultural and educational program thus: “The path we tread,” he said, “is a very narrow and special one. We should like very much to offer more and more courses of specifically Jewish content, and every time we get the opportunity we do so, even when we have to subsidize these from our other offerings. Of course, we are criticized for being too secular, too parevdik, by the ultra-Orthodox; the whole community center movement is so criticized and we bear the brunt because we’re the largest center. But many of our critics would like us simply to remain dark, untenanted, except for what they would call ‘positively’ Jewish classes, lectures, or concerts. Actually, we offer a richer Jewish program as part of our total program than we would be able to if we limited ourselves to Jewish material. Compare our classes in Yiddish, Hebrew, Jewish history, religious thought, Jewish philosophy, current Jewish issues with those offered in any similar institution, the largest synagogue center, say.
As for our general offerings, they must all be on the highest possible level and broadly within the stream of Jewish tradition. We will, for example, not offer a course in how to play bridge, but we might offer one in chess. We stress recreation through the arts, the liberal arts too. And there is also a religious aspect here. The mood that prevails during a poetry reading, for instance, when many people come simply to sit in the presence of a poet, is almost religious in its reverence. This is true even when the poet doesn’t read well.
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Actually we try hard to get away from the academic notion of courses. There is a control and a compulsion in formal course work not conducive to recreation. We like our students to be inspired. We want them to be doing something—dancing, painting, writing, talking—using their bodies in some way, enjoying themselves while doing all this. We’re not here to give them what we happen to think might be good for them; we give them what they want now, or what we think they will come to want once given a sample. And always we try to present everything on the highest level, in the most dignified way, and in the best tradition of quality and seriousness. We insist in our contracts that no public performance may start later than five minutes after the announced time, and late-comers to a musical performance are seated only during the intermission. We’re always ready to try out something new, like two series we’ve been talking about lately, one presenting younger poets, the other younger musicians, artists who are on the way to achieving wider recognition.
He paused reflectively. “I think we’re doing well, all things considered. Perhaps there should be more solid achievement required in some of our classes, and Auden is going to ask his students in a course on Shakespeare’s sonnets next fall to do more than merely come to class—-they’ll have to memorize some of the poems. But we are bringing ideas and art to the general community, we do not pander to vulgarity in any of our undertakings for any reason, and even though some of our artists or teachers or lecturers may not be Jewish, and regardless of who is in the audience, all this strikes me as essentially Jewish.”
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