Ctl, ujm was being sarcastic, i think.
A lot of people say that the YH for haskalah was something our zaydes had to fend off and the nowadays the YH is all about tayvah. I think this was true in the 90s and 2000s. I believe the haskalah virus, with the mass dissemination capacity of the internet, has found many new hosts and is raging silently. Gone are the inflammatory newspapers and youth groups, but quietly, even lomdei torah are being influenced by garbage online. Prior to slifkin and the bumbling bloggers, no one had heard of haskalah driven hashkofa questions, rishonim who held rejected viewpoints, achronim who were influenced by Bible criticism(or even just the Bible critics themselves). No one honestly cared.
Just look at some of the posts online. I’m sure the posters who make claims like boruch above got ensnared by garbage online. They definitely didn’t hear it from their rebbeim.
Re, zionism… As long as there is a shmad state, there will be a need to know that we must be separate from it and recognize the false ideology it represents.
Re, other gedolim’s view of controversial rabbis…rabbi kook had a PR job done to him by both his supporters and detractors. His opponents tried to erase him from early 20th century Judaism. His supporters conjured up a fantasy world where the gedolim all held of him. The truth is that he was initially respected and held of, but was discovered to have had hashkofos that at the very least disqualified him from being an authority to rely on hashkofically. Rav zonnenfeld participated in the cherem. The chazon ish assered his seforim. Rav elchanan called him a rasha openly. That’s not talked about much, but it’s true.
Re, rabbi yoshe ber. It’s complicated; post war America needed solidarity. If the gedolim had made a huge machaah over him, it would have made a schism and undermined our efforts to rebuild torah. Especially considering that rabbi yoshe ber was on the side of building judaism and had faults that did not disrupt that goal overall. If torah were rebuilt and some people held of torah umada and Zionism, it’s wront, but can be addressed once we fight conservatism, reform and orthodox indifference to education. He was also a brisker at heart who often thought closer to his roots, sometimes wavering into modernishe ideas, sometimes not – he also firmly opposed bible criticism and radical changes that his followers would later try to implement (i.e feminism)
Yet in private, rav aharon definitely did not consider him to be one of the gedolei hador – go ask his talmidim; it’s not a secret.