anon1m0us: You did not “reiterate” point by point, and, again, the difference is not semantics. The differences are:
1. MO made it a religious value to acculturate, even bending halacha to do so. Everybody, including especially Rav SR Hirsch and even including Rav JBS, agrees that this is NOT a good thing.
2. MO violates halacha. Period. Whether or not Rav H. Schachter condones the various behaviors is not relevant. If one joins that community then they will be joining a community whose halachic standards are lower than traditional Orthodoxy (see point a, above, for reason #1).
3. I posted at least 5 points in my post from page 1. Point one, a YU administrative issue for posting this video on their blog (and for interspersing the genders as they did), was never addressed except for a false claim that it is only “hashkafa” when it is, instead, halacha to be marchik from arayos, which certainly does not allow any woman to throw herself around and almost come in contact with the man sitting next to her, and the points at the very end were never addressed either. Here is that post, again:
“
I doubt you believe that their halachic standards are “no less”, but, just in case, here is one small example, off-hand.
On the official YU blog, there is a video of an interview of a bunch of students, both male and female. Instead of interviewing them separately, or at least separating them to the greatest extent possible, they are interspersed male and female around one table. If anyone setting up this event cared about/had the proper sensitivity for tznius, then a different arrangement would have been made. After all, YU does maintain a school for each gender. So there’s no reason there couldn’t have been separate contingents from each school. Unless they intentionally wanted to mix them and convey that. That’s one point.
At certain points in the video you can easily observe one of the young women dressed not 100% appropriately and you can also observe one young woman laughing and, while seated, clearly leaning over and closer to “falling” into an unsuspecting young man next to her. Considering her hair was uncovered, I would be dan LiKaf zichus that she is not married to anyone including this young man. Therefore, in addition to the public impropriety of behaving this way regardless of marital status, since there was a man seated next to her it is that much worse. That’s a second point.
To the scoffers who will say I am making too much out of this, they are missing the point entirely (as scoffers often do).
I didn’t say this was on the level of that piece by the prutza who proudly advertised her znus in a long article for the Beacon, whose Torah Umada or cultural sensitivities evidently made them conclude it was appropriate to publish this and broaden this chilul Hashem. This video is very far from that, of course.
But since you asked about standards, I answered about standards. As YU proudly proclaims, that standard is “Nowhere but Here”, as in YU.
So please be honest. If you like YU’s derech and think its liberties are muttar, then that’s your choice. If you think it’s perfectly halchicly acceptable to review bars/pubs in a YU (student) publication and talk about being “hit on”, then that’s also your choice. But please don’t falsely characterize their MO standards as Orthodox when those standards are, instead, only MO and NOT traditional Orthodox. “