Letter From the Editor- Fall 2014
by Amanda Botfeld
“Out with the old and in with the new,” as the saying goes. Time to upgrade. It’s a new school year, a new staff—over half our students are Leviathan first-timers—and, most importantly, we got a new drawer.
Yes, a new drawer. Leviathan has a drawer inside the student media filing cabinet; this year, we got top shelf.
But in organizing our perfectly average gray metal drawer, I came across something I had never seen before: one of the first Leviathans.
It was old, but not too old. Even from the 70’s, all the pages were still intact. I started looking through more Leviathans—we’ve paralleled history. We interviewed the first openly gay Rabbi. We spoke with Dennis Ross, one of the Camp David peace negotiators, a year before the peace process collapsed. We covered Israel’s nuclear weapons before computer research was even possible.
Pretty soon, other staff members took interest too. We started combing through vintage Leviathans, searching for new old ideas. We recycled bits and pieces of old Leviathans all throughout this quarter’s issue, from oreo double-stuffed ads to our “Levi-a-wha ??” on the opposite page. We even pulled an image straight from a 1978 Leviathan—a map of Israel superimposed on the Bay Area, for some much-needed perspective (see page 15).
One of our new staff members even photographed some of our old archives—documenting where we are, and where we’ve been (see page 4).
As I enter my final year on Leviathan, I find myself awestruck and inspired; I am amazed by this kind of passion. So many students have taken on Leviathan fullforce, adopting this publication as their own. They have, quite literally, taken history into their own hands.
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