Shabtai (society)
| Formation | 1996 |
|---|---|
| Type | Secret society |
| Headquarters | Yale University |
| Location |
Shabtai (formerly known as Eliezer) is a global Jewish leadership society whose membership consists of Yale University students, alumni, and current and former faculty.TIME magazine has referred to Shabtai as Yale's "modish club du jour" and the campus' "secret society of a different stripe."
Founded in 1996 by then-graduate-students Oliver Benjamin Karp, Noah Feldman, Cory Booker, and Michael Alexander and Rabbi Shmully Hecht, the society aims to attract Jewish and non-Jewish leaders on Yale's campus in order to create a dialogue between various branches of Judaism and between the secular and religious worlds in an intellectual salon setting. The society's Friday night meetings, discussion-based format and ethos of mutual improvement have drawn comparisons to Benjamin Franklin's Junto Club. As one journalist described it, "like Yale’s famous secret societies, Shabtai is elite and exclusive, but unlike the infamous Skull & Bones or Scroll & Key or Book & Snake, it is not clandestine." Another observer described it as "not that different from the men’s clubs at Harvard," however, the society has never been gender exclusive. Though historically the society has had several names, in 2014 the trustees voted to change its name permanently to Shabtai. Its motto was "Uniquely Jewish, uniquely Yale."
New members are typically selected or "tapped" before the commencement of their senior or last year before graduation from Yale. Shabtai boasts a diverse membership of Yale students, alumni, and current and former faculty, including:
Guests, speakers, and scholars in residence at Shabtai (both affiliated and unaffiliated with Yale) have included Aharon Barak, Ehud Barak, Richard Goldstone, Senator Richard Blumenthal, Guido Calabresi, Alan Dershowitz, David Brooks, Jake Tapper, Amy Chua, Stephen L. Carter, William Kristol, Jonathan Klein, Adin Steinsaltz, Jay Winter, Thomas B. Griffith, Jerry Springer, Will Eisner, Jack Balkin, Donna Dubinsky, Governor Dannel Malloy, Senator Joe Lieberman, Elizabeth Wurtzel, Eric Alterman, Charles Grodin, Elliott Gould, Leslie Epstein, Dovid Katz, Joshua Safran, Peter Salovey, Norman Finkelstein, Philip Weiss, Jeremy Ben-Ami, Trish Hall, and the late Zvi Kolitz and Sherwin Nuland.
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