A kingdom of fools?

by Reb Yudel

David Klinghoffer has begun blogging on BeliefNet. So far, I've challenged him on torture and materialistic medicine. I wonder: What foolish or evil things would I advocate for if my salary depended on it?

For a book length refutation of Klinghoffer's last book, look here.

Cabalist's Daughter by Yori Yanover is "laugh-out-loud funny" says Binghamton Jewish Reporter

by Reb Yudel

Rabbi Rachel Esserman of the Binghamton Jewish Reporter looks at The Cabalist's Daughter and likes what she sees. Her review begins:

While it’s not uncommon for novels to offer wisdom about life’s absurdities, few manage to do so while being laugh-out-loud funny. That’s what makes two new tales of woe and apocalypse, "Isaac’s Torah: Concerning the Life of Isaac Jacob Blumenfeld Through Two World Wars, Three Concentration Camps, and Five Motherlands" by Angel Wagenstein (Handsel Books) and "The Cabalist’s Daughter: A Novel of Practical Messianic Redemption" by Yori Yanover (Ben Yehuda Press), so much fun to read. My first impulse is to fill this review with quotations from both works to show just how wonderful their dark humor is, but that wouldn’t do justice to the complex and interesting plots they also contain.

Esserman turns to The Cabalist's Daughter after discussing Isaac's Torah:

While the events of "Isaac’s Torah" are loosely based on history, the same cannot be said for those portrayed in Yanover’s "The Cabalist’s Daughter." This offbeat look at contemporary messianic redemption and the end of the world starts slowly, but gathers steam as Nechama Gutkind leaves her adopted parents’ house in order to facilitate the beginning of the messianic age. On her side is a 130-year-old master kabbalist, Rabbi Lionel Abulafia, who has written "The Cabalist’s Handbook of Practical Messianic Redemption," which offers a humorous, and at times almost-fall-off-your-chair funny, look at how God created and developed the world. Against her is Samael, otherwise known as Satan, who is, as in traditional Jewish lore, an angel doing God’s bidding, even if his actions seem evil to humans. Samael has set in motion a plan to destroy the universe in order to return it to the wholeness that existed before creation. Nechama seeks to redeem humankind before his plan succeeds.

While the plot in the second half moves quickly and creates a great deal of suspense, my favorite parts are the work’s strange and wonderful theological discourses. For example, Abulafia writes that "some scholars suggest Creation is the handiwork of a sadistic celestial child, who delights in pulling the wings off butterflies and babies from their mothers’ bosoms. Soon, they surmise, God’s mother will come into the room and smack him, and thus bring an end to our suffering." (This is one of the milder interpretations of celestial behavior offered.) When explaining Abulafia’s interpretation of Samael’s behavior, Yanover notes that the unfortunate angel is only doing his job: Samael "is in charge of destroying the Jews, and so followed orders like a loyal soldier." Even though Jewish prophesies usually predict his defeat, that doesn’t stop him: "If Samael were to take every blasted prophecy seriously, he might have as well closed up shop and concentrated on his real passion, creating crossword puzzles for the New York Times."

Readers should be wary of the novel’s interpretations of Jewish history and mysticism: these sections are funny, but clearly biased. The branch of Judaism Nachama and Abulafia belong to is the Cosmic Wisdom movement, which is loosely based on the Lubavich Chasidic movement. The similarities between the movements include a rabbi who encourages his followers to open Cosmic Wisdom Houses across the world and the debate among members of both communities over whether their late leader is really the messiah.

The craziness featured in "The Cabalist’s Daughter" is closer to that of such works as "Good Omens" by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett and "The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams than it is to more traditional Jewish novels. However, it was a great pleasure to finally read a novel featuring a Jewish theological approach to the apocalypse.

Although Wagenstein and Yanover offer bleak looks at the world and jaded thoughts about the nature of God, their unflagging humor and enthusiasm prevent their novels from becoming depressing. Trying to compare these works is difficult because they each offer something wonderful. "Isaac’s Torah" is the more successful literary work and Wagenstein the better writer. However, for sheer fun and weirdness, "The Cabalist’s Daughter" excels on a scale with which the other novel cannot compete. Fortunately for me, I don’t really have to choose. Both books are welcome additions to my shelf.

The Ultimate Israeli Party

by Reb Yudel

Every election, Israel's parliamentary system encourages the creation of small political parties that never manage to garner enough votes to actually win Knesset seats.

This year, the process has resulted in a party so sublime in its improbable Israeliness that it can never be equaled.

JTA reports:

Perhaps the most unusual alliance in this year's election is between the Green Leaf Party, which has no seats in the Knesset, and the Pensioners' Party, which has six. Renamed the Holocaust Survivors' and Grown-Up Green Leaf Party, the party's prime issues are legalizing marijuana and pensioners' rights, especially...  Read More those of Holocaust survivors. One of the party's TV ads shows party head Gil Kopatch smoking a joint at the grave of Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion.

Here's another election commercial:

The New York Times discovers The New Jewish Times

by Reb Yudel

The New York Times rediscovers Yossi Klein Halevi's youthful magazine, The New Jewish Times. Unfortunately, and typically, the Times overplays the Sex In The City angle and gives short shrift to the actual content. Some day I might just haul the six rare issues up from the basement and post them online...

Not such a long time ago, in a galaxy not so far away, specifically in the downtown Manhattan of 1980 with its punk clubs and squeegee men and loose-joint dealers and $150-a-month sublets, a moment of literary and journalistic kismet was occurring in a factory loft halfway between the East Village and Chelsea.

The loft held the mismatched desks, layout tables and glaring overhead lights that constituted the office of New Jewish Times, a new and precarious monthly magazine. As for the staff, it was a miscellany of gifted malcontents and sundry outsiders — Soviet émigrés, children of survivors, yeshiva rebels, CBGB regulars, “a bunch of slobs with overheated opinions,” in the recollection of one alumnus.

With their very first issue, those opinionated slobs declared their independence from the norms of Jewish journalism, whether sober journals like Commentary and Dissent or the boosterish newspapers sponsored by local Jewish federations. The entire cover consisted of an illustration of a mushroom cloud with the deadpan headline asking, “Next Year in Jerusalem?”

The Times might have noted, for instance, that fear of an Iranian-sponsored mushroom cloud looms large over most of Yossi's reporting these days--and in fact define's contemporary mainstream Jewish journalism. Read the article for yourself.

The Jewish Bob Dylan (June 15, 1972 radio show)

by Reb Yudel

From The Internet Archive: Bernard Timberg analyzes the songs of Bob Dylan looking for Jewish themes and imagery. He identifies messianic longings in Quinn the Eskimo, references to Jewish burial practices in Masters of War, and finds significance in the fact that the initials of John Wesley Harding can be interpreted as the name of the Jewish God, YHWH. Issues such as social justice and a sense of out-sideness imbue the songs of Dylan as they do the history of the Jewish people. Timberg also interviews a number of people who knew Dylan when he was still Bob Zimmerman in an effort to investigate the Jewish roots of his music, including a woman that was at his Bar Mitzvah and a counselor at a Jewish summer camp Dylan attended as a child. Also explored are a number of myths about Dylan that touch upon his Jewish identity.

An editorial that will live in infamy

by Reb Yudel

Kung Fu Jew blogged earlier this week about reacting to the horrible Mumbai terrorist killings as universalistic Jews. It’s worth pointing out a particularly egregious example of the particularistic Jewish response that appeared in last week’s New York Jewish Week.

The editorial, “Another Day Of Infamy“, linked the Mumbai killings to Kishinev and Babi Yar. It begins:

And so Mumbai joins Kishinev, Hebron, Berlin, Babi Yar, Maalot, Sbarro’s, Sderot (we could easily mention 150 other sites) to the annals of sudden infamy. Another “wake-up call,” we’re told, for a somnambulant world. It is somehow perverse, even cruel, however, to speak of a wake-up call when the six Jews killed in Mumbai by Islamic terrorists were preceded by more than 2,000 Jews killed (and 5,000 wounded, some horrifically) by Islamic terrorists in the last decade alone.

You wouldn’t know from this paragraph — or the eight that follow — that nearly two hundred non-Jews were killed in the coordinated terror attacks whose primary targets were foreigners in Mumbai. The official paper of the UJA-Federation of Greater New York treats them as unpersons. Has the paper officially bought into the Chabad doctrine that gentiles are less human than Jews?

Shame on Jonathan Mark for writing this editorial, Gary Rosenblatt for publishing it, and the UJA-Federation for not noticing that something has gone very rotten in their newspaper.

Waiting for the sky to fall

by Reb Yudel

This morning, 78 percent of us woke up with an unfamiliar companion: hope.

But what about the other 22%? Sure, we know the campaign pandered to fear, arguing Obama was untested, risky, might pressure Israel with the Palestinians, lead to disaster in the Middle East. Of course they would wake up this morning with a little fear.

So I figured. But that effort to empathize with political opponents did not prepare me to deal with the high-level paranoia that seems to be metastasizing in Orthodox Jewish circles.

Herewith, some species of Orthodox Jewish paranoia.


1) First is the fear that Obama is the new Hitler, the new Haman, and maybe -- though it requires some adjustments to traditional Jewish dogma -- the all-but-antiChrist.

From the Haredi Cross-Currents, Chava Willig Levy writes:

Even Obama acknowledges his "spooky good fortune."

It certainly looks as if God is guiding Mr. Obama straight to the White House. But if God is guiding his history, and ours, aren't we mere spectators forced to watch passively -- some might say helplessly --as it unfolds? Several of my coreligionists think so, fatalistically pointing to the fact that the secular date of Obama's breakthrough keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention -- July 27 -- coincided with Tisha B'Av, a fast day commemorating the many seismic tragedies that have befallen the Jewish people.[...]

It looks as if the smooth-talking Haman, whose ambitions have been fulfilled at every turn, who has been blessed with "spooky good fortune," is destined to succeed. It looks as if God is guiding his
history so that he will have his way. But Mordechai knows that, at this juncture, fatalism would be fatal. He beseeches Esther to intervene, to help halt history in its tracks. And when she demurs, Mordechai upbraids her (Esther 4:14): "Who knows whether it was for just such an opportunity as this that you attained your royal position?"

In the absence of full disclosure, Esther has to resist her temptation to follow protocol, to be politically correct. But she accedes to Mordechai's demand only after he agrees to accede to hers (Esther 4:16): "Go and gather all the Jews in Shushan, and fast on my behalf for the three days...My maidens and I will also fast."

We have no Esther today. But over 2,400 years after she left the  world's stage, her example remains. We must emulate her two-pronged strategy: politics and prayer.

On his more modern Orthodox (albeit with intelligent design sympathies), the blogger known as Avakesh warned yesterday:

Leaders that arise from nowhere worry me. Ahashveirosh once used to be a stable boy (Megilla 12b) and Hitler was an unemployed painter. When Hashem brings someone out of nowhere to rule geat empires, I grow concerned about what He has in mind. These are messianic times and messianic times also bring forth false messiahs.

And at the uncensored, ultra-Orthodox watering hole Yeshiva World news, response to Obama's election included this eschatalogical musing that borders on parody:

Gittel this may not be Germany, but America is going to be the first country to go before Moshiach comes. Do you really intend to stay here for it's downfall?

Oh, and guys, OUR FEAR IS NOT UNFOUNDED! Yes, Kol Ma DiAvid Rachmanah L'Tav Avid, that's first and foremost, but that doesn't mean we have to walk blindly into a trap, Hashem gave us saichel for a
reason!If you want to know exactly why so many people are freaking out, well, I'll give you my reason. If you open up Sefer Yechezkel, the posuk that talks about Milchemes Gog U MaGog, if you take every seventh letter in that posuk, it spells out the name O-B-A-M-A.

Coincidents? I think not.

Moshiach is on his way here, we're standing at the precipice of the third world war.

Guys, I think we should all start being makpid on Seudas Melaveh Malkah, and start keeping a cheshbon hanefesh.

2) Then there's the bogus fear that Blacks are rising up against the Jews in all their latent anti-Semitism

On Yeshiva World News:

In 1984 when the Bobover Rabbi zt"l Rabbi Shlomo when he made a kinus
for the the holochust. He said we should not think that in America we
are secured we will have one day a BLACK president. His neveus became a
reality

Seen on Facebook:

this is an email I received from someone in NYC. It is disappointing to read this after such a historical night...

Tonite , I travelled to Yale University where I give my once a semester Torah class to Maimonides students. BH the class went well.. I then left the building with the Maimonides.Rabbis..

We saw and heard the revelry of the students celebrating the Obama victory. with their generous cups of beer in hand... We looked at one another.. and shrugged..

I proceeded to the New Haven train station to go back to NYC.. taking the 1130 P..M train.. tired and trying to discern what the victory meant for the Jewish people, the country.,and. the world..I heard the conductor, passengers and crew laughing celebrating the victory...none of which surprised me... and then 4 exuberant young people said to me ":you must be upset?"

" I asked why? "'

'they responded ," because Obama has won.".

again I asked why should I be upset?"

" because you are Jewish"..they answered..

I answered , "did u know that polls have said aprox 80 % of Jews most likely voted for Obama"

they replied.. "but you are religious!".

I replied with disbelief..,"what .??

They responded " the majority of religious JEWS were supporting McCain.".

I asked.."how do u know that?

"everyone knows that" they said."." Religious Jews know that the day of their power and their ruination of WALL STREET IS OVER.,. CHANGE IS COMING.,. OBAMA HAS PROMISED THIS."

They walked away..

I felt sick,.. and thought.. wow so maybe this is how the chapter for American Jews is.ending..

Received by direct email:

I was waiting to cross Broadway on 42nd street when I was approached by a rather large, smelly,  toothless, homeless guy (who happened to be a black man).  When I shook my head "no" in response to  his request for money he responded that Jews never give him money (how he can  know that I'm not sure as less than 10% of the Jewish population actually wear Kippot).  He then started saying that, now that there's a Black President,  things are going to be different and how "we're gonna bomb Israel" (he said this  twice).  Now I am sure that this guy is crazy and his anti-semitic views  don't reflect the feelings of the vast majority of Obama supporters  (heck, I'm sure  that they don't even represent the views of the vast majority of large,  smelly, toothless, homeless people)  but I can't help  but be upset by his words.   I've always felt that the future of the Jewish
people does not lie in Teaneck, Brooklyn or the Five Towns.  I don't feel "at home" here.  I think that we are in for a rough stretch.

Obviously, not every Orthodox Jew shares these sentiments or voted for McCain, though Orthodox Obama supporters feel enough of a minority to form a Facebook group, I voted for Obama and Yes, I'm still Frum. In a pre-election survey only 1/6 of Yeshiva University students were for Obama, with 2/3 for McCain. Yes, only slightly less popular among evangelical Jews than among evangelical Christians. For both communities, it will be interesting to see what happens if Obama suprises them and turns out to be simply an American president without eschatalogical implications.

I'd like to think that come 2012, relieved McCain voters will vote for Obama.  Perhaps in numbers sufficient to outweigh all the anti-Semites Obama disappointed today by naming a former Israeli soldier Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff.

(h/t SR, DK)

Have you seen the Kabbalist's Daughter?

by Reb Yudel

All points bulletin: Have you seen the Kabbalist's daughter?

Ben Yehuda Press publishes new catalog

by Reb Yudel

What are the dreams of a TwentyFourSeven world?

by Reb Yudel

Sean Voisen poses a fascinating question about cultural production:

There is a hypothesis that says that the purpose of sleep is to reinforce certain memories, or rather, neural connections, that were created during the previous day. Sleep does this not in a way that one might expect — by actually strengthening the connections — but rather by subtly washing away the neural connections created during the day that are deemed trivial or unimportant. Leaving only the most important ones remaining. A bit like waves washing gently on a rocky beach over thousands of years — eventually most of the rocks are turned to sand and only the largest rocks remain.

When it comes to the preservation of culture, time, I think, works quite similarly. Take literature, for instance. Of the many millions of bodies of text that have been created over the thousands of years since man first invented writing, only a very few have been continually preserved and set aside as “classics.” The rest were beaten into sand and washed away by the ocean of time.

This
isn’t a random process either. The Iliad or the Old Testament or Beowulf or Hamlet aren’t available to us today by mere fortunate happenstance. Society made great efforts to keep them in circulation and preserve them. If culture is like a brain distributed across a certain population, and time is its sleep, then these cultural works are the synapses that matter. Somehow. Even though when you read them in high school it doesn’t seem that way.

Will the Internet and digital storage media do away with this form of cultural sleep? If everything can be preserved, whether or not it is of significant cultural value, will it? Where then will classics come from? Or will culture break down into nervous chaos — where everything is of equal importance and so nothing is of importance at all — perhaps like the mind of a chronic insomniac?

Even in a digital world, preservation of information still requires time, money and resources, albeit small. Websites come and go. So do blogs. They are more ephemeral even than books. So, perhaps the reverse will be the case — that because we can preserve anything, we don’t produce anything worth preserving, and thus preserve nothing at all. Either way, in the future, the mechanisms by which culture evolves will almost surely be different.

At Ben Yehuda Press, we're trying to capture the best of today's Jewish culture -- much of it already flickering on screens -- and pin it down into books we hope will become classics for this generation, and beyond.

It's sobering to think that outside cultural forces beyond our control and prediction will determine whether our collection will prove to be -- to switch metaphors slightly -- a thriving cultural preserve, a zoo, or a collection of fossils.

I'm convinced, however, that just as neither a DNA sequence or a YouTube clip is the one best way for preserving an animal, so too the medium of books -- whether stand-alone or read on a device -- will maintain an important place.

How Would God REALLY Vote - A call for collaborators

by Reb Yudel

David Klinghoffer, resident Jew at the Discovery Institute, has just come out with a new book: How Would God Vote: Why the Bible Commands You to Be a Conservative.

Longtime readers of Klinghoffer's Forward column won't be surprised to find the book maddening in its refusal to engage in serious thinking. He ignores whole swathes of Torah and Talmud; doesn't bother thinking of the actual consequences of his policies; and lines up enough straw men to constitute a fire hazard.

Klinghoffer does surprise on occasion. He praises the idea of reparations to African-Americans for slavery. He downplays the need for global conflict. (Better, he says, to fight "cultural decadence" at home.) And if you're looking for a Republican propagandist for whom opposition to abortion is only a first step toward banning contraception and no-fault divorce, Klinghoffer is your man.

However, as someone who does think the Torah has something to say about economic and political arrangements, I'm looking at this book as an opportunity. Get ready for: How Would God REALLY Vote: A Jewish Response to David Klinghoffer.

I'm looking for volunteers to write a chapter or two of the book. Chapters can come in a variety of genres:

• You can rip tearing holes into Klinghoffer's logic
• You can show where Klinghoffer misunderstands Torah
• You can show how Torah addresses a policy area that Klinghoffer doesn't deal with

Contributions can be repurposed from already-published articles, op-eds, and blog posts.

Deadline is July 7. Publication date is planned for August 15, in time for political conventions and the high campaign season.

If you're interested, raise a virtual hand below, or drop me an email at larry at yudel dot com.

Blacks, Jews, and the Post-Racial Candidate

by Reb Yudel

New Voices and the Jewish Student Press Service is hosting an evening on the theme of Blacks, Jews, and the Post-Racial Candidate this week.:

With Ari Berman (The Nation), Ta-Nehisi Coates (Village Voice and The Atlantic Monthly) and Sam Freedman (Professor of Journalism, Columbia University and New York Times columnist). The discussion will be moderated by Marissa Brostoff (The Forward).

The event will take place on Wednesday, May 28th at 7 p.m. at the Center for Jewish History, on 15 West 16th Street in New York City. Dessert reception to follow. $10, general admission. $5, students and CJH members. Buy tickets now by clicking here.

You should all go, of course. But rather than wait to hear what the experts have to say, howzabout we have a symposium on this very subject?

I'll begin with my current thoughts on the topic to get the ball rolling.

I think the organized Jewish community is running head-long into something nasty.

I think the gap between the 50+ crazy-about-Israel set is going to collide with the 40- crazy-about-Obama set to cause the biggest Jewish communal explosion -- or implosion -- in two decades.

He is going to be the most divisive figure among American Jewry since Abbie Hoffman.

I think this will prove a net gain for Obama.... and provide some grim entertainment among those of us who like watching Jewish communal self-immolations.

What do you think?

Jonathan Mark misplays the Father Coughlin card

by Reb Yudel

Over at the blog of the Jewish Week, Jonathan Mark recently asked, "When Father Charles Coughlin, the most incendiary anti-Semitic preacher of the 1930s, supported Huey Long, do you think Jewish Democrats rolled over and charged that there some unpleasant preachers supporting Alf Landon, too, or do you think Jews in the 1930s had more dignity than that?"

Actually, it turns out that Jews indeed had more dignity back then: Rabbi Walter Peiser of Baton Rouge, according to the Institute of Southern Jewish Life, "refused to say an invocation to the state legislature in 1929 in protest of Governor Huey Long’s political corruption. Peiser explained to Time Magazine that his prayers would have been 'coarsened and cheapened…by a Chief Executive…unworthy of high office.'"

Know of any rabbis who declined an invitation to the White House lately?

My 10 minutes of googling around the internets didn't find much more of a Jewish response to Long, other than Wikipedia entries on the individuals Seymour Weiss, a close Long confidante, and Dr. Carl Weiss, Long's apparent assassin.

News roundup

by Reb Yudel

I should be working, but haven't yet licked my blog addiction. News of note:

• Aish HaTorah angle to today's story of twenty-something arms dealer? (Talking Points Memo)

• You know how we keep hearing that Iran's drive for nuclear power must mean it wants to build nuclear bombs? Apparently, the U.S. is working with Iranian neighbor Bahrain to support a civilian nuclear program. Double speak or US-support proliferation race? (AbuAardvark)

• Satmar funding pro-Yiddish, anti-Ben Yehuda propaganda in Israel (Ha'aretz)
  
• Nancy Sinkoff reminds us that sometimes a Mussar sefer is just Benjamin Franklin translated into Hebrew. (the Seforim blog)

• Yesterday marked the 33rd anniversary of America's first gay marriage.

• Return of Jewish terror? 15-year-old loses leg to explosive-filled Purim gift, apparently because of his family's Messianic Jewish beliefs. (Ynet)
  
• Will Bush attack Iran before November? Chris Floyd reads the tea leaves and says yes. Arthur Silber, who has been calling for mobilization against war with Iran for over a year, asks whether our silence is Enabling Evil? (Remember: If the bombs start falling on Iran, you can't say that the American Jewish community hadn't been working for that goal for years).
  
• Saudis to retrain 40,000 clerics to encourage moderation and tolerance. Yeshiva University's Richard Joel might want to try a similar program. (BBC)
  

Finally, from earlier this month: How Bush's delusional incompetence brought Hamas to power in Gaza (Vanity Fair)

Jewish Week: Leading Rabbi Apologizes For Shocking Statement

by Reb Yudel

Wasn't Samantha Powers fired for less?

The Jewish Week reports:

Rabbi Hershel Schachter, Rosh Yeshiva of Yeshiva University's rabbinical school, issued an apology today for a statement he made that appeared to advocate shooting the Prime Minister of Israel should the government "give away Jerusalem."

The statement, part of a 39-second clip posted on YouTube this week, is from a discussion the rabbi had in Israel with American students learning at Yeshivat HaKotel in Jerusalem. It is not known when the statement was made.

In what appears to be a response to a question about serving in the Israeli army, the rabbi, a leading decisor in the Orthodox community, says: "First you have to know what the army is going to do. If the army is going to destroy Gush Katif, there's no mitzvah to destroy Eretz Yisrael.

"If the army is going to give away Yerushalyim [Jerusalem], then I would tell everyone to resign from the army - I'd tell them to shoot the Rosh Hamemshalah [Prime Minister]," which prompted laughter from his audience.

"No one should go to the army if they [the army] are doing aveirus [sins," the rabbi continued. "We're talking if the army is seeing to it that the country is secure, if they're doing the right thing.

"I'm not sure if the army is doing the right thing," he added, "we have to look into that."

Rabbi Schachter, much revered by his many students and highly respected throughout the community as a Talmudic scholar, has been known to make blunt, politically incorrect statements in the past. In 2004, his remarks seemed to compare women to animals in expounding on the issue of reading from a ketubah at a marriage ceremony. He said the marriage would be valid "even if a parrot or a monkey would read the ketubah."

Prior to that incident, the rabbi described Jews as superior to other people, noting that "Jews and non-Jews "have different genes, DNA and instincts." His defenders say he is naïve, not mean-spirited, in part because he has little dealing with the community at large, cloistered within the study halls of Yeshiva. They say he speaks casually in class, unaware of the larger ramifications of his remarks.

Critics agree, but note that such a person, despite his brilliance, should not be in such a position of prominence.

For example, Rabbi Schachter was just named as one of two American rabbis to oversee the conversion process for the Rabbinical Council of America in its agreement with the Chief Rabbinate of Israel.

In a statement issued today, Rabbi Schachter said: "Statements I made informally have been publicly excerpted this week. I deeply regret such statements and apologize for them. They were uttered spontaneously, off the cuff, and were not meant seriously. And, they do not, God forbid, represent my views. Jewish law demands respect for representatives of the Jewish government and the state of Israel."

Richard Joel, president of Yeshiva University, said: "Rav Schacter has apologized for his off the cuff statements that certainly do not represent his views. Let me make it clear that Yeshiva University repudiates any such statements or any such sentiments."

Friends of Dorothy Epstein in the New York Times

by Reb Yudel

Activist Dorothy Epstein led a high-power life -- so it's no surprise that two people close to her appeared in The New York Times earlier this month.

Henry Foner, who edited her memoir A Song of Social Significance (Ben Yehuda Press, 2007) was in the hospital for hip replacement surgery. This is the story he told the Metropolitan Diary:

Dear Diary:

The morning after I underwent hip replacement surgery at Lenox Hill Hospital, I was visited in my room by the surgeon. I expected the routine inquiry about my condition and almost fell out of my bed when he asked me, as though he were talking to my body, ''Which side are you on?''

Since this is the title of one of the great songs in our country's labor history (''My daddy was a miner, and I'm a miner's son.''), I recovered my senses long enough to point to my left side.

Meanwhile, Marilyn Gelber -- companion of Dorothy's son Robert -- showed up in a Jan. 22 article on the petty vindictiveness of Rudy Guliani:

“There were constant loyalty tests: ‘Will you shoot your brother?’ ” said Marilyn Gelber, who served as environmental commissioner under Mr. Giuliani. “People were marked for destruction for disloyal jokes.”

(Gelber was fired by Guliani, apparently for attacting too much personal publicity for her landmark work in negotiating a landmark agreement with upstate governments to preserve the watershed that drains into New York City's water supply.)

A week later she appeared in a happier report: The story of how a kid from the projects of Brooklyn made it to an upstate, small-town college -- thanks to the foundation that Gelber directs.

Dorothy Epstein, who never relaxed her gratitude for the free public education she received at Hunter College during the Great Depression, would be very proud.

A drug & alcohol policy that can save lives

by Reb Yudel

Writing in The American Interest, Mark Kleinman offers suggestions on how to treat intoxicants to minimze harm:

Deny alcohol to problem drinkers. When someone gets caught drinking and driving, we take away his license: his driving license, that is. The “license” to drink—legal permission to buy and consume alcohol in unlimited quantities—is presumed to be irrevocable. But why? We know that someone who drinks and drives is a bad citizen when drunk, but not that he is a bad driver when sober.

If someone is convicted of drunken driving, or drunken assault, or drunken vandalism, or repeatedly of drunk and disorderly conduct—if, that is, someone demonstrates that he is either a menace or a major public nuisance when drunk—then why not revoke his (or, much more rarely, her) drinking license?

Of course, in a country whose citizens believe that the Creator of the Universe will send them to Gulag Everlasting for imbibing alcohol or even caffeine, we're more likely to see President Huckabee declare a War on Cola to assuage the Utah electorate than anything like common-sense.

Stupid Jews Watch: How Jeff Zucker destroyed TV news

by Reb Yudel

Former NPR and Dateline reporter John Hockenberry offers a post-mortem on network television news (MIT Technology Review):

I can say with confidence that Murrow would be outraged not so much by the networks' greed (Murrow was one of the first news personalities to hire a talent agent) as by the missed opportunity to use technology to help create a nation of engaged citizens bent on preserving their freedom and their connections to the broader world.

Torah-True party snack or stomach-churning plague?

by Reb Yudel

Aaron Freeman moves from comic Torah to parsha performance art in his latest video.

Note: Sensitive souls should consult with rabbinic guidance before replicating this stunt at home. (crossposted to JewSchool

Bayme's Newest Big Blowhardery

by Reb Yudel

Baymes piece purports to help Jewish schools through the defeat of a strawman.

He neglects the fact that 80 area students and their parents wanted to go to a Jewish high school -- but couldn't get the chance.

It had nothing to do with some abstraict fear of Jewish high schools.

It had everything to do with people running those schools - who had no idea of they were doing.

And this "lay leadership" included ______, X of the United Synagogue, and ____ of JTS.

My daughter's school closed down two weeks before it should have started because of Jewish professionals who meant well, but acted incompetently.

Stop using nameless "they"s as scapegoats of all your problems. Maybe the problems are the way you're going about your business. How hard would it be to have a real investigation, a questioning of what sort of service board members provided by their presence on the board? If they could damage one school badly, I wonder what other damage they're wreaking in Jewish communal life?