Category — Forward

Abbot Katz joins the black-hatters who cunningly object to the term “ultra-Orthodox.” What do they want? What they really want is to be identified as the real “Jews,” nothing less. They will complain at every other possible term until everyone else is deemed treif/insufficiently frum (that’s you, Modern Orthodoxy), until and unless they are accepted as the standard, despite their ever-expanding new stringencies and radicalism.

Katz writes in the Forward that,

“Orthodox Jews seem to be seen as marking the spiritual baseline, while the “ultras” are typed as a kind of fanatic insurgency, sparse but dangerous.”

Oh, no one is saying you people are “sparse.” Your numbers and power grows everyday.

“In fact the Chasam Sofer is very much of a piece with his rabbinic predecessors and successors. Nowhere in the yeshiva world is he credited with striking a stance at any fundamental remove from his forebears.”

Why is this about the Chasam Sofer? He is hardly considered the father of ultra-Orthodoxy. Let us be clear. Katz is avoiding the true areas of significant change, from traditional Judaism to quiescent fundamentalism.

The two substantial quiescent fundamentalist movements are the Chassidic movements and the contemporary yeshiva movements respectively. These movements have changed, and their creations were both departures from normative Judaism. Additionally, many sectors of each group became more radical over time, particularly in the post-war period. That is to say, more fahfrumpt, with a greater interpretative stringency in Jewish law aimed at maximum disengagement with the secular world.

“Again, this peculiarly binary view suggests that those rabbinic giants who predated the Chasam Sofer were by definition something less, or other, than “ultra.”

No. This is to say that the normative pulpit rabbis who preceded the likes of “gedoylim” like Rabbi Ahron Kotler and the Chazon Ish were by definition something less, or other, than “ultra.”

Yaakov Menken weighs in on the ULTRA_ORTHODOX blog Cross-Currents, where he displays a profound ignorance of the difference between activist and quiescent fundamentalist classification.

“Most complaints about the use of the “Ultra” modifier stop there — pointing out that the term is both inaccurate and pejorative, and seems to lump Satmar Chasidim together with Kahanists and Yigal Amir.”

This is SUCH nonsense. Kahanists, like Rabbi Kahane himself, are rightly considered to be radicals stemming from the Modern Orthodox camp. And both Baruch Goldstein and Yigal Amir attended the flagship right-wing Modern Orthodox universities, Yeshiva University and Bar Ilan respectively. A full embrace of religious-Zionism is outside the tenants of ultra-Orthodoxy. Menken clearly doesn’t know what he is talking about. I’m shocked, just shocked, at his ignorance. Who would think that the creator of Cross-Currents and “The Everything Torah Book,” would get these basic sociological classifications so terribly wrong?

The big lie of the ultra-Orthodox is that they are normative traditional Judaism. And this is one of the reasons they prefer hagiography to history. History is not their friend. And the entire haredi-kiruv industry would fall apart if their lies were exposed.

I hope, over time, they will be.

Yoffie’s star just keeps on rising. I am working on a conspiracy theory on him…make take me a bit…and I may try to post it somewhere else…it’s pretty nifty, if I can fit all the pieces together.

Anyway…don’t you get fed up with all those Jewish political hacks who speak on behalf of all of us? Don’t you kinda want to slap them, sometimes? Well, guess what? Rabbi Yoffie doesn’t like it either!

The Forward reports,

Yoffie said it was critical for all Jewish leaders to realize that “nobody has the right to speak in our name.”

In the editorial “Fear Factor,” the Forward explains “the mystery of the power of the so-called Jewish lobby.” The Forward writes,

Most surprising, a parade of Jewish politicians and organizational leaders, the elite of what’s called the Jewish lobby, has spoken out aggressively to reject the rumors and defend Obama — but it hasn’t helped much. Early indications are that Jewish voters will spurn Obama in numbers large enough to hurt him. And all the efforts of the vaunted Jewish establishment haven’t convinced them otherwise.

That’s the secret of Jewish lobbying success: It’s not about the professional influence-peddlers and fundraisers. It’s about frightened, angry Jews, thousands of them, determined to stop anyone they suspect is against them. Once they get going, no one can talk them out of it. They feel powerless and vulnerable before enemies great and small, and they have the clout to do something about it. And they don’t always check the details before hitting the barricades.

Isn’t this phenomenon going to get worse as the Orthodox become a greater and greater percentage of of the Jewish community? After all, Orthodox Jews have a more pronounced perception of division between Jew and gentile, and are disproportionately descendants of Holocaust survivors, a heritage not known to allay Jewish paranoia.

Heeb’s humor editor tackles the question, “Is Heeb secular?” In…where else? The Forward! If you want Deutsch’s perspective on one foot, it is,

And Heeb magazine? Well, it is certainly Jewish, insofar as it’s all about you-know-who, but secularist? That would imply that Heeb has some sort of overarching view of the role of religion in Jewish life and culture, and that definitely isn’t true.

Deutsch, by the way, is himself an Orthodox Jew.

Only on the Forward’s resurrected Bintel Brief column do you get to turn to Lisa Loeb about what to do about your daughter’s engagement to a loser, jobless Chabadnik “parasite” of a fiance.

As some of you may be aware, there has been a lot of feedback for the guest post series series by “Seth” that I published, “Letter From Dark Light.�? My blog needs to be fixed to pickup trackbacks, but here are a few of them:

The Forward weighs in, with Daniel Treiman noting on the Bintel Blog that,

This week The Kvetcher has a series of guest posts from someone who used to study at Ohr Somayach’s Jerusalem yeshiva — and it doesn’t sound like a pleasant place.

Failed Messiah asks, “Is Ohr Somayach a Cult?�?

Cult News lists the Forward post on their January 4th links section.

Dov Bear offers a link and discussion thread.

So does Thoughts of a Secular Jew.

And Baalbatish.

And Shalom Bayit:

Man, I have to have more guest posts!

As for “Seth,” well, Cipher and others want to know what he is doing now, and how he is doing, but I don’t want to bore you guys with more if you don’t want an epilogue, so let me know either way.

And thanks to everyone for publicizing Seth’s story. The only way to fight Ohr Somayach is to educate the liberal and Jewish community, and that means bearing witness to what you saw if you were there.

Obviously, there is only so much that can be done. All Rabbi Nota Schiller (Israel) or Rabbi Rakowsky (Monsey) need to do is scam one secular Jew they meet while flying first class on a plane, selling their nonsense as “saving American Jewry�? and yet another 1/2 a million is sunk into these pits of misery, and they expand still further. The best we can do is slow their growth, and warn others, and…hey, wait a minute. It seems that the Philadelphia branch of Ohr Somayach has…failed. It has closed.

The Jewish Exponent reports,

For a time, the building housed Ohr Somayach Philadelphia, a Jewish outreach organization geared toward youth, but that closed earlier this year.

Indeed, the number rings and rings, and the website Dark Light International directs you to for Philly leads to nothing.

Ohr Somayach can be contained.

Related:

South African chief rabbi connected to OS protects serial philander (no judgments!), Ohr Somayach’s South African FOUNDER

The [Most Dubious] Power of a Rebbe’s Blessing –Another supernatural rabbi tale that never happened.

For a long time, many of us have grumbled that Jewish victimology is a dead end, or worse. That promoting Holocaustism and lashing out at all critics of Israel and American Jewish policies were taking us to a place we do not want to go.

The Forward elucidates these concerns in its editorial, “Joe-Bashing and the Jews.�? We can rail at anti-Semitism, or note it privately, or we can spend our energy and focus correcting where we have gone wrong communally. As always, defense groups who claim to speak for the Jewish community are disproportionately at fault. They have no right to speak on the Jewish community’s behalf. They are causing us serious harm.

The Forward notes,

Ironically, when Israel’s foes successfully present themselves as underdogs and victims of Jewish bullying, the very attempt by Jews to fight back becomes evidence for the prosecution. And the more the Jewish community’s advocates try to respond with their old, familiar weapons of self-defense — the historic claims of victimhood and vulnerability — the less effective the weapons become.

American Jews have long presented themselves as fighting allies of the embattled Jewish state. Now the other side is firing back, using the Jewish community’s own weapons. American Jews are caught off guard, unprepared for the counterattack[...]

American Jews still have vast resources. They have many more friends than enemies. But a critical milestone has been passed: The post-Holocaust taboo on demonization of Jews is very nearly gone.

Pretty astute, huh? Too bad the Forward didn’t take a more explicit shot at the Neocons, the Jewish defense organizations, and Jewish communal “leaders�? and laymen who act like a bunch of whiny, hypersensitive crybabies. That would be badass, but I guess even the independent Forward doesn’t quite have the sack to…oh…oh wait…oh, my.

It doesn’t help when the biggest Jewish representative bodies allow themselves and their community to be identified in the public eye with a discredited administration and a larger conservative movement in terminal meltdown. It doesn’t help when Jews ignore or deny Israel’s genuine shortcomings. It doesn’t help when they overreact to criticism — hostile, benign or just clumsy — and intimidate their critics into resentful silence, reinforcing their enemies’ worst stereotypes.

This week’s Forward had an editorial supporting expanded hate-crimes legislation. The Forward is usually responsible about noting the reasons why people differ from their editorial position, but they omitted the most important one as to why some of us do not support hate-crimes legislation, and in fact, prefer it be repealed, and perhaps replaced with extra sentencing for unprovoked attacks.

I do not support hate-crimes legislation because there are serious concerns over implementation on a fair and consistent level. I believe it is just as bad if someone harms a person because he is a white Christian as it is to harm a person because he is black or gay. Now, I have no doubt that the Forward believes the same thing.

So I am disappointed that the Forward did not even discuss this issue. Because there is a real concern that hate-crimes are being selectively enforced to protect only “minorities,�? and are not being enforced the same way for the assailants of whites that are targeted by those who, well, hate white people.

And perhaps, this is the problem with special legislation protecting minorities in the first place. It suggests that hatred towards regular white people isn’t as bad somehow.

It’s just as bad, it most certainly happens, and it may be happening more than we would like to publicly admit. And there certainly appears to be reluctance to prosecute it as such.

As I think most of you know, the Forward is by far and away my favorite newspaper. Not my favorite “Jewish” newspaper; just my favorite newspaper period. But the one thing I like more than reading the Forward is reading about ME in the Forward.

I was invited to join some rather heavy hitters for some blog punditry in reaction to the new Forward 50 list, an annual listing of Jewish machers determined by the staff of the Forward. There should be a bit of back and forth over the next few days, so please do check it out.