Category — History

Did the rabbis use the czar’s brutality to enforce religious and communal obedience?

Reb Leibish writes,

Seeking to protect their economic and social interests, they did their best to include “non-useful Jews” in the draft lists so that the middle-class families (who paid Kahal taxes and bribes to Rabbis) were predominantly exempt from conscription, whereas single Jews, as well as heretics (maskilic-minded individuals), beggars, outcasts, and orphaned children were taken by Khappers they employed to the draft. They also used their power to suppress protests and intimidate potential informers who sought to expose the arbitrariness of the kahal to the Russian government. In some cases, communal elders had the most threatening informers murdered (the Ushitsa case, 1836 ). The UltraOrthodox claim that their disgust at informers arises from Tzarist persecution of the Jewish poor. That is largely false. The disgust arises from the informants amongst the Jewish poor publicizing the corrupt practices of the Kahal leaders and Hassidic rabbis who enriched themselves during the Cantonist period.

“Something” is there – he just knows it, but he just can’t quite translate it into words.

A favorite pastime of social liberal Jews is to overreach in perceiving cultural parallels between the Jewish immigration experience to today’s immigrant groups even where little or no parallel exists. A Jewschool writer, chillul Who?, has decided that today’s Muslim punk rockers, who paint figures such as ““Osama McDonald,” write songs such as, “Suicide Bomb the Gap,” and have band names such as ““Vote Hezbollah” have so very much to do with American Jewry’s immigration experience.

“ Something about this story makes me think Lower East Side culture, circa 1920.“

Why don’t you explain what that “something” is? Go ahead. We’re waiting.

Below: The 1912 L.E.S. boys band, “Treifa Medinah” who painted, “Vote Gedolim,” and whose anthem song was, “Bitches on the back of the elevated trains.”

So very much in common. So very much.

Rabbi Jacob Joseph was the only chief rabbi of New York. This is what Wikipedia writes about New York’s only chief rabbi.

His tenure was marked by the divisiveness of New York Jewry, and the polemic of the kosher slaughterhouses of the city. Vehemently anti-religious Yiddish newspapers such as Die Forwards and Die Wahrheit unleashed their wrath, spreading false and malicious rumours about the chief rabbi’s personal life.

Eventually, after six years, the Association stopped paying his salary. The butchers then paid him until 1895.

There is only one problem. The Forward did not begin publication until 1897. Now, let’s see if Wikipedia’s Forward page (which the article links to) mentions that and…yup. “It was founded in 1897.”

Menachem Butler published an excerpt of a book implicating the Forward which has spread over the net.

That blog and with it, that post, is gone, but it was him. Look.

Newspapermen representing papers like Die Forwards and Died Wahrheit unleashed their wrath upon him with an overabundance of venom. They caused rumors about the personal life of the chief rabbi and made him despised and troubled.

Menachem Butler apparently published an excerpt that was incorrect from, “The Life and Work of Judah David Eisenstein as Reflected Primarily in His Memoirs” by Rabbi Robert L. Samuels.

This post has been edited by site owner.

Pictured below: Vehemently venomous wrathful anti-religious “Jews” bent on slandering frum people!

President-elect Obama today noted,

After announcing Clinton and the rest of his national security team, Obama said he was sure that team members shared “a core vision of what’s needed to keep the American people safe,” but he also wanted “strong personalities and strong opinions” in his administration.

“I think that’s how the best decisions are made,” Obama said. “One of the dangers in the White House, based on my reading of history, is that you get wrapped up in groupthink, and everybody agrees with everything, and there is no discussion and there are no dissenting views.”

I wonder how far back in history he had to go to find such a problem…

Sailer wrote an essay asking, “What is art?” Within the essay, Sailer discusses the Jewish role of Jewish buyers and critics, of which there is no shortage, and suggests,

“The basic problem is that Jews tend to be cognitively stronger with words than with images, so they are better at making up theories about why a stuffed shark is art rather than determining which art objects are beautiful and which are not.”

There is a good reason to explain why Jews may tend to be better at words than images, of course. Our religion bans the use of images and sculpture to a large degree, so there was simply less incentive to develop those skills, as they were not rewarded.

My own family, it should be noted, has a gift of exceptional hearing. How did that develop? Well, it is more closely related to words and of course, tone, something which is considered of value in the Jewish world. For my own family, it also provided dispensation to live in, say, the then Russian capital of St. Petersburg, when most Jews were not allowed to live within the city limits in the latter 19th century, but where my family resided because they were recognized as proficient professional musicians, as one member worked in the opera. But regardless of this privilege, they got get the hell out of Russia, though that side was quite conservative politically. The family joke is that the single issue my great-grandmother and her parents had with the czar was his anti-semitism.

I can’t say Jews are usually strong in music, as many Jews, to my parents chagrin at any given service they are attending, sing out of tune. But there appears to have been a role and outlets for at least some to excel at music since at least the first Temple period.

Still, I have heard similar complaints about the role of Jews in the classical music world similar to those leveled at the Jews in art world. But it seems a harder case to make, especially from an American perspective, where our composers are pretty critical to our limited canon.

The Jewish Journal reports,

the West has failed by not promoting its ideology in the “clash of ideas and values,” Hirsi Ali declared.

“When Saudi Arabia spends $2 billion abroad for hospitals, mosques and schools, it conditions the aid on the recipient’s acceptance of Saudi Arabia’s fundamentalist form of Islam,” she said. “But Western private and public philanthropy comes with no message, it’s value free.”

What the West must do, she urged, is to attach a clear message to its aid inculcating the values of individual responsibility, the equality of men and women and a scientific approach to counter tribal superstitions.

The West also fails to understand that there’s little basic difference between Islamic “moderates” and “extremists,” Hirsi Ali argued.

“When Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denies the Holocaust, we may consider him crazy, but the concept that Jews are vermin is accepted throughout the Islamic world,” she said. “In none of the 57 nations that make up the Organization of Islamic Countries is the Holocaust taught.”

Hirsi Ali recalled, “I was raised in an educated family, and my father led the opposition to the Somali dictatorship, but I heard nothing about the Holocaust until I came to The Netherlands.”

Another Western mistake lies in its admiration of multiculturalism and its exclusive focus on white racism, Hirsi Ali maintained.

“It is a fallacy that all cultures are equally valuable and must be preserved,” she said. “Some cultures are superior to others. Some value human rights, while others justify the subjugation of women.”

Along the same line, “While white racism is properly denounced, we’re too shy to address black racism or Islamic racism.”

Some of you probably think Jesse Jackson lost his presidential bid in 1988 because he is a shrill anti-white, anti-semitic, scam artist. Well, you are wrong (and probably “racist”).

The NY Times explains why Jesse really lost.

Representative Artur Davis, an African-American Democrat of Alabama, said race was no longer the automatic barrier to the White House that it once was.

“There is a group of voters who will not vote for people who are opposite their race,” Mr. Davis said. “But I think that number is lower today than it has been at any point in our history. I don’t believe this campaign will be decided by race; there are too many other important issues. Jesse Jackson would not have been elected in 1988. But we’ve changed.”

Ron Coleman explains how the Jews in one of NYC’s most famous Orthodox enclaves saw fit to steal a neighborhood name — a name that had no monetary value. Why would they bother, then? Well, remember, they weren’t black hatters back in the day, nor even monolithically Orthodox.

Our favorite contemporary Jewey-Jew (but in that edgy Aprikorus way) comic artist pens his first comic for the Jewish Daily Forward. And what would be a better debut comic in the Forward than a Jewish comic about…Jewish comics?

Morton Sobell has confirmed two important things about the Rosenbergs, one of which was assessed correctly by “Heir to An Execution,” the documentary on the Rosenbergs by their granddaughter.

1) David Greenglass, Ethel’s brother, lied about her involvement in spying for the Soviets. She knew it was happening, but was not an active participant. Her own brother’s lies are largely at fault for her execution, which apparently, Greenglass has already conceded. The Jewish community largely blamed the U.S. government for fixing the trial in order to execute Ethel. But when we understand Greenglass’s role, this mitigates the situation to some degree.

2) Julius Rosenberg was guilty of espionage during the height of the Cold War.

Sobell was also involved with espionage against this country and for the Communists. Never the less, his confession at this late hour was the right thing to do, as was his corroboration about Julius. He betrayed his country. But at the end of his life, he decided to be true to history.

And that is more than what we can say for other Communist spies from that era.