Rabbi Shafran has responded to criticism over his recent essay. I am bothered most by answer #2.
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Best Jew-Libel Ever! And from the Agudath Israel Spokesman

Rabbi Avi Shafran, spokesman for the loathsome haredi Agudath Israel, has blamed the Haitian earthquake on Eli Valley’s comic in the Forward newspaper. No, I am not fucking kidding.

His heimeshe writes,
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Halfsours insists that Eli Valley’s new comic savaging the “cool Jew” phenomenon signals that we are at “the middle of the end” of the hipster movement generally.

I am inclined to agree. Frankly, in our troubled economic times, and with so many problems besieging our nation, many of us lost patience with this “ironic” nonsense a long time ago.

But who is Valley mocking specifically? [Read more →]

Eli Valley drew a comic mocking American-Zionist education. The Forward declined to publish it, which is their right.

So Gawker took it instead.

Voonga! Voonga! (That means, “mazel tov!”).

The Forward’s Dan Friedman thinks he just might have.

…if you combined Abe Foxman with Jeff Foxworthy?

You might be a “self-hating Jew”….if you enjoy reading Eli Valley comics in the Forward.

Eli Valley’s new comic published on Jewcy targets both Chabad and the Tanya, the most important Chassidic text.

Valley quotes the Tanya as declaring that gentiles have animal souls in order to explain Agriprocessors treatment of their non-Jewish workers. He also references the NCYI trip to Agriprocessors, where they claimed everything appeared to be A-OK, or rather, A-OU, as comparable in integrity to the Red Cross giving their own certificate of kashrut to Thereisenstadt.

In other Eli Valley news, the Forward just published his “1-In-5 Majority,” which gently ribs Orthodox Jews who leveled passionate denunciations against Obama and his Jewish supporters.

Eli Valley is racking up the hate for his new comic in the Forward. But some of the enraged denunciations are just plain bizarre.

Ed Lasky writes in his essay, “A Challenge to the Liberal Jewish Community,” in the American Thinker that,

Rabbis and other leaders in the Jewish community were in the forefront of criticizing “smears” against Barack Obama during the recent campaign. These comments concerned not only his heritage but also those people he chose to associate with and support-among them, Pastor Jeremiah Wright, Jr. and Rashid Khalidi. These leaders have also been engaged in outreach efforts towards Muslims – some have even broken bread with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who denies the Holocaust and whose regimes sponsors anti-Semitism around the world.

Oh, really? The Jews For Obama and the NJDC…these people broke bread with Ahmedinijad?

Which Reform temple do you think they attend? I personally suspect Temple Rodeph Shalom is affiliated with these guys. Don’t they have that “Classical Reform” look about them?

Joseph Conrad once said “You shall judge a man by his foes as well as by his friends.” If we look at the former, Eli Valley has pissed off the wrong people. The boys at Commentary!

Eli Valley has a new comic on Jewcy lambasting the ways Zionists view themselves and the ways they expect Diaspora Jews to view themselves.

Now, you might think that as a fellow Non-Zionist Litvak, I might agree with Valley’s scathing sarcasm.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

True, I can’t help but remember a bitter debate that Eli Valley (who commented as “EV”) and I had versus the utter contempt displayed towards Diasporists by The Zionists, but I have changed since then. I have grown.

The Zionists are correct, and Eli Valley, wrong. Well, at least partially.

First of all, achievement must be measured according to ability. We have to remember that the fact that the average Israeli IQ is only 94 and the fact that the average American Ashkenazi IQ is the highest in the nation, between 112-115, does not mean that Israel doesn’t have many very talented and very bright people, who are doing great things in select sectors. And who says I.Q. means all that much in the first place? After all, Diaspora Jews might be better at curing diseases, composing symphonies, and writing books, but Israelis make much better taxi drivers ( or at least, do so more often) and are considered to look better in bathing suits, and if so, may perform better at frolicking in the sea, a skill (among many) not measurable by IQ tests.

Additionally, some of Israel’s weaknesses are structural and social, not inherent. For instance, the fact that Israel’s haredim abhor the work ethic doesn’t preempt that one day they could be productive members of society (in theory). And even Israeli music is making great strides as well, even if their most important musical contribution to the world in the past twenty years was popularizing Radiohead through their song “Creep,” it is no accident it was them as opposed to say, Syria, right? Also, Israeli cinema continues to get better and better at the high end, and who is to say that they won’t overtake Jewish dominated Hollywood by 2525 if Hollywood should stagnate during that period? And Israeli cinema still slaughters the movies coming out of any other Middle Eastern country, absolutely every single one (except Iran). And we must remember that while, yes, Israel allows (only some!) of her women to be forced to the back of select (nationally owned) bus lines, well, we had a similar problem even until the 60s. In parts of the south. So what if in terms of progress, they are going absolutely the wrong way?

So I have a new slogan to help with marketing efforts,

“Zionism…it’s still (relatively) successful…at least by Middle Eastern standards, except for the genocidal threat thing.”