Last month The Jewish Federation held a party for about three hundred. The occasion: to honor outgoing Federation Chairman of the Board Lionel Bell and to welcome the incoming designated Chairman Todd Morgan, who assumes office January 18. It was a festive occasion with plenty of food, speeches (all of them brief) and warmth. In a sense, a gathering of friends.
All the photos were taken at the event by Peter Halmagyi.
A Gathering of Friends Read More »
The big surprise of the holiday season, if you caught it, was Jerry Seinfeld’s wedding.
It turns out the man whose television persona perfectly embodied men’s fear of commitment was, in real life, simply waiting for the right Jewish woman. Once he found her, baddaboom, baddabing, you’ve got a traditional Jewish wedding, chuppah, broken glass, the works. It’s so traditional, the crabmeat canapes come out only after the rabbi leaves. They even saw to a kosher Jewish divorce for the once-married bride. Who knew television’s darkest satirist was such a sentimental traditionalist offscreen?
O.K., so it wasn’t as big a surprise as the absence of global chaos at the passing of the millennium. Still, the wedding touched a nerve. It was one of those media moments that periodically come along to remind us how little we really know about our fellow Jews.
Another such moment came last spring, when Israel’s daily Ha’aretz carried an interview with Hollywood actor-producer Michael Douglas. The reporter kept asking typical Hollywood-insider questions, like why movies are so violent and what it’s like kissing Demi Moore. Douglas kept turning the interview around to his own angry question: How dare Israel tell him he’s not Jewish?
There’s a shocker. Douglas is the half-Jewish son of screen legend Kirk Douglas. Papa Kirk only recently reembraced his Jewish roots after a lifetime, so he says, of neglecting them. Son Michael never evinced any visible Jewish attachment. Now, offered a chance to woo a million Israeli fans in their own language, he’d rather vent about “Who is a Jew.” Who knew he cared?
If you’re like me, you’re wondering what the heck is going on out there in the American Jewish hinterland. Well, so are a lot of highly trained social scientists. Increasingly, scholars of Jewish identity are concluding that much of what they thought they knew about the hearts and minds of American Jews is simply wrong.
After years of gloomy reports about declining observance and galloping intermarriage, evidence is piling up to suggest American Judaism is stronger than anyone realized. A great many Jews seem, like Seinfeld, to care more than anyone suspected. And a great many children presumed lost turn out, like Michael Douglas, not to be.
Of course, social scientists don’t base their research on People magazine. They prefer weighted samples and focus groups. Lately, though, their picture isn’t much clearer than ours. They keep bumping into the statistical equivalents of Seinfeld and Douglas, and they can’t account for them. The more they learn, the greater the mystery.
Take that study of Jewish population surveys just completed at the University of Miami. The study, alert readers recall, compares local Jewish surveys conducted in 40 different cities in recent years. Printed alongside are numbers from the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey, presumably to provide a national context.
If you’ve been following the news, you already know the national survey is completely out of whack with the local ones. Whatever range of Jewish behavior the local surveys show, the national average is nearly always lower than the lowest, which makes no sense at all.
For instance, Jews who say they usually or always attend a Passover seder range from a high of 86 percent in Baltimore to a low of 62 percent in Denver. The national survey shows a figure of 60 percent. Similarly, lighting Chanukah candles ranges from 95 percent in Boston to 59 percent in Sarasota. The national figure: 57 percent.
At the other end, the percentage who have visited Israel ranges from 61 percent in South Palm Beach to a low 27 percent in Hartford. The national figure: 26 percent.
Then there’s that 52 percent intermarriage statistic, the most famous figure in the 1990 national survey. According to the Miami study, it was all a misunderstanding. It counted non-Jews with Jewish ancestry as intermarried Jews. Counting only actual Jews, the 1990 survey found a 43 percent intermarriage rate. But that’s clearly still too high. If every other measure of assimilation in the national survey is inflated, intermarriage must be inflated, too. The true intermarriage rate is probably between 33 and 38 percent.
All in all, the Miami study badly undercuts the 1990 survey. That’s trouble for the survey’s sponsor, the United Jewish Communities. They’re planning a $4 million follow-up survey this year, and all its methods are suddenly suspect. It was put on hold last month while UJC leaders figure out what to do. Then they have to explain how they managed to ignite a worldwide intermarriage hysteria with a statistical error.
The really interesting part, though, is what happens when that’s all settled. The mystery remains: What, exactly, makes American Jews Jewish?
We know from surveys — the accurate ones — that about four-fifths light Chanukah candles and attend a seder. Close to that number observe Yom Kippur. About 40 percent have visited Israel. Just 20 to 30 percent follow other Jewish practices, like attending synagogue regularly, lighting Sabbath candles or joining Jewish organizations.
How do the majority — the 50 or 60 percent who only observe Chanuka, Passover and Yom Kippur — relate to being Jewish? Do they think about it only three times a year? Or is something else going on that surveys don’t detect?
Increasingly, scholars think something else is going on. Today’s Jewish identity is fluid, idiosyncratic and reinvents itself constantly throughout adulthood, says Brandeis University sociologist Bethamie Horowitz. The focus might be traditional observance, Holocaust literature, klezmer music or pro-Israel activism. “It’s like a salad bar, and everybody these days is putting a different collection of items on their plates,” says Horowitz, whose 1999 “Connections and Journeys” is becoming a bible of the new Jewish identity studies.
Reworking the questionnaire is the other reason, besides the 1990 survey’s flaw, that the Year 2000 national survey was put on hold. The researchers need to figure out how to measure a host of subjectively changing attitudes, from spiritual searching to pluralism-related anger at Israel. “We need to widen the way we define Jewish identification to include the idiosyncratic things people relate to Jewishly,” Horowitz says.
They need to tell us why, despite low levels of traditional practice, so many Jews actually end up marrying Jews. They also need to tell us what the Jewish community will look like as growing numbers of half-Jews opt in, bringing their mixed heritage with them.
Until we clear up these mysteries we will never be, as Seinfeld once said, masters of our own domain.
J.J. Goldberg writes a weekly column for The Jewish Journal
Mysteries of the Jews Read More »
For about 10 years now I have been telling everyone I’ve met, with very little prompting, that America was becoming a partly Jewish nation. By that I meant that we were largely accepted within government, education, law, medicine and most of the elite institutions in the U.S.; that our children had access to the best schools; and that the job market was open to us. And, more to the point, that by occupying such a primary role in the making and dispersal of culture, high and low (novels and art, films and TV), we were imprinting the rest of this nation with a Jewish sensibility. So what’s the great surprise that today Ruth Bader Ginsburg sits on the Supreme Court without any fanfare or that Madonna is “drawn towards” kabbalah or that everyone consumes bagels.
But now as we trumpet the story on our cover — Jewish being “the new, new thing” — I am less certain. Or, more accurately, I believe that while Jews have in the main become part and parcel of white America, the ascendancy of Jewish culture in America has peaked. We are, if you will, in the process of descent. That’s descent, not dissent. My non-Jewish friends say fondly on hearing this new outburst of skepticism from me: “How Jewish.”
What are the signs or cultural signals that suggest this? I will list three — though there are others I leave for you to discern.
1) Computers are not Jewish. Computers have come into their own as we enter the 21st century. They are driving our economy, changing the ways in which we live and work, functioning as the successor to our most recent post-industrial revolution. Forget MIT and bright Jewish computer scientists/entrepreneurs and Route 128 circling Boston during the first computer revolution 40 plus years ago. Silicon Valley and the new computer centers in the Pacific northwest are not driven in large numbers by Jewish technicians, programmers or entrepreneurs.
2) The Internet is not Jewish. The internet of course is the newest development in media to grab the attention and allegiance of the mass market. It follows, almost in a straight line, the shifts from vaudeville to films and radio to television — each of which was importantly served by Jews in the role of entrepreneur, producer, writer and agent. The flow of culture here went from a production center outward, into the open market.
To be sure the Internet has Jewish components, but the dynamic flows from the receiver inward. We join a Jewish chat room or Jewish singles. It is all highly focused, custom tailored, self selected. It is a very different kind of mass market. Non-Jews go their way; we go ours.
3) The new cities are not Jewish. Remember Lenny Bruce’s famous line: “In New York everyone is Jewish. In the Midwest no one is Jewish.” Well the same seems to apply to the new cities — Houston, Phoenix, San Diego and Seattle.
These are cities where shifts of population and growth are taking place, but they lack central cores that attract Jews.
Boston, where I once lived, was dominated by New England Brahmins and the children and grandchildren of Irish and Italian immigrants. Jews played only a minor role in the politics of the city; nor were we key players in banking or real estate or publishing. But Harvard and MIT in the second half of the 20th century soon had strong Jewish pluralities, as did the very important psychiatric and psychoanalytic communities. And so, despite no strong Jewish presence in business and politics, the culture of the city had a very real Jewish feel to it. Not so the new cities.
We live in a world where our (modern) landscape is constantly being altered. It is possible, I suppose, to posit that Jews have survived and even prospered precisely because we have become (of necessity) so adaptive. In fact, we have been so successful at adapting that the culture in America has come to resemble us, with many Americans taking on our sensibility, as we sail easily through it.
Gary Rosenblatt wonders “if America accepts Jews and their culture too readily” so that we might “lose our distinctiveness as a people.” That seems to be a serious concern as we enter the new century. But, if I am correct, and we are now about to proceed through some decline, what should be our next great worry? That word, worry, is almost axiomatic in the Jewish community.
Are we to expect a resurgence of anti-Semitism? Further assimilation, once our appeal for the wider society has diminished? A turn toward orthodoxy and a holding fast to Judaism and our Jewish traditions? My own guess is: Yes, to all of the above, but in modest to small numbers.
Rather I expect that most of us will continue our adaptive ways. By now it’s probably a mix of genetic and learned behavior. It will mean greater uncertainty and increased flux. And for those of us who wish still to remain Jewish, as well as for those who wish to kick-start a moribund affiliation, it will mean redefining once again who we are as Jews and what it means to be Jewish in America. That’s what happens in altered landscapes: It’s usually not possible to stand still. —Gene Lichtenstein
The Altered Landscape Read More »
Steve Glickman, Jewish Student Association (JSA) president at Georgetown University, is battling “muffled intolerance on campus.” He gives a small but chilling example.
“Yesterday, when we were passing out blue ribbons… against intolerance and for diversity, two students approached and said specifically they don’t support Jews here,” he said, his voice thick with fatigue. “The sentiment exists among a larger number of students than it’s currently being given credit for… This shouldn’t be glossed over by students or the administration.”
The hatred hasn’t stopped at talk.
In twin acts of vandalism apparently driven by bigotry, a seven-foot silver Chanukah menorah set up by the JSA was first damaged and then broken.
The incidents drew a striking display of student solidarity. In a break with the past, they also evoked strong, public condemnation from the administration.
At about 3:15 a.m. on Saturday, Dec. 11, a dozen students were keeping vigil by the seven-foot silver menorah set up by the JSA in Red Square on the main campus. A young man approached, shoved the menorah to the ground and yelled an anti-Semitic slur.
When the vandal took off running, the vigil-keepers followed in pursuit. Two students tackled him and held him down until campus and district police arrived shortly afterward.
Media reports have identified the suspect as business school sophomore Michael Byrne of Garden City, N.Y. He was taken into custody first by the campus police, then the Metropolitan Police Department. Charged with destruction of property and released, Byrne was taken back to campus, put on a plane home and, in the words of Georgetown spokesperson Dan Wackerman, “suspended until further notice.”
Prejudice had reared its venomous head on Dec. 4 when vandals toppled the menorah in Red Square. The structure’s central pole was twisted, the nine light bulbs broken. A similar attack had occurred last year.
Then, early on Dec. 7, another chanukiah at the university’s law center near Union Station was also knocked to the ground. A police and FBI investigation has concluded this incident was due to high winds.
The two attacks on the Red Square menorah are still under investigation.
“Part of the environment that allowed it to happen… [was because] the university was careful not to give last year’s vandalism of the menorah too much exposure,” said Glickman. “Only a handful of individuals on campus know what happened.”
Not so this year. An 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. vigil at the Red Square menorah began the night of Tuesday, Dec. 7. The vigil, which ran through Saturday night, showed the strength of the bonds forged between Jews and other religious and ethnic groups on campus.
Scores of other students joined JSA members throughout the week. The Knights of Columbus, a Catholic student organization, stood vigil the first night. Students from the Protestant Leadership Team took their place the following evening. Black Student Alliance (BSA) members kept vigil all through the last day of Chanukah. Other organizations furnishing volunteers included the Muslim Student Association, College Republicans, College Democrats and the Catholic Daughters of America.
“Here at Georgetown, we’re a diverse community,” said BSA President Erica Cannon. “If something happens to one group or person, we all need to be there in support.”
Glickman singled out African-American students on campus for special praise.
“The black students on campus have been extremely supportive and want to see some things change,” he said.
The menorah desecrations are not the only hate-inspired incidents troubling these student leaders. During the past few years, resident assistants have testified in campus meetings on diversity about swastikas in the stairwells of freshman dormitories, Glickman reports.
Early Sunday morning, in Kopley Hall, a Red Square dormitory, two swastikas were placed on flyers announcing a Friday vigil and Shabbat service at the menorah.
This time, the administration’s response was swift. A mandatory meeting for students in the dorm was held 9:30 p.m. that Sunday.
More dramatically, Georgetown President Father Leo J. O’Donovan attended a Saturday evening Havdalah service hosted by the JSA. He underscored his condemnation of the vandalism.
The college president listened to Jewish student concerns and helped dispel earlier skepticism about the administration’s seriousness in tackling anti-Semitism.
“After meeting with Father O’Donovan, I and other Jewish students have faith that [the administration] is committed to working with us to make whatever changes are necessary to create a more tolerant and accepting community,” said Glickman afterwards. “This incident affected him almost as much as it affected the Jews.”
The More Things Change Read More »
The 1999 souvenir program sold at Jacob’s Field in Cleveland featured a full-page ad for Best’s Kosher, “the official kosher hot dog of the Cleveland Indians.”
Madonna, Roseanne, Elizabeth Taylor and Sandra Bernhard are among the pop celebrities studying Kabbalah, a once-obscure form of Jewish mysticism undergoing a remarkable renaissance.
Best-selling books over the last year include “Kosher Sex” and “Kaddish,” and in “The Big Lebowski,” a recent Hollywood film, John Goodman plays a bowler who proclaims, “I never roll on Shabbos.”
What’s going on here? Is it “in” to be, and “do” Jewish these days?
The anecdotal evidence is strong. Michael Jackson attends an Orthodox Friday night service, comedian Adam Sandler has a hit with his “Happy Hanukah” song, kosher food products are found in supermarkets everywhere, Barbara Streisand records “Aveinu Malkenu” on a recent album, and Crown Books signs Francine Klagsbrun to write a book about the Sabbath.
Is Judaism the next big trend to sweep American society? Is there a downside to this, and if not, why do some of us feel vaguely uneasy about this seeming infatuation with things Jewish on the part of non-Jews?
Richard Siegel, the executive director of the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, notes that Jewish culture has become increasingly mainstreamed into American society, from television and movies to Broadway and literature. He says that in his travels around the country, he sees more regional theaters and symphonies and museums doing plays and music and exhibits with Jewish themes.
“The phenomenon is in the normal integration of the Jewish experience into American life,” says Siegel. “Despite our demographic problems, we American Jews have been successful in maintaining our specific identity within an open society.”
We still obsess over which famous personalities are Jewish, though we tend to be quite arbitrary and selective, claiming popular movie stars with tangential ties to their heritage while excluding born-Jewish criminals or other embarrassing individuals as not really one of us. We seem to have matured to the point of no longer insisting on a “Jewish seat” on the Supreme Court (though we have Ruth Bader Ginsburg), but take inordinate pride in the fact that the champion of professional wrestling is a bald brute named, simply, Goldberg.
Some Jewish leaders believe that one way to bring unaffiliated Jews back to Judaism is to show them that non-Jews are interested in Jewish teachings and ethics. If Madonna studies Kabbalah and Michael Jackson goes to shul, then maybe Jews will be impressed sufficiently to explore their own religion, according to the theory.
But Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of the New Republic, is not convinced that any of this adds up to a new mainstreaming of Jewish life into American culture. Forty years ago, he points out, Hollywood stars like Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor and Sammy Davis, Jr. were converting to Judaism, but so what?
Americans in general are obsessed with celebrity, and like most minority cultures, he says, American Jews are looking constantly for reassurance from the majority. “It’s pathetic and anachronistic,” he says, “like those books about American Jewish sports heroes. We should be beyond that by now.”
Jenna Weissman Joselit, who teaches American and Jewish studies at Princeton University, puts the issue into historical perspective. Jews yearning for acceptance by non-Jews is nothing new, she says, noting that an exhibition of Bezalel art from Palestine at Madison Square Garden was a big hit in 1914, and Jews were thrilled to see Christians buying Jewish art.
“It’s a symptom of our insecurity,” she says, adding that the increased mixing of cultures of late may be a product of the growing rate of intermarriage and a heightened interest in “the other.”
So what are we to make of all this? The evidence is clear that Jews and things Jewish are increasingly part of American life, but the impact of that presence is far more difficult to gauge, and much of the reaction is personal. Are you filled with pride when a TV sitcom character mentions how he or she celebrated Chanukah, or do you cringe with embarrassment?
The deeper question is whether this mixing of cultures will have a positive or negative effect on American Jewish life. The fear is that if America accepts Jews and their culture too readily, we will lose our distinctiveness as a people and assimilate completely. That’s already happening in terms of interfaith marriage, since Christians now see Jews as acceptable marriage partners.
The positive view is that with acceptance, Jews will feel more comfortable with their identity and will be emboldened to observe their rituals and maintain their distinctive customs and lifestyle with pride.
In the end, then, it’s what we make of it. We can relish the normalcy of it all, with Yiddish words (including a few off-color ones) commonly used by average Americans, or bemoan the fact that we still seem to care whether Gwyneth Paltrow is Jewish. Maybe the question we should be asking in this context is not “who is a Jew?” but who cares, and why?
Gary Rosenblatt is editor and publisher of The New York Jewish Week.
Is Jewish the Next Next Thing? Read More »
Religious discrimination in the workplace may be less of a problem for Jews than for other religious minorities, according to a new nationwide study.
Of the nearly 675 people surveyed — most of whom are affiliated with one of five religious minorities in the United States — 66 percent said that some form of specific discriminatory behavior based on religion had occurred at their workplace, and one in five had either experienced religious discrimination themselves or knew of a coworker who did. The study was conducted by the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding in New York. But Jewish respondents reported the lowest degree of discrimination — even lower than Christians — and the highest level of comfort on the job.
It is not clear from the study how many of those Jews surveyed are observant Jews.
Part of the reason for these findings is that most Jews in America are likely to have been living here for at least two generations, Georgette Bennett, the president of the 7-year-old Tanenbaum Center, explained at a recent news conference .
“Jews have been here longer than a great percentage of the sample,” of which 42 percent were foreign born, “and they tend to be assimilated into the larger culture,” Bennett said.
In the study, American-born workers were more comfortable on the job than foreign-born workers.
Indeed, the study grew out of an awareness that as more immigrants come to the United States from Asia and the Pacific Islands, India, Pakistan and Africa, the growing presence of minority religions is changing the face of the contemporary workplace.
The exploratory study conducted telephone interviews in the spring of 1999 among a sample designed to overrepresent five religious minorities in the United States: Judaism (102 people), Islam (102), Hinduism (107), Buddhism (103) and Shintoism (12).
Those questioned also included 188 Christians and 28 people who did not identify with any of the above-mentioned religions.
Jews Report Less Workplace Discrimination Read More »
In Berlin, it is fashionable for young Germans to wear yarmulkes and yellow stars.
In Prague some years ago, the leading rock band called itself Shalom and throughout central Europe there is a fascination with Jewish icons.
In the United States, Ivy League colleges that wouldn’t hire Jewish professors in the 1940s are now headed by Jewish presidents. A recent study shows that Jews suffer less discrimination in the workplace than any other religious group — even Christians.
Do these phenomena mean that the Western world is experiencing a wave of philo-Semitism and loves all Jews?
Not exactly, says professor David N. Myers, a young historian and director of the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies.
The kippah-wearing Germans, he believes, are looking in part for a relatively painless way to acknowledge their grandparents’ guilt and to undergo a fairly easy national catharsis.
Young Czechs are in search of an authentic national culture preceding Communism, in which Jews in general, and writer Franz Kafka in particular, represented the kind of cosmopolitanism eagerly sought by Prague intellectuals.
In the United States, the story is different and of greater historical interest, says Myers.
In the short run, the country’s sustained economic well-being makes for greater general tolerance and social harmony, he says, noting that “the state of peaceful co-existence is greased by the current economic juggernaut.”
The downside is that many of those Americans left behind feel even more marginalized than before and are often attracted to the radical extremism of burgeoning hate groups.
But from a historical perspective, Myers believes that the present status of American Jewry represents the culmination of a long process of Jewish emancipation, the likes of which the world has not seen before.
“At no other time, not in Alexandria during the Second Temple period, not in 11th century Spain, not during the Weimar Republic in Germany, has Jewish emancipation and social integration reached the present stage in America,” Myers asserts.
What we are seeing, he adds, is not a unique period of philo-Semitism, but part of a long historical process in Jewish life in the Diaspora.
In this process, Jews have become part of the cultural mainstream of America and have infused it with their own humor and sensibility, from Seinfeld on TV to bagels at McDonald’s.
The price for the integration has been the dilution of Jewish particularism and distinctiveness. And, warns Myers, if America is ever wracked by economic turmoil in the future, hostility toward Jews will rise again.
Jewish Days of Wine and Roses Read More »
A man who will argue before the U.S. Supreme Court next year that his planned execution in Florida’s electric chair constitutes “cruel and unusual punishment” can point to a 2,000-year-old Jewish law when he pleads his case.
A friend-of-the court brief filed last week in the Supreme Court by the National Jewish Commission on Law and Public Affairs, which advocates the position of the Orthodox community, and the American Section of the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists, backs Anthony Bryan’s position.
In citing only Jewish law and excluding any reference to previous Supreme Court decisions, the brief is believed to mark a first for America’s highest court.
The brief, written by the father-daughter team of Nathan and Alyza Lewin and reviewed by former Israeli Supreme Court Justice Menachem Elon, delves into the biblical and talmudic texts relating to execution in Jewish law.
The brief does not address the legality of the death penalty itself, but it does refer to the same Jewish text that an interfaith group has used to justify abolishing the penalty.
Alyza Lewin said her father, who has argued 27 cases before the Supreme Court, decided to write the brief because he thought the court — especially Jewish justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer and Justice Antonin Scalia, who has expressed interest in talmudic law in the past — would find it interesting as they consider the case.
The brief supports Bryan’s contention that execution in an electric chair violates the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids cruel and unusual punishment.
It concludes that the Sanhedrin, or High Court, during the time of the Second Temple in Jerusalem rarely imposed the death penalty. However, when a death sentence was imposed, the rabbis said the execution must be done in a painless and quick manner with as little disfigurement as possible.
That apparently has not been the case with Florida’s electric chair, which is known as “Ol’ Sparky.”
During two executions in the 1990s,smoke and flames erupted from the headpieces worn by two convicted killers, and the smell of burning flesh reportedly filled the execution chamber, according to a Web site maintained by Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism that details Supreme Court cases.
The last time the U.S. Supreme Court considered whether or not electrocution could be used as a method of punishment was in 1890.
In that case, the court ruled that the state of New York could use the electric chair instead of hanging death row inmates.
Reform and Conservative Jewish leaders have cited Jewish text — including the same passage the Lewins used — in their recently launched drive to abolish the death penalty.
Leaders of the National Jewish/Catholic Consultation, which is co-sponsored by the Reform and Conservative movements’ National Council of Synagogues and the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, said they “acknowledge the theoretical possibility of a justifiable death penalty, since the scriptures mandate it for certain offenses.”
However, they concluded that the “the arguments offered in defense of the death penalty are less than persuasive in the face of the overwhelming mandate in both Jewish and Catholic traditions to respect the sanctity of human life.”
The group’s statement on the death penalty cites a passage of commentary from chapter 1, verse 10 of Mishnah Makkot that shows the rabbis were clearly uncomfortable with the death penalty.
“A Sanhedrin that puts one person to death once in seven years is called destructive. Rabbi Eliezer ben Azariah says: Or even once in 70 years. Rabbi Tarfon and Rabbi Akiba say: Had we been the Sanhedrin, none would ever have been put to death.”
However, the next sentence in that passage, which is not cited in the consultation’s statement but is noted in the Lewins’ brief, quotes Rabbi Simon ben Gamliel as saying, “Such an attitude would increase bloodshed in Israel,” signaling that he thought the death penalty was a good deterrent.
Mark Pelavin, associate director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, acknowledged the statement by Rabbi Gamliel, saying “Halachah is ambivalent about the death penalty.”
“The sages really wrested with the application of the death penalty,” Pelavin said, adding that they wanted it to be imposed fairly.
The Jewish and Catholic leaders in their joint statement opposing the death penalty argue that the death penalty is not imposed fairly in the United States, saying that “suspiciously high percentages of those on death row are poor or people of color.”
Jewish Law Cited in Death Penalty Case Read More »
Since childhood my father had always introduced me as his “Kaddish.” It wasn’t until my teens that I realized the implication of that honor. Upon his death 53 years ago, I went to a local synagogue morning and night for 11 months. It was a tiny shul near the intersection of La Cienega and Olympic Boulevard in Los Angeles.
I had not the faintest notion of what to expect. My family, though spiritual, was not wrapped in the ritual and trappings of the faith. Though I had attended many bar mitzvahs of friends and cousins, I didn’t have one myself. Consequently, I had no knowledge of Hebrew and couldn’t read the prayer books.