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Jewish Journal

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July 23, 2009

Palestinians’ Plight, Holocaust Are Not Analogous

Leave a Comment / Opinion /

For decades, the Palestinian nationalist cause has sought to draw a dark line linking the experience of ordinary Palestinians from 1948 on to the experience of ordinary European Jews from 1933 to 1945. That link, it appears, is firmly embedded in the mind of the president of the United States.

Barack Obama, in his much-anticipated speech to the Arab world last month in Cairo, expressly linked the two historical events. In one breath, Obama said, “Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust … Six million Jews were killed — more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless, it is ignorant, and it is hateful.”

Then, without breaking stride, Obama said, “On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people — Muslims and Christians — have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than 60 years they’ve endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. They endure the daily humiliations — large and small — that come with occupation.”

This remarkable linkage, in the throwaway phrase “on the other hand,” cannot be dismissed as a sloppy transition. It is the president’s way of agreeing with those who say that Zionism created a new class of victims who have suffered as much as the Jews of Europe.

As someone with family members who survived the Holocaust and are still alive to testify, I find this comparison and linkage intellectually false and offensive. Let’s consider the facts to fully appreciate the amount of suffering of the Palestinian Arabs and determine whether they have a legitimate claim to share the mantle held by the Jews who suffered during the Final Solution perpetrated by the Nazis.

First, consider the Jews of Europe. In 1933, 9.5 million Jews lived in Europe. By 1945, 6 million Jews were murdered — two out of every three on the continent. The Nazis first forced Jews to live in segregated ghettos, then mowed them down with machine guns or put them on trains to gas chambers. Others were forced into slave labor camps.

Now consider the case of the Palestinian Arabs. Palestinians are subject to long waits at hundreds of military roadblocks throughout the West Bank. The Israeli army monitors or restricts access to major Palestinian roads. As a result, many Palestinians can no longer work in Israel and must rely on welfare from the state or others.

In addition, Israeli roadblocks limit the ability of humanitarian agencies to deliver food and supplies into the territories. It is worth mentioning here that the “daily humiliations” to which Obama referred are not motivated by racial animus but by efforts to prevent terrorists from killing Israelis.

Say what you will about the Israeli efforts to control the Palestinian population — Israel’s worst critics may call it dehumanizing, they may call it apartheid, they may call it an illegal occupation. But it is not mass murder. It is not Auschwitz.

There is no comparison. By now the Palestinians could have had their own state. They could have had secure borders, citizenship rights and easy access between Gaza and the West Bank. But time and again, they refused to compromise with the Jews.

By comparison, the Jews of Europe were not offered a thing: not safe passage to neutral countries far away from Europe. Their cries were ignored by the leaders of the world, who thought a rescue effort would detract from their economic, military and other interests. They were not provided with water, electricity and other humanitarian supplies by their oppressors. They were not given hundreds of millions of dollars to ease their economic privations. They were not given a seat at the table of international organizations.

To put it mildly: Jews would gladly have put up with checkpoints, security barriers and everything else with which the Palestinians live.

Those who promote the moral equivalence of the Holocaust and the plight of the Palestinians are engaging in an unconscionable revision of history. This is not an “on the one hand, on the other hand” comparison. On one hand is the memory of the 6 million, all innocent, all murdered in cold blood. There is no other hand. Let the Palestinians find another analogy.

Cheryl Halpern was an appointee of former Presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

Palestinians’ Plight, Holocaust Are Not Analogous Read More »

Good As (Jonathan) Gold

Leave a Comment / News /

I give myself credit for very little in this world, but I will take it for discovering Jonathan Gold before the Pulitzer committee did.

Gold is The L.A. Weekly food writer who received journalism’s highest award—aside from the Rockower, of course—in 2007, the first food writer ever to receive a Pulitzer.

He received the $10,000 prize, wrote the judges,  “ for his zestful, wide ranging restaurant reviews, expressing the delight of an erudite eater.”

But that’s not why he won it. By that description, Calvin Trillin got robbed.  Trillin is not a bit less zestful or wide-ranging, and he was stuffing his face long before Gold gnawed his first pork knuckle. (I’ve met Gold twice—he has made up for lost time). Not only would Trillin qualify by this measure, so does his predecessor, A.J. Liebling. And Gail Greene, and Craig Clairborne.

What sets Gold apart is what I recognized when I wrote what I think is the first article appreciating Gold—who else would spill ink in the pre-Web 2.0 years on a food critic at an alt weekly?

And what set him apart was his ability to draw us together.  Whether Gold knows he’s on a holy mission or not, he’s tapped into food’s holy mission: to bring different people to a common table.  Gold’s reviews knit together this diverse city, gave unity to our diversity, celebrated it, allowed us to taste it.

I thought of all that as I sat down today to read my umpteenth Gold review in today’s LA Weekly—the first and often the last piece I’ll read in that paper each week (I hate to sound prudish, but I always had a problem with a self-described progressive magazine that helped fund itself by running prostitution ads featuring exploited immigrant women.  We’d have a 70 page paper if we took those ads—and many years ago we used to—but it’s just a tawdry way of paying for your high-minded message. That said, I gotta read Gold).

May 27, 1999

Good as Gold

When the editors of Gourmet named Jonathan Gold the magazine’s restaurant critic, an obvious question came to mind: Why don’t they just stick a fork in our hearts? To his fans in Los Angeles, losing Jonathan Gold cannot hurt much less.

Gold has been writing restaurant reviews in Los Angeles for about a decade, first at The Los Angeles Times and Los Angeles magazine. Occasionally he goes national. Food & Wine has carried his reports from the food bazaars of Southeast Asia. Rolling Stone, Details and Spin all run his music criticism. But lately his local fans have become spoiled by turning regularly to Gold’s Counter Intelligence column in the LA Weekly.

Most big-city restaurant critics describe meals you can’t afford at places you can’t get into. Gold can do this too, mercilessly. His recent review of the must-be-seen-at Lucques dressed it down for overcharging. A man who ranks the Green Fish-Ball Curry at Thailand Plaza as one of the city’s ten best meals is unlikely to be wowed by yet another rare whatever-crusted ahi at twenty-two dollars for five ounces. Gold’s passion—his bread and butter—has been reporting on his meals at the hundreds of Shanghainese, Cantonese, Japanese, Indonesian, Pakistani, Isaan, Persian, Arabic, American regional, Korean, Mexican, Peruvian and other micro-ethnic eateries that lurk among the strip malls and boulevards from San Gabriel to Agoura. Places whose addresses include fractions, places where the phone is answered in unrecognizable languages, places unknown even to members of the ethnic group whose food they serve. When a Guatemalan friend wanted a special place to take her sisters for a taste of home, she asked me. I searched the online archives for Gold.

His writing is passionate, concise, and muscular—a cocktail of Tom Wolfe and Elizabeth David. “At first glance,” he writes of the signature dish at the South Indian vegetarian restaurant Daswaprakash in Cerritos, “pessret looks like a working maquette for an Eero Saarinen structure, a beige, lentil-flour pancake with the dull, smooth sheen of a freshly pressed pair of gabardine slacks, as big around as a phonograph record and bent into a kind of ‘50s-curvilinear shape. Thin, crisp edges work to a slight, sour chewiness at the center. The pancake encloses a mixture of green chile and minced raw onion—a sort of elegant counterpoint of slight bitternesses—and the package is spicy—hot as an East L.A. taco.”

Gold fits neatly into a little known but much appreciated type: the Jewish -American food writer. Think about it: A.J. Liebling, Raymond Sokolov, Jane and Michael Stern, Jeffrey Steingarten, Seymour Britchky, Calvin Trillin, L.A.‘s own Merrill Schindler. The Jewish cultural appreciation for the importance of food and eating has no doubt helped launch at least a dozen notable careers, Gold’s included. Stand aghast if you must that these writers happily left behind the food strictures of their faith. Trillin has written odes to barbecued pork, and Gold’s favorite local dish is something called the pork pump. You could be religiously, morally, or dietetically sworn never to go near the stuff, but still be entranced by Gold’s vivid description.

Like most of these fine writers, Gold has chosen a life that rewards him for eating whatever doesn’t eat him first. For those who keep kosher, his Rabelesian approach to the world’s larder has got to be chilling. After all, it hasn’t been that many generations since Gold’s ancestors abhored what he seems to crave.

If that offends you, there is good reason to forgive Gold his appetite, and that has to do with the other lines he crosses. You could map the area of the average restaurant reviewer’s travels, and it would pretty much overlap with Visa’s preferred zip codes. Los Angeles is a city segregated by lack of good public transportation, by massive freeway systems, by staggering home prices, by race. We don’t live in one another’s neighborhoods. We don’t, usually, eat in one another’s restaurants. Gold drives across these boundaries like Il Postino peddling his bicycle from village cottage to hilltop villa. His reviews draw us Angelenos near in a way that a thousand flowery mayoral speeches on tolerance and diversity cannot. Anyone who’s heard Korean pop knows that music is not really the international language. A tour among the grasshopper vendors at a Bangkok market will convince you that food isn’t either. So what is? Appetite. We are all hungry for something, The Farm Dogs memorably sing, and why not take them literally. I wouldn’t eat the “particularly stinky fermented-shrimp sambal” at Sudi Mampir on a bet, but Gold seems to thrive on the stuff. And he describes the glee the Indonesian proprietors express when their loyal customers, longing for a taste of home, feel better after eating it.

We may not understand what our neighbors eat, but we understand their devotion to their grandmothers’ recipes, to the familiar smells, to a finally perfect slice of something eaten a thousand times before, as something very human. Without Gold, a little of the stitching has gone out of the LA fabric. Score one for the Forces That Pull Us Asunder. In the building where I work, the easiest way for me to start a conversation with the Phillipino consular officials, the Korean bankers, the Latino journalists, the black lawyers, is to ask them about the food I know they are hungry for. Without Gold, how will I know?

Read my Gold piece in its native habitat here.

 

Good As (Jonathan) Gold Read More »

Affirmative Action…Again

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Over the past month, the contentious debate over affirmative action has resurfaced. The Sotomayor hearings and the New Haven fire fighters decision of the US Supreme Court generated much heated debate, argument and media attention.

What has not received much attention and impacts directly on the volatile issue of affirmative action is a recent action of California’s attorney general, Jerry Brown. Brown, California’s former governor and a potential candidate for governor next year, issued a ” title=”Proposition 209″ target=”_blank”>Proposition 209 over a decade ago (sustained as constitutional by the courts) made clear that no government agency in California can discriminate for or against someone on the basis of their race or ethnicity.

In a display of legal gymnastics that nearly defies description, Brown argued that the ban on race conscious programs in Proposition 209 is unconstitutional because it would prevent race and gender conscious programs that might be permissible under the federal Constitution. In essence, Attorney General Brown opines that the barring of discrimination is impermissible because it has made the re-imposition of discriminatory governmental preferences difficult (i.e. a further constitutional amendment).

Prop 209’s ban on racial preferences is found by Brown to “effectively disadvantage racial minorities and women in the political process;” apparently, if one isn’t receiving a preference one is disadvantaged!

His arguments fly in the face not only of logic, but of the history of preferential treatment in California and the reasons Proposition 209 was enacted. It was a reaction to the rampant reverse discrimination that existed in California—- from admissions and hiring at the University of California to virtually every other governmental entity that had contracting authority in California; the forms to be completed to qualify as a “minority” were legendary. Preferences on the basis of race and ethnicity were the rule, their implementers denied they existed and a majority of Californians simply got fed up. Hence 209 passed with 54% of the vote.

Brown’s argument is troublingly tortured and specious. It is an odd day when language that simply says, “the State shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin” is deemed discriminatory itself.

Affirmative Action…Again Read More »

Paula Abdul demands $20 million to return to ‘Idol’

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NY Magazine reported Tuesday that Paula Abdul, the L.A. Laker turned pop star turned ‘American Idol’ judge is demanding $20 million to return to the show next year. Producers have offered Abdul $10 million for the 2010 season—a pittance if you consider it’s only a five-fold increase from her previous salary. Not to mention, the figure falls tragically short of Ryan Seacrest’s paycheck which clocks in at $15 million. So the Jewish princess pouts.

Is there anyone who thinks Abdul deserves to make as much as her co-stars? Cowell, for example, is a far more important figure. The provocative judge (and show co-creator) whom everyone loves to hate possesses the one opinion that matters—both to the audience and the ratings. Seacrest, the affable yet anodyne host, has the most on-camera work to do. Then there’s Abdul, beloved by Cowell (and ensnared in a very unappetizing flirtation with him) but mostly thought “weird” by everyone else. She is known for gushing incoherently at contestants and swaying as if in a drug-induced haze during performances rather than having an impact on ‘Idol’ votes.

For Abdul, the show is a self-serving vehicle. It even earned her a short-lived reality series in which Abdul pranced around her L.A. mansion, blathering on about nonsense, while various assistants did her makeup and brought her clothes. In an attempt to revive her music career during the ‘Idol’ finale last May, she debuted a new single in a sexy number, only to see Adam Lambert’s Rolling Stone cover sell more copies. Abdul needs to have her head checked for unhealthy levels of chutzpah. And she should thank her lucky stars for every moment ‘Idol’ stretches out her stardom, because without it she’d likely be $20 million in debt.

More on Abdul:

Paula Abdul’s public addiction

VIDEO: Paula Abdul talks about being Jewish

Paula Abdul demands $20 million to return to ‘Idol’ Read More »

Why The New Jersey Rabbi Sting Stings

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Does it matter that so many of the men arrested today in New Jersey and New York on charges that include money laundering and organ trafficking are Jewish?  And not just Jewish but rabbis and community leaders?

Of course it matters to Jews.  This is big news from New York to LA, with all the attendant hand-wringing and oy-gvalting that goes along with the revelation of a prominent crook who, as my mother would say, happens to be Jewish (see Madoff, Bernard).

But you’ll notice a lot of those arrested have Italian surnames.  Is the Italian press full of oy veys (in Italian, of course)?  No.  But Jews see a Goldstein in handcuffs, and feel viscerally the shame, the guilt, the fear of backlash…

Some resent it.  Rabbi Brad Hirschfield of CLAL, who made his resentment at the press’s emphasis on the “Jewish” angle clear in this email:

When New Jersey Mayors, politicians and rabbis get arrested for money laundering, it’s news that should be reported. It’s especially important for Jews to hear this news and address the discomfort created by religious leaders behaving badly. Isn’t that what we ask of other groups when their leaders do the same?

But the coverage, which initially began in the New Jersey Star-Ledger, suggests that the motivation for the coverage may be less than appropriate. In fact, it may be nothing less than an excuse to vent deep resentment at a particular portion of the Jewish community.

When a headline reads, “NJ officials, NY rabbis caught in federal money laundering, corruption sweep”, one expects a story which describes that event. In this case however, no mention is made of any rabbis actually getting arrested. Despite plenty of details about various politicos being taken into custody, there is nothing about rabbis.

This may be a big deal, but the headline and the story don’t match – where is the info on the rabbis? This kind of coverage actually borders on Jew-baiting, and it potentially says something at least as ugly about the author/editors as it does about those who committed any crime. Consider the following quote found on the paper’s website and carried on CNN:

The arrests…“began with an investigation of money transfers by members of the Syrian enclaves in New York and New Jersey,” the newspaper said on its Web site, NJ.com. Those arrested Thursday “include key religious leaders in the tight-knit, wealthy communities,” the report said.

“Enclaves”? “Tight-knit, wealthy communities”? Could it be that the paper harbors deep resentment against Jews who they see as over-privileged, stand-offish people who operate as a law unto themselves? Is this the moment to celebrate how “those people” will now get their comeuppance? If not, why describe the community in classically anti-Semitic ways instead of calling out the specific leaders who broke the law, violated the religious rules of their own community and should be punished to the full extent of the law for any wrongdoing they committed?

This story needs to be told, but it needs to be told better than this. It needs to be about justice, not just desserts. By the way, when all this calms down, the Syrian-Jewish community should also take a good look at itself to see what they do which contributes to their being perceived of this way by their neighbors.

While victims of bias should never be blamed for the bias against them, in most cases for a stereotype to take hold it must be rooted in some partial truth. Ironically, coverage like that in the Star Ledger will make that ever less likely to happen, confirming the kind of hostility which is used by any community looking for a reason to turn inward.

But J.J. Goldberg, the editorial director of The Forward, had perhaps the most insightful take on the Jewish reaction in a post Madoff interview with New Voices magazine. He said our reaction is shock not because we’re afraid of anti-semitism but because we naively hold our religion inviolate:

It’s because we hold Judaism so dear, we don’t want to think it’s capable of creating problems. In 1993, there was a wave of Pell Grant fraud cases where people were setting up phony schools to apply for Pell Grants and then keeping the money. [The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations] had two days of hearings. [Anti-Defamation League National Director] Abe Foxman wrote a letter [to John McCain] complaining that all of the witnesses that had been called up represented yeshivas. He said, the way this has been set up it could create the unfortunate impression that this is some particularly Jewish pattern of crime. And McCain wrote back and said, it is. Yeshivas were this huge network of institutions where people study full time. They had been mainly supported by the billionaire Reichman family from Toronto. [The Reichman family] went bust, and all of a sudden there are all of these cases of fraud and money laundering. Anything to support this impossible system. But you can’t talk about Judaism leading to wrongdoing. It can’t be. Judaism is only good.

The less involved you are in daily Jewish life, the more inviolate it has to be. Think of Superman and [the city of Kandor] in the little bottle in his Fortress of Solitude. It has to be preserved because there’s nothing you can do with it. Flowers that you press into a Bible. The less you can do with it the more you need it to be perfect.

Goldberg traces the problem of corruption in the Jewish community to the rise in wealth (well, one could argue, it is kind of hard to be tempted to money-launder when you have no money).  He says:

Before the modern age, Jews lived in ghettoes. They could tax themselves. Tzedakah was not voluntary. Shabbes wasn’t voluntary. The first synagogue in America, Shearith Israel in New York, adopted a rule saying that if you violated Shabbes you got fined. It didn’t work. People just resigned from the synagogue. [The community] had lost enforcement power. And once you’ve lost enforcement power, you’ve got to ask for it. And once you’ve got to ask for money, you become dependent on the wealthy. Rabbis now depend on the goodwill of a few rich people. And so the balance of power between the moralists and the hedonists shifts. There used to be a check. The moral authority of the Jewish community had enforcement power. Now it’s around for entertainment. Instead of scolding Jews, now they scold goyim. They have no authority to scold the Jews. None. Rabbis lose their jobs for being moral scolds. So there is no more moral authority.

I don’t know if the people arrested are guilty, but if they are, Goldberg’s harsh last statement—“There is no more moral authority”—will be just a bit harder to disprove.

 

Why The New Jersey Rabbi Sting Stings Read More »

N.J. rabbis arrested in corruption probe

Leave a Comment / United States /

Several rabbis reportedly were arrested as part of a public corruption and international money-laundering investigation in New Jersey.

According to media reports, among the 30 arrests made Thursday morning by the FBI were the mayors of Hoboken and Secaucus, the deputy mayor of Jersey City and a New Jersey state assemblyman.

The Asbury Park Press reported that the rabbis arrested were religious leaders from Syrian Jewish neighborhoods in Deal and Elberon, as well as Brooklyn, N.Y. The newspaper said the investigation involved the Deal Yeshiva, a Sephardic institution that has a boys’ division in Ocean Township and a girls’ school in West Long Branch.

According to The Star-Ledger, the arrests are the result of a two-year probe by the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service that began with an investigation of money transfers by members of the Syrian enclaves in Deal and Brooklyn, two tight-knit and wealthy communities.

The Monmouth County Prosecutor’s Office and the IRS removed at least three boxes from the Deal Yeshiva as students were arriving at school, The Star-Ledger reported, as well as several boxes from the Ohel Yaacob synagogue in the same town.

Law enforcement authorities are expected to announce more information about the arrests at a news conference Thursday afternoon.

Read “Why The New Jersey Rabbi Sting Stings” here.

N.J. rabbis arrested in corruption probe Read More »

Rabbis and politicians arrested in New Jersey corruption scandal

Leave a Comment / Uncategorized /

Did you hear the one about all those New Jersey mayors and rabbis who were arrested today in the Garden State latest corruption scandal involving public figures?

Among those arrested this morning were Assemblyman Daniel Van Pelt (R-Ocean), Jersey City Deputy Mayor Leona Beldini, Hoboken Mayor Peter Cammarano and Secaucus Mayor Dennis Elwell, all Democrats, authorities said. Several area rabbis and other community leaders and politicians, including Jersey City Council President Mariano Vega, were arrested.

The New York Times, via JTA’s Fundermentalist, tunes us into the Jewish tidbits in this story:

Weysan Dun, special agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s Newark office, said the rabbis arrested — including the grand rabbi of the Syrian Jewish community in the United States, Saul Kassin — were part a vast money-laundering conspiracy with tentacles in Israel and Switzerland. Another person, Levy-Izhak Rosenbaum, of Brooklyn, was accused of being a kidney salesman who enticed vulnerable people to give up a kidney for $10,000 and then sold the body parts for $160,000.

Mr. Dun stressed that the case was neither motivated by religion nor by politics — an important point given that the New Jersey governor’s race pits the former United States Attorney, Christopher J. Christie, under whom the investigation began, against a Democratic incumbent, Gov. Jon S. Corzine, whose administration was not spared in Thursday’s arrests.

More from the AP.

Rabbis and politicians arrested in New Jersey corruption scandal Read More »

Shattering the Chains of Silence

Leave a Comment / Community /

I recently met with several women, who have spent the greater part of their professional lives advocating on behalf of agunot—women whose recalcitrant husbands refuse to grant a get.  They came to me hoping discover the solution to the agunah problem.  The plight of wives—and husbands for that matter—whose spouse callously withhold a writ of divorce is a traumatic experience.  It is hard to believe that despite many attempts by Rabbis, and advocacy organizations to circumvent the agunah problem, there are many, many men and women who are suffering.  I don’t have the solution, but perhaps together, with our varied voices paired with our religious and ethical conscience, we may discover the magic bullet.

Here’s a just a few of the existing band-aides that attempt to prevent couples from becoming agunot as well as release those who are currently chained to loveless marriages:

1. RCA prenuptial agreement
2. Heskem L’ Kavod Hadadi (the agreement of Mutual Respect)
3. Rabbi Emanuel Rackman’s Beit Din
4. Rabbi Michael Broyde’s Tripartite Pre-nuptial Agreement
5. Nullifying a marriage based on a technical defect in the wedding ceremony

1.  The RCA prenuptial agreement includes a “binding arbitration agreement, whereby both the groom and bride accept the Beit Din of America as an arbitration panel, and is legally able to render any decisions relating to the get.  The BDA prenup agreement proposes to compel a husband to give a get or pay $150 per day for each day that he refuses to grant her a bill of divorce. 

A few problems that are embedded in this solution: any person who is very wealthy, mentally unstable or has absolutely no funds, and therefore nothing to lose may not be threatened by the monetary obligation, and simply ignore the bet din’s pleas. In addition, the women may refuse to accept the get in exchange for child custody, or other demands.

2.  Another prenup, called the Heskem L’ Kavod Hadadi (the agreement of Mutual Respect) works much like the RCA prenup. However, both the bride and the groom obligate themselves to support the spouse, the amount ranging from $1500 per month to half his/her monthly net income. 

While the Israeli agreement has potentially increased the financial burden on the recalcitrant spouse, there are cases where the recalcitrant party may simply ignore the financial obligation and continue to withhold the get without concern for the pain this action may cause.

3.  A third, rather radical solution was proposed by Rabbi Emanuel Rackman in 1997.  The rationale behind the Rackman court is that since “grave errors,” “mistakes,” or “salient defects,” underscore the marriages at issue, the wives’ initial consent to marry their husbands was marred, rendering the marriages void.  Therefore, the Rackman Beit Dins have freed many chained spouses without the need for a get to be given by the husband to the wife. 

There has been many critiques written on the Rackman courts, and despite the fact that it has the potential to alleviate the suffering of so many, Rackman’s court’s are not widely accepted by the Orthodox community.  (see Rabbi J. David Bleich in his 1998 article entitled Kiddushei Ta’ut: Annulment as a Solution to the Agunah Problem).  Rabbi Dr. Michel H. Broyde dismisses Rackman’s solution, saying that the Rackman court allows for the annulment of marriages based on defects in the husband that arose after the marriage was entered into—something that Rabbi Broyde feels is unfounded in the halakhic literature.

4.  Rabbi Broyde has advocated for the annulment of marriages in cases where unknown to their wives, their husbands were homosexuals, impotent, epileptics, mentally ill or apostates when their wives married them. (based on heterim by Rav Moshe Feinstein and others).  Rabbi Broyde has also proposed a Tripartite Pre-nuptial Agreement: authorizing the rabbinic court to void a marriage by communal ordinance; establishes that a consecutive fifteen-month period of separation is a condition to void the marriage; and appoints agents to give the get in the husband’s stead.  This agreement has not yet been authorized by the Orthodox community.

5. Yet another proposed solution that could free agunot is finding a defect with the marriage ceremony.  If the wedding did not fit the halakhic requirements of kiddushin, then the marriage could be annulled.  Some even advocate to purposefully introduce a technical error into the wedding ceremony—having a non-observant witness, for example.  While this solution has its merits, it seems disingeneous to purposefully flaw the wedding ceremony. 

So where des this leave us?

There should be no reason why any Rabbi officiating at a wedding does not insist that a couple signs a prenuptial agreement.  Many of the agunah cases that have been resolved, have in large part been due to the binding prenuptial agreement. Yet, this is not enough.  We must ask ourselves if there is a way to find a halahicly acceptable premise with which to accept the Rackman courts.  If not, then we need to advocate for larger acceptance of Rabbi Broyde’s Tripartite Pre-nuptial Agreement, which it would seem would free many agunot, if employed.  Or, perhaps, (and I am not sure how I feel about this) advocate for a small technical breech within the kiddushin ceremony.

Whatever the solution, let’s break the silence. Our community must galvanize together and raise a voice of moral conscience to advocate for the freeing of women who are currently agunot, as well as find solutions to prevent men and women from becoming chained to hateful, loveless marriages in the future. 

Do you have the answer?

 

 

Shattering the Chains of Silence Read More »

LETTERS: July 24-30, 2009

Leave a Comment / Letters to the Editor /

Kudos to Suissa

Kudos to David Suissa for his informative and brave article on his recent visit to Israel (“Chaos and Unity,” July 17). I hope American Jews start waking up as well. If they could support Obama in such large numbers, maybe if they start pressuring him … he could be made to stop pressuring Israel.

Jewish congressmen and women, like Feinstein, Boxer, Berman, Waxman, Schiff, just to name a few in this state, can also start standing up for Israel. It wouldn’t hurt.

Marsha Roseman
Van Nuys

Thank you David Suissa for giving us the hard truth of Israel’s view of President Obama.

In just a few months, Obama has turned Israel’s greatest ally into a scary question mark.

Obama might have united the Jews of Israel, but the Jews of America are blind to the dangerous direction Obama is taking regarding the United States and Israel relations. Keep it up; the hard truth will save us.

Hershey Gold
Los Angeles

Room for Liberalism in Jewish Publications?

I wanted to thank Rob Eshman for alerting me to the great job that Commentary Magazine is doing (“Sedentary,” July 10). His over-the-top criticism of that magazine as left-bashing assured me that they have a much better grip on reality and evil than he does. So I went to their Web site and immediately found an article by David Hazony on the bias and conflict of interests of so-called human rights watchdogs like Amnesty and the U.N. Human Rights Council. That clinched the deal, and I immediately paid for a subscription to the magazine. What a great magazine!

Warren Scheinin
Redondo Beach

In one quick breath, President Obama equated Palestinian suffering with the Holocaust and presented us with the Arab narrative of Israel’s founding and history.

So what is Mr. Eshman’s answer? We need more liberal voices in a conservative Jewish magazine.

Liberal Jews in their hopeful reality continue to cling to their hopes for Obama and condemn those who see a danger in President Obama’s world view and threat to Israel’s future existence.

Liberal hopes and dreams come at a very high cost. It’s sad that 78 percent of liberal Jews placed those idealistic hopes ahead of reality and still cannot admit to the danger.

Betzalel “Bitzy” N. Eichenbaum
Encino

Rob Eshman complains that Commentary, like a grumpy old man, so incessantly pines for the past and despairs for the future that Eshman knows what it says without having to read it. Apparently, Eshman took his own advice, because he clearly did not read the last issue.

One article actually refuted those who wax nostalgic about baseball’s good old (steroid-free) days. The author noted many old-time records were artificial due to the pre-1947 exclusion of blacks, and that current achievements are thus more impressive. Hardly the complaint of a grumpy old man — unlike Eshman’s own reminiscence of the magazine’s glory years, when he was a boy of negative 20.

Eshman also slams an author for complaining about Jews concerned with Darfur and global warming. Actually, the article nowhere mentioned Darfur or global warming. Rather, it lamented that “hipster” Judaism has no call to collective action, pursuing neither justice nor holiness, only coolness. Eshman apparently concedes that attending drug-fueled raves and wearing “Shalom, M——- F——-” T-shirts is not quite Rabbi Heschel marching with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. So he describes a straw article, easier to defame.

Eshman’s advice for making a good conservative magazine is to become, well, less conservative. Yes, Commentary is predictable. It consistently supports Israel’s security and opposes global terrorism, anti-Semitism and a nuclear Iran. Sadly, these are increasingly conservative positions.

Of course, Eshman is an expert on publications that readers can skim because the content is predictable. After all, he edits one.

Sheila and Mitchell Keiter
Los Angeles

In his column titled “Sedentary,” Rob Eshman complains that the magazine Commentary has gone from a once venerable magazine of the independent intellectual class to become an Obama/left-bashing magazine without any balance of liberal political views (“Sedentary,” July 10). 

Frankly, I never heard of Commentary and if what Mr. Eshman says is true I wouldn’t pick up a copy any more then I’d watch the unbalanced babble of FOX news. If Mr. Eshman thinks there is a need for the type of magazine Commentary once was then I suggest that Mr. Eshman with his talent move on and get a magazine published that is balanced and meets the standards of the original Commentary. Or, Mr. Eshman, are you too sedentary in your job as Editor-in Chief to take on such and important task?

Leon M. Salter
Los Angeles

I had not read Tevi Troy’s article in Commentary, but was prompted to by Mr. Eshman’s “Sedentary”. In my opinion, Mr. Eshman has exhibited the most egregious example of out of context quote to deprecate a thoughtful and knowledgeable article by an author who had been deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services from 2007 to 2009, and thereby the magazine Commentary as well. The words following Mr. Eshman’s quote are: “Rather, medical treatment came to be considered a human right to which universal access was required without regard to cost. Because people needed these goods so much, it was unscrupulous or greedy to involve the profit principle in them. What mattered most was equity. Consumers of health care should not have to be subject to market forces.” A worthy sentiment and not Mr. Eshman’s interpretation that Mr. Troy meant that “liberals hate to save lives.”

Harold F Powell
Sherman Oaks

Phillips v. Dershowitz

I read the article by Mr. Dershowitz intently (“American Support for Israel Must Remain Bipartisan,” July 17). Apparently, he is beginning to smell something emanating from the current administration’s attitude toward Israel’s survival but is willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and to take President Obama at his word that he will bring about a two-state solution with a demilitarized Palestinian entity. In the meantime, those centrifuges in Iran keep twirling.

Mr. Dershowitz also mentions a generational gap in Europe. He liked the president’s Cairo speech, for the most part. What part didn’t he like? He didn’t like Pat Buchanan or Robert Novak (who does?). He didn’t mention Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh, who are major, sincere supporters of Israel. In Israel, your writer, Mr. Suissa, mentions a recent poll taken there in which 6 percent of Israelis consider Obama to be pro-Israel. I was amazed the support in Israel for Obama was that high. What is it the 94 percent are feeling? They want to live, maybe?

Mark Steinberg
Los Angeles

The Jewish Journal published Alan Dershowitz’s rebuttal to Melanie Phillips without including Phillips’ article. In printing only half the debate, it seems that The Journal is more interested in reinforcing it’s own prejudices.

Further, there were several inconsistencies within the article itself. Dershowitz repeatedly said he takes Obama “at his word” when it comes to Obama’s pro-Israel pronouncements. Yet quickly thereafter, when it comes to “parts of President Obama’s Cairo speech” with which he disagreed, he suddenly decides to “judge administrations by their actions more than by their words.” He writes that “Joe Biden strongly suggested he believes Israel should have the right to take military action to protect its citizens,” failing to mention that a couple of days later Obama retracted Biden’s statement and said there was “absolutely not” any green light to attack Iran. Finally, Dershowitz said that in the 2008 election “Jews were on the winning side, and that is good for Israel.” Using that logic, did he urge Jewish support for Ronald Reagan against Carter and Mondale? Is he urging more Jews to vote Republican so that the Jewish vote is not always so lopsided in favor of Democrats?

Steve Lackner
Los Angeles

Editor’s Note: Ms. Phillips’ entire essay is at jewishjournal.com.

Is Wagner Welcome?

Los Angeles City Supervisor Mike Antonovich is right not to allow Richard Wagner’s music in Los Angeles. Wagner was very anti-Semitic, and he loved Hitler and hated Jews.

I am a Holocaust survivor and I am agreeing with the supervisor’s wish.

Manny Steinberg
via e-mail

Jewish Community Library

I appreciate your continuing coverage of the closing of the Jewish Community Library (“Community Library Moving to AJU,” July 3). However, the news and the decision-making process have been distressing. John Fishel said, “the children’s collection will stay here.” But there is no funding for the library past December 2009. What is the use of a collection if there is no funding to employ librarians, run programs, or keep the doors open? Equally, what does it mean to say that the adult collection has “moved” to the AJU, when less than 50 percent of the collection will actually be moved, and “AJU has not yet determined if it will need to hire a community librarian”? In difficult times, it may be necessary to make cuts in cultural programs and institutions. But let’s be straight and honest about it. Then, the public can be clear on what is at stake. The children’s library in The Federation building serves a diverse and large group of families. If we end up with an interactive, ecumenical children’s museum (the Zimmer) and no place of Jewish learning for children across the hall, that sends a terrible message about the importance of Torah. Let’s understand that the children’s library is effectively slated to close, and let’s rally to do something about it. Please contact me if you are interested in helping.

Rabbi Debra Orenstein
via e-mail

Farmers Market

The calendar’s mention of the famed Farmers Market’s 75th anniversary recalls fond memories of this happy, gregarious landmark, which offers “something for everyone!” (“The Calendar,” July 10). On any given day one can recognize old actors, aspiring young acting hopefuls, out-of-towners, senior citizens who’ve been schmoozing there for decades, and I can recall years ago there was talk of tearing it down, but fortunately Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky prevented it. The thought of losing this important “piece of L.A.’s history” is unthinkable!

Eddi Cress
Sylmar

I’m With Cheney

In my two most recent visits back to my happy hunting grounds of Los Angeles, I have come across two articles written by your columnist, Marty Kaplan, about the former Vice President of the United States, Richard Cheney (“Cheney Meant Well,” July 17). Mr. Kaplan doesn’t seem to think very much of Vice President Cheney, but then again Marty, (who was once married to the Princess of Self-Denial, Susan Estrich, a girl who never met a Democrat, even an anti-Semitic one she didn’t like, nor a Republican that she did) seems to have a hang-up about a Vice President who protected this country, who was — and IS — a firm friend of Israel and isn’t a plagarizer like the current occupant of that position. Or a coward either, like Biden — and of course, Obama.

Kaplan, like fellow Obama cheerleader and excuses-maker Congressman Bobby Wexler, would love to see Vice President Cheney indicted for various reasons, including making sure we were safe after September 11. He claims that Vice President Cheney “didn’t need no stinking laws”.

Very funny, Martin. Considering that Obama, you know, that guy who sat in a pew for 20 years and not only listened to but applauded a Nazi of Color, the guy who for three months straight has smeared Israel for allowing Jews to build rooms and playgrounds but can’t say a damn thing about Neda Soltan until he had to, considering that Obama twists the Constitution every day to suit his own twisted ends, is shoving a health care plan that most of us will not only find useless but will be dangerous to senior citizens, who wants the doors of Gitmo open but certainly won’t bed down Khalid Sheikh Mohammed right next door to either himself and Michelle or Rahm, an Obama that lies and evades the truth about his own citizenship and place of birth, well, that is a bit rich.

Obama and Biden only love LIBERALS. They do NOT love Jews, nor Israel. But give a pass to the Iranian Guards (read: thugs) who murdered Miss Soltan and others, hell, they’ll be the first in line, just as they were as Senators when they voted against Kyl-Lieberman, or the bill correctly designating the Iranian Guards as terrorists. That’s TERRORISTS, Marty. Something Dick Cheney wasn’t afraid to call them but something two little moral relativists (read: moral retards) cannot do.

If anyone deserves to be indicted and impeached, methinks it would be both Obama and Biden.

In conclusion, Marty Kaplan is not even fit to shine Vice President Cheney’s Cowboy boots. Nor are Obama, Biden or Wexler.

Alan Rockman
Tolleson, Arizona

Fact Checking

I seemed to have missed your disclaimer that you do not check the facts contained in opinion pieces you print. For example, Raphael Sonenshein’s article in your July 10 issues claims that “Franken … had a successful radio talk show.” The fact is the show folded due to miserable ratings and, indeed, the entire Network he was part of, Air America, went bankrupt.

And how could you in good faith print “he cannot hold a candle to the vitriol of the right’s talkers,” this, a man whose book’s title calls someone “a Big Fat Idiot”? I challenge you or Mr. Sonenshein to find anything approaching vitriol from Dennis Prager, Jean Hannity, Michael Medved or Bill O’Reilly. The worst I have heard so far is Mr. O’Rielly’s habit of calling opponents “loons.” Can’t you impose even a modicum of reality in your left-wing articles?

 

Warren Scheinin
Redondo Beach

 

Tired of Excuses

Over the last ten years that I’ve been involved in the Orthodox world, I have been told something over and over again. The way to determine if someone is Orthodox is if they keep kosher and are shomer shabbos (keep the sabbath). If the individual is a man, he is also required to be a part of a minyan (a group of 10 men praying together), praying three times a day if possible.

Whenever there is an individual who follows the above rules, yet does something that brings negative attention to the Orthodox world, then I am told that they are not really frum, haredi, Orthodox, or practicing Judaism. To be honest, I see this as a lame excuse to perpetuate the vision that those who are Orthodox are perfect.

I personally believe that when someone parades around in the Orthodox traditional clothing, keeps kosher and shabbos, and when the individual davens three times a day in a minyan, usually at an Orthodox synagogue — even if they do something against the cultural norms, they are still considered Orthodox, haredi, frum or what ever else you want to call it. The rest of the world will not buy into the excuse that keeps being given.

Those who perpetrate sex crimes against children come from all cultural backgrounds. This includes those of other faiths, neo-Nazis and the Orthodox Jewish community. 

I’ve also recently been given the excuse that the haredi men in Jerusalem that are rioting against the parking lot being open on shabbos are “not really practicing Judaism” or are not really Orthodox. 

To the rest of the world they are seen as Jews. It doesn’t matter if one group does not feel they are practicing Judaism correctly or not. They are all seen as Jews. As a people we need to do something about this, besides saying they are not really practicing or doing it correctly. We are one people, no matter what our skin color is, how we daven (pray) or don’t pray. We are all responsible for each other. We must stop being in denial and face the fact that there are those who are orthodox who also molest children, sexually assault adults and act in ways in which one does not feel an Orthodox person should behave. The first step in healing is recognizing the problem. Denial will get us nowhere, except to allow more children and adults to become the next victim of sex crimes and/or more journalists to be spit at, or worse.

Vicki Polin
The Awareness Center, Inc.
Baltimore, Md.

Correction

In the July 10 Torah Portion column, it was Pinchas who speared Zimri and Cozbi.

 

LETTERS: July 24-30, 2009 Read More »

The Wall

Leave a Comment / David Suissa, Opinion /

There are few places on earth that move Jews like the Western Wall in Jerusalem. After my visit this summer, I think I’ve discovered why this ancient structure has such a magical hold on us.

First, there are the obvious reasons. It’s a piece of our national and religious history — a remnant of the Second Temple destroyed more than 1900 years ago.

You touch the Wall and you feel your ancestors. You feel the Bible. You feel the Jewish story.

You also feel Jewish unity. Go on any Friday night and you will see unity in action. Everywhere you look, there’s a different prayer service. Sephardic services coexisting with Ashkenazi and Chasidic services. Dancing bohemians dressed all in white right next to straight-laced daveners dressed in sharp suits.

Outside the Wall, Jews pray and hang out in their little bubbles. But when they come to the Wall, their bubbles connect. They might not pray together, but they pray right next to each other.

It might be the only place in the world where this happens: All the voices of Judaism singing simultaneously. Unity without uniformity. Diversity not as a theoretical construct, but as a real-life experience that you can see, hear and feel.

Because of my background in marketing, I’ve also been sensitive to something uniquely seductive about the Wall: It’s anti-marketing. It doesn’t try to sell you.

This is the ultimate coup. The biggest enemy of marketing today is marketing itself. Consumers are hip to our tricks. They’re suspicious of any commercial agenda.

That’s why marketers are desperate to create the illusion of authenticity.

Imagine for a moment if the Wall didn’t exist. Some Jewish entrepreneur might raise $100 million to build a memorial to the Second Temple. Just like at other tourist sites, you’d see big banners on the walls promoting one thing or another, ticket offices, ushers, brochures, velvet ropes and so on. No matter how authentic the monument would try to look, it would still be a commercial enterprise.

It would scream marketing.

The Western Wall doesn’t scream anything. It has no logo, no signs, no slogans. It’s not designed by Frank Gehry. It’s not a marketing brand.

It’s a monument to authenticity.

It seduces you by its silence. It makes no claims or promises whatsoever — because it doesn’t have to. It’s the real “real thing.”

Over the years, this authenticity and connection to our ancestors and feelings of unity are what have moved me the most. This year, however, I felt something new.

It was something in the idea of a wall itself.

The idea that a wall actually pushes you back. It tells you to go away.

It’s not like a building with a door that invites you to come in and make yourself comfortable. The Wall says, “Touch me, feel me, ask for blessings, but then leave. Take these blessings to the world. Go spread the light and the lessons that I represent. Take the memory of your people and create your own memories and your own stories.”

In a way, it’s like the Torah that we unfold and read on Shabbat. We read it, we feel it, we learn it — and then we go away. In the Jewish tradition, we are expected to go back into the world and live out the Jewish message.

When I shared these musings with a rabbi friend the other day, his eyes lit up and he told me about this cryptic talmudic story.

It’s a story of King David going against God’s will and digging the foundations of the Temple. When he hits the spot for the Holy of Holies, the chaotic waters burst out and flood the world. It’s only when David writes and sings the psalms of Shir HaMa’alot that the waters return to their original place.

As the rabbi explained, when King David stopped trying to build a monument, he accessed the feminine side of his personality — he wrote and sang the psalms that brought peace and balance to the chaotic waters.

Thus, the Jews don’t need to touch the Holy of Holies. We are attracted to the mystery of Jerusalem — where the world was founded, where Abraham tried to sacrifice Isaac, where our collective story was shaped — but we cannot enter this mystery. We can only touch one of its remnants — the Wall.

Because it’s “only” a wall, we can’t stick around for too long and wallow in its greatness.

But we can do more: We can sing and dance and wallow in its holiness.

Instead of admiring it, we can absorb it. We can absorb the Jewish unity that we felt on Friday night; the yearning for blessings that we put in the cracks of the stones; the joy we felt when we sang and danced; and the tingling emotions that touched us when we recalled the story and hardships of our people.

It’s as if the Wall, in its utter simplicity and humility, is saying to us: “I am so old now, I am so small, it’s OK if you take me with you.”

David Suissa is Publisher & Editor-in-Chief of Tribe Media/Jewish Journal, where he has been writing a weekly column on the Jewish world since 2006. In 2015, he was awarded first prize for “Editorial Excellence” by the American Jewish Press Association. Prior to Tribe Media, David was founder and CEO of Suissa Miller Advertising, a marketing firm named “Agency of the Year” by USA Today. He sold his company in 2006 to devote himself full time to his first passion: Israel and the Jewish world. David was born in Casablanca, Morocco, grew up in Montreal, and now lives in Los Angeles with his five children.

The Wall Read More »