Category Archives: Journalism

Fresh Air Amid the Reek

Even more remarkable than the article itself was where it appeared.

Written by Elissa Strauss, an essayist and a “co-artistic director” of a “non-religious Jewish house of study for culture-makers at the 14th Street Y” in New York, the piece – “What Did the Orthodox Do Now?!” – graced the pages of the Forward, where Ms. Strauss is a contributing editor.

The essay’s focus was the non-Orthodox Jewish media’s “fixation with Haredi Jews”; those organs’ “hunger for sensationalism” in their reportage on the Orthodox community; the “crude laziness” evidenced by such tunnel vision; and the reduction of “a whole community of Jews” to “a kind of caricature in stories that often traffic in stereotypes.”

Points well taken, and the Forward, of course, is a good example of such invidious ink-spilling. It has some excellent reporters but also maintains a stable of writers and bloggers with chronically jaundiced views of the charedi world. And so it deserves credit for publishing Ms. Strauss’ piece, which was essentially a rebuke of its own journalistic bent with regard to our community.

Ms. Strauss attributes the obsessive negativity displayed by some non-Orthodox writers for charedim to a desire to feel a “moral superiority” over their subjects, to “pat ourselves on the back for being so much better.” But she also raises the specter of other “much more complicated emotions” involved, “possibly including envy…”

A second remarkable article appeared recently in a Jewish publication that doesn’t display any noticeable anti-charedi bent: the venerable politically conservative monthly, Commentary. On the heels of Ms. Strauss’ piece, it published a lengthy scholarly historical and sociological overview of the charedi community, written by Jack Wertheimer, a respected professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Titled “What You Don’t Know About the Ultra-Orthodox” (although the latter term is eschewed in the text of the article, in favor of “Haredim”), it presents an impressively clear and unbiased picture of the American charedi world and its ideals, and demonstrates what the piece’s subtitle promises: “The least understood and most insular American Jews have much to teach us.”

Professor Wertheimer acknowledges various grievances and complaints some Jews voice about charedim; in each instance, though, he also explains the charedi viewpoint, and does so eloquently and well.

As in every community, there are, unfortunately, distasteful things and unsavory players in our own. We do ourselves no favor pretending otherwise. “The Haredim,” however, explains Professor Wertheimer, “are expected” by other Jews “to be free of vice because they are supposed to ‘tremble in fear of G-d’.”

How wonderful a testimony to the Torah’s truth such perfection would be. Alas, free will is what it is, and living a superficial charedi lifestyle cannot preclude bad behavior. But generalizing from outliers to the community as a whole is wrong and indefensible.

As is the refusal Professor Wertheimer asserts “to acknowledge the good and not only the problematic or off-putting [to some outsiders] aspects of Haredi life.

Ms. Strauss puts it pithily: “We aren’t really interested in the Orthodox. We aren’t willing to see a full picture, the good and the bad, the complexity of these many individuals living so differently than us.”

That’s a sort of unwillingness many of us charedim, too, are occasionally guilty of, whether the subjects of our opinionating are other groups of Jews, non-Jews or President Obama. But it is particularly glaring, all said and done, in Jewish media reportage on charedim.

Not long ago we read in shul of how Bilam broke the news to his sponsor King Balak that Hashem has thwarted their plans to curse Klal Yisrael, the king responded: “Come with me to another place from where you will see them; however, you will see only a part of them, not all of them, and curse them for me from there” (Bamidbar 23:13).

At first thought that puzzles. Why would Balak think that having Bilam look at the Jews from a different place and in a limited way might facilitate a successful curse?

Things, though, can look very different from different vantage points. And a focus can be chosen. One can aim one’s sights at the negative in a people – or a community or an individual; or one can pull back to see a larger, more comprehensive, and thus more accurate, picture.

Perspective, in the end, is everything, and a skewed one can be a very misleading and dangerous thing. Balak clearly hoped that a view from a different “angle” might reveal something negative about Klal Yisroel, some vulnerability into which a curse might successfully settle. Boruch Hashem, he had no success.

Unfortunately, some Jewish media have succeeded for years in portraying charedim from a malevolent perspective, sullying our community and beliefs with selective vision, animus and unjustified generalizations.

Ms. Strauss and Professor Wertheimer deserve kudos for pointing that out, and for suggesting that those media aim to be accurate and fair. May those writers’ words be taken to heart by those who so need to hear them.

Letter in the New York Times

To the Editor:

“A Damaging Distance” (news analysis, Sunday Review, July 13) may well be right that the reduced interaction between Arabs and Israelis is lamentable. But to attribute Israel’s erection of a barrier wall between Palestinian land and Israeli land to “the common wisdom that the two nations needed not greater intimacy but complete separation” ignores something rather important.

The wall was built for one reason: to prevent terrorism. In the three-year period after its erection, only a handful of murderous attacks were carried out in Israel. In the three-year period before it was built, 73 such attacks took place, and 293 Israelis were murdered as a result.

(Rabbi) AVI SHAFRAN
Director of Public Affairs
Agudath Israel of America
New York, July 13, 2014

Dangerous and Defective Products

It isn’t every year that news reports about Agudath Israel of America’s annual dinner make the pages of media like the Forward or The New York Times. This, however, was one such year.

The reason for the attention was the heartfelt and stirring speech delivered by the Novominsker Rebbe, shlit”a, the Rosh Agudas Yisroel, at the gathering. And the fact that New York City mayor Bill de Blasio chose not to contest the Rebbe’s words.

Rav Perlow spoke to the issue of organized deviations from the Jewish mesorah, a topic that is timely because of the insistence of the latest such movement on calling itself “Open Orthodoxy,” rather than summoning the courage to find an independent adjective for itself, as did the Conservative and Reform movements of the past.

Over the past century or two, the term “Orthodox” in the Jewish world has been synonymous with full affirmation of the mesorah – including most prominently the historicity of Yetzias Mitzrayim; the fact that the Torah, both Written and Oral, was bequeathed to our ancestors at Har Sinai; and that Avrohom, Yitzchok and Yaakov actually existed – concepts that prominent products or leaders of the “Open Orthodoxy” movement are on record as rejecting.

Yet, the “Orthodoxy” in the group’s name has misled various Orthodox congregations across the country to assume that there must be truth in that advertising, and to engage the services of graduates of the “Open” movement as rabbis. And so, the Rebbe apparently and understandably felt it was important to, in effect, proclaim a strong and principled “caveat emptor,” so that any potential buyers of this particular bill of goods will beware of the fact that the product is dangerously defective.

And so he invoked the sad examples of the other heterodox movements, which, while they seemed once upon a time to offer the promise of Jewish fulfillment and a Jewish future to some undiscriminating Jews, have, the Rebbe lamented, “fallen into an abyss of intermarriage and assimilation” and are on the way to being “relegated to the dustbins of Jewish history.”

A rather unremarkable if unfortunate truism, that. But, at least to the two newspapers, it seemed to be news (“Orthodox Rabbi Stuns Agudath Gala With ‘Heresy’ Attack on Open Orthodoxy,” gasped the Forward headline) – at least combined with the fact that New York City mayor Bill de Blasio spoke after Rav Perlow’s remarks and chose to not address them. It couldn’t have been much of a dilemma for him, as an elected official (not to mention one presumably not expert in Jewish theology), to decide whether or not to mix into a religious issue.

The New York Times columnist who wrote about the rabbi and the mayor is Michael Powell. If his name elicits a sour taste, it’s because it was he who, only last month, wrote an egregiously unfair column about the East Ramapo School District’s “Orthodox-dominated board” that “ensured that the community’s geometric expansion would be accompanied by copious tax dollars for textbooks and school buses.” Those books and buses, of course, are mandated by law for all New York city schoolchildren – even Orthodox ones. He has written a number of other columns that touch upon – and not in a positive way – charedi communities, including a long cynical magazine piece about Satmar back in 2006.

What further upset Mr. Powell was Mr. de Blasio’s praise for the Agudah as a movement, and for its executive vice president Rabbi Chaim Dovid Zwiebel, with whom he has worked for years and who he said “is someone I deeply respect and listen carefully to.” Bad enough, the writer seemed to be thinking, that the mayor didn’t stand up for the cause of kefira, but did he really have to express admiration for an Agudath Israel leader?

Mr. Powell clearly has an “Orthodox problem.”

That’s unfortunate. Still, a columnist has the right to be biased, unfair and even offensive. What even a columnist may not do, though, is offer his readers errors of fact.

Rav Perlow did not, as Mr. Powell reports, offer a “shower of condemnation for Reform and Conservative Jews.” The Rebbe simply reaffirmed Orthodox Judaism’s insistence that heterodox theologies – ideas and beliefs, not people – are incompatible with the Judaism of the ages. Anyone who knows the Rebbe, or any of the manhigei hador, knows that they have only love and concern for all Jews, no matter how misled they may be by their religious leaders.

The reporters missed the real story. That a clarion call had been sounded to all Jews – charedi and otherwise – who recognize that the Torah is true and that our mesorah is real, to address the deceptive attempts to convince Jews that ersatz “Judaisms” and even “Orthodoxies” are something other than capitulations to the Zeitgeist.

The mayor may have understood that. Or just, wisely, recognized that he had no expertise to engage the issue of the meaning of Judaism.

Would that Mr. Powell had followed his example.

A Place Called Doubt

The term “botched execution,” much in the news of late because of the case of convicted murderer Clayton Darrell Lockett, might seem to imply that the condemned prisoner has remained alive. Mr. Lockett, however, died, at least indirectly as a result of the lethal three-drug cocktail administered to him on April 29. His death was technically due to a heart attack, after he showed signs of life and even tried to speak at a point when the drugs should have conclusively dispatched him and the official execution was halted.

It turns out that the intravenous line sending the drugs into his body might at some point simply have slipped out (his body was covered during the procedure) but his protracted death has brought the subject of lethal injection as a means of execution – and the death penalty itself – into the global spotlight.

Considering that the crime for which Mr. Lockett was sentenced to death was the shooting and burying alive of an acquaintance, it’s hard to argue that, even if Mr. Lockett had an unnecessarily protracted painful death, it was devoid of some measure of justice – to the degree justice can be attained in this world.

But it has nonetheless raised the question of whether the combination of drugs used by some states is the best method of execution, and aroused the ire of anti-capital punishment activists.

The latter’s activities, ironically, have increased the likelihood of messy executions. Because the simplest and most humane means of causing a person’s death is not a combination of drugs but rather the straightforward administering of a barbiturate like sodium thiopental or pentobarbital, routinely used at low doses in medical procedures as anesthetics and invariably lethal in larger ones. Under pressure from death penalty opponents, however, drug manufacturers have halted supplies of those drugs to U.S. prisons (and require all resellers to do the same). Medical societies, moreover, do not permit physicians to participate in executions.

The drug issue, however, is resolvable, and prison personnel can be trained to competently place IVs and administer the substances. What most people are really talking about when they talk about “drug cocktails” and “botched executions” is the death penalty itself.

From a Jewish perspective, even aside from the import of the Sheva Mitzvos B’nai Noach, the removal of a dangerous person from the world is wholly proper. And many Torah-respecting Jews, as a result, consider the death penalty in the United States to be a good thing.

And yet there is the sobering fact that the wheels of American justice have on a number of occasions gone off track. Just last month the murder conviction of Jonathan Fleming, 51, was vacated by a New York judge when evidence emerged proving that, despite an eyewitness’ claim, he was out of state when the crime took place. New York has no death penalty, but if it did, the new evidence might have been discovered too late. As it is, Mr. Fleming spent nearly half his life behind bars.

Then, this month, Brooklyn prosecutors dismissed murder convictions against three brothers who spent decades in prison for two separate homicides. A discredited detective, it has been charged, convinced a drug addict to falsely finger them in the crimes.

Nearly 70 people have been released from death row since 1973 after evidence of their innocence emerged. Many of these cases were discovered not because of the normal appeals process, but rather as a result of new scientific techniques, investigations by journalists, and the work of expert attorneys, not available to the typical death row inmate.

So where does that leave a believing Jew on the topic of the death penalty? In a place too many of us don’t seem to believe exists: doubt.

We’re quick to recognize many of the unhealthy influences of contemporary society on our own behavior. Our times assault us with attitudes, crassness, immorality and materialism, and we do our best to prevent ourselves from being affected by it all. One societal ill, however, that seems to have snuck in under our religious radar is something that thoroughly riddles American politics and media: the need to “take a side” on every issue, and to proclaim that we know what we really cannot.

The ailment infects pundits and would-be pundits even in the charedi world, and it is not to our credit that it rages unchecked. To be sure, there is nothing wrong with having opinions on all sorts of matters. But, all too often, conclusions are offered with urgent conviction but without the complete knowledge, comprehension or objectivity that truly intelligent opinion demands.

It would do us well to resist the compulsion to pontificate when the topic at hand – and the death penalty is but one example – should inspire instead a sort of humble ambivalence.

Bias Vs. Backbone

A sports team owner’s base racism was all the talk of the world town last week. But a more subtle – and thus more dangerous – prejudice has been on public display, too, of late. It was largely ignored, however, likely because the bias revealed was against charedi Jews.

The opportunity for expressing the bias was the situation in the Monsey-area East Ramapo school district, whose public schools service a largely minority population but where there are many yeshivos and Bais Yaakovs. And a prominent salvo in the recent bias-barrage was fired by New York Times columnist Michael Powell, who pens a column in the paper highlighting people against whom the writer has rendered his personal judgment of guilt.

His villains in an April 7 offering titled “A School Board That Overlooks Its Obligation To Students” were the Orthodox Jewish members of that entity, which is charged with overseeing the workings and government funding of all schools in the district. Of the approximately 30,000 school children in the district, roughly 22,000 are in yeshivos; the remaining 8,000 are in public schools.

Mr. Powell began his piece by lamenting the laying off of assistant principals, art teachers and a band leader at the district’s public schools, as well as the curtailing of athletics programs and the rise in some class sizes.

The problem, the writer informs us, began with the “migration” of “the Hasidic Jews of Brooklyn – the Satmar, the Bobover and other sects” to the area. Intent on “recreat[ing] the shtetls of Eastern Europe,” he explains, the newcomers have been “voting in disciplined blocs,” resulting in “an Orthodox-dominated board” that has “ensured that the community’s geometric expansion would be accompanied by copious tax dollars for textbooks and school buses.” In case the bad guys’ black hats aren’t sufficiently evident, he takes pains to add his assertion that “public education became an afterthought” to the board. The piece is accompanied by a photograph of a sad-looking black mother hugging her even sadder-looking son.

Then one Ari Hart, representing a Jewish social justice organization, Uri L’Tzedek, jumped aboard the bandwagon with an opinion piece in the New York Jewish Week. Insinuating that the school board members are contemporary Shylocks, he righteously invokes Rav Moshe Feinstein, zt”l, who forbade yeshivos from taking government funds for which they do not qualify. The article was titled “East Ramapo’s Children Are Suffering.”

What is really suffering here, though, is truth.

State funding to all school districts, including East Ramapo, is based on a statutory formula involving property values, income levels and public school student numbers. Wealthier districts, fairly, receive less government funding than poorer ones.

For most school districts, where the large majority of students attend public schools, the state aid formula accurately identifies districts that are poor and require more aid, and those that are wealthy and require less aid.

East Ramapo, however, because of its odd student demographic and relatively high property values, is funded, following the formula, as if it were one of the wealthiest school districts in the state – when it is in fact one of the poorest.

The critics seem unaware (or choose to ignore) that all schoolchildren, even Orthodox ones, need textbooks and a way to get to school, and are legally entitled to both. School boards are thus mandated to allocate the funds necessary to meet those needs for both public and nonpublic school students; they would be in violation of the law were they to neglect that obligation. Unfortunately, because of the state allocation formula and substantial budget cuts over recent years, insufficient funds have remained to support public school programs in the district than had existed in years past.

The East Ramapo School Board’s members have disbursed the funds entrusted to them the only way they could – the only way any responsible school board could possibly do so.

Why, then, their vilification? Good question. There are, I believe, two answers. One is that a common, if mindless, conclusion when members of ethnic minorities level charges of wrongdoing against others is that the latter are guilty until proven innocent – in some cases, as here, even afterward. Secondly, while there are crass bigots like Donald Sterling there are also more “refined” ones, who take care to hide their bigotries behind a mask of high-mindedness.

Something, however, happened this past week that should give pause to those intent on assuming the worst about charedi Jews and on trumpeting their assumptions.

At a press conference in Monsey, some 75 people gathered to speak, hear or report on a new initiative, “Community United for Formula Change,” launched by a group of local charedi, black and Latino activists, who are working together to address the problem of the East Ramapo school district’s inadequate funding. Among those involved in the initiative are Chassidic rabbis, pastors of Latino and Haitian churches, and American-born black community members.

I was privileged to be present at the conference, as a representative of Agudath Israel of America, which is concerned with the acrimony in East Ramapo and is backing a bill in Albany that would allow an alternative state educational funding formula to be used in Rockland County. I was struck by the friendship, unified spirit and determination among the multi-ethnic backers of the initiative.

One black speaker at the press conference, Brendel Charles (a councilwoman for the town of Ramapo, but who attended as a parent of two public school children), told Tablet magazine that “she originally believed the problem was that the ultra-Orthodox members of the board were making decisions without regard to others in the community.”

“I thought that there could be a possibility that there was something wrong,” she said, “that there could be a prejudice of [their] thinking, ‘We don’t have to give them that [they felt], because it doesn’t really matter’.”

She recalled hearing another parent suggest that “Well, we want to send the Jews back to Israel.” Worse things were in fact said openly at school board meetings. One speaker compared the board to “Pontius Pilate washing his hands, or the soldier who has committed war crimes who claims he was only following orders.”

But when Ms. Charles’ husband joined the East Ramapo school board, she recounted, he quickly “realized that… the school board members weren’t trying to hurt the public school kids,” but rather that “we don’t have the money” to provide the services needed.

Ms. Charles, according to Tablet, “criticized those in her community who have allowed the situation to deteriorate” and is quoted as saying, “It’s been a war. It’s become religious against non-religious, black against white, them against us. ‘Their children are getting everything, our children are not.’ And that’s the wrong energy. The color is green. We don’t have enough money. That’s the problem.”

Michael Powell, Ari Hart and others like them would do well to hear those words well, and to realize that people of good will and intelligence, of different colors and creeds, understand what needs to be done in East Ramapo. And, rather than rabble-rouse or prance around on bandwagons, they have chosen the constructive path, and set themselves to the task at hand.

The Secular Sky Is Falling!

(This essay appeared in Haaretz this week, under a different title.)

Well, it won’t be long now before Israel institutes penalties for watching television on the Sabbath and declares a religious war against the Palestinians. At least that’s what a cursory – or, actually, even a careful – reading of a recent New York Times op-ed might lead one to conclude.

In the piece, Abbas Milani, the head of the Iranian studies program at Stanford University, and Israel Waismel-Manor, a University of Haifa senior lecturer, argue that Iran and Israel might be “trading places,” the former easing into a more secular mode, the latter slouching toward theocracy.

Whether the writers’ take on Iran has any merit isn’t known to me. But their take on Israel is risible, and the evidence they summon shows how clueless even academics can be.

The opinionators contend that the “nonreligious Zionism” advanced by David Ben-Gurion in the 1950s is “under threat” today by “Orthodox parties” that “aspire to transform Israel into a theocracy.”

The irony is intriguing. It was none other than Ben-Gurion who pledged, in a 1947 agreement with the Agudath Israel World Organization, representing Haredi Jews, to do “everything possible” to promote a single standard, that of halacha, or Jewish religious law, with regard to “personal status” issues like marriage, divorce and conversion; to designate the Jewish Sabbath as the new state’s official day of rest; to provide only kosher food in government kitchens; and to endorse a religious educational system as an alternative to Israeli state public schools. Those concessions, which pretty much sum up Israel’s accommodation of religion, were seen as inherent to its claim to be a “Jewish State.”

The impression Messrs. Milani and Waismel-Manor seek to promote is that there has been some sort of sea change of late in the Haredi community’s influence and designs. The writers, like other “the secular sky is falling” oracles, point to demographics (the Haredi community considers children to be great blessings) and the rise of Haredi political parties (although they are not currently part of the government coalition and always at the mercy of the larger parties) as evidence.

But a closer look at recent religious controversies in Israel, whether the drafting of Haredi men, traditional prayer standards at the Western Wall, conversion standards or subsidies for religious students, reveals that Haredi activism, such as it is, is aimed entirely at preserving the “religious status quo” of the past six decades, not at intensifying the state’s restrained connection to Judaism – much less at creating a “theocracy.” Some outside the Haredi community feel that the religious status quo is outdated and needs to be changed. But Haredi political activism is limited to pushback against that cause; it does not aim to impose Jewish observance on any Israeli.

And on the infrequent occasions when individuals have sought to expand real or imagined religious values in the public sphere – like imposing separate seating for men and women on selected bus lines servicing religious neighborhoods – Israel’s courts have stepped in and conclusively quashed the attempts. (Separate seating on those limited lines remains voluntary, and anyone seeking to force it is subject to prosecution.) And when religious vigilantes have been reported to have done ugly things (see: Beit Shemesh), the reported actions have been broadly condemned, and have ceased. Messrs. Milani and Waismel-Manor presumably know that there have been no moves in Israel to compel synagogue attendance or to cut off criminals’ body parts, sharia-style.

They get totally wrong, too, what they describe as “the vast majority of Orthodox Jews” who they contend are “against any agreement with the Palestinians,” further contributing to the writers’ feverish imagination of (excuse the expression) Armageddon.

There are many, to be sure, in the “national religious” camp who agitate for annexation of the West Bank and shun the idea of a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. (The New York Times op-ed authors quite erroneously conflated this community, represented in Israel’s government by Habayit Hayehudi, with the Haredim, despite their distinctly different religious, political and cultural positions.

But the vast majority of Haredim are famously deferent to their religious leaders, many of whom have maintained for decades that that land may, indeed should, be ceded in exchange for a meaningful peace with trustworthy adversaries of good will. The current Haredi (and much non-Haredi) opposition to the here-again, gone-again current peace process is due to the apparent lack of such an adversary. While Haredim await the Messiah’s arrival and restoration of all of Eretz Yisrael to the Jewish people and the re-establishment of the Davidic kingdom, they do not consider it acceptable to try to push history forward.

Yes, Israel’s Haredi population has grown, and its growth has had impact on aspects of Israeli life – in Haredi communities. There has never been any attempt to insinuate religious practices into non-Haredi ones, and no one has ever put forth any plans to do so. The overwhelming majority of Israeli Haredim just want to be left alone and allowed to live their lives as their – and most Jews’ – ancestors did. That shouldn’t discomfit, much less threaten, anyone. And it certainly shouldn’t be portrayed as some looming catastrophe by sky-watchers in ivory towers.

Ultra-Cation

It was gratifying to see that a recent essay of mine in the Forward stimulated thoughtful responses. I had made the case for jettisoning the time-honored (if, to me, less than honorable) term “ultra-Orthodox.”

I argued that, like “ultra-conservative” or “ultra-liberal” in domestic politics, the prefix implies extremism, something that isn’t accurate about most charedim.

What best to replace it with is less obvious, as “charedi” is a foreign word, and euphemisms like “fervently Orthodox” insult non-charedi Jews, many of whom are as fervent in their prayer and observances as any charedi Jew (not to mention that some charedi Jews are far from fervent).

I suggested using the unadorned word “Orthodox” to refer to charedim, whose lives, I contended, most resemble those of their forbears.

After all, I argued, self-described “Centrist” and “Modern” and “Open” Orthodox Jews are, well, self-described, with those prefixes of their choices. So why not use “Orthodox” alone, without any modifier, to refer to “black-hatters,” or “yeshivish” folks. (The charedi subset of Chassidim could simply be called Chassidim, a word familiar to English speakers.) Think Coke, Cherry Coke, Diet Coke…

One immediate response to my essay came from Samuel Heilman, a Queens College professor of sociology.

Professor Heilman’s jaundiced eye regarding charedim is legend. He is often quoted in the media as critical of Orthodox Jews more conservative in their practices than he. (After September 11, 2001, he famously, risibly, implied that charedi yeshivos are “quiescent” beds of potential terrorists.)

The professor rejects “ultra” too, but sees the prefix not as a pejorative but as reflecting the idea that charedim are “truer in their beliefs and practices than others.”

He also accuses charedim of departing from the Orthodoxy of the past. The example he offers is that, in the charedi world, “water must be certified kosher.” And he decries the charedi “notion that Orthodox Jews always shunned popular culture.” Hasidic rebbes,” he explains, were, “among the crowds who streamed to Marienbad, Karlsbad and the other spas and baths of Europe for the cure, so much a part of popular culture in pre-Holocaust Europe.”

Charedim, the professor pronounces, fear “the encounter with the world outside their own Jewish one,” unlike the true inheritors of the Jewish past, like himself, who “believe Judaism can meet and successfully encounter a culture outside itself and be strengthened rather than undermined by the contact.” They, he adds, “also have the right to be called Orthodox.”

If by “kosher water” Professor Heilman means filtering water in places where the supply contains visible organisms, that is something required by the Shulchan Aruch. Most cities’ tap water is free from such organisms, but New York’s, at least in some areas, is not. And applying codified halacha to contemporary realities is precisely what observant Jews, whatever their prefixes, do.

As to pre-war Chassidic rebbes’ visits to European hot springs spas, they were “taking the waters,” not attending the opera. (Contemporary charedi Jews, a sociologist should know, take vacations too.)

And nowhere in my article, of course, did I claim that non-charedim forfeit the right to be called Orthodox. Nor did I assert (or ever would) that a non-charedi Jew is in any way inferior to, or less “true” to Judaism, than a charedi.

What I wrote, rather, was that charedi attitudes and practices are those closest to the attitudes and practices of observant Jewish communities of centuries past. A familiarity with Jewish history and responsa literature readily evidences that fact.

In an “Editor’s Notebook” column, The Forward’s editor, Jane Eisner, whom I have personally met and come to respect, defended the paper’s use of “ultra-Orthodox,” taking issue with my contention that it is pejorative. “[J]ust as often,” she contends, “it connotes something desirable, a positive extreme.” She cites “ultra thin” used to laud things like military ribbons and computer mouses. But people, of course, aren’t ribbons, and Ms. Eisner declines to address my citation of “ultra” as used in political discourse, the rather more pertinent comparison here.

I was surprised to read that someone as thoughtful as she would echo the professor’s peeve. To my contention that charedim today are most similar to observant Jews of the past she asserts: “[N]ot my grandparents, who were strictly observant Orthodox Jews, but did not dress, act, or think like the Jews of Boro Park and Crown Heights today.” The latter, she contends, refuse “to engage in the modern, secular world, to partake of its culture, acknowledge its obligations and respect its differences.” Charedim, she writes, do not practice “normative Judaism. Or even normative Orthodoxy.”

I didn’t know Ms. Eisner’s grandparents, but I am prepared to trust her memory. I’m pretty sure, though, that she didn’t know their grandparents, who I’m also pretty sure looked and lived much more like charedi Jews today than she might suspect.

And while there may be charedim today who fit the unflattering description Ms. Eisner provides, there are many, many more who most certainly do not, who engage, if within limits, with the modern world and its culture, and who fully “acknowledge its obligations and respect its differences” even as they live lives centered on halachic observance. Is the editor of a major Jewish newspaper really unaware of the variations of charedi experience? And is not generalizing from individuals to an entire group the very essence of prejudice?

The Forward can call us whatever it likes. I did my best to explain why the term is insulting, but I can’t force anyone to accept that judgment. I’ll suffice with the hope that other media may prove more open to change, and with the knowledge that I helped foster some intellectual engagement with the issue.

But whatever any medium chooses to call us, the contention that the charedi community today is some sort of Jewish aberration is a wild fantasy, fueled, perhaps by demographic predictions. History and facts, though, are… well… history and facts.

And neither editors nor sociologists are entitled to their own.

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Unpublished Heroes

I think it’s time I came clean regarding my doubts about Judaism, about everything I was taught by my parents and rabbaim in yeshiva. How can we be sure that the Torah was really given to my ancestors at Sinai? Are its laws really eternal? Is halacha really G-d’s will? Are Jews in fact a special people? And are Orthodox Jews true examples of what a Jew should be?

I came across some very compelling literature that called traditional Jewish beliefs into question, and was disturbed by what I had read, and so I read more, and did a good amount of serious thinking and research.

As to Orthodox Jews themselves, yes, most seem to be fine people, but there have also always been “characters” – people with strange fixations or behavior patterns. And then there are Jews proven or rumored to be… not so nice.

The thought that the “outside” world might provide a more rarified and thoughtful community was an enticing one. And so I began to entertain doubts about Jewish beliefs, my religious identity and my community.

I was 14.

To my relief now, many decades later, there was no Internet then to intensify my confusion, and no examples of people who had abandoned Jewish beliefs and observance and written best-sellers about the fact. I had no opportunity at the time to capitalize on my doubts and gripes with a memoir that would garner me the media spotlight, interviews and royalties. Though I had what to tell, like how my second grade rebbe would rap my fingers hard with a ruler when I misbehaved. I would have had to have been truthful and admit that he didn’t do it in anger, and that I felt he loved me dearly throughout. But I could have racked that up to Stockholm Syndrome.

Lacking the commercial incentives, though, allowed me to take my time, do some critical thinking and research, and give Judaism a chance. I engaged my doubts with information, and was blessed to have parents who gave me space, who didn’t try to overly control my reading, dress or activities; and with rabbaim who didn’t consider any question off-limits.

And so I found answers to all the questions I had. As a result, even though I was raised in an Orthodox home, I consider myself “Orthodox-by-choice,” someone who made a conscious decision to accept the Torah, and the mission it bequeaths all Jews.

What reminds me of my intellectually tumultuous days is the spate of “I Escaped Orthodoxy and Lived!” memoirs that have appeared in recent years, practically a cottage industry. The autobiographies are celebrated and hyped for their anger and outrage, and an “enlightened” world considers their authors to be heroes.

Please don’t misunderstand. I don’t mean to disparage the true experiences of others, or to discount the special challenges some may have faced, especially in very insular and rigid communities. But there is much that is deeply suspect in some of the literary accounts. In one case, a writer was revealed to have entirely fabricated a terrible crime, a murder-mutilation of which there is no police record. Needless to say, that employment of creativity calls the rest of the writer’s impossible-to-confirm personal experiences into some doubt.

More recently, another writer has been making the rounds and has not only contradicted herself about a formative period in her life but admitted to having been mentally unstable and self-destructive since childhood. Her intelligence and eloquence at present is obvious. But her description of her far-from-New York, non-chassidic community is at wild odds with reality. Whether her personal memories are real or delusional thus remains unclear. Her publisher and the media, of course, don’t seem to care much either way.

Although I can rightly wax suspicious about some of the assertions in some of these ostensibly true stories, I have no right to deem their writers intentional fabulists. Perhaps their once-Orthodox environments, or some other life-experience, so damaged them that they became confused as a result. Or perhaps they suffer from some congenital emotional problem beyond their control.

But what I can do is reflect on the fact that adolescence brings all sorts of psychological and intellectual challenges, including to Orthodox adolescents. And recognize that a particularly powerful challenge is presented to young people these days by the Internet and social media, which provide easy misinformation, precarious camaraderie and false solace; and by publishers anxious to sell books – the more outlandish and prurient, the better.

Of little interest to blogs or editors, tellingly, are the vast numbers of intelligent, sensitive Orthodox youth, including many in the most insular communities, who stand up to the special, myriad challenges of our time as they forge their personal paths through life.

Those young Orthodox Jews are the true, if unpublished, heroes, for ignoring the contemporary, technology-empowered sirens of cynicism. They are heroes for having the courage to pursue resolutions for any doubts or confusion they may harbor, for realizing that there is balm for the wounds they may have suffered, and fulfillment in the religious heritage bequeathed them by their parents, and their parents before them.

Aggravated Journalism

Hella Winston was surprised that her name appeared at the bottom of the recent New York Post report about the murder of Brooklyn businessman Menachem Stark, indicating her “additional reporting” to the story. She had not written any of the article – and certainly not its tasteless, insensitive headline (which implied that an unlimited number of people surely wished the Chassidic businessman dead) or the article’s incendiary opening words: “The millionaire Hasidic slumlord…”

She had nothing to do, either, with the rest of the ugly piece, which was rife with unnamed “sources” and unsubstantiated innuendo. (It went so far as to dredge the cesspool of a rabidly anti-Orthodox blog to find what it apparently deemed a journalistic gem– an anonymous posting opining that the victim’s “slanted shtreimel on his head gives his crookedness away.”). She had not seen the article before its publication.

Ms. Winston, a sociologist by profession, had simply been contacted by the article’s main writers, she says, and provided them a small piece of information of no great consequence. Needless to say, the Post’s odious offering deeply hurt the murdered man’s wife, children and community. And I have no doubt that Ms. Winston is herself pained to have been associated in any way with the tabloid’s loathsome “report.”

What’s significant, though, is that the article’s writers cared to contact Ms. Winston, who has no prior connection that I know of with the paper.

What likely inspired them was the fact that she has some familiarity with at least part of Brooklyn’s charedi world (though Post reporters have no dearth of contacts who actually inhabit that world). She is best known, in fact, for a book she wrote several years ago that focused on young people raised in chassidic communities who abandoned their upbringings to pursue more culturally American lives. Through their words, the book portrays communities like those in Borough Park and Williamsburg as small-minded, constricting, suffocating environments.

What’s more, in 2006, Ms. Winston wrote an op-ed for The New York Times in which she described an unusual Pesach seder, whose participants were people who had “[broken] free of strictly Orthodox communities” and of the “myriad rules and regulations” that, in such places, “often [come] at the expense of the meaning of the holiday itself.” Passover, to them, she wrote, “embodies how strict Orthodoxy has become little more than social control.”

And in the Winter 2006-2007 issue of the Jewish feminist publication Lilith, Ms. Winston wrote of the “rigid gender roles” in Orthodox communities, the regulations that “control… women’s bodies and their mobility”; and of how yeshivos “can become breeding grounds” for deviancy.

Then there is the slew of articles Ms. Winston has written for the New York Jewish Week, practically all of which focus on (real, asserted or imaginary) unsavory happenings in the charedi world.

In 2011, for one instance, after the horrific murder of a little charedi boy, Leiby Kletzky, she wrote a lengthy piece in that paper contending that the Brooklyn charedi neighborhood volunteer security force Shomrim, which had played a major role in identifying the vehicle used in the boy’s abduction, had acted irresponsibly in the case and possibly hindered the police. The alleged critics of Shomrim quoted – “officials” and “sources” –were all unnamed. And “some,” the piece confides, believe that the murderer’s “violent tendencies… were known to people in the community who should have, but failed, to report him.” No evidence for any such knowledge was presented, nor has any emerged in the ensuing years.

The article then digressed into the halachic realm of mesira, or “informing,” on suspected pedophiles. There was no evidence of sexual abuse in the case, and no evidence was offered at the time (or has been uncovered since) that Leiby’s killer, currently serving 25 years to life in prison, is a pedophile.

So it’s not hard to imagine why those assigned by the Post to deliver the sort of article about the more recent murder that its readers savor – one filled with as much titillating information or misinformation as might be gathered on deadline – turned to a writer who has presented a negative picture of the Chassidic community in a book and numerous articles.

They could have turned, too, to any of a number of writers for Jewish media. Like Jay Michaelson of the Forward, whose anti-religious screeds seem to say much more about his wild anger at Judaism than about the community he regularly lambasts. Or to his colleague, the graphic artist Eli Valley, who seems to share Mr. Michaelson’s emotional agitation, although he is considerably more creative. Or to any of a number of columnists at organs like the Los Angeles Jewish Journal.

The unsavory exists, to be sure, in Chassidic (and non-Chassidic and non-Orthodox) communities, as it does in every non-Jewish community. That’s unfortunate and depressing. But so much of the Jewish and general media seem to relentlessly focus on Orthodox wrongdoing, and so often in in a journalistically irresponsible, if not libelous, way. Why that is so is something for a psychologist to ponder. For the rest of us, it should be enough to simply note the fact, and bemoan it.

No one really expects a New York tabloid to embrace accuracy and objectivity; such papers exist to titillate and scandalize their readers, not inform them.

But impartiality, fairness and truth shouldn’t be too much to ask of Jewish media. Unfortunately, the day when those ideals are respected by those organs has yet to arrive.

Agudath Israel Condemns NY Post’s Lack Of “Basic Human Dignity”

Below is a statement issued today by Agudath Israel of America:

The New York Post crossed a line today, even for a paper specializing in the sensational, with its offensive front-page cover and equally offensive coverage of the vicious murder of a young Hassidic father of eight, Menachem Stark, Hy”d.

The paper demonstrated the poorest taste by choosing to focus on anonymous accusations rather than on the human tragedy of a wife and family’s sudden and terrible loss, and on their, and their community’s, grieving. Particularly at a time when Jews have been attacked on New York streets and are regularly vilified by hateful people around the world, the tabloid has demonstrated unprecedented callousness and irresponsibility.

Perhaps it is unrealistic to expect very much from a medium like the Post, but one should, we think, be able to expect some basic human decency in the wake of a family’s terrible personal loss.

Agudath Israel of America and its constituents, along with decent people of all religions and ethnicities, extend our deepest sympathies to Mr. Stark’s widow and children.

We, further, commend the New York City Police Department for its active pursuit of leads to Mr. Stark’s murderers, and pray that they be apprehended and brought to justice swiftly.

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Reflections on Jews, Judaism, Media and Life