December 17, 2008 | 10:43 pm

Gay, Muslim and alone

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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Bacchus as a bride at 17

I’ve written before about Muslim punk rockers and football players, homosexuals and headbangers. Today we return to the gay theme with this Column One from the Los Angeles Times about Aliyah Bacchus.

Besides having an amazing name, Bacchus also has a compelling, though somewhat seasoned, story:

She has traded her abaya, which she wore throughout middle and high school, for an ankle-length black trench coat and sunglasses with metallic frames. She has one piercing in her left ear, four in her right, a metal rod bridging the cartilage in the ear’s upper rim, a ring in her bellybutton, another in her nose.

Aliyah is Muslim. It’s a part of her identity she can’t shed, like her sexuality, like her last name—Bacchus, as in the Roman god of wine and merriment—and like her ink-stained flesh: the angel tattooed between her shoulder blades, the dark dragons on her lower back, the polar bear on her stomach, the dying rose on her right wrist.

She knows that in some Muslim sects, homosexuality is considered a crime punishable by death. But Aliyah lives in America, raised in low-income housing projects 20 miles from Manhattan’s West Village, where police raided the Stonewall Inn in 1969, setting off riots that sparked the beginning of a national gay rights movement.

In America, Aliyah knows, it is acceptable to be gay. But how, she wonders, can she be true to who she is while also adhering to her family’s faith? How does she reconcile both sides of her existence?

Not easily. Her family has written her off. Renouncing homosexuality is her only ticket back.

“I want to be a part of my family,” Aliyah says. “But what is the price that I have to pay? Honestly, I would rather die than go back to that person I was.”

Erika Hayasaki, the Times reporter on the story, had good access and captures some interesting dialogue between Aliyah and her aunt. It’s after the jump:

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December 17, 2008 | 7:20 pm

Madoff: Jewish, yes, but Orthodox too?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Talk about bad PR. Since Bernard Madoff was charged with running a $50 billion Ponzi scheme, Jews have been taking a lot of blame for this bad apple. Anti-Semities are usually looking for any opportunity to malign Jews, and Madoff made it easy.

Madoff’s co-religionists have distanced Jewish values from the avarice that sunk Bernard Madoff Investment Securities. Rob Eshman’s column this week, online later tonight, is wistful for a Jewish concept of hell: “Because then I could take comfort that Bernard Madoff will go there. And Rabbi David Wolpe of Sinai Temple wrote for On Faith that Jewish ethics can’t just be present in the home but must also underlie business practices:

The Rabbis of the Talmud declare: “If one is honest in business, and earns the esteem of others, it is as if one has fulfilled the whole Torah (Mechilta, Vayassa).” Religion may begin at home, but it should never end there. If it does not move us to decency and goodness, it matters not at all what pieties we profess.

Rabbi Elliot Dorff told me something similar yesterday:

“As a religious Jew, how do you see it being OK to daven three times and day and then defraud the Jewish communities of many cities of their funds?“ Dorff asked. “If anything, this shows you can’t be a religious Jew simply by observing the laws. Being a religious Jew must entail being moral as well. Beside the fact that it both illegal and immoral to do this to individual investors—to do it to Jewish federations representing the Jewish community is just unconscionable. What happened to Kol Yisrael Areivim Zeh BaZe—all Jews are responsible for each other?“

“Piety,“ he added, “is not an excuse, let alone a justification, for immorality.“

It was Dorff’s comments that led Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein to pick up the phone.

Adlerstein, the Irmas Chair in Jewish Law and Ethics at Loyola Law School and one of the Cross-Currents collaborators, wanted to know where I got information that Madoff was Orthodox. I told him I hadn’t actually looked into it, but had heard that he was a member of an Orthodox shul and was treasurer of the Yeshiva University board of trustees and had been involved with a number of other Orthodox causes. When Dorff told me Madoff was Orthodox, I had no reason to doubt him. Maybe I should have.

“If he isn’t Orthodox, please clear that up,” Adlerstein said. “We don’t need the attention.”

Adlerstein called back two hours later, saying he had spoken with a “highly placed Manhattan source,” which I understood to mean a friend.

“He ain’t Orthodox. He isn’t a Sabbath observer. He is a Sabbath desecrator. By no means can he be considered Orthodox.”

I called Dorff back and he said he made the same presumptions I think most people have. I’m still not certain what the answer is. I can find no information online about whether Madoff kept kosher or Shabbat.

But does that even matter? I have plenty of friends who don’t neatly fall into the categories of Orthodox, Conservative, Reform or Reconstructionist who practice mitzvot and keep the Sabbath holy. If Madoff was involved in Orthodox life, how can anyone but the rabbis say, outside the most legalistic judgment, that he isn’t Orthodox?

The interesting thing to me is the way Madoff’s sins are being passed around. Everybody wants to distance their community from a guy who moved seamlessly through the upper echelons of the Jewish and financial worlds for years and allegedly stole straight from the tzedakah box.

Many Jewish leaders have been quick to express what a shande Madoff’s alleged transgressions were. (And they were.) Non-Orthodox Jews, specifically, have demonstrated a bit of schadenfreude when observing Madoff’s fall.

The reality, though, is we’re all responsible for Madoff. Muslims, Christians and Jews, Orthodox, Conservative and Reform, secular and sectarian. It doesn’t matter what strain Madoff came from or belongs too.

Religious values don’t inspire and prop up Ponzi schemes. Getting financial returns that are too good to be true do.

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December 17, 2008 | 6:33 pm

Rick Warren to give prayer at Obama inauguration

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

At this point, the Rev. Rick Warren should really just assume the title The New Billy Graham. During the past few years, he has clearly transitioned from being just a megachurch pastor to an international evangelist, crusading for Christ and social justice in America and Africa. His “Purpose-Driven Life” is, I think, second in total sales to one book: the Bible.

Today we learn that Warren spring-boarded from this summer’s faith forum, hosted at Saddleback Church, to delivering the invocation at President-elect Barack Obama’s inauguration Jan. 20. Obama will be the first president since Harry Truman to

not have a close relationship with Graham.

I’m not sure this will even register with conservatives and evangelicals; I’ve never before put any weight in the prayer given at the president’s inauguration. If I did, I’d really have to wonder what Graham said wrong at both of Bush’s. But if musings at The Reality-Based Community are any indication, liberals aren’t happy:

Can’t we have Jeremiah Wright instead?

In the above video, which I was already planning to post today before the inauguration news, Warren talks with Beliefnet Editor-in-Chief Steven Waldman about gay marriage, torture and his dark nights with God.

Christianity Today has something of a synopsis of the interview. It’s after the jump:

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December 17, 2008 | 1:15 pm

Little Adolf Hitler wants to have his cake and eat it too

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Adolf was once a common name, and even for a few notable Jews. But that all changed when Adolf was followed by Hitler and came to be associated with the wickedest man of the 20th century. So it’s quite unusual to hear that someone has actually named their child Adolf these days. But I suppose when the boy is also given the middle name “Hitler,” the parents aren’t running from the Nazi reference.

The AP reports:

EASTON, Pa.——The father of 3-year-old Adolf Hitler Campbell, denied a birthday cake with the child’s full name on it by one New Jersey supermarket, is asking for a little tolerance.

Heath Campbell and his wife, Deborah, are upset not only with the decision made by the Greenwich ShopRite, but with an outpouring of angry Internet postings in response to a local newspaper article over the weekend on their flare-up over frosting.

“I think people need to take their heads out of the cloud they’ve been in and start focusing on the future and not on the past,” Heath Campbell said Tuesday in an interview conducted in Easton, on the other side of the Delaware River from where the family lives in Hunterdon County, N.J.

“There’s a new president and he says it’s time for a change; well, then it’s time for a change,” the 35-year-old continued. “They need to accept a name. A name’s a name. The kid isn’t going to grow up and do what (Hitler) did.”

True. A name is only a name. But names usually say something about both the child and the parents. Maybe the names of the Campbell children will offer hints about little Adolf Hitler’s parents.

Adolf has two sisters, JoyceLynn Aryan Nation and Honszlynn Hinler Jeannie. The latter, just eight months old, was named for Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler. ...

The kids are growing up in a home festooned with a swastika in every room. The father wears boots that once belonged to a Nazi soldier, and claims a relative was a member of Hitler’s feared Schutzstaffel.

The parents insist they are not racist, although they don’t believe in mingling the races.

And Heath Campbell claims he doesn’t understand why people are shocked when they hear his son’s full name.

I’m shocked too. I just can’t believe Campbell doesn’t get why his kids’ names would be offensive. And I don’t.

Thanks for the link, Ben Plonie.

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December 17, 2008 | 12:54 pm

Time names Obama person of the year

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

With his historic election to the presidency, Barack Obama must have been a lock for Time’s person of the year. Today the newsweekly made it official.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Gov. Sarah Palin and Chinese director Zhang Yimou were runners-up.

I know what you’re thinking: This is not a religion story. True. But with how much religion dominated the presidential election, particularly when it was related to Obama and Palin, this was certainly worth making note of.

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December 16, 2008 | 7:57 pm

Christmas came early for anti-Semites

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Roswell Christmas Card

Like I said Friday, in allegedly stealing from Jews, Bernard Madoff gave a real gift to anti-Semites. That much was evident from many of the comments my posts have received. On LAWeekly.com, Steven Mikulan writes that the white-wing blogs have been downright giddy:

Over at the neo-naz Stormfront.org, Celtic Welsh Warrior noted that the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity was among the Jewish organizations allegedly damaged by Madoff:

“Ouch, the pain, the suffering. Jews robbing Jews. Dumb race.
Celebrate Christmas, celebrate being White. Drive a stake into the heart of the Jew Devil with Christmas Season.”

Cheery, I know. These are the same hatemongers who buy Kevin MacDonald’s books and sing his praises.

Keeping up with that Christmas theme Bradley Burston writes in Haaretz:

For the true anti-Semite, Christmas came early this year.

The anti-Semite’s new Santa is Bernard Madoff. The answer to every Jew-hater’s wish list. The Aryan Nation at its most delusional couldn’t have come up with anything to rival this:

The former chairman of Nasdaq turns out, also, to be treasurer of the board of trustees at Yeshiva University and chairman of the university’s business school. Rich beyond human comprehension, he handles fortunes for others, buying and selling in a trading empire that skirts investment banks and other possible sources of regulation. He redefines avarice, knowingly and personally bilking charities and retirees in the most classic of con games.

Even better, for those obsessed with the idea that Jews control finance, entertainment and the media, is the idea that Madoff’s greed was uncontrollable enough that he targeted fellow Jews, even Holocaust survivors, some of them his own friends, as well as Israeli companies who insured Jews, including Holocaust survivors.

The beauty part, for the anti-Semite: Madoff’s machinations, which could have been put to use for the sake of humanity, have directly harmed Jewish welfare and charity institutions.

He has managed to harm contemporary Jewry in ways anti-Semites could only dream about.

Click here for the rest. To be clear, though, Burston confuses losses at the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles ($6.4 million) with those made by the Jewish Community Foundation ($25.5 million on paper; $18 million in original investments).

For my part, I’ve been shocked not that the largest investor fraud in U.S. history has brought out the crazies, but how just mainstream some of them seem to be. Having only experienced anti-Semitism in its most mild forms, I often forget how deep-rooted these prejudices are. As a friend wrote on my Facebook wall:

“Jews and money is a time-honored bigot flashpoint. I know people in the world really believe this. I believe these people are fine upstanding citizens and are just like you and me. Well liked, polite. But behind the anonymity that Internet comment boards provide, they can let their true beliefs out that they keep inside in polite company and they don’t have to couch their words. They can be as bad as they wanna be.”

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December 16, 2008 | 3:32 pm

What would the sages say about Madoff?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Rabbi Elliot Dorff

I’m looking forward to reading what editors and columnists for Jewish newspapers have to say this week about Bernard Madoff. I think I can posit a safe guess: something about a special place in hell ...

But yesterday, though, with a real Jewish authority. Rabbi Elliot Dorff is rector of American Jewish University and a modern-day sage. One of the authors of an opinion from the Conservative movement that blessed same-sex unions and also co-chaired Rabbis for Obama, Dorff also serves on the board of the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles, which lost $6.4 million in an investment with Madoff.

Dorff, who co-chairs the Federation’s committee on the vulnerable, said that though the needy don’t have enough money to invest with Madoff—I read the baseline was $10 million—they will suffer the most from his alleged house of cards.

What he found most troubling, though, was that for decades Madoff had lived and breathed Orthodox Judaism, and yet he apparently didn’t have a problem ripping other Jews off.

“As a religious Jew, how do you see it being OK to daven three times and day and then defraud the Jewish communities of many cities of their funds?” Dorff asked. “If anything, this shows you can’t be a religious Jew simply by observing the laws. Being a religious Jew must entail being moral as well. Beside the fact that it both illegal and immoral to do this to individual investors—to do it to Jewish federations representing the Jewish community is just unconscionable. What happened to Kol Yisrael Areivim Zeh BaZe—all Jews are responsible for each other?”

“Piety,” he added, “is not an excuse, let alone a justification, for immorality.”

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December 16, 2008 | 4:45 am

True confessions of a Bernard Madoff investor—er, former investor

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

There are some crazy rumors flying around concerning this Bernard Madoff mess. (There have also been more than a few anti-Semitic comments left on this blog.) One of those wild rumors was that a foundation belonging to Steven Spielberg had lost a $300 million investment. Not true.

The landscape of losses remains incredibly unclear. I spent all day on the phone with various Jewish communal leaders, compiling my own list of victims, but felt I only scratched the surface ... in Los Angeles. And remember, Madoff was better connected back east; the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington, for exampled, reported losing $10 million.

My story should be online early Tuesday morning. In the meantime, here are the lamentations of one former Madoff investor:

The call came at 6 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 11. I had been waiting for it for five years. When the call finally arrived, it was my wife Sarah who answered. What the person said on the other end of the phone was both simple and devastating: we were financially wiped out.

Of course, I knew this instantly from the look on my wife’s face. Her words to the caller, the person handling our financial matters, grew insistent: “You’re joking? This is a joke, right?”

We didn’t know it yet, but we had been playing in the Bernard Madoff Investment Securities LLC Fantasy Financial League.

I think everyone knew the call would come one day. We all hoped, but we knew deep down it was too good to be true, right? I mean, why wasn’t everyone in on this game if it was so strong and steady? We deluded ourselves into thinking we were all smarter than the others. When it came to the investment game, we had it figured. And what was the game anyway? The way it was vaguely described to us was that the “New York people” had a system whereby they placed a series of instant trades — at once with futures, currencies and stocks — and out of this magic recipe fell a tiny 1% guaranteed, no-risk profit for the group. You do that 20 times a year, take away management fees and, voilà, a steady 15% return. Man, these guys were good.

But of course the call did come, as it always does with such things. It was not an ordinary Ponzi scheme we were all part of; it was the biggest in the history of the world, valued at some $50 billion. Lucky us. Small investors, institutions, hedge funds, global banks, pension funds — all fell victim to usual suspects: a smooth huckster and greed.

You never want to hear the words that come with such a phone call. “We are all wiped out.” But they came, and we went numb. We lost, on paper, $1.2 million. My wife’s family’s combined losses are close to $30 million. We’re talking old ladies and men, lawyers, children with Madoff trusts, students in college and an array of others who thought they had the world beat — and they did, at least for a time.

Read the rest of Robert Chew’s tale here.

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December 15, 2008 | 9:53 pm

Shoe-hurling in the Arab world

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

When I was in Israel in August 2007, I traveled with a group of journalists to an Arab Israeli town in the upper Galilee. The purpose was to see how money from the United Jewish Communities was improving life in poor Arab towns. When I slipped out of the community center, I didn’t exactly discover the secret to coexistence.

I wandered the neighborhood before stopping to watch young boy and two young girls playing outside their house. When they noticed me, they shouted words I didn’t understand and took a few steps toward me. One of the kids was waving at me, holding some paper in their hand. This, I thought, was my invitation to go talk with these kids about their feelings about Jews. Not sure how I was going to accomplish that in Arabic, but I walked their way nonetheless.

The paper, it turned out, was money. I guess they thought that, based on my curly hair, I would drawn to a few bucks like a mouse to cheese. I tried to brush this affront off in the most embarrassing way—by engaging the children in some dialogue—at which point the little boy, maybe 8 years old, took off his sandal and held it up like he was going to swat me.

As you can imagine, I quickly turned tail. I wasn’t afraid of being attacked. I knew what the boy meant when he lifted his sandal at me. Among Arabs, showing someone the sole of your shoe is an absolutely vile curse.

“Hitting someone with a shoe is a deep insult in the Arab world, signifying that the person being struck is as low as the dirt underneath the sole of a shoe.”

The New York Times offered that explanation today after an Iraqi journalist became an Arab folk hero for throwing his shoe at President Bush and shouting “This is a gift from the Iraqis; this is the farewell kiss, you dog!”

Well, Mr. President, I haven’t been a fan of your administration or the war in Iraq. But at least I can offer you my shared sympathy on this one.

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December 15, 2008 | 4:30 am

Bernie Madoff cut deep into LA’s Jewish community

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Photo of Madoff, 1999: AP

The mess caused by Bernard Madoff’s alleged $17 billion Ponzi scheme is much worse for American Jews than I thought. Originally, I assumed it would give fodder to anti-Semites along the lines of the financial meltdown. Turns out Madoff’s hedge fund was backed heavily by Jewish individuals, institutions and organizations. At least two foundations have already closed their doors. We’re talking less than four days since the story broke.

I’m looking right now at how this will shake out for the Los Angeles Jewish community. Early indications are that the hit will be big.

For one, the Jewish Community Foundation, which manages the endowments for a number of major Jewish institutions, had invested $18 million with Madoff. At the end of October, that investment, mostly made years ago, was valued at $25.5 million. Today it is essentially a big fat goose egg. And I’ve heard the story is the same for a number of salt-of-the-earth members of the Jewish community, many of whom had invested the bulk of their savings with Madoff.

Madoff was, reportedly, an affable, intelligent guy.  He was incredibly well-respected here in Los Angeles and even more so back east. At the end of the day, he was a salesman, and what he sold were returns good enough to keep folks happy but not so good that they grew suspicious.

The Jewish Community Foundation, like, I imagine, thousands of others, has retained counsel and is weighing its options. However, the Wall Street Journal reports that investors are unlikely to recover their losses—and that those who got their money back from Madoff previously may have to surrender any gains they received.

It seems we’ve only scratched the surface of the shake out in—or better yet, shakedown of—the Jewish community.

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December 14, 2008 | 1:52 pm

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I generally hate nightfall at 5 o’clock. But the plenitude of Christmas (and Hanukkah) lights on my street have, at least temporarily, changed that sentiment. The neighborhood almost feels magical. Pretty simple decorations and arrangements. Nothing as amazing as the light sequence in the above video, which you might recognize from this time last year.

(As an aside, the Starbucks I am sitting in right now is playing the Peanuts Christmas soundtrack. Awesome.)

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December 13, 2008 | 4:11 pm

Playboy apologizes for nude Virgin Mary

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Look who’s apologizing for its lustful way of remembering the Virgin Mary. My man A-Dob has the story:

A nude model resembling the Virgin Mary on the cover of the Mexican edition of Playboy magazine, published only days before a major Mexican festival dedicated to the mother of Jesus, prompted the company’s U.S. headquarters on Friday to apologize.

The magazine, which hit newsstands on December 1 as ceremonies began leading to Friday’s pilgrimage to the Mexico City shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe, showed a model wearing nothing but a white cloth over her head and breasts. ...

“While Playboy Mexico never meant for the cover or images to offend anyone, we recognize that it has created offense, and we as well as Playboy Mexico offer our sincerest apologies,” the statement said.

Raul Sayrols, publisher of Playboy Mexico, said in a statement, “The image is not and never was intended to portray the Virgin of Guadalupe or any other religious figure. The intent was to reflect a Renaissance-like mood on the cover.”

Renassaince-like mood ... right. And men buy Playboy for the good reading.

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