February 5, 2009 | 4:51 pm

Speaking at Jewlicious

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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Two years ago, then-presidential-hopeful Barack Obama turned down an invitation to speak at Jewlicious Festival because of a scheduling conflict. This month, I’ll be taking the president’s place because I have no conflicts, except for, you might think, that whole believing-Jesus-was-the-son-of-God thing.

Joining me will be Matisyahu, Queen EstherK and Benyamin Cohen, better known, at least here, as Bizarro Brad. I’m actually speaking on a panel with Cohen. Something about religious immersion journalism.

The press release for the program can be downloaded here and tickets purchased here.

February 5, 2009 | 4:08 pm

What Obama said at National Prayer Breakfast

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

The headline from JTA was “Obama: Faith should not be divisive.” Ya think?

In his first address at the National Prayer Breakfast, President Obama said that he will be establishing a White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnership, details from Dan Gilgoff, and said he would not be favoring one religion over another:

“Jesus told us to ‘love thy neighbor as thyself.’ The Torah commands, ‘That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow.’  In Islam, there is a hadith that reads ‘None of you truly believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself.’  And the same is true for Buddhists and Hindus; for followers of Confucius and for humanists.  It is, of course, the Golden Rule – the call to love one another; to understand one another; to treat with dignity and respect those with whom we share a brief moment on this Earth.”

There’s a little more here; The New York Times has the full transcript.

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February 5, 2009 | 3:14 pm

Turning memories of the Holocaust against the Jews

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

It’s no revelation to readers of this blog that part of the anti-Semites verbal arsenal now includes referring to Jews, specifically Israelis, as Nazis. The Washington Post, in a headline for a column by a former director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, calls this “the new anti-Semitism.”

The columnist, Walter Reich, runs through many of the images we saw during Israel’s war in Gaza and then concludes:

Are all those who have accused Israel of being a Nazi state anti-Semites? Hardly. There’s genuine anger in the Muslim world, as well as in Europe and elsewhere, about Israel’s actions in Gaza. The suffering is terrible. So are the images of devastation Israel left behind. And there are also plenty of people who are angry at Israel because it stands for the reviled United States.

But the reality is that much of the vitriol directed at Israel has indeed been spouted by anti-Semites. Not only have they hurled the Nazi canard at Israel, they’ve expressed clear anti-Semitism—some of it openly violent or even eliminationist. The pro-Israel but reliable Middle East Media and Research Institute has been documenting anti-Semitism on Palestinian television for years, including calls for the murder of Jews. It reports that, the day before International Holocaust Remembrance Day, one Egyptian cleric admitted on an Islamist TV channel that the Holocaust had happened—and added that he hoped that one day Muslims would do to the Jews what the Germans had done to them. To demonstrate what he had in mind, according to the institute, he showed footage of heaps of Jewish corpses being bulldozed into pits.

In designating an International Holocaust Remembrance Day back in 2005, the U.N. General Assembly acted with noble intentions, even if parts of the world body still aim to delegitimize Israel. Such commemorations help the world understand that the goal of the Holocaust was the annihilation of an entire people—and help them appreciate the vast differences between that event and, for example, the war in Gaza. But even as the Holocaust has been increasingly acknowledged and explained, it also has been increasingly used as a cudgel to beat Jews and the Jewish state.

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February 5, 2009 | 4:10 am

Koufax got swindled by Madoff, too

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

As if there weren’t already enough big names on the Bernard Madoff hit list, you can add Sandy Koufax, who rivals Einstein for most popular Jew from the 20th century. Little details as of yet. This isn’t surprising. Koufax has become notoriously press shy since his days as a celebrity in Dodger blue. Here’s what the AP found out:

Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax, a high school baseball teammate and friend of New York Mets owner Fred Wilpon, was among the clients who invested with Bernard Madoff, according to a court filing released Wednesday night.

More than two dozen accounts involving the Mets, their owners and companies affiliated with their owners were listed, many with addresses at Shea Stadium.

Koufax attended Lafayette High School along with Wilpon in the 1950s and the two remain close. Koufax usually shows up each year at the Mets’ spring training complex in Port St. Lucie, Fla.

Tim Teufel also was on the list. The former Mets infielder was hired this week as manager of their St. Lucie farm team in the Florida State League.

Among the entities that had accounts with Madoff were Sterling Mets, the Mets Limited Partnership, the New York Mets Foundation and Sterling Doubleday — the entity that owned the team when Wilpon and Nelson Doubleday were partners.

No amounts were listed in the filing, made in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan.

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February 4, 2009 | 9:33 pm

Tolan: two-state solution on its ‘deathbed’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Sandy Tolan, author of “The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East,” writes an op-ed from his faculty position at USC that says “the two-state solution is on its deathbed” and new Mideast envoy George Mitchell needs to realize that. A big excerpt is after the jump:

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February 4, 2009 | 5:09 pm

Christian-Jewish coalition saves Jewish schools in former Soviet Union

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

How important are Christian-Jewish relations? I’d definitely say it beats have my coreligionists blame my ancestors’ coreligionists for killing their Messiah and stealing their money. Christian-Jewish coalitions are often spoken of in stories about support for Israel, sometimes involving massive rallies or being connected to iconoclastic ministers like the Rev. John Hagee. Today, one such organization is joining with the Israeli government to help save World ORT schools in the former Soviet Union.

From JTA:

The 16 ORT schools face being absorbed into the public education system, and losing their Jewish character, following the Jewish Agency for Israel’s decision to stop funding the program which provides for Jewish studies, teachers wages and security. The program also funded hot meals and school buses.

The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews and the Israeli Ministry of Education made the $600,000 pledge in response to a frantic search for funding, led by the ORT representative in Russia, Avi Ganon. He tried to find ways to keep the schools Jewish, despite cuts in funding by the Ministry of Education and, more recently, the Jewish Agency.

However the long term future of ORT’s network of schools in the former Soviet Union is not yet secured.

“The Fellowship feels privileged to be able to help; but this is only a band-aid and there’s no solution yet to the fundamental issue,” said Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, founder and president of the IFCJ. “The fundamental issue is that there is no Jewish organization that is willing or capable of assuming responsibility for the welfare of Jewish children and their future in the Former Soviet Union.”

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February 4, 2009 | 1:42 pm

Pope tells bad bishop to recant views on Holocaust

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Photo: Reuters

I’m not sure if Pope Benedict XVI had already planned to issue this directive when he moved to “rehabilitate” a Holocaust-denying bishop who had been excommunicated two decades ago or if this is a reaction to international outcry, but today the Vatican told Bishop Richard Williamson he must recant his positions on the Holocaust.

From the NYT:

A statement issued on Wednesday by the Vatican Secretariat of State said that Bishop Williamson “must absolutely, unequivocally and publicly distance himself from his positions on the Shoah,” or Holocaust, which it said were “unknown to the Holy Father at the time he revoked the excommunication.”

The unsigned statement seemed a clear indication that the Vatican was facing an internal and external political crisis.

The day before, in a rare case of a head of state criticizing the pope, German Chancellor Angela Merkel called on the pope to clarify his position on the Holocaust, saying his previous remarks had not been “sufficient.”

The statement from the Secretariat of State noted Benedict’s remarks last week in which he expressed his “full and unequivocal solidarity” with Jews and condemned all Holocaust denial, yet it went far beyond the pope’s earlier remarks in which he had never mentioned Bishop Williamson by name.

For a refresher on Williamson’s most recent remarks, Swedish television aired these remarks days before his excommunication was lifted:

“I believe there were no gas chambers ... I think that two to three hundred thousand Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps ... but none of them by gas chambers.”

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February 3, 2009 | 6:08 pm

Non-Jew wins Jewish book award for fiction

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I’ve been meaning to congratulate Peter Manseau. His first novel, “Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter,” received the National Jewish Book Award for fiction. He told me this was the first time in more than 50 years that the award has gone to non-Jewish writer. Manseau can now be mentioned in the same sentence as Malamud, Ozick and Roth and gives hope to the rest of us. I think the appropriate expression here is: Mazal tov!

The official description from Simon & Schuster:

Summer, sweltering, 1996. A book warehouse in western Massachusetts. A man at the beginning of his adult life—and the end of his career rope—becomes involved with a woman, a language, and a great lie that will define his future. Most auspiciously of all, he runs across Itsik Malpesh, a ninetysomething Russian immigrant who claims to be the last Yiddish poet in America. When a set of accounting ledgers in which Malpesh has written his memoirs surfaces—twenty-two volumes brimming with adventure, drama, deception, passion, and wit—the young man is compelled to translate them, telling Malpesh’s story as his own life unfolds, and bringing together two paths that coincide in shocking and unexpected ways.

Moving from revolutionary Russia to New York’s Depression-era Lower East Side to millennium’s-end Baltimore with drama, adventure, and boisterous, feisty charm to spare, the unpeeling of this friendship is a story of the entire twentieth century.

Jeff Sharlet, Manseau’s co-author on “Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible,” reviewed his friends book when it came out in September. (I had intended to but couldn’t foster enough of an L.A. connection.) Here’s what Sharlet had to say:

Peter, the outsider as insider, the son of a Catholic priest and a nun—an abomination in his own tradition!—a Gentile who has written of passing as a Jew, of lying to little old Jewish ladies to make them better when he came to take their Yiddish books away (he was the book collector for the Yiddish Book Center), a novelist who writes in English, speaks Yiddish, and, he once explained, dreams in Catholic whether he wants to or not, has produced the real thing. Or, rather, produced is not the word: he has manufactured it. Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter flows so fast you may read it in a sitting or two, but it’s not an organic creation. It’s assembled. The narrator of the novel is a writer much like Peter, who intersperses his translation of a Yiddish memoir with “Translator’s Notes” that tell us more about his own love affair with a young, secular Jew who is busy reinventing herself as an Orthodox woman. The bulk of the novel is the memoir, and that Peter has drawn from the dust of the Yiddish Book Center’s warehouse, borrowing parts and pieces from the Sweatshop Poets and Di Khaliastre, the Gang, Yiddish experimentalists in Warsaw between the wars, and the Big Three—Mendele, Sholem Aleichem, and I.L. Peretz—and the author of the first play banned on Broadway, Sholem Asch, and the darker, even more forgotten writers, Lamed Shapiro and Yankev Glatshteyn and the writer who went by “Der Nister,” the hidden one. Peter, once a Yiddish book collector, has become a Yiddish book thief, snatching stories from limbo and resurrecting them as Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter.

Nextbook previously published a revealing excerpt from the book. And you can hear Manseau talk about his book on NPR or in the video after the jump:

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February 3, 2009 | 4:43 pm

Jewish community’s ‘devastating losses created by Madoff pale when set beside ...’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

In his first article as executive editor of Commentary, Jonathan Tobin writes that that Jewish community has much bigger problems than the hundreds of millions of dollars lost by nonprofits in the Bernard Madoff investment mess. The most pressing issue, Tobin writes, is the resurgence of the “continuity crisis,” which the Jewish community has struggled with for two decades. An excerpt:

The results of the past two decades suggest that the outreach model is a failure; individual Jewish federations and most communal organizations have seen declines in fundraising, and what data there are indicate that these efforts have done little to renew the commitment of Jews on the margins to the community or its future. Indeed, one of the reasons that generous Jews have been so determined to bypass the larger Jewish communal organizations may well be that those organizations have been so ineffectual in addressing the concerns of committed members of the community who have wanted to use their wealth to ensure a specifically Jewish future in the United States and in Israel. The consensus-driven culture of Jewish philanthropy has, predictably, failed to make a decisive choice with respect to the future of American Jewry.

The combined crises of 2008—the financial collapse and the Madoff scandal—will certainly exacerbate this dilemma and perhaps even sharpen the debate over the allocation of dollars. But the devastating losses created by Madoff pale when set beside the more pressing concern of demographic decline and the possibility that the decline in the number of people who are interested in Jewish causes will only accelerate over time unless something is done to arrest it.

The inability of the apparatus of Jewish philanthropy to find the will to focus its existing resources on the threat posed by rising levels of assimilation dwarfs the worries generated by financial scandals, even those as serious as that of Madoff.

I wrote a story that will be published this week about related changes at the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles. The umbrella organization is trying to engage new members in the process of communal building, but by extending its funding to non-traditional organizations and reducing its support to blue-bloods, some have voice strong displeasure with the changes.

“There is no sense of the value of keeping a community together,” said the president of a nonprofit traditionally supported by the Federation. “We’re just going to have to make it on our own.”

More on that later.

(Hat tip: The Fundermentalist)

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February 3, 2009 | 4:02 pm

Dicky Dawkins: ‘Beware the Believer’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

See Dawkins dance. See Dawkins rap. See Dawkins bag on believers like me and you.

It’s Dick Dawkins and The New Atheists, featuring Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris. Hilarious. Thanks, Faith Central.

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February 2, 2009 | 10:36 pm

Sexual abuse in Brooklyn’s Hasidic community

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Joel Engelman at 7

NPR aired a brutal story today about two former Hasidic boys who were sexually abused as youngsters—one at the mikvah and the other at his school. Joel Engelman’s tale is particularly troubling and evokes memories of the Catholic clergy sex abuse scandal. Shame. A code of silence. Fear of God and man.

NPR reporter Barbara Bradley Hagerty explains:

Engelman parks his car across from the United Talmudical Academy, a hulking building on a desolate street. This was the yeshiva, or Jewish boys’ school, that Engelman attended. Engelman says he was 8 years old, sitting in Hebrew class one day, when he was called to the principal’s office. When he arrived, he says, Rabbi Avrohom Reichman told him to close the door.

“He motioned for me to get on his lap, and as soon as I got on the chair, he would swivel the chair from right to left, continuously,” Engelman says. “Then he would start touching me while talking to me. He would start at my shoulders and work his way down to my genitals.”

Engelman says this occurred twice a week for two months. He told no one for more than a decade. Reichman was, after all, a revered rabbi. Four years ago, he told his parents. And a year ago, when he heard that Reichman had allegedly abused several other boys, they confronted Reichman. When the school heard about it, they gave the rabbi a polygraph.

“He failed miserably,” Engelman says. “So they told me, ‘This guy is gone. This guy has to go.’ “

But a few weeks later, a religious leader from the school approached Engelman’s mother, Pearl. He posed an astonishing question: On a scale of 1 to 10, how bad was the molestation?

She was speechless. Then she says, the man continued, ” ‘We found out there was no skin-to-skin contact, that it was through clothing.’ So he’s telling me, ‘On a scale of 1 to 10, this was maybe a 2 or a 3, so what’s the big fuss?’ “

The school hired Reichman back. That was in July 2008 — one week after Joel Engelmen turned 23 and could no longer bring a criminal or civil case against the rabbi.

Reichman and school officials declined to be interviewed for this story. But Rabbi David Niederman, who heads the United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburg, says the school did its due diligence. He says the allegation was thoroughly investigated by an independent committee of lay people and rabbis.

“I’m convinced that they made a serious investigation,” he says. “They felt that it’s not credible.”

Now Engelman has filed a long-shot civil suit against Reichman and the school, claiming they broke an oral contract.

Reichman’s attorney, Jacob Laufer, says the lawsuit is baseless and that the community is fully behind the rabbi.

“Even after these accusations were publicly made,” he says, “the parents continue to compete among themselves for the opportunity to have their children be educated by Rabbi Reichman.”

The Reichman case is not isolated. Four ultra-Orthodox rabbis in Brooklyn have been sued or arrested for abusing boys in the past three years. That’s a tiny fraction of the actual abuse, says Hella Winston, author of Unchosen: The Hidden Lives of Hasidic Rebels. She says that in researching her book, she encountered dozens of alleged victims who told her sexual abuse is an open secret in the Hasidic community. But the community is so insulated and the rabbis are so powerful that few dare to come forward.

“If I become known as an informer, then people also won’t want to have anything to do with my family,” she explains. “They won’t want to marry my children, won’t want to give me a job. This is the fear.”

But more and more accusations against rabbis have begun to circulate. Last August, politician and radio talk show host Dov Hikind devoted an hourlong program to sexual abuse. He interviewed Pearl Engelman, who spoke under an alias, about her son’s case.

The calls flooded in. Hikind, who is an Orthodox Jew himself, represents this area in the New York Assembly. He says after the show, people started showing up at his office with their stories.

“Fifty, 60, 70 people,” he says, “but you got to remember for each person who comes forward, God only knows how many people are not coming forward.”

The Jewish Journal published a cover story two years ago about sexual abuse, under the headline “Don’t Kid Yourself: There’s abusive clergy in the Jewish community, too.” It’s worth a read.

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February 2, 2009 | 6:26 pm

CT writer: Updike was ‘North America’s most theological’ writer

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

When John Updike died last week, I published only this short obituary from the AP. A lot more meaningful remembrances were published since—including one from John Irving and another from Updike’s New Yorker editor, Roger Angell.

Certainly worth reading is this article resurrected from the Christianity Today archives. In “Rabbit Trails to God,” the author refers to Updike as “if not a “Christian” novelist, certainly North America’s most theological one.”

An excerpt is after the jump:

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