May 23, 2013 | 2:54 pm

Large L.A. bakery drops RCC, switches to Kehilla Kosher

Posted by Jonah Lowenfeld

Since the Doheny Meat Market scandal broke in late March, three kosher establishments have dropped the Rabbinical Council of California's certification. Schwartz Bakery, which announced it had left on May 20, is likely the largest of the three. Image courtesy Facebook/Schwartz Bakery

Schwartz Bakery, a kosher bakery and caterer with six retail locations across Los Angeles, has dropped the Rabbinical Council of California (RCC) as its kosher certifier. The bakery announced on its Facebook page on May 20 that all of its locations were now being supervised by a competing kosher agency, Kehilla Kosher.

According to its Web site, Schwartz is "the first kosher bakery in Los Angeles." It is the third kosher establishment to leave the RCC in recent weeks, and the second to join the businesses supervised by Kehilla.

On May 23, two Schwartz locations were still listed in the directory of RCC-certified businesses the kosher certifier's Web site.

The RCC has been under intense pressure since March, when video footage emerged that showed the owner of Doheny Glatt Kosher Meat, the largest meat distributor under RCC supervision, allegedly bringing unidentified animal products into his store at a time when the kosher overseer was absent.

Schwartz is likely the largest business to leave the RCC to date. Founded in 1954, the family-owned business also caters events, sells packaged baked goods to retailers across the Southland and runs the lunch program at Yeshivat Yavneh, an Orthodox day school near Hancock Park.

Marc Hecht, Schwartz Bakery’s owner, and RCC President Rabbi Meyer May could not be reached immediately on Thursday for comment.

May 22, 2013 | 11:41 am

The battle brewing over Sen. Boxer’s Israel visa bill

Posted by Jonah Lowenfeld

Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) during the second session of Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., on Sept. 5. Photo by REUTERS/Jim Young

In March, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D – CA) introduced a bill that would allow Israelis to enter the United States without first applying for a visa. The measure would, its backers say, help improve the business ties between the U.S. and Israel and encourage more Israeli tourists to come to America. Who could have a problem with that?

A lot of pro-Palestinian, Islamic-American, leftist and peacenik civil rights groups, it turns out. Opponents of the bill say it grants Israel an exemption from the requirement to treat all Americans coming to visit Israel in the same way Israelis would be treated on their trips to the United States (should the bill pass).

The bill’s language requires Israel to make “every reasonable effort, without jeopardizing the security of the State of Israel, to ensure that reciprocal travel privileges are extended to all United States citizens.”

That’s not enough, say the bill’s opponents. Framing the policy this way “not only allows, but also codifies, Israel’s routine practice of racial profiling and discriminatory treatment of Americans of Palestinian or Arab descent, as well as Muslims and human rights activists critical of Israeli policies,” said a coalition led by the California chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR-CA) in a letter to Boxer on May 21.

Boxer disagrees, saying the proposed law only gives Israel the same “right to deny entry to individuals based on national security concerns” enjoyed by all other countries.

“In fact,” Boxer wrote in a letter to the Los Angeles Times on May 5, “the U.S. explicitly warns countries that are granted entry into the visa waiver program that we retain the ability to deny entry to any foreign national who represents a ‘threat to the welfare, health, safety or security of the United States.’”

The Times of Israel reported about the dispute over whether to allow Israel to join the visa waiver program, which currently allows citizens of 37 countries to travel to the United States without first obtaining a tourist visa. Israel already grants automatic, three-month tourist visas to U.S. citizens who travel to the Jewish state; Boxer’s bill, which has been referred to committee, would give Israelis traveling to the U.S. that same privilege.

Rep. Brad Sherman (D - Sherman Oaks), who introduced a similar bill in the House of Representatives in January, told the Times of Israel that those who oppose granting Israel entry into the visa waiver program are “the same people who wake up every morning and accuse Israel of genocide.”

Sherman noted that both France and the United Kingdom currently have reciprocal visa waiver relationships with Israel.

“Over 300,000 Israelis have to go through a [laborious] bureaucratic process to get into the United States [each year], and 21,000 people are on America’s ‘do not fly’ list,” Sherman told the Times of Israel on May 20. “And here you’ve got one person saying 100 Arab Americans were inconvenienced, but we don’t know who they are.”

One Arab-American, George Bisharat, a professor at UC Hastings College of the Law and son of a “Palestinian father and my blue-blood American mother,” described his inconvenient experiences (he called it “blatant racial profiling”) in an opinion piece in the L.A. Times earlier this month. Here’s his description of the welcome he received at Israel’s Ben-Gurion airport:

The screeners, typically youngsters half my age, grow tenser and the questions begin: "Where was your father born? Where are you going in Israel? What is your purpose here? Where will you stay? How many times have you been here before? Who do you know in Israel?" I respond, patiently and truthfully. On it goes for hours, punctuated by long waits on hard benches as increasingly senior interrogators shuttle in. Occasionally I am strip-searched. When I clear customs, the non-Arab passengers from my flight have long since departed the airport. I endure this whether traveling alone or with my family. In 2000, my daughter spent a substantial part of her ninth birthday contending with such a Ben Gurion Airport welcome committee.

Both Boxer’s bill in the Senate and Sherman’s in the House have been referred to committee. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has lobbied for Israel’s inclusion into the program.

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May 15, 2013 | 4:51 pm

L.A. city controller candidate attacks opponent for “misleading” Jewish mailer

Posted by Jonah Lowenfeld

Los Angeles City Councilman Dennis Zine, right, seen in a photo included in a mailer sent to Jewish voters earlier this month. Zine is running for Los Angeles City Controller.

In the 21st century, when candidates for public office tailor their messages to address different segments of the electorate, it’s no surprise that L.A. City Councilman Dennis Zine, who is running for city controller, sent a carefully crafted blue-and-white mailer to Jewish voters in Los Angeles earlier this month.

But unlike the straightforward mailers sent by Zine’s campaign to black (pdf) and Latino (pdf) voters, which feature photographs and statements from leaders in those minority communities who have endorsed the candidate, Zine’s outreach to Jewish voters makes creative use of statements that are not endorsements to bolster the candidate’s credentials.

The mailer (pdf) includes a photograph of Zine shaking hands with Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who has not endorsed either candidate in the race. It also uses the names and logos of local synagogues and Jewish nonprofits, as well as statements attributed to religious and lay leaders involved in those organizations, in ways that might lead some voters to believe that Zine has the endorsements of those organizations and individuals.

Zine’s mailer does include a disclaimer informing voters that its mention of these organizations “in no way implies” that the organizations have endorsed Zine’s candidacy. But Zine’s opponent in the May 21st runoff election, attorney Ron Galperin, said the mailer was still “misleading.” 

“It’s a disclaimer, in very, very small print, at the bottom, which basically says ignore everything on the rest of the page,” Galperin said. “It’s a blatant attempt to suggest that the Jewish organizations that he listed -- and stole the logos of -- are supporting him, which is just plain false.”

The mailer makes clear that Zine, who was a Republican until 2011, when he changed his registration to “decline to state,” has the support of Rep. Brad Sherman (D – Sherman Oaks) and Former California Assembly Speaker Robert Hertzberg. Photos and statements attributed to those two Jewish leaders are featured prominently.

But the largest photo in the mailer is of the candidate, a Christian of Lebanese ancestry, wearing a white yarmulke, seated next to an unidentified bearded man in a black hat, and the significance of other statements on the mailer is hard to determine.

Arnold Gerson, the Chief Executive Officer of American Friends of Magen David Adom (AFMDA), is quoted in the mailer thanking Zine for “supporting Israel’s pre-hospital medical services.”

According to Rob Rosenthal, AFMDA’s chief marketing officer, that statement, which appears in the Zine mailer alongside AFMDA’s logo, is from a letter sent in 2007 by AFMDA’s Gerson thanking Zine for a donation he made.

“We’re appreciative of Mr. Zine's support, but weren’t aware of his candidacy and have no involvement with his campaign,” Rosenthal wrote in an email to The Journal on May 14. “But we look forward to his continued support on behalf of the people of Israel.”

Rosenthal added that, as a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, AFMDA is prohibited from endorsing candidates.

John Schwada, director of communications for the Zine campaign, said that Zine, a former officer with the Los Angles Police Department who has represented part of the San Fernando Valley in the council since 2001, has given from his personal funds to support a variety of causes over the years. Schwada noted that Zine served as a president of The Executives, a support group for the Los Angeles Jewish Home for the Aging, and said that quotes like the one from Gerson’s 2007 letter are frequently reproduced in campaign communications.

“This is standard operating procedure in a campaign, to tout your support and the good things you’ve done for other people,” Schwada said.

Galperin, a Democrat, has the endorsements of both the Democratic Party and of the Los Angeles Chapter of Democrats for Israel. The son of Holocaust survivors, Galperin mentioned that he has his own prominent Jewish endorsers, including Rep. Henry Waxman (D – Beverly Hills) and former Reps. Howard Berman and Mel Levine.

Galperin, who has long been active in the Jewish community, once taught Hebrew school and spent two decades as the cantor at Temple B’nai Emet in Montebello. His spouse, Rabbi Zachary R. Shapiro, is the spiritual leader at Temple Akiba in Culver City.

Galperin said Jewish voters were no different than any other group of voters, but said Zine’s mailer was less than forthright in its effort to win over Jewish Angelenos.

“The controller’s job is to be the watchdog for the city of L.A., and most importantly, to be honest,” Galperin said. “Everybody who runs for office wants to make the best case for themselves, but you have to do it honestly.”

The Zine mailer uses the logos of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and Temple Aliyah in Woodland Hills. A representative from AIPAC declined to comment for this story. Messages left on May 14, the eve of Shavuot, for Temple Aliyah’s Rabbi Stewart L. Vogel and David Brook, both of whom are quoted by name in the mailer, were not returned on Tuesday. A message left on Tuesday for another leader whose name appeared in Zine’s mailer, Rabbi Richard Camras of Shomrei Torah in West Hills, also received no response.

To see the mailer, click here (pdf).

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April 25, 2013 | 12:28 pm

Immigration reform: no longer so controversial, but not inevitable either

Posted by Jonah Lowenfeld

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, right, participated in a discussion about immigration reform on April 23. Dan Schnur, left, director of USC's Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics, moderated the discussion. Photo by Jonah Lowenfeld

When Jesse Gabriel, an alumnus from the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles’ New Leaders Project, explained why he and two other members of the 2012 cohort decided to host a discussion of immigration reform on April 23, he said they selected the topic precisely “because we know it’s so divisive.” But Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, the first speaker on Tuesday evening, immediately challenged the assertion.

“It might have been, 10 years ago and 15 years ago,” said Villaraigosa, who is set to leave his position at the end of June. “People kind of get that we’ve got to do something with 11 million people that are working here.”

Villaraigosa was referring to the estimated 11 million immigrants living in the U.S. illegally who would, under a bill introduced on April 16 by a bipartisan “gang of eight” senators, be given a path to citizenship.

And while it’s impossible to say how the bill will fly nationwide or how it will fare in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, there appeared to be significant common ground in the discussion at Federation headquarters between local political players from both parties. 

“We’re living in a more diverse environment,” said moderator Dan Schnur, explaining why positions on immigration reform may have moderated significantly in recent years.

Schnur, who is director of the University of Southern California’s Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics, which co-organized Tuesday evening’s event, served as national communications director for Sen. John McCain’s failed 2000 Presidential bid. But while Schnur and panelist Mike Madrid, a Republican expert on Latino voting trends, seemed chastened by the experience of watching their party’s Presidential nominee lose the Latino vote last year by a 40-point margin, neither one assumed that GOP congressmen or the party’s white, aging voter base would share their moderated perspective on immigration.

Though support for comprehensive immigration reform is now hanging at around 72 percent in California and over 65 percent nationwide, Madrid said that attack ads aimed at voters in Republican house districts would have eat into that support.

“When you start hearing this framed as ‘Amnesty,’” Madrid said, “you’re going to start seeing public opinion start to get a little bit shaky.”

The bill that will be brought before the Senate does have elements that bother Democrats, as well. Villaraigosa said he disliked the length of time – 13 years – that it would take immigrants to achieve full citizenship, and questioned the bill’s spending $4.5 billion in increased border security. The mayor said that the overall reform measures were worth compromising on those elements.

Hector de la Torre, who spent six years as a Democrat in the California Assembly, said he was concerned about the proposed bill’s provision that would allow more than 400,000 guest workers to enter the country without a path to citizenship.

“My grandfather was a bracero,” De La Torre said, referring to the program that brought millions of Mexican guest workers to harvest produce in the United States between 1942 and 1964. “He was treated like an indentured servant.”

“That is my strong opposition to guest-worker type programs,” De La Torre continued. “Unless they are fully endowed with civil rights in this country, I don’t buy it, I don’t get it. And if I was [in Congress] I would be having a very hard time with that piece of it.”

That said, De La Torre acknowledged that members of his party are lining up in favor of the bill, and there appears to be more momentum now than there was in 2007, the last time that Congress considered immigration reform legislation. Labor and business groups have come out in favor of the proposed legislation – which did not happen in 2007 – and leaders in the Republican party have the 2012 election results foremost in their minds.

Whether Republican voters will go along with such a change of heart is unclear.

“When you tell voters to change their opinions on something because it’s the right thing to do politically, that’s not always the most effective route to take,” Schnur said.

There is an economic argument to be made in favor of immigration reform that both Democrats and Republicans could get behind. An influx of young immigrants, Madrid said, could help buttress the country’s social safety net, keeping Medicare and Social Security solvent even as the U.S. population ages. De La Torre said that in the first three years of the program, the overall GDP could grow as much as 1.3 percent annually.

But many GOP congressmen in deeply red districts won’t necessarily have an incentive in the near term to take a more permissive view of immigration reform. Everyone who spoke on Tuesday night agreed that the success or failure of the immigration bill will be determined by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, and specifically by House Speaker John Boehner.

If the bill gets to the floor of Congress, Villaraigosa predicted that the chamber will take a number of trial votes to consider amendments to make the bill more stringent – and thereby more palatable to GOP congressmen.

But its fate depends on whether Speaker Boehner allows the bill go to a vote in the first place.

“If he’s not willing to do that, it’ll die,” Villaraigosa said, adding that if the bill becomes overly harsh, representatives from his party might just take a pass.

“Democrats will just wait for another election,” the mayor said.

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April 16, 2013 | 9:49 pm

Elie Wiesel on Boston’s bombs: send in the philosophers

Posted by Jonah Lowenfeld

In the wake of the bombs that exploded at the finish line of the Boston Marathon on April 15, law enforcement agencies are combing through evidence to better understand what took place.

But Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, who is a professor at Boston University, said that to properly respond to this terrorist act, the country needs to engage in some very big, very broad thinking.

“If I were the President,” Wiesel said in an interview with the Jewish Journal on April 16, “I would create a special commission of educators and philosophers and social philosophers and thinkers, to think it through what is happening to our land, if this can happen.”

This week, Wiesel is speaking with students at Chapman University, in his third year as the school's visiting Distinguished Presidential Fellow. And it’s safe to say that, as perhaps the best known Holocaust survivor living today, Wiesel is more often on the receiving end of queries about how societies can descend into violence.

But, faced with this fresh new horror, this still barely understood act of terror, the 84-year-old writer and teacher was left with the same questions as everyone else.

“Usually, a terrorist wants people to know why he did it,” Wiesel said. “Since the 19th century, when terrorism began assassinations in Europe, they signed their assassinations. What joy does the assassin draw from killing people? Try to understand that. You can’t.”

Wiesel was just as confounded by the bomber’s choice of target, a nonviolent sporting event in the city that he called “the Athens of today,” for its concentration of colleges and universities.

At a time when many observers and pundits are holding their tongues in light of the dearth of known facts about the attack, the fact that Wiesel is left with questions about Boston is not surprising. But it is notable that Wiesel saw what took place in Boston as part of a baffling epidemic of violence that included last year’s shootings in Sandy Hook and Aurora, the 2011 shooting that gravely wounded Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, and other acts of terror.

“The appeal to violence and to extreme violence -- what is it? What brings it? What motivates it?” Wiesel asked.

“I don’t have the answer to the question,” he continued, which is why he proposed the Presidential commission. In Wiesel’s view, what the world is seeing and experiencing today is nothing short of an historic trend, one that must not be ignored.

“We cannot just turn the page and say, 'Oh, it will pass,'” he said.

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April 11, 2013 | 9:26 pm

Greuel, Garcetti spar in L.A. mayoral debate at AJU

Posted by Jonah Lowenfeld

In the first debate between the two remaining candidates running to be the next mayor of Los Angeles, City Controller Wendy Greuel and City Councilman Eric Garcetti attempted to convince voters that there were significant differences between them even as the two veteran politicians took identical positions on one issue after another.

The candidates spent a good deal of time on Thursday night addressing questions about the city’s quality of life. The three-person panel on the stage at American Jewish University asked about neighborhood development and traffic, and the moderator, KABC anchor Marc Brown, relayed questions about the city’s sidewalks and its spay-and-neuter law from people who submitted them via Facebook.

Greuel and Garcetti both said they were in favor of bringing football back to L.A. Each also promised to end chronic homelessness in the city and pledged to ask for givebacks from the unions if elected mayor.

That last pledge would place the new mayor in the awkward position of trying to take back some of the raises that he or she had voted to award to municipal workers in 2007, when both Greuel and Garcetti were on the city council. Were Greuel to win and make good on her promise, she would also be negotiating against some of the very same unions that spent millions promoting her candidacy during the primary.

But at the debate on April 11, which was co-sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League and AJC Los Angeles (American Jewish Committee), Greuel said she was “independent enough to be your next mayor,” even as Garcetti twice labeled her the “chosen candidate of the downtown power brokers.”

With the election set to take place on May 21, there weren’t too many fireworks between the two candidates on Thursday evening, but Greuel and Garcetti did throw some barbed attacks at one another.

Garcetti questioned the math underlying Greuel’s claim to have identified $160 million in wasteful spending as controller; he also assailed Greuel’s proposal to increase the number of police officers by 2,000 over the coming eight years. Greuel stood by the $160 million number, and called her suggestion to increase the city’s police force a “goal,” not a plan.

“I believe that if you don’t look forward to a goal, you’ll never get there,” Greuel said.

For her part, Greuel questioned Garcetti on whether he had acted quickly enough in making known his opinion on two skyscrapers planned for Hollywood. Garcetti opposed the plan, which was approved by the city’s planning commission late last month, but Greuel, who said she opposed the plan, felt her opponent had waited too long.

“Let’s resolve it before it comes to the planning commission,” Greuel said.

Garcetti defended his course of action, saying that he had always thought the project was too large, but wanted to give the developers the opportunity to see if they could rally public support behind it.

When Jewish Journal Editor-in-Chief and Publisher Rob Eshman, who was one of the three questioners on Thursday night, asked each candidate for the “vote defining difference” that could help Angelenos decide between these two polished, Democratic City Hall insiders, Greuel pointed to their “different experiences,” arguing that her work in the public and private sector have helped to prepare her to be the best mayor.

Garcetti, at other points during the debate, noted that he had the support of the three leading candidates for mayor who were knocked out during the first round of voting in March. He also said that the campaign shouldn’t be about “big names from faraway places telling us how to vote,” which was a thinly veiled criticism of Greuel who has won endorsements from President Bill Clinton and Magic Johnson, among others.

While most of the focus during Thursday evening’s debate was on the candidates who want the city’s top job, the lame duck mayor Antonio Villaraigosa fired off an attack at the two candidates 24 hours earlier during his final State of the City speech, critiquing Garcetti and Greuel for not paying more attention to education during the campaign.

Taking the mayor’s criticism to heart, Adrienne Alpert of ABC7’s Eyewitness News kicked off the debate with a question about education, asking the candidates if they would support Villaraigosa’s 22 “partnership schools,” which are under the supervision of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), but receive additional support from private funds. Both candidates said they would maintain the mayor’s support and focus on those low-performing schools.

And even if it was Greuel who came out with a stronger-sounding defense of “choice” on Thursday night, loudly proclaiming her support for the “parent trigger” law, which allows parents to vote out a school’s administration and bring in a new operator, Garcetti, who has been endorsed by the city’s teachers union, United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), said he was also in favor of the parent trigger.

Where Garcetti will stand on the polarizing issues related to education reform remains to be seen. As of late Thursday evening, both Garcetti and Greuel had signed an online petition in support of the LAUSD's reform-minded superintendent, John Deasy. Earlier in the day, UTLA members "issued an overwhelming vote of no-confidence" in Deasy, according to The Daily News.

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April 10, 2013 | 10:29 pm

What does Jewish law say about Doheny’s “kosher” meat?

Posted by Jonah Lowenfeld

Doheny Glatt Kosher Meat Market. Photo by Jonah Lowenfeld

By now, most people reading this are probably familiar with the details of the scandal that all but destroyed Doheny Glatt Kosher Meat Market just before the beginning of Passover. Most readers are likely also familiar with the decision made by the Rabbinical Council of California (RCC) and other local L.A. rabbis a few weeks ago that allowed all meat that was purchased from the shop before 3 p.m. on March 24 to be considered kosher.

But just because Jews in L.A. and across the country are aware of the decision -- which was made in consultation with the legal authority for the Orthodox Union’s kashrut division, Rabbi Yisroel Belsky -- doesn’t mean they don’t want a better understanding of the halachic (Jewish legal) reasoning that led to it. ***

“All throughout Yom Tov, I fielded questions,” Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky of B’nai David-Judea told me recently. “I actually gave a shiur (class) on the afternoon of the seventh day of Passover.”

“In a nutshell,” said Kanefsky, who was in the room when the initial decision was made, “there’s a halachic dispute that goes back hundreds and hundreds of years as to when you can apply the principle that the majority of the meat that is present determines the halachic status of all the meat that is present.”

Rabbi Belsky, Kanefsky said, directed them to one side of that rabbinic debate, and allowed the principle of rov, or majority, to be employed in the Doheny case.

“Prior to there being definitive knowledge of questionable or forbidden meat present,” Kanefsky said, “one can presume, based on majority, that any given piece of meat purchased from the store is kosher.”

Kanefsky is hardly the only rabbi to have tackled this question in the weeks since video footage revealed that Doheny’s former owner had, on at least one occasion, brought eight boxes of unidentified animal products into the store, which had been certified as glatt kosher by the RCC.

Rabbi Elchonon Tauber, a prominent local Chassidic scholar, gave an hour-long class on April 9 about which mixtures of prohibited and kosher meats are permitted to eat and which mixtures are not.

“So many people are wondering: what makes three o’clock the magic number?” Tauber said near the beginning of the class at Chabad-Lubavitch of South La Cienega (Chabad SOLA). He went on to lead the 35 men present through the relevant section of the Shulchan Aruch, a 16th century code of Jewish law.

Every detail, it seemed, had an impact on whether the meat was to be considered kosher: what the buyer knew about the seller when he bought it, what the seller knew about the meat, even whether the seller was himself a religious Jew.

The reasoning was complicated, and drew some strong reactions from those in attendance. (Video of the class – # 17 in Tauber’s weekly series – has been posted at the Chabad SOLA web site.)

But if Tauber – who sits on the rabbinic advisory board of the local kosher certification agency that competes most directly with the RCC, Kehilla Kosher – is standing behind Belsky and the RCC’s decision, there is at least one person who disagrees.

“The claim that since the majority of the product in the store was definitely kosher we can assume that the meat being bought is kosher needs clarification,” writes a guest poster on the blog of Rabbi Yudel Shain, a kosher consultant from Lakewood N.J.

The post continues:

If a store has 1000 kosher chickens and 10 livers of which 9 are not kosher and 1 is kosher, if I purchase a liver at that store I am definitely not allowed to eat it. We can only group similar items to create the majority. We must therefore be able to establish that we had a majority of livers, tongues, rib steaks etc. against the unknown product that was brought in.

And that’s only the beginning. The poster – who Shain, in an interview with The Journal, declined to name – goes on to question the RCC’s statement that the meat was not unkosher but merely not glatt kosher. It also questions the RCC itself.

Shain said he approved of the reasoning used by the guest poster, who he said was also a rabbi.

“I am convinced that treyf (non-kosher product) was going in there,” Shain said. “I have no doubt.”

Among the rabbinic community, however, Shain may be a lone voice. He said he had submitted the guest blogger’s post and another post about the Doheny scandal (which lifted a few paragraphs, without attribution, from work done by this reporter) to other Jewish news outlets that primarily serve an Orthodox readership. Those news outlets, he said, turned him down.

*** I’m not a scholar of these matters, not by a long shot. If I’ve misrepresented the statements of any of these rabbis, I hope they’ll forgive me. (And, more to the point, that they’ll contact me so that I can correct any errors.)

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April 4, 2013 | 11:35 pm

Remember “Foreskin Man?” He’s baaack…

Posted by Jonah Lowenfeld

Panels from the latest issue of "Foreskin Man," the anti-Circumcision superhero comic. Courtesy MGMBill.org.

The comic book hero “Foreskin Man,” the muscle-bound and caped opponent of circumcision who first made headlines in 2011, has returned.

The fourth issue was released on April 3, according to a press release from Matthew Hess, the anti-circumcision activist who was the behind failed ballot measures two years ago that aimed to stop the practice in San Francisco and Santa Monica.

In previous issues, Foreskin Man spirited away baby boys who were to be circumcised by blood-spattered doctors and vicious-looking mohelim (Jewish ritual circumcisers); in the latest issue, the flying hero is sent to Turkey, where he stops a ghoulish-eyed Muslim father from using a curved blade to circumcise his son.

Hess regularly is asked to refute charges that his opposition to circumcision stemmed from anti-Semitism, and the new comic might help him in that regard. Circumcision is a central rite of Judaism and Islam, and Hess told SFGate blogger Debra J. Saunders that he’s not concerned about reactions from members of any religious group to his efforts.

“I can’t let fear be the driving force of intactivism,” he told Saunders.

For all four issues of Foreskin Man, click here.

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