Thursday, July 6, 2006
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Jewish Renewal Leaders Rabbi Arthur Green Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi Write The Jewish Week
1) On [Mordecai] Gafni
Although a month has passed since the original revelations concerning Mordechai Gafni and his deceptive, abusive relationships with women, we remain deeply concerned about the harm he has caused and the effect on its victims. ("Deconstructing The Gafni Case," Editor's Column, June 9)
Although we are glad to hear that Gafni, whom each of us had at one time befriended and supported, has admitted his illness and committed himself to a course of therapy, we do not see the issue as fully resolved. We ask ourselves how we could have been so deeply deceived and allowed ourselves to be lied to and manipulated as we were. We should have seen more and listened better. Perhaps we were too zealous in not wanting to listen to what we considered lashon ha'ra [gossip], and that kept us from hearing the outcry of women who were suffering real harm. Perhaps we were too taken up with seeking out the good in a person to notice the presence of evil.
We are particularly disturbed at the thought that there might be women who let themselves fall under Mordechai Gafni's sway partially because they saw our names associated with his, and thus trusted him in part because of us. To them we offer our most humble and profound apology. If it is any consolation, be assured that we have learned a great deal from this experience, and will be better listeners in the future.
Jewish Whistleblower responds:
Once again the Jewish Renewal leadership minimizes their role in protecting Gafni and attacking the brave survivors who came forward and their supporters. Apparently, teshuvah in their goofy religion doesn't involve apologizing to any of them. Perhaps Jewish Renewal should have read David Sosnowik's letter (reproduced below): "Molesters are sick individuals. Few would dispute that. But those rabbis and religious institutions that would cover-up the behavior of such individuals are much worse than sick. They are criminals who should face the full wrath of community, law enforcement, and true religious leaders. And after being held to account here for their actions, they might then be better prepared to face the same Almighty we all serve, the protector of the weak and the true judge."
Body Outlaws
I look back now and pat myself on the back for what amounted to years of extended performance art, my body my tool for sociopolitical commentary, my every stomach roll a calculated fuck you to the beauty mafia and the culture that nursed it. I cultivated a righteous (if somewhat smug) anger and unleashed it upon anyone unwise enough to discuss the StairMaster or order salad dressing “on the side” within earshot of me.
A few years down the road, once I’d staged a definitive exit from the ranks of Rhinoplasty High, something strange happened.
Hotline
He is still letting out rhythmic exhalations that echo and imitate the beating of my heart as well as the still present, inexplicable tick tick ticking in my head when I have exhausted myself of Important things I need to tell him. And, like an old lover in sync with me, he comes just when I finish, at the same instant, with a gasp and a pitiful roar. We both sit quietly, spent, entangled in the fiber optics between us.
Simcha Stress and Bridal Blues
By Elisa Albert in the July 11, 2003 Jewish Journal:
Whenever I tell someone about my impending nuptials, the reaction is the same.
First come the whoops of joy and the chorus of "Mazel Tovs!"
Then, invariably, the tone shifts. Faces fall. "How are you?" they ask, in much the same tone one might hear at a shiva call. "How are things going?"
Planning and executing a wedding, the implication suggests, are psychologically only slightly less taxing than death or divorce.
New York Times: WEDDINGS/CELEBRATIONS; Elisa Albert, Joel Farkas
August 17, 2003
Elisa Tamar Albert and Joel Samuel Farkas are to be married today by Rabbi Michael Gotlieb at the Saddlerock Vineyards and Ranch, a winery in Malibu, Calif.
Ms. Albert, 25, is keeping her name. She is a short-story writer and a candidate for a master's degree in creative writing at Columbia. She graduated from Brandeis and received a certificate from the Radcliffe Publishing Course. She is the daughter of Elaine Hearst Albert and Carl A. Albert, both of Los Angeles. Her father retired as the chairman and chief executive of the Fairchild Dornier Corporation, an aircraft manufacturer in San Antonio. Her mother is the director of the children's literacy program for the Los Angeles Jewish Federation.
Mr. Farkas, 34, is to begin his third year at Fordham Law School this month. He graduated from the Los Angeles campus of Antioch College. He is the son of Pamela R. Farkas and Dr. David E. Farkas, both of Los Angeles. His mother is a psychotherapist there, and his father a dentist.
Ms. Albert and Mr. Farkas grew up in the same Los Angeles community, and their families were acquainted -- her older brothers were friendly with him -- but the difference in their ages left them only vaguely aware of each other. In 2001, when they were both living in New York, their mothers arranged their first meeting as adults, although not for the usual reasons: Mr. Farkas's brother had died by his own hand seven weeks earlier, and Ms. Albert's brother had died in 1998 of cancer, and their mothers thought they might give each other emotional support.
Ms. Albert recalls that she made the first call to Mr. Farkas with trepidation. ''If your mom's just giving out your number,'' she said into his answering machine, ''feel free to ignore this message.''
But Mr. Farkas was glad to have someone from home to talk to. He teased Ms. Albert about her hesitant message, and they arranged to meet in Union Square for coffee.
Both remember their surprise, on that first meeting, that their two-person support group quickly seemed to become something else. ''I was like, 'Oh my God, he's really cute,' '' Ms. Albert said. ''I was chiding myself for being shallow in the face of something much more serious and weighty.'' Mr. Farkas, who also had a crush, worried that the family connection that had brought them together might cause some awkwardness, and that the the age difference could become an obstacle.
A week later, though, he called Ms. Albert and asked her to join him for a band performance at a downtown club. At his apartment afterward, they talked for hours. Just as her patience with his own hesitancy was about to give out, he kissed her.
''Basically, we didn't spend a minute apart for the next six months,'' Ms. Albert said. And in that time, the losses they had each suffered became not just the basis of their introduction but part of their relationship. ''We marvel that something so awful can give way to something so positive,'' she said.
The New York Times Divorce Announcement
Elisa Albert writes in The Modern Jewish Girl's Guide To Guilt:
… My New York Times wedding announcement read, as many do, like a smug sigh of relief: Nice privileged over-educated girl marries nice privileged over-educated boy. Accelerated offspring, sound real-estate investment, timely death, and flourishing of Judaica on the planet forthcoming. Continuity of the Jewish people thusly assured and hopes and dreams of respective families fulfilled, all with a lively hora, some lovely orchids, and top-of-the-line kitchenware to seal the deal.
But less than a year after our triumphant announcement (oh, and the getting married itself), my husband and I separated, and all that pride, joy and hope inscribed in the paper of record quickly gave way to a tailspin of failure, reproach, and profound guilt. It wasn’t only my life and heart I’d destroyed: I felt I had dashed the hopes of loved ones, wasted an obscene amount of money, and failed to fulfill the needs of my people by reproducing. I found myself fairly buried under the rubble.
...One day we wer fighting and I felt hopeless and things were going dreadfully, and the next his good friend's wife (a rabbi, no less!) ran into a friend of mine at a mall several states away and breezily offered up the news that we were kaput. Then an in-the-dark relative of mine, still more states removed, got a pseudo-sympathetic phoen call from said rabbi's sister-in-law. And so on. (Um, an aside, if I may? Perhaps we should collectively be focusing a little less on themed bar mitzvah parties and a little more on philosophical illumination of concepts like Lashon Ha Ra. Just a thought.)
Elisa Albert Interview With Publisher's Weekly
I was raised in a very insular and infuriating [Los Angeles] Jewish community, and one that proved endlessly dissatisfying to me as I grew up, but it's impossible for me to shake its influence. There's the desire to reclaim it somehow, make it my own and reinvent it in a way that's meaningful. There's a good deal of sentimentalism inherent in that urge, and one I think I share with the population of my stories.
>Your closing story at once apes and purports to address Philip Roth.
It's designed to pretty much dynamite everything that precedes it. I was aiming to level my own shtick, to poke fun at myself and my own obsessions. I'm most enamored of writers who seem self-aware and are willing to stand back and take aim at their own narrative patterns from time to time, like, say, Mr. Roth. I think I needed to do that in order to put this collection to bed and move on, narratively speaking. That it's fake-autobiographical and mock-revealing made the writing process hugely amusing, if only to me. And a great teacher of mine once said that as long as you're amusing yourself, you're onto something.
An Open Letter About Rabbi Saul Berman
Jewish Whistleblower writes in reaction to this:
Dear Rabbi [Avi] Weiss,
I am deeply disappointed and shocked at your decision to offer a position as Director of Rabbinic Enrichment to Rabbi Saul Berman at this time. Further, you refer to him in you public letter as "a person of great brilliance, integrity and sensitivity".
Unfortunately, many of us have found over the past few years that simply is not the case. Rabbi Berman has not only defended and protected now confessed sexual predator and child molester Rabbi Mordecai Gafni but he has continually made false public claims of investigations that he personally conducted and claims that determinations of Rabbi Gafni's innocence had been made (see copy of one of those public letters below). Rabbi Berman continued to make such claims while at the same time refusing to talk to several of the brave survivors of Rabbi Gafni who came forward and attempted to discuss the matter with him. Some investigation.
Rabbi Berman not only publicly defended Gafni, but he has attacked many individuals trying to protect others from being abused by Gafni in a very public campaign aimed at destroying their reputations and names. Ultimately, Rabbi Berman was responsible for the creation of the environment in which Gafni remained unchecked and where he abused further vulnerable victims.
Rabbi Berman throughout his conduct in the Gafni case, has demonstrated a total lack of character and integrity. His refusal to address the totality of his conduct publicly or do anything even resembling teshuvah towards the brave former survivors of Rabbi Gafni or their supporters forces me to question your judgment in hiring Rabbi Berman.
Rabbi Weiss, if Rabbi Berman is entitled to public honor from his colleagues without any accountability or teshuvah for his public conduct over the past years for protecting a sexual predator with public lies, then I believe you and your colleagues have failed to appreciate any of the lessons we had hoped you learned from the Lanner affair and our community's inability to deal with sexual predators will as such continue. I would have expected more from you.
The Mishnah, Avot 4:4, reminds us that sequestering a hillul Hashem will always be unsuccessful: "Whoever desecrates the name of Heaven in private will ultimately be punished in public, whether the desecration was committed unintentionally or intentionally."
(Public Letter Berman attached his name to, one of several)
To Whom It May Concern,
I have had occasion during the spring, summer and fall of 2004 to conduct an extensive personal inquiry in response to accusations which have been made against Rabbi Mordechai Gafni and publicized on the Internet. A more balanced version of these same issues than that on the Internet was raised in an editor's column by Gary Rosenblatt published in the Jewish Week newspaper, in which Rosenblatt asserted that he was unable to draw either a negative or positive conclusion about these issues, calling his extensive research into the issue an "investigation without a conclusion".
I have invested literally hundreds of hours in talking to parties directly and indirectly related, reading public statements posted on the Internet, and following the unfolding of this issue. I have come to a number of clear and unequivocal conclusions.
First, as I have written in a public letter together with Rabbi Joseph Telushkin and Rabbi Tirzah Firestone, we have found the decades-old accusations against Rabbi Gafni to be unconvincing now, as they were dismissed in responsible contemporaneous investigations. We believe that these accusations have been intentionally distorted, kept alive and circulated by a small group of people who have waged a vendetta-like campaign against Rabbi Gafni, creating a false and unfair impression of his character.
Second, the material posted on the Awareness Center website and related Internet blogs is not credible. Both in regard to Rabbi Gafni as well as to other cases posted there, the Awareness Center has grossly distorted facts and blatantly lied. Indeed, working together with a small team I have collected a host of examples of such behavior on the part of the Awareness Center. While the Awareness Center does address an issue critical to the Jewish community, that of sexual harassment and abuse, the center itself has unfortunately become an abuser itself of the first order.
The major other Internet poster of accusations against Rabbi Gafni is a certain Luke Ford. Luke Ford, who poses as a journalist, also runs a pornography site. He is a discredited Internet gossip columnist for the pornography industry, who, by his own written admission, regularly publishes libelous material as truth without even the slightest attempt at verification.
Third, I have urged Rabbi Gafni to continue actively writing and teaching his communities of students around the world. I have done so based on my firm conclusion that he poses absolutely no danger or threat to anyone. Indeed, I firmly believe that the notion suggested by Vicki Polin of the Awareness Center that he poses any danger whatsoever is patently absurd. While in some areas I would take issue with Rabbi Gafni's thought, particularly in areas where he departs from classical Orthodoxy, the work he is doing is serious and is of great benefit to the Jewish community worldwide.
I urge the readers of this letter to continue to support Rabbi Gafni's work, including his public teachings, writings, television projects and social activism. We are in need today of hearing the emerging voices of the next generation of Jewish leadership, and Rabbi Gafni's voice is one of them. I look forward to learning what he has to teach in the decades to come.
Rabbi Saul J. Berman (Director, Edah)
Yori Yanover writes me: "Enough is enough. Now this anonymous smut peddler is a moral authority, rebuking real people? He's disappointed in Avi Weiss? What is this, a production of Through the Looking Glass? Oh, a finger up the throat to you, Luke."
My New York Fact-Finding Mission August 16 - 23
Anyone who will assist me in my pursuit of truth will be amply rewarded, if not in this life, then in the world to come. Email Luke
I'm trying to remember if I have any friends or readers in New York. I'm passive about these things, so unless you email me, I'm probably not going to ask you to meet up.
Chaim writes:
I am making inquiries among those in the know. Will they fly you business class? Coach blows, coast to coast. But JetBlue is nice. Preliminary thoughts on hotels: It all depends on where you daven. Satmar? Bobover? Chabad? Each has its own charms and its own corner of Brooklyn. Manhattan is full of Godless Jews and Modern Orthodox who, as we all know, are but two generations removed from Baal worship.
Are You a Successful Woman in Need of REVENGE?
Chaim Amalek writes:
Has Luke Ford shamed you in front of your friends or otherwise wronged you? Do you want to get back at him the one way that will truly count, because it will require of him that he put more effort into his writing that is presently the case? The answer is not to hire Mexican day laborers to camp out on his front lawn or lawyers to sue him out of his flea infested bedding. It's to hire the author of this blog to work on your interesting projects so that he no longer has the time to help out Luke with his.
Just think of the shame and regret Luke will feel once he sees me tooling around town in a recent model Toyta Camry, taking this or that meeting with important people in Hollywood while he must make do with the company of wanker enablers and drives around in a serial killer van. He'll think to himself, "But for my lithium problem, that could have been me." And as for the person who hires me, you will get a solid, trustworthy inventive sort whom you can take to all manner of social events without any fear of embarrassment, just so long as the topic of discussion does not turn to the nefarious role of the Jews in polluting our culture with their insane and suicidal obsession with multiculturalism and in favor of unlimited immigration from the Third World. (Hey, I'm just kidding! I am, after all, a liberal upper west side Jew myself!)
Fill Luke's heart with regret. Just write to me at chaimamalek@yahoo.com, or call if you already have the number. Not only do I offer the chance at revenge as noted above, this can be your chance to hire a real New York Jew to have on call as your non-kabbalistic, non-scientological guru; your political adviser, idea incubator, and oh so much much more.
Remember, revenge is a dish best eaten with whipped cream.
Dennis Prager's Son David (23yo) Married Esti Warshawsky (Miami Beach, FL) July 2
On his radio show, Dennis waxed lyrical about the wedding. He said there's no comparison between getting married and living together without marriage.
Prager's step-daughter Anya marries next month.
Laurie Zimmet writes: "Mozel Tov, David and Esti. I'm send you lots of love and hugs from Baghdad...wishing you a world of joy! What a wonderful time in your lives! Mozel Tov!"
Author Jon Papernick
I call Jon Papernick (JonPapernick.com) in Waltham, Massachusetts Sunday afternoon, July 2, 2006.
Jon: "Last time I was interviewed, I mentioned that Henry Miller was one of my influences and the person wrote 'Henry James.' Maybe you want to run it by me..."
Luke: "When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?"
Jon: "I did want to be a writer but I didn't think I'd be good enough. I took a creative writing class in eleventh grade, and my teacher (Mrs. Gerard) told me I was not a good writer. She died before my book came out.
"As someone who's been a teacher for the past six years, it's been my primary mode of income, I would never say that to anybody. What we write is always a work in progress."
Luke: "You'd never say that to anybody? Even if their work sucked?"
Jon: "Not as a teacher. I'd say they hadn't fulfilled the ambitions of the story.
"When I was 18, I wrote and self-published a novel (Turned Into Earth) that was an absolute piece of junk. I sensed a lot of resentment from my friends. In a sense, everybody wants to be a writer. They all want to publish a book. Here I am calling myself a writer... If they're not doing any writing themselves, in a sense they feel like they're wasting their lives.
"You've got to play being a writer before you are a writer. You've got to convince yourself that you are one before you have the chutzpah to do it."
I tell Jon that I've made my living from blogging for nine years but I've never made more than $50,000 in a year.
Jon: "Wow. I've never made close to that and I've never blogged."
Luke: "Whenever I come out with a book, half the people I mention this to respond, 'How are you going to market it?' I find that annoying."
Jon: "I didn't get that question. When my first book (The Ascent of Eli Israel and Other Stories) came out, I wish I'd gotten that question. I got a great review in The New York Times when the book first came out, and I assumed it'd just go from there. I didn't do any marketing. Nobody said anything. I wish people had. I would've gotten a website way back then, and made phone calls to independent bookstores, made postcards and bookmarks, had friends write reviews on Amazon... Whatever it takes.
"As far as marketing, the best thing is to just get your writing out there. I'm going to write a weekly column for Jewcy.com called 'The Perfect Jew.' That should get some attention. I have to go out and do things to make myself a better Jew."
Luke: "How were you raised Jewishly and where are you today?"
Jon: "I went to synagogue twice a year and hated it. The biggest and oldest Reform temple in Canada - Holy Blossom. It was really Reform. I was the third generation of my family to have gone there. It wasn't for me. My parents didn't practice. They sent me to Hebrew school in first grade and I failed.
"I grew up with any antipathy for Judaism. I had a bar mitzvah. I crammed for it for six months in the rabbi's basement.
"I did it in Hebrew but I didn't know what it meant.
"A lot of your education comes from home, so if you're not getting the support, you don't follow through with it. Through my early twenties, I had a real antipathy towards Judaism. It wasn't until I went to Israel at age 22 (in 1993) that I got a sense of pride about being Jewish. It was the turning point in my life.
"I don't practice at all, that's why I'm doing The Perfect Jew column. It springs out of a quote from Leon Wieseltier. He said that people from my generation don't know what they're rejecting. They're slackers. Eighty percent of my religious education comes from the writing of my stories.
"Writing is a spiritual act. It's a meditative prayer-like act, trying to drag creation out of the darkness of your subconscious. I'm interested intellectually but I don't enjoy going to synagogue. We go a couple of times a year. Part of the reason I don't enjoy it is that I don't know the songs. You go there and they start singing and I have a mental block and can't remember them. For The Perfect Jew, I'm going to try to learn some of these prayers.
"If you sit in a classroom and don't speak, it's boring, but if you're involved in the conversation, it's great.
"We just had a son seven weeks ago. He's my first kid. We want to bring him up with a strong sense of Jewish identity.
"My wife is the daughter of a Reform rabbi."
Jon spent his first 22 years in Canada (getting a B.A. in Creative Writing from York University) and a couple of years after returning from Israel in 1997 while he saved up for graduate school (converting his Canadian dollars at the rate of 62 U.S. cents per, he got an MFA in Fiction from Sarah Lawrence College).
Luke: "Did you get your money's worth from Sarah Lawrence?"
Jon: "Yeah. It was great. I can't tell you what I learned except that I think I learned everything. It's osmosis. You're reading stories, writing stories, critiquing stories. You're living it 24 hours a day. Almost immediately upon arriving in graduate school, my writing went from good to very good."
Luke: "What crowd did you hang out with in highschool?"
Jon: "We were into punk music. We rode skateboards. We drank a lot. We had a lot of fun. But we were nice. We didn't get into fights. We weren't bad kids. We enjoyed hanging out. I'd sit by the convenience store drinking a slurpee, getting drunk, watching TV."
Luke: "At what age did you become interested in girls?"
Jon: "Twelve."
Luke: "At what age did you become a man?"
Jon: "Seventeen."
Luke: "Is there any non-sexual event you'd describe as the demarcation point of when you became a man?"
Jon: "Maybe it was seven weeks ago when I had my baby. There are many times that you think you've reached it but then you have another point... Maybe I won't reach it until I don't have a father."
Luke: "Tell me about you and God."
Jon: "Growing up, I was definitely a nonbeliever. Listening to punk music, I questioned everything. Nothing made any sense. I believe in God the Creator. A God who created the earth and then absented himself. I have a sense that God left an imprint on our DNA which acts as a representative of him or herself, meaning guilt. Guilt is a representation of God. It keeps us from doing things we should not do. There's a certain code we have to live by and that's God."
Luke: "What did you love and hate about the practice of journalism?"
Jon: "I liked doing it in Israel because it was an interesting subject. What I hated is that when I came back to Canada, I was only able to land a job on the financial desk doing gold price and pork futures, which was boring. I liked how dynamic journalism can be, but it can also be crushingly boring. Ultimately, it was disappointing. I thought journalism would be a way for me to make a living while I wrote my fiction but I realized that it exhausts you. It takes all your energy away from you that you could be using for writing. When you're a journalist, you work all year round, and long hours. When you're a teacher, you get Christmas off, March break, and summer. When I worked as a journalist [in Canada], I had six off days in a year and a half.
"I'm doing more personal journalism now. Things I care about. I'm less interested in going out to a fire house and asking, 'Why did city hall burn down?' I'm a little self-centered in my journalistic desires now, but I've earned that right.
"I use my fiction tools when I write my journalism now.
"I like to craft my stories. When you write for a wire service, you have to bang those stories out.
"But I did get to meet Yassir Arafat, which was bizarre."
Luke: "Other things you loved about it?"
Jon: "Not really, otherwise I'd still be doing it."
Luke: "What do you love about writing fiction?"
Jon: "I love the way it makes me feel when I am on the ball, in the zone, when I'm writing something that is working. That is the best feeling in the world. It's totally self-contained. You're not relying on anybody else for this happiness. You don't rely on your wife. You don't rely on your parents. You're all alone in the room and making this incredible act of creation.
"What I don't like is when I'm not writing. I have this terrible feeling that I should be writing. I don't write every day. I haven't written any fiction since my baby was born. There's this terrible feeling that life is passing you by."
Luke: "What kind of sexual wattage has your writing created in women?"
Jon: "Some when I was an undergraduate. When I was 21, I had two girlfriends at the same time. That didn't work out, but for about a year and a half, it seemed to excite people. And I wasn't even any good at the time. My wife will say that when she read my story, The Ascent of Eli Israel, that was when she realized she wanted to marry me. She thought it was the best story she'd ever read.
"Sometimes I think I can count all the people who've ever hit on me with two hands."
Luke: "What do you love and hate about teaching?"
Jon: "I love teaching. You do get to use your writing skills. It takes [away] the solitariness of being a writer. What I don't like is grading. That is why I don't teach composition. At Boston University, I had to grade 60 essays every two weeks."
Luke: "What's the situation with your novel, Who by Fire, Who by Blood?"
Jon: "This is a problem. It's novel that took me four years to finish. It makes my collection of short stories look like Disneyland, and those stories were disturbing. I can't get it published. My agent sent it around and he couldn't sell it. I fired him and sent it around to a bunch of publishers and couldn't sell it. Then I went back to my agent, revised the novel, threw out 65 pages, and he sent it out to various publishers who like it better, but I think they're afraid of it. It has the emotional sensibility of Richard Wright's Native Son and Camus' The Stranger.
"The other Jewish writers who came up at the same time as me are writing things that are friendlier. This is an unfriendly book."
Luke: "Is your book linear [and realistic]?"
Jon: "Yes. These days, publishers seem to want to have novels set in two to three different times or places. Mine is set in one place and goes from point A to point Z. It's a traditionally told story. Publishers today like to see narratives chopped up, which often makes up for writers not knowing how to tell a story. I liked Everything is Illuminated, but there's not a story there. It's a short story that's been expanded to 300 pages."
Luke: "How much research do you do for your fiction?"
Jon: "It depends. I never do research for three months and then write. I write and then research as necessary. As I need things, I read things."
Luke: "At what stage does your wife [of four years] read your work?"
Jon: "Sometimes every page, which drives her crazy. When I have a draft, she'll always read it. She's my built-in bulls--- detector. She's not a writer. She's not a major reader. But she's one of the smartest people I know and she'll keep me on track."
Welcome Back, Google
For the past two months, I've been banned from Google's search index because I had sold sub-domains. (I lost almost half of my traffic.) When that advertising deal ended last Monday, I removed the sub-domains, and emailed Google that I was once again a good boy. Now I'm listed again in Google.
Lame Jewish Journal 20th Anniversary Issue
Numerous staffers (such as Marc Ballon) spend paragraphs defending their choice to write for a community paper when they all feel they qualified to write for major newspapers such as The LA Times. Methinks they do protest too much. I assure you that if any of these people got a job offer from the Times, they'd take it and not look back.
AMALEK's Plans to Bring People Closer to G-d
Chaim writes:
Are you two going to marry? When? Could you make it soon, as I would like an excuse to visit LA, and I no longer have the excuses I used to?
I've decided to break out of my poverty by offering bat mtzvah lessons to hot adult women who maybe failed to have this taken care of when they were young because the ceremony didn't then exist, or perhaps because they were/are of a different faith. No matter - I will tutor the women of LA in how to be women as per the law both written and oral (especially the latter). I'm also looking into forming a bet din that can do conversions of both genders and which can handle the curious problems of the transgendered. (If a candidate for conversion was born a man but then becomes a woman, what, if anything, must be circumcised?) You could be one of the judges (and then we would again live in a time in which the judges are themselves judged).
Rob Goodman Visits Boulder, Interviews Rabbi Zalman Shachter-Shalomi
Rob calls me June 27 to tell me about his trip last week.
Rob: "My friend Guy Lieberman [helped] me meet with Zalman Shachter-Shalomi at his house for about half an hour. I interviewed him for my other movie (180 Degrees to Jerusalem). He didn't remember."
Luke: Did you interview him on camera?
Rob: "Not on camera. He recorded it on a tape recorder because he was very suspicious about my coming because everyone reads your blog. Maybe one person reads your blog and tells everybody else but they are all aware of what I said and wrote on your blog. They were nervous, apprehensive, fearful, angry at me, as you said they would be.
"I asked him, 'If you wrote this letter that you'd done your own research, Gafni's innocent, anyone who speaks against him is speaking lashon hara, the people who attack Gafni (you and Vicki Polin) are out of your minds and wrong, and you stand behind Gafni 100%... He put his name on the letter.
"He doesn't seem to remember it. He offered a bunch of explanations as to why: One. Rabbis he trusted, like-minded people, endorsed the letter. Two. He had personal experience with Gafni. Reb Zalman's daughter was shown the light by Gafni. She was secular. She went to a Gafni event and over time became spiritual, religious and leads a meaningful life now. Three. Gafni was doing a lot of good for the Renewal movement. He was attracting a lot of people. They were getting their message out more clearly because Gafni was a part of the team.
"Reb Zalman didn't understand why I was making such a big deal about it. I said that once they made the letter public, it was a letter intended for the public, once they make these proclamations, they have to be accountable for them when it turns out they were wrong.
"You can't talk about your personal healing. You have to talk about the course of events and where you went wrong and the sort of teshuva (repentance) you're going to do. If you don't, you'll seem like the [Catholic] church or the Bush administration.
"He said, 'What do you expect me to do? What can I do? I've made my own teshuva in my own way. I've contacted people. We're speaking amongst ourselves about it.'
"He said I was belittling the situation by continuing to ask questions to which he didn't have an answer. He felt that I knew there was no answer.
"We had a nice talk about other things and that was the end of the meeting.
"Reb Zalman is a very nice man. He's very gentle and guru.
"My encounter with Rabbi Tirzah Firestone: I've never met the woman. But she read what I wrote on your blog. I saw her at the screening of Guy Lieberman's film Universal Faith.
"Guy told me she was on a seven day fast. She did not want to meet me. She felt that I had come aggressively. I did not press her."
Rabbi Mordecai Gafni's Supporters
Metuka Benjamin (Director of Education, Stephen S. Wise Temple), Rabbi Phyllis Berman (Former Director Elat Chayyim summer program), Rabbi Saul Berman (Director, Edah Zivit) Davidovich (Executive Producer, Israel Channel 2 Television), Rabbi Tirzah Firestone (Congregation Nevei Kodesh), Rabbi Shefa Gold (Director C-Deep, composer and teacher), Rabbi Arthur Green (Dean, Hebrew College Rabbinical School), Rabbi Eli Herscher (Stephen S. Wise Synagogue) Arthur Kurzweil (former Director, Elat Chayyim, Jewish Book Club), Avraham Leader (Leader Minyan, Bayit Chadash) Stephen Marmer, M.D. (Psychiatrist, UCLA Medical School) Jacob Ner-David (Board Chair, Bayit Chadash) Peter Pitzele (Ph.D., Bibliodrama Institute) Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi (Rabbinic Chair, Aleph Don Seeman, Ph.D. Emory University) Rabbi Joseph Telushkin (author, Jewish Literacy and Jewish Wisdom) Rabbi David Zaslow (Havurah Shir Hadash) Noam Zion (Hartman Institute), signed the following letter (in early 2005 I presume) and gave it to Gafni and his supporters to distribute as widely as they say fit:
To The Jewish Community worldwide:
In this letter we the undersigned ask the Jewish community worldwide to reaffirm its commitment to the Torah, and to the ethical principles of Judaism. Although the specific focus of our discussion is Rabbi Mordechai Gafni, whom have known collectively for many years, the issues we address are universal and timeless.
A group of several people – none of whom know Rabbi Gafni personally in any real way, and none who has had any contact in the past twenty years – have undertaken a systematic campaign to besmirch his name. Their primary method has been to keep alive and distort two very old and long discredited stories. Their attacks have recently increased in volume and intensity. He has consistently and generously offered to meet with them, but they have refused.
Many people who know Rabbi Gafni well, as all the undersigned do, have individually and collectively examined the accusations about him that this group has been spreading. We have found their rumors and accusations to be either wholly without substance or radically distorted to the point of falsification. We conclude that the false and malicious rumors against Gafni constitute lashon hara – and that the dissemination of such lies is prohibited by the Torah and Jewish ethical principles.
Thus we must address and to make right the wrong that has been attempted in regard to Rabbi Gafni, and affirm our support of him as an important teacher and leader in the Jewish community.
We have worked with Rabbi Gafni in many contexts, ranging from colleague to employer. We have published his works in our collections, co-taught with him, and known him in a host of other close relationships. Over the years, we have also extensively discussed with him the different stages of his life and the decisions he has made in relationships, professional choices and more.
We affirm without reservation that in addition to being a person of enormous gifts, depth, and vision, Rabbi Gafni is also a person of real integrity. He possesses a unique combination of courage and audacity coupled with a genuine humility that comes only from having lived life fully – with all of its complexity, beauty and sometimes pain.
Leaders of his caliber and depth who are committed to ongoing personal development are few and far between. From our dual commitment to him as an individual, as well as to the most profound ethical teachings of the Torah, we urge you as the reader of this letter to reject the false reports about Rabbi Gafni, and to give him your full support, as we all have done and continue to do.
If you have further questions, please feel free to contact any one of us directly.
So now when someone such as Rob Goodman takes them (such as Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Rabbi Tirzah Firestone) up on their offer to contact them directly, it doesn't sound like they have much to say. Nor do they convey that they have learned anything.
Stephen Marmer, Joseph Telushkin and company made their support of Gafni public. They made harsh attacks on Vicki Polin and myself for reporting and publishing on Gafni's ways. Now they want to keep silent and ask to not be held responsible for their words.
They remind me of cockroaches hiding under a rock who scurry away when exposed by the sun.
In case you miss the metaphor, I see myself (at my most narcissistic and grandiose) as shining the light of truth into dark crevaces. What a delicious feeling. It's not often that I can picture myself as righteous. I'm going to treasure this. In Gafni's fall, they sinned all, but I am redeemed.
Telushkin wrote the book, Words That Hurt, Words That Heal: How to Choose Words Wisely and Well. Marmer wrote a big fat plug for the book that was featured on the back cover.
I suspect that this letter above was written by Gafni. All Zalman and company had to do was sign their names and give away their credibility. It was easy and all in the holy cause of combatting gossip.
Cathy Seipp Returns From Washington D.C.
My other memorable museum moment was sitting outside the American History museum over the weekend with Matt and Emmanuelle, but first I have to tell you the backstory to that. They hadn't known that Luke Ford has a new girlfriend, nor that one of this girlfriend's major attributes, according to Luke, is that she's very small and so takes up hardly any space in his hovel. (I hope he at least gets her a wheel for exercise or something.)
So as we were sitting on a bench resting our museum feet and I was relaying the news about Luke's new romance, I quoted his description of the new girlfriend in a rather loud and sarcastic falsetto: "Oh, she's so small!"
Lukeford.net's Unkind Jew of the Month.
Other recipients have included Michael Aushenker.
Thane Rosenbaum's Weird Luke Ford Obsession
He's on this bizarre jihad to let people know that I'm not a writer and that they should have nothing to do with me.
He's losing friends over his Luke Ford crusade.
For months before I wrote a word about him, Thane's been terribly disturbed, even threatened, by little ol' me.
I don't understand it. I've never slept with anyone who's slept with Thane. I've never even shared a kiss with one of his women, nor held hands. Yet he's on this weird mission to persuade people that I'm a lothario.
Thane, dawg, I'm just a humble man of God. I don't spend my spare time kickin' it in the hood with the brothers, but rather in the beit midrash with my face buried deep within in the heavenly pages of the Talmud.
Since I critiqued Mr. Rosenbaum, he's been telling anyone who will listen that they should have nothing to do with me. He's told writers who've given me interviews that such interviews betray his friendship.
Thane's out of his gourd. Why do his friends indulge him and send me emails requesting that I remove their interviews? I'd never do that.
The Torah says you should not hate your neighbor in your heart. If you have a problem with somebody, you should go to that person and try to talk it out.
I've politely emailed and called Thane several times and invited him to talk things out with me, but he's not man enough to pick up the phone and talk to me. Instead he emails and calls everyone with the remotest connection to me and complains about my critique of him and his work. He goes on weird lengthy tirades about how I misunderstand him and his work.
His pathological behavior just reinforces my initial perception of Thane as a narcissist.
Now, I am every bit the narcissist that Mr. Rosenbaum is (frankly, I'll match my narcissism with anyone) but I can't imagine making the requests Thane is (asking novelists to pressure me to remove our interviews from my website). I've never never done anything like that. It's absurd.
It's pathetic that Thane's friends are going along with his request. They know it's pathetic. I can feel it from their reluctant emails.
For the record, I am not going to remove anyone's profile on my site because said person wants me to do so in the interest of their friendship with Thane.
Be a man, Thane Rosenbaum. Don't hide behind women's skirts and ask them to do your dirty work for you. If you have a problem with me, send me an email. Write it out. Talk it out. Deal with me directly.
I'm not going after your private life. I'm not publishing your private correspondence. I'm not investigating you. All I've done is publish my opinion that your writing is shallow (though often entertaining) and that your writing reflects flaws in your character.
I don't view your flaws as any more significant than the ones I have. I give you props for being a far more accomplished and recognized writer than me. I just blog. I'd love to write a novel but never been able to. You've published several. You're published by major houses and teach at major universities. You're invited to speak at major conferences. You have friends in the literary big-time. By all these standards, I'm nothing compared to you. Why do you devote such energy to shutting me down? It won't work and it only makes you look bad.
I hope at least that you'll get some good material out of this silly one-way feud.
Mate, I have a ton of lithium I'm willing to share with you. It's helped me out to no end.
Frankly, Thane, if we ever hung out together, we'd probably get along famously. We'd be narcissists in platonic love.
'You're Better Than That Black Guy'
Spain's soccer coach Luis Aragones got in trouble for telling one of his players during practice that he was better than that black guy, the French striker Thierry Henry. Aragones said, "That black guy is s---."
So what? I don't see anything horrible in what Aragones said and I don't believe he deserved to be fined.
Deposition Of Mordecai Gafni's Third Wife
They divorced in August of 2004, before Gary Rosenblatt's article that blew Mordecai's story wide open.
Email Deposition May 9th , 2006
The following is my personal testimony of what it was like to be married to Mordechai for almost 7 years. I share what I have known of Mordechai's drastic and tragic dark side. I focus upon the shadow aspects of our marriage and his personality, for I believe they are crucial to share, given what has unfolded in these past weeks. Please keep in mind that I could also write pages worth of testimony about the light side of Mordechai - from the beauty of his teachings to his ardent dedication to making a contribution in the world and helping others. May his light side and his dark side know full integration.
Also, while you can pass this testimony on to other concerned parties, please do not share it with the press. I do not want my name to appear in the press. Thanks.
Background: I was 19 years old when I first encountered Mordechai I was studying in Jerusalem the summer after my freshman year of college. I was an eager baalat-teshuva, newly "turned on" to the beauty of Jewish practice. I devotedly went to his classes at Isralight and other venues. We went on our first date the spring after I graduated college. I was 23 and star-struck.
He was 15 years my senior. We got married at the beginning of 1998, less than 8 months after our first date. Several people warned me about Mordechai's past. He adamantly insisted that the bulk of the rumors were lies, exaggerations and the evil workings of other people's jealousies. I believed him.
He actually told me early on about some of his sexual misdemeanors as well as affairs he had on his 2nd wife. He assured me that he had done teshuva, changed, and that things with me would be different. I was all too ready to believe this as well Plus I thought that I could help him, fix him; that my love could help him become the great man he had the potential to be. As soon as we started seriously dating, he pulled me into working for him full-time on writing and organizational projects. I was dedicated to his "mission" of Jewish Rennaissance and gave it all of my time and energy.
His emotional abuse and manipulations began immediately upon our marriage. But I was so dedicated to the mission that I withstood it. The years that followed were a strange mix of great excitement, activity and purpose, as well as huge despair, confusion and pain. On the outside I seemed to be living a fairy tale of success and contribution. Behind closed doors I was living a life of enslavement, debasement, manipulation and verbal abuse. On top of the abuse, Mordechai was having more than one affair on me; 1ying to me on a daily basis.
Finally, I started to see through the fog of falsehoods. Fled Israel in February of2004, only to be lured back in June 2004 by Mordechai's promises of change and commitment. But nothing changed. By early August of 2004 I finally demanded and received a divorce.
Soon thereafter, Mordechai came "under attack" by his enemies in America. In the fall of 2004, articles about his sexual misconduct and questionable reputation came out in America and Israel. He begged me to keep our divorce a secret until all of this bad press died down. I reluctantly agreed - mostly because I believed that the work that was going on at Bayit Chadash was valuable and I did not want to jeopardize it. Mordechai lied to the reporters and all who asked, saying that we were still married. He even lied to the Rabbinic supporters who helped wage a campaign to protect him. Mordechai refused to publicly tell the truth about our divorce until Pesach of 2005 (March/April). I am ashamed to admit that I was manipulated in to also remaining silent and covering up to protect him, as I had done myriad times during our marriage.
Now that I see the damage that Mordechai has caused in so many people's lives I deeply regret that I did not speak out earlier about the abuse that I suffered at his hands. I also deeply regret that I did not speak out about the countless lies and manipulations that I witnessed him engage in on a regular basis. I sorely regret that I led people to believe that we had a good marriage when in actuality it was most often a hell. I have been studying, practicing and engaging in psychotherapy these past two years since I left Mordechai The more I have learned - and now that I have beard the stories of what has happened with other women - it is now utterly clear to me that Mordechai is a dangerous sexual predator and sociopath. He hurt me in deplorable ways and I fear that he will continue to hurt others if he is not stopped. I pray that my speaking out now can help to thwart any and all future abuse at his hands.
1. Information about Sexual Abuse Molestation of a Minor: Before we got married, Mordechai shared with me that he had indeed had a sexual encounter with a minor. Her name was Judy - a teenager who was in his JYPSY youth movement He explained to me details of their encounter and how he went about covering it up and discrediting her. He told me that she had seduced him. He said that they did not have intercourse, but that they had at least been undressed, sexually physical and that he had ejaculated. After Judy reported this, he lied to everyone involved, saying that she was emotionally unstable, jealous and had made it all up. He even received a document signed by a Rabbi attesting to his innocence. Judy was under-age, a student of his, and were it not for the statute of limitations, he could go to jail over this.
2. Mordechai also told me stories about various teachers and staff people connected with Yeshiva University with whom he had struggles. He told me how he blackmailed a teacher (one of his "enemies" at YU) who tried to block him from studying teaching there after the Judy incident He had information about this particular man and threatened to share it if the man continued to try to block him. The man stayed quiet
3. Adultery Lying: He also told me of several affairs that he had in Boca Raton while married to his second wife. These affairs were with women in his Congregation (the name of one woman was XXX XXX). At least one of them was a married woman (whose name I don't recall, though I can find it). There was a scandal at the synagogue over rumors about his sexual misconduct I do not think that his second wife ever found out about these affairs. They eventually left Boca to move to Israel I believe that the main reason for this was that he needed to flee before people found out the truth (though he never framed it that way).
4. Adultery Lying: One of the reasons (among many) that I divorced Mordechai was because he had an affair while we were studying in Oxford. It was with a woman named XXXXXX at Wolfson College. He lied to me on a virtually daily basis to cover up this affair. This went on for approximately 10 months (from December 2002 Sept 2003). It was an agonizing time for me even though I did not consciously know what was happening. I finally convinced him to tell me the truth about the affair when we left Oxford and moved back to Israel. I was devastated, and realized that all of my hopes that he was a "changed man" were baseless fantasies.
5. Adultery Lying: I also was racked with suspicion that he was having another affair - with his "teaching partner", [LF: Erica Fox]. On countless occasions I begged him to stop teaching with her and to pull back from their "friendship". He refused. Also on countless occasions I point blank asked him if they were having an affair. In response, he consistently told me how crazy, jealous and insecure I was. I have finally found out that they were indeed intimate with each other while we were married, as well as after. (All of this went on between 2002 until our divorce in August of 2004). I also have heard that he had affairs with two other women while we were together - one a young woman in Israel and the other in America.
6. Debasing Sexuality: Mordechai was consistently verbally demeaning to me, particularly when we were having sex. While we were being intimate, he would demand that I repeat, "I am a whore." I reluctantly went along with this at first. Eventually I refused to say it. Over the last two years that we were together I would go to bed absolutely dreading the possibility of having sex with him. Additionally, he viewed pornography on a regular basis; including paying money to have memberships to certain sites. Eventually his computer and email were so full of pornography that he paid tens of hundreds of dollars to get it cleaned, for fear that someone may see it and that he would lose his job. I understand from formal depositions made with lawyers and the police in Israel that he had much more "extreme" sexual interactions with other women after our divorce; which involved a lot of S&M and also played heavily on themes of debasement.
7. Stealing Intellectual Property: Mordechai used other people's stories/teaching (making slight changes) without attributing them properly. (The story in Soulprints about DDD giving him a soulprint box was, for instance, based upon a story in one of Robert Fulghum's books.) Furthermore, I worked full time on both books "Soul Prints" and "The Mystery of Love". There are entire sections of these books which I myself wrote - with no public recognition given as to the depth and breadth of my contribution. Just a few of the numerous examples of this are the poem/invocation at the beginning of "Soul Prints", as well as the Parable of the Royal Wine in ''The Mystery of Love". I insisted that I wanted at least these pieces to be attributed to me. He refused Seeing I had no real choice, I gave in in the end and allowed the pieces to be used without attribution.
8. Verbal Abuse & Emotional Manipulation: This was a constant throughout our marriage. I have pages and pages of journal entries describing entire scenes and dialogues full of emotional abuse. His yelling explosions, full of demeaning putdowns and blame, were virtually a daily occurrence. I eventually stopped fighting back and would just dissolve in tears after each explosion. He needed to always be right, always in control. If I didn't agree with him on something then he would burst into a rage and tell me how stupid I was. But more than that, he would tell me how unloving, insensitive and selfish I was. Convincing me that I was the evil, selfish, unloving one was one of his most powerful tools of manipulation. He capitalized on my natural desire to be loving and giving. My goodness was a knife in his hands with which he daily carved his sick designs into me. I was utterly bewildered by his manipulations; the way he would turn everything around and make me the bad one. These turn arounds rendered me powerless time and again. In fact, I was so distraught by the nature of his putdowns and manipulations that I had regular fantasies of doing violent and suicidal acts against myself. My most recurrent fantasy during his abusive tirades was of slashing my throat. I was not "allowed" to express or feel anger towards him and so I turned all of my anger at him back upon myself. I had never in my life been suicidal before this time and since I left him I have not had suicidal or violent thoughts at all.
9. Verbal Abuse Manipulation of Others: I witnessed Mordechai being verbally abusive and manipulative with many other people. I saw it happen most with [], his main staff person, but also - tragically - also saw it with his Sons, most particularly DDD. I found his neglectful and insensitive treatment of his sons to be deplorable. I could go in to greater detail about this but will refrain out of respect for bow hard all of this must be for them. Seeing him with his sons was another big factor in my wanting a divorce. The thought of him mistreating any future children that we would have was just terrifying to me.
10. Lies: As I mentioned above, Mordechai lied about our divorce and other essential issues to the numerous Rabbis who supported him when he was being attacked in the press and at various teaching institutions. The Rabbis he lied pointblank to include R'Danny Landes, R'Joseph Telushkin, R'Art Green, R'Eli Herscher and R'Saul Bennan, as well as others. He likewise lied to the press and the entire Bayit Chadash community and Board. (He was so efficient and convincing a liar that I view all of his supporters - from the Rabbis to the Ner-David family to the Jewish Renewal Movement at large - as victims of his pathology. I strongly believe that they should not be held responsible for 'covering up' his misdeeds. I believe they all did the work to find out the truth, but the truth was too elusive.)
11. Exaggerations - Beyond the examples above I witnessed Mordechai lying routinely in most every type of setting. Whether it was in a speech, at dinner with friends, teaching. or in talking to donors. He was consistently aggrandizing himself by exaggerating his successes, popularity, power and connections. He would get furious with me when I myself did not join in on telling these inflated stories about him; saying that I was selfish and unloving for not also telling these tales. Time and again he falsely claimed to be a spiritual holy person. During his writings and teachings he would claim to pray, meditate, exercise, eat healthy, etc. None of which he did in the least. He led entire meditation retreats without ever having meditated himself. In my opinion, all of his frequent claims to spiritual enlightenment were (and are still) dangerously misleading fabrications.
12. Psychological Sickness - I think it is crucial to share that based on all that I have known of Mordechai I see that he clearly has two psychological disorders which are evident and expressed in numerous ways. The most obvious is a narcissistic personality disorder. He exhibited the following characteristics which correlate with the DMS-IV diagnosis of narcissism. In the DMS, at least 5 of the following attributes are requires for diagnosis. Mordechai exhibits them all. I could give numerous examples in each category, but will refrain for lack of space and because they are just so very obvious to anyone who knows Mordechai.):
a. has a grandiose sense of self-importance - exaggerates achievements and talents.
b. Is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power and brilliance.
c. Believes that he is "special" and unique and can only associate with other special or high-status people or institutions.
d. Requires excessive admiration
e. Has a sense of entitlement - expecting especially favorable treatment or compliance with his expectations
f. Is interpersonally exploitative; taking advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends
g. Is envious of others or believes that others are envious of him
h. Lacks empathy; is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others
i. Shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes
As for the antisocial (or sociopathic) personality disorder. He exhibits the following of the criteria for the DSM (of which 3 are needed for diagnosis):
a. failure to confirm to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors (such as his sexual harassment in the workplace and sleeping with students and employees)
b. deceitfulness, repeated lying
c. irritability and aggressiveness (as is known by anyone who has ever worked under Mordechai, or crossed his path politically)
d. reckless disregard for safety of self or others (such as endangering himself by juggling numerous affairs at once, given his history)
e. lack of remorse; indicated by rationalizing having hurt, or mistreated othersUnfortunately, with Axis II Personality Disorders the chances for change via treatment are extremely slim; as opposed to Axis I disorders which are considered more treatable. Mental Retardation, for example, is also on Axis II, because no amount of therapy will be able to fully 'treat' retardation. The same is understood for Personality Disorders - they are not entirely treatable. Thus, in my opinion, the belief that Mordechai will one day be able to return to being a teacher leader of any sort is a dangerous one. I personally (and professionally) do not think that he should be "allowed" to return to any such roles at any point in the future. A tragic loss, perhaps, but in the end we as a culture and as a people need to reassess the traits that we value and pull forth from our leaders. May this whole fiasco pave the way for new standards of humility, sincerity and a genuine care for others.
Jack writes:
Poor nice modern Jewish girl goes off to learn in yeshiva and comes home with Gafni. Yikes! I wonder what will happen to Erica Fox. Her lectures are sponsored by Harvard. I notice that she removed Gafni from all her ads and put some other new age dude in place.
When Gafni led the JPSY program (Jewish Public School Youth), he would cancel group prayer, substituting a pep talk by himself, because it was more important for the "kids" to hear him than to daven.
For years, Mordecai and his third wife used a joint name.
About Erica Fox:
As a consultant and executive coach, Erica works with businesses and organizations to build consensus, improve communication, facilitate change and mediate disputes. In recent years she has worked extensively with organizational leaders and work teams to address conflict and improve collaboration and performance.
Sexual Perversity in Chicago
Case of the Kosher Butcher in Chicago -- Meyer Miller (not convicted of any sex crime).
Case of the Rabbi/Teacher at Hillel Torah in Chicago - Rabbi Tzvi Wainhaus.
Seeking Friends Through Emmanuel Levinas
yesterday i thought:almost 80 million people there must be someone disappointed with this narcise culture... so the key was emanuel levinas i went to search, then typed levinas, enter &... here we r, 10 people, only men! u were the first so i went to see ur profile klik add to friends & unexpected visitors knocked my doors so... didn't have time to read ur profile... maybe it is good because if i see u so successful i would be too modest to ask for acceptation:) so thank:)
Steve Stern Interview
I call him Monday morning, June 26.
Steve sounds sleepy.
Luke: "Is this a good time to talk?"
Steve: "I'm just making some coffee."
Luke: "It's 5:50 a.m. my time."
Steve: "Wow. Where do you live?"
Luke: "Los Angeles."
Steve: "Wow. You live there."
Luke: "Yes. Is that incredible?"
Steve: "That place is an abstraction to me."
Luke: "Have you spent time here?"
Steve: "One night. I had a job interview in 1982. I went to some hotel, sat in a room with some academics. They asked me a few questions which were utterly bewildering. I spent the night in a friend's apartment and flew back, not before a drive up Sunset Strip and did a handstand on Cary Grant's handprints, back in the days when I could still do handstands."
Luke: "How do you think of LA?"
Steve: "The whole West Coast. I grew up in Tennessee and developed a phobia of traveling west of the Mississippi."
Luke: "Why the phobia?"
Steve: "I came to the Northeast about twenty years ago. I really like it up here. My girlfriend Sabrina [43 yo] is in Brooklyn. We are back and forth between upstate and down. It's the best of both worlds.
"After growing up in the South with a heat that is so debilitating in the summers, the garbagemen say, 'Throw out your dead!' in the morning, I like the fierce winters."
Luke: "Can you just stay inside or do you have to venture out to teach classes?"
Steve: "I travel between my apartment and the school [Skidmore] and that's about it, though I've become a homeowner recently."
Luke: "I am 40 years old and I have friends who tease me for using the word 'girlfriend.' How do you deal with it?"
Steve laughs. "It's a problem. I've taken to referring to her as my unplatonic sometimes domestic partner, but that's a little clumsy. At 58, it's undignified to say girlfriend. But what are you going to do? We have no plans to marry. We've been together six years now. She's an old Lefty, an underground comic artist. My association with her keeps my hipness quotient up."
Luke: "Have you been married?"
Steve: "I was married when I lived in Memphis. We split up around 1986. We were technically married a couple of years. We were together about seven."
Stern has just the one marriage and no kids.
Luke: "Are you a serial monogamist?"
Steve: "I suppose so."
We laugh.
Steve: "I'm always very faithful to the one I'm with. This last one seems to be terminal."
Luke: "How do you feel about marriage?"
Steve sighs. "It's not something I think about a lot. I married my ex-wife because she said, 'Marry me or leave.' It seemed the path of least resistance. But everything changed once we had done it. I'm not comfortable with the institutionalization of relationships. But if Sabrina wanted to do it, I'd probably do it in a heartbeat.
"She's outdoorsy. I'm not. I'm an old shut-in, an anemic, myopic diaspora type. She's a vital shiksa who drags me up mountains. I've done more globe trotting since we've been together than in all the years previous, which everyone says is good for me."
Luke: "Does she make you feel 15 years younger?"
Steve: "No. She's constantly reminding me of my age and putting me through my paces."
Luke: "Do you wear bow ties a lot?"
Steve: "Not since that [dust jacket] photo was taken. That may have been the one time in my life I put a bow tie on. It was just a clip-on. It was 1986 for Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven. In those days, I was cultivating an image. I've become less of a narcissist in my twilight years."
Luke: "How does your shiksa relate to your Jewish and Yiddish obsessions?"
Steve: "She's tolerant. She's a seeker. She's much more spiritual than I.
"When I was invited to Israel in 2004, I'd never been. It was not high on my list of priorities. Sabrina said, 'You're going. I'm going with you.' When I taught [at Bar Ilan], she came and stayed for a month and dragged me to every manner of a holy place, which I'm better for."
Luke: "Where are you and God?"
Steve laughs. "It's an on-again, off-again relationship. It depends on the time of day and my mood. I've never liked the phrase 'secular Jew' or 'cultural Jew.' I don't think there's any way of taking God out of the equation."
Luke: "Why don't you like the phrase if it is accurate?"
Steve: "I remember doing a reading in Detroit sponsored by the Arbinger Ring [sp?], all these old Jewish lefties who were guardians of Yiddishkeit. I loved being with them because they were old agent provocateurs. They were also fiercely secular and atheistic yet devoted to the culture of Yiddish and kinda Zionists yet devotees of the Yiddish literature I love and read mostly in translation. I remember them asking me, 'How do we teach our children the history and culture and heritage and the tradition exclusive of God?' My answer is, 'You can't.'
"I'm an armchair mystic. My discovery of this mystical component of Judaism I came upon in my mid-thirties. I read everything in translation that I can get my hands on.
"It's a literary endeavor with me but I reserve the right to believe that the myths are real and true even if they never happened."
Luke: "I hate to sound like a Christian, but does God play a role in your life? As a practical matter, do you not do things because you believe God does not want you to?"
Steve: "It's a tough question. It's a tricky business when you feel a strong attachment to the tradition without practicing the rituals. Where's the line between authenticity and hypocrisy? I'll wrestle with that to my grave. There is real mystery to our lives but I'm not someone who pays a lot of attention to the mitzvot. I don't know where ethics come from without some notion of the divine."
Luke: "The New York Times."
Steve laughs. "I do believe in the sacred.
"You're catching me after half a night's sleep. This periodic relationship we have, it takes me a couple of nights to get used to sleeping with somebody else in the bed. So I take heavy doses of barbiturates. I'm inarticulate but probably honest.
"This morning I was reading the Zohar as translated by Danny Matt. I resonate to this stuff in ways I'm not sure I understand. I don't read Hebrew. I don't pretend that one can approach the Jewish mystical discipline without a foundation in Biblical scholarship. I've always loved the idea of the book. The people of the book is a literal concept. The state of Israel begins when the Jews who had taken up residence for some 2,000 years in the book depart. They steal out of pages and back on to the land. It's a reason I've never been able to identify with Israel.
"I'm not sure what the stories of the Zohar mean. There's something of the mysterium tremendum in my reading of the literature. I'm a bookish guy. That's the way I connect. I'm bookish without being particularly scholarly. I have a profound emotional response to the texts. That's about as close to the sacred as I get.
"I distrust myself as I'm telling you this because I don't feel that I'm functioning on all my pistons, so I'll just continue to embarrass myself. How the hell you are going to organize this..."
Luke: "Don't worry about me. This is great. How are your Yiddish skills?"
Steve: "Halting. I have some friends in town who are a husband and wife Reform rabbi team. I used to get together with Rabbi Linda once a week to study Yiddish. She was fluent in Hebrew but it was still the blind leading the blind. It made me feel that I was approaching authenticity. I grew up in the South in a Reform synagogue. My joke is that I thought I was a Methodist until I was 35. It was so completely stripped of the accouterments of the Jewish tradition.
"I came to the Jewish tradition through books. I'd been writing stories, most of which remained unpublished. They had these Jewish elements -- characters with Jewish names. That came as a surprise to me. I did not think of myself as particularly Jewish. I had few Jewish friends. My whole frame of reference was the South. I still like to be thought of as a Southern writer though it doesn't happen very often.
"I had courses reading the standard American Jewish writers. I always had a passion for [Bernard] Malamud and Philip Roth but it wasn't like they spoke to me more deeply than the post-moderns such as John Barthe, Thomas Pynchon, or Samuel Beckett.
"There just came a time when the chords began to vibrate stronger. It's still a mystery to me.
"I got a job doing oral history interviews at a folklore center at Memphis [circa 1982] researching an old Jewish ghetto on North Main Street in Memphis. This place began to reassemble itself in my imagination and became the locus for a bunch of stories and about three books.
"This imaginative territory I wanted to live in was a homecoming. It was a completely self-contained East-European ghetto community. When I began to explore that culture, it included stories and folklore and the mystical dimension of Judaism. I had no idea that there such rich Jewish folklore and these wonderful motifs such as dybbuks and golems and lamed vavniks, tzadikim, liliths, citra acura, and a whole magical dimension that informed this gritty and squalid Jewish neighborhood.
"Being seduced into this world wasn't a choice. Sometimes when I look back, I wonder, 'How did I end up in the ghetto?'
"It still seizes my imagination, even if it doesn't delight too many readers.
"I've got to let the cat in."
Luke: "What was your last sentence?"
Steve: "It was a regretful notion that if you write about the ghetto, there's a good chance the books are going to remain there. Often I think that most of my audience is dead and gone and never made it past 1944."
Luke: "Can I challenge you on that as someone who has never published a novel?"
Steve: "Sure."
Luke: "My hunch is that the noncommercial aspect of your work is not the subject you deal in but the fantastical mystical multiple-thread approach rather than having a single protagonist relentlessly going in a direction."
Steve: "That's fair enough. The Jewish content compounds..."
Luke: "It's not commercial."
Steve: "When I began writing about this stuff 25 or more years ago, it seemed fresh and nobody had much heard of the dybbuks and the golem. These things have oddly become common parlance. So many younger writers such as a Michael Shaven, Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, are using this material and they are wildly popular. I'm not sure it is the material as how it is used.
"At the risk of sounding sour grapes, I think there's a way of taking the material out of the tradition, detaching it from that exclusive Yiddish world, and bringing it into a popular arena. If it works, more power to them. I feel responsible for keeping those motifs as anchored to as authentic environment as I can. There's a reluctance to go there for readers.
"I don't know. It's something I brood about. It's my fate. I can still wake up in the morning and wonder, 'How the hell did I get into Yiddishkeit?'
"There's a story by Malamud called 'The Man in the Drawer.' The narrator goes to Russia in the late sixties and meets a Jewish communist cabdriver who turns out to be a closet writer and wants the narrator to sneak his stories out of Russia. It turns out that his stories are steeped in Jewish ritual.
"The writer explains, 'When I think Jews, comes stories.'
"I still have friends who ask me, 'When are you going to drop this Jewish masquerade?'
"I've worn the masque so long, it seems to have become a part of my face."
Luke: "Have you had a period of your life where you were observant of Jewish law?"
Steve: "No. Never. When I started getting into Yiddishkeit, my friends worried I'd show up in sidelocks and a caftan. For a while, I thought if I'm going to explore this, why not go the whole hog?"
Luke: "Why not live it?"
Steve: "The observance is not that important. I don't disparage it. I hate fundamentalism in any form but I have a lot of respect for observant Jews. I have good friends who grew up in homes I envy, where they took for granted, not just the observance, but the heritage, in ways that I will never be able to.
"Going to Israel was a reckoning for me. How does one define oneself as a Jew."
Steve laughs. "The cat wants to be on both sides of the door simultaneously."
Luke: "Were you speaking literally or as a metaphor for your life?"
Steve: "Well..."
Luke: "You have a cat there right now?"
Steve: "Yes. Sabrina has shut herself up in her studio so she doesn't have to listen to me blathering.
"For me, the Holocaust is the end of the story."
Luke: "What do you mean?"
Steve: "The Diaspora was the story I was interested in. The Holocaust made a nice operatic climax to the arc of Diaspora Jewish history. I ignored the State of Israel as an afterthought. It was too messy, too complicated. I wondered what the hell Jews were doing in the Middle East. Then I got invited to teach at Bar Ilan [for the fall semester in 2004].
"Most of my friends in Israel were quite Orthodox. There's no question of identity in Israel [even for the secular]. A kind of identity I was not used to. I was used to the definition and baggage of the Diaspora and the suffering and the neuroses and the self-loathing and Kafka as a role model. You take that to Israel and they say, 'Drop it already. It's old. We know who we are here. We're bold. We're courageous. We're warriors. We're builders. We're all the things that you anemic bookish Jews weren't. I was humbled."
Luke: "How did your time in Israel change you?"
Steve: "My experience was stereotypical. Suddenly you're faced with the existence of a place that is an astonishment. It's miraculous. And a kind of Jew that seemed like a whole other species. Men my age who had seen so much more of life, who'd been in wars, and wrestled with all the socio-political-religious aspects of their lives till sundown every day and lived in history in a way that I hadn't, except through books. I found myself humbled and admiring but knowing I am not one of them.
"My glib line is that I went to Israel feeling insecure about my authenticity as a writer and came back insecure about my authenticity as a human being."
Luke: "Martin Buber said certain mysteries are only available to those in the dance. You've never been in the dance of the mitzvot. Yet you write a tremendous amount about that life. I'm wondering how authentic can you be if you've never practiced it?"
Steve: "I wonder about that myself. I went to New York [two weeks ago]. My friend Melvin Bukiet [the novelist] has done an anthology called Scribblers on the Roof. I participated in this reading program on the roof of the Ansche Chesed synagogue. There were the usual suspects of Jewish writers. A bunch of us went out afterwards. I was with younger writers such as Dara Horn, who I admire tremendously. She's exploring and redeeming Yiddishkeit in a way that feels very authentic despite the fact that she's coming at it through books. I feel a sense of attachment to community with her that I never had. I was talking to her about this. I don't know that she is particularly observant."
Luke: "She's moderately observant [and literate in Hebrew and Yiddish]."
Steve: "She was amused by my dilemma of conscience. It didn't seem to be an issue with her, that you enter that world by the imagination and that it is as valid a means of participating in the dance as any. I'm not so sure. I reserve the right to call myself a fraud.
"I remember meeting Chaim Potok and almost asking his permission to poach this material. He didn't know me from Adam and said essentially, 'Go for it.'
"I've had the blessing of writers I regard as super-kosher -- Chaim Potok, Cynthia Ozick, Dara Horn... Even at 58, I need the assurance of writers I do regard as authentic that I'm not just an impostor.
"I'm much more a child of Kafka than of Isaac Singer. I love his paradoxes. That he can write about hopelessness in the language of midrash, connecting his godless cosmically-paranoid vision to a sacred dimension. Nobody can do it like him. That elevates him to sainthood, if there's such a thing as a secular saint."
Luke: "What do you have against linear narrative?"
Steve laughs. "Absolutely nothing. I love linear narrative. I encourage my students at every opportunity to write a linear narrative.
"I guess I broke with my own convictions in The Angel of Forgetfulness. Most of my short stories are linear.
"I love the oral tradition and folklore and those are about as conventional as narratives can be. I know I seem to have strayed in recent years from pure cantankerousness. I'm doing it again.
"I like to play with different time frames. The book embodies a kind of timeless place. If you can connect a secular narrative to a mythic timeless element, that dissolves all times into the same.
"The book I love, a revised New Testament, is Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude. The message is to give you what appears to be a linear narrative but turns out to be something that was already written and had existed all along. It renders historical time into a universal timelessness."
Luke: "What about the poor reader?"
Steve: "I see myself as reader-friendly. I recently published my only Holocaust story. I generally concede the ground to people who were there, such as Bruno Bettelheim. Cynthia Ozick wrote about the Holocaust. She said, 'The devil made me do it.' The devil made me do it too.
"Most of the story takes place in a boxcar where the character is trying to overcome the horror by telling a story. The narrative moves back and forth between the reality and the tale. And the tale assumes its own reality. There's a deliberate ambiguity between a real horror and an enchantment."
Luke: Some argue that a linear narrative with one protagonist battling the world to achieve something he desperately wants (and in the process having a realization) is the way the human mind best responds to stories.
Steve: "I emphatically agree. It's the thing I try to indoctrinate my students with. That storytelling is a natural function of the human and there are conventions and a design, almost in our DNA. I love that. I believe there should be entertainment and fascination in telling a story. If it doesn't happen in my stories, I regard it as a failure. I don't mean to subvert narrative. Whether what I do works or not, I will leave to my four readers to decide."
Luke: "You get such glowing reviews. How does that feel?"
Steve: "I can assure you that they don't translate into sales. I've always gotten good reviews but it doesn't help. It's pathetic to be on the dinner circuit when you'd like to be on Broadway."
Luke: "May I share my experience of reading you and perhaps eliciting a reaction?"
Steve: "Sure. I'm going to hate this but go ahead."
Luke: "I enjoy the realistic portions of your writing. I feel like I am there in the scene, but when the protagonist changes or it becomes magical, it throws me. Segments of your writing are commercial. I jump into a story and I see everything going on and then suddenly there are rabbis flying in the air and ugly old women with really bad breath."
Steve: "I don't know why I'm constitutionally inclined to fantastic events. It's a matter of taste. The literature of our time that is most honored, appreciated and read is in the realistic naturalistic tradition. That's fine. But it's not where literature began. The great classic American authors were all fabulists -- Hawthorn, Poe, Melville. It's not that as a writer you decide to write stark, gritty urban realism or fabulist or magic realist.
"Don't do that! Stop!"
Luke: "The cat?"
Steve: "Yes. He's clawing the sofa.
"I was writing stories with flying human beings before I fell into Yiddish literature, but in that literature, those boundaries are largely ignored."
Luke: "How do you think spending so much time in academia has affected your writing?"
Steve: "It's completely infantilized me, made me out of touch with real world experience, made me this mewling, puking neurotic. Otherwise...
"It's something I don't know how to measure. I've been doing it for so long. I don't love teaching. If I didn't have to do it, I'd leave it in a heartbeat. But when I do it, I work hard. I'm conscientious.
"It takes a toll. The energy you give to it is not recyclable. I hear writers talk about how 'My interaction with my students feeds my work.' It's bulls---. You give them the same energy you give to your work, but it doesn't come back.
"I guess it is a measure of my failure as a writer that I am condemned to teaching until I die."
Luke: "Are your politics left-wing and how important is that to you?"
Steve: "I'm becoming more political as I get older. Part of it has to do with suddenly discovering we are in a fascist administration. Also, I'm less of a narcissist than I used to be. The more you get out of the way, the more room you give history to pour in. Being in Israel woke me up to political realities. I take history more personally. And yeah, I think it is filtering into my writing in a way I hadn't anticipated. There's a lot more bloodshed in my work than there used to be."
Luke: "There are sections of your writing that are erotic, but the eroticism always gets killed by the arrival of some old lady with bad breath."
Steve: "It had to do with that I have never had sex. I've only read about it.
"There is a lot of coitus interruptus in my stories. I haven't examined that. I'm afraid to. There's an impulse to sabotage the experience of my characters. Often they are sabotaging themselves.
"A friend was over last night pawing the paperback of The Angel of Forgetfulness, and he was saying, 'The sex scenes really are quite good.'"
Luke: "Why do you have so many old, ugly and smelly people in your books?"
Steve: "I'm a geriatric-phile. I like old people. I've been practicing to be one for a long time.
"These are interesting questions."
Luke: "I bet you haven't been asked them before."
Steve: "I haven't. And I haven't really thought about them. In folktales, there's always a hag, a witch and a hunchback. I am fond of grotesque characters. It's a way of endowing characters with mythical accessories.
"I'd like to think I'm in line with the Southern writers I admire such as Flannery O'Connor. All of her characters are grotesque. I also think it comes from something very perverse in my own nature, but I can give it a literary rationale."
Luke: "When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?"
Steve: "An acrobat. I could walk on my hands until my mid-forties when the arthritis set in."
Luke: "What's with the flying rabbis in your work?"
Steve: "It's part of my innate hostility towards gravity. It has to do with that passage between worlds and that one can elevate oneself from the ordinary to the extraordinary. With me, there has to be an element of irony, so if you have a character who does it, it has to be an old moth-eaten rabbi who's an unlikely candidate for that sort of elevation in transcendence."
Luke: "What crowd did you hang out with in highschool?"
Steve: "I hung out with the popular crowd but I was the courtjester. I was the friendly hunchback. I did not have a great sense of self-esteem in highschool unlike the incredible confidence I radiate today. After highschool, I went from the cool crowd to the wrong crowd. There were a lot of years in the counterculture, which is a dignified way of saying drug-taking hippies. Those were the lost years of Steve Stern."
Luke: "Which years of your life were the happiest and why?"
Steve: "Oh boy. I could be really corny and say now. There's truth in it. This feels like the first truly healthy stable relationship I've been in."
Luke: "You better say that or you're going to get in trouble if she ever reads this."
Steve: "My graduate school days were a lot of fun. It was unexpected. I came off the hippie commune in Northwest Arkansas and I went over to the university in Fayetville. I'd been a hippie for a bunch of years. They were colorful years, but I wasn't doing what I wanted to do. Once I got into graduate school, I became full-throttle a reader and writer. That was euphoric. I didn't realize it at the time, but looking back it seems like an idyllic period. Those were the days when I was pals with the Clintons [from 1974-1976]. They were in the law school when I was in Arkansas. Hillary's best friend was my best friend's roommate.
"I got to know them. I played volleyball with them on Sundays. They were starry-eyed idealists. Uncorrupted."
Luke: "Have you been quoted on the Clintons?"
Steve: "I don't know. Probably not. When he was elected, I wrote a long heartfelt letter, probably the best thing I've ever written. I expected that during the inauguration, he'd take a piece of paper out of his pocket, unfold it, and say, 'As my friend Steve says...' Then I got a form letter back. I'm probably long forgotten."
Luke: "Did anything that happened during the Clinton presidency surprise you?"
Steve: "Hillary was much better in bed than I expected.
"Oh, I was very disappointed. Like everyone, I had high hopes."
Luke: "Were you surprised that Bill was a philanderer?"
Steve: "No, I wasn't surprised.
"I thought he was in love with Hillary. They were the perfect couple.
"I held such high hopes for Hillary, but things like this flag-burning bill she's trying to pass feels like such a betrayal.
"Hillary had a sense of humor. She could be ironic in a way that Bill couldn't. He was always laughing. He could tell a joke.
"I remember my last conversation with Bill. He was always earnest. When you're in his zone, you're his best friend, but as soon as he looks away, you cease to exist. I didn't feel that with Hillary.
"I remember Bill asking me, 'How's the writing going?' I earnestly told him it was going well. 'I'm writing a story about a kid who escapes the Nazis and spends the war in the trees. I'm calling it Tarzanstein.' He's nodding genuinely. Hillary was standing behind him saying, 'Why do you listen to this guy?'"
Luke: "Did you have any inkling that this was the future president of the United States?"
Steve: "There was a sense then that he had a large ambition and that he had the ability to realize his ambition. He was regarded by everybody in Arkansas as someone with a destiny. That's a phenomenon I don't think I'd ever encountered before."
Luke: "Did he feel your pain?"
Steve: "Only on the volleyball court. He was a moral compass on the volleyball court. He played with the law students, all of whom were corrupt. I think he kept them honest. They cheated like crazy."
Luke: "Was he known as a philanderer?"
Steve: "I don't think so. I had a sense that it was a solid marriage. They were newlyweds. They had just bought a house.
"There was clearly a sense that he was marking time."
We've been speaking for 100 minutes.
Luke: "Would you be willing to give Bill Clinton oral sex for keeping abortion legal?"
Steve laughs. "I have some standards. But no. I'd rather let my country die for me.
"Luke, I'm going to have to go. It was fun talking to you. I hope this is something you can use."
Afterwards, I email Steve: "What kind of sexual voltage passes through attractive women when they learn you are Steve Stern, the acclaimed novelist?"
Steve: "I tend to have the same effect on women that Joseph had on Potiphar's wife. This leads to many broken hearts all around, but hey, not my problem."
Luke: "What are your degrees? From where? Years graduated? What is the name and city and year of the highschool you graduated from?"
Steve: "Nothing very distinguished. East High School in Memphis, 1965. Rhodes College, Memphis 1970, Univ of Arkansas, 1976. A lot of dropping in and out and washing up between degrees."
I ask Alana Newhouse, Arts and Literature Editor of the Forward, why Stern has not had more commercial success.
She replies: "Ah, if only someone could figure out that mystery. I presume the decreased readership for literary fiction in general must have something to do with it, but beyond that, I'm mystified. His fiction is gorgeous and funny and smart and dirty -- in short, my ideal."
Manchester rabbi frequents whorehouses
The Lubavitcher rabbi is most likely spinning in his grave. One of his Hassidim was photographed consorting with whores. Prior to this event, he announced on TV that, for religious reasons, he is unable to shake hands with a woman.
He regularly frequents whorehouses, garters especially turn him on, and he pays extra for special sexual services. No, we're not talking about a high-class pimp or an executive in the pornography industry, but rather an ultra-Orthodox rabbi of the Lubvitcher school.
The bestselling tabloid in the world, News of the World, published on Sunday the scandalous story of Manchester resident, Rabbi Dovid Jaffe. Jaffe, married and the father of four, heads the Lubavticher center in Manchester and prepares youths for their bar-mitzvah ceremony.
Recently, he appeared on BBC 4 as a guest on a show featuring Jewish customs. While on television, he described the difficulties in maintaining an ultra-Orthodox lifestyle in England and went on to say that, for religious reasons, he cannot even shake hands with a woman.
It turns out, however, that the rabbi who is not prepared to clasp hands with women is more than happy to clasp plenty of other body parts. He was photographed recently visiting the "Angels" whorehouse in Manchester and cavorting with the women there.
The weekly paper that exposed Rabbi Jaffe's exploits says that, for half an hour of sex, the rabbi is willing to pay forty pounds, fifty if oral sex is also part of the package. He prefers to have his whores dressed in garters.
"He's a frequent client here," reveals one of the whores. "He's a man who knows exactly what he wants." One whore, who in a moment of boredom perhaps wanted to purify herself, happened to watch the BBC production and discovered that her client was a rabbi. His remarks on the show infuriated her.
"How hypocritical can you be? On one hand, he won't shake hands with women and, on the other hand, he comes around all the time and has very bizarre requests. Only a day before preaching on television, he came here and had a good time."
When he arrived for a visit at the house following his TV appearance, one of the whores told him, "I don't know whether to ask for money or an autograph."
Amalek Parades Down the Streets of New York
I am so proud of him. At long last, Chaim Amalek has returned to his roots. He writes:
"I like to say that I was a red diaper baby: in my youth I marched against Trotsky; I marched on behalf of clemency for the Rosenbergs; I marched arm in arm with King in Selma; and I agitated for American withdrawal from Vietnam. But yesterday, I declared myself a pink diaper baby. And again I marched.
"Now, you might ask, why is this news to anyone? Because for too many years I responded to my disappointment over the failure of the progressive agenda in this country by medicating myself, and not with Lithium ala Luke Ford (a double edged sword to be sure, as those who know him biblically invariably come to learn), but with food. I got very, very fat, less mobile, and still am. But sometimes a cause beckons me that is so worthy that I put on my clean clothes, pack a lunch, and take to the streets for some progressive work. Such a time came and such a cause was to be found yesterday in New York, as I marched in the Gay Lesbian Transgendered Pride Parade on behalf of those who, like the Colored people of yesteryear (that's what we called them back then), merely want the right as transgendered people to use whichever public bathroom facilities they wish.
"The atmosphere was joyous. My skin tingled as I felt the ghostly energies of my old comrades marching alongside me. And yet, despite all the cheerful positive energy for meaningful social change that was in the air, I found myself deeply troubled. You see, although this rally occurred in a City of Color (much like me, white people are a declining, aging minority within New York), there were practically no People of Color to be seen at this rally - and no Muslims, either. Where were the women in burkas, the men in turbans? Why were no Muftis bestowing their blessings on the marchers, as progressive clergy from various Christian and Jewish denominations were bestowing theirs? Why were so few undocumented workers from Mexico marching along with us? And what about the Chassidim - some of them are gay. Where were they?
"I have no answer for this, except to further agitate on behalf of greater inclusivity and less arrogance from those who make outsiders feel unwelcome, even at progressive marches: wealthy Republicans, bigoted whites, and triumphalist heterosexualists. Only when all of people have been amalgamated into one coherent whole can the progressive agenda prevail and humanity march forward into a future of peace, progress, and dignity for all."
Chaim, I'm proud of you. I plan on leading just such a march one day, on behalf of the marginalized actors and actresses of the San Fernando Valley who can't even get SAG cards because of the poverty of their on-the-job wardrobes. No justice, no peace.