Sex Before Marriage In Orthodox Judaism

Posted on July 6, 2016 by Luke Ford

Marc B. Shapiro writes: Because the masses had no interest in what the rabbis had to say about this matter, R. Landsofer concludes that one need not even rebuke them, as they won’t listen anyway. Not long ago I heard a rabbi going on about the holy communities of Europe of a few hundred years ago, about their support of Torah, the respect they gave to the rabbis, and their commitment to halakhah. All of this is true, but if you look a little closer you find that these communities were actually very much like contemporary Modern Orthodox communities, in that together with a commitment to halakhah, many people also felt that they could determine which halakhot could be ignored. Or perhaps they didn’t even think they were violating halakhah. Maybe they assumed that the rabbis were making their lives difficult with extreme humrot. Either way you look at it, it is very obvious that there were many in traditional Jewish societies who created their own standards of practice which did not always correspond to what the rabbis insisted on, and they had no interest in changing their ways because of what the rabbis were saying…

R. Israel David Margulies (19th century) cites this text from Sefer Maharil and correctly notes that in medieval times the brides were much younger than in his day. He assumes that the typical bride was under 12 and a half years old, and therefore there was no problem of impure thoughts with such brides…

Regarding the age of Jewish brides in medieval times, See Avraham Grossman, Hasidot u-Mordot (Jerusalem, 2001), ch. 2. He makes the following interesting point (Pious and Rebellious, trans. Jonathan Chipman [Waltham, 2004], pp. 47-48):

“The phenomenon of beating wives may also have been exacerbated by marriage of girls at an early age. The fact that at times the wife was extremely young led the husband to relate to her as he would to his own daughter. This was particularly true in those places where young girls were married to husbands significantly older than themselves, which was, as we have seen, a common phenomenon in Jewish society, and particularly in Muslim countries. Moreover, it may well be that the beating of the wife, which was a part of the life of the young couple, also continued thereafter.”

…In a comment to my last post, Maimon wrote: “On the subject of R. Bachrach’s responsum – it bears noting that the pre-reform homogeneous [should be: heterogeneous] Jewish society (especially in Germany) contained people of varying levels of observance from across the spectrum and as such many behavioral patterns that would be unthinkable in contemporary Orthodox society are detailed in the Halakhic writings from that era.” Maimon is correct, and it is not only in recent centuries or in Germany that one finds communities with people of different levels of religious observance. This is how Jewish societies have always been, in every era and place, at least until the second half of the twentieth century and the creation of haredi societies. I have already cited numerous examples that justify this statement, but let offer one more that shows how even in medieval times young men and women would socialize in a way that Maimon might say “would be unthinkable in contemporary Orthodox society.” I would only add that instead of “contemporary Orthodox society,” I prefer to say “contemporary haredi society,” since as mentioned already, Modern Orthodox society still has significant variations in level of observance. (When I speak of variations in level of observance, I have in mind bein adam la-Makom halakhot. I am not referring to halakhot having to do with monetary issues and dina de-malchuta dina, regarding which I believe the Modern Orthodox community is superior to what we find in the haredi world.)

R. Meir of Rothenburg was asked about young Jewish men and women who were drinking together. As a joke, one of the young women asked one of the men if he would betroth her. He took a ring and threw it to her, and recited the text of kiddushin. (At a future time I can discuss the halakhic arguments that R. Meir used to free the woman from having to receive a get.) One cannot overlook the fact that the way the young men and women were socializing together, much like you would find among kids at Modern Orthodox high schools, shows that there was no strict separation between the sexes…

7. Two people have asked me to comment on Rabbis Yitzchok Adlerstein’s and Michael Broyde’s article here arguing that hasidic schools shouldn’t be forced to offer secular education. While the Seforim Blog is not the place for commenting on these sorts of matters, after reading the article I felt I had to make one point. Adlerstein and Broyde cite the famous Supreme Court case which allowed the Amish to opt out of secular education and they apply this logic to the hasidic communities. While it is true that if it went to court the hasidic communities would probably prevail, there is a big difference between the Amish and the hasidic communities. The Amish do not take welfare, food stamps, and other forms of government assistance. Thus, they make choices and live with the consequences. However, the hasidic communities refuse to provide their children with the basic skills needed to function in the modern economy, and as a result rely heavily on the welfare state. No one who believes in limited government and is opposed to the welfare state can support a situation where kids are allowed to grow up almost guaranteed to be in need of public assistance.

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Man who claimed to have escaped Auschwitz admits he lied for years

Posted on July 6, 2016 by Luke Ford

Why do so many people lie about their suffering in the Holocaust? Because there’s money and prestige to be gained from claiming victim status. These liars aren’t the only sick ones here. We’re sick for giving people the incentive to make up stories about their suffering.

Chaim Amalek This is a variant of “Stolen Valor”, whereby people falsely claim to have done something brave or to have been victimized in some infamous way. Which the perp chooses – to have been a war hero, or a victim – I suppose reflects both the culture and their personal pathology. I had to deal with quite a bit of this in my own life when I got back from ‘Nam.

Susan Williams Really you were in Nam..
Give me dates, experiences names…

Chaim Amalek I don’t like talking about it, but yeah. Gulf of Tonkin, Battle for Hill 9021, Tet offensive, Arclight, Escape from Hanoi Hilton, made it back to Saigon in time for its fall in ’75. Mayaquez Incident. I was deep in the shit.

Susan Williams I hope you didn’t leave any half caste behind

Chaim Amalek As I said, I hate to talk about it. I maintained the purity of my instrument just so I would not leave behind any mischelungen. And after the war, I was so messed up, I served in the Carter Administration as head of counterterrorespionage directorate for extra-terrestrial matters. It was a wild time.

The Guardian: Joseph Hirt said he fabricated story of being sent to camp and meeting Nazi doctor Josef Mengele to ‘keep memories alive’ about history of the Holocaust.

A Pennsylvania man who claimed for years to have escaped from Auschwitz, met track and field star Jesse Owens and Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, confessed on Friday that he had fabricated the entire story.

“I am writing today to apologize publicly for harm caused to anyone because of my inserting myself into the descriptions of life in Auschwitz,” Joseph Hirt, 86, wrote in a letter sent to his local paper, LNP, this week. “I was not a prisoner there. I did not intend to lessen or overshadow the events which truly happened there by falsely claiming to have been personally involved.”

“I was wrong. I ask forgiveness,” he added. “I determined at that moment to do everything in my power to prevent the loss of the truth about wartime life (and death) at Auschwitz.”

For years, Hirt gave public speeches about his experiences in the second world war, including his Jewish family’s flight from Poland to Belgrade. But he also told people that he was arrested by the Nazis, sent to the concentration camp at Auschwitz, and met Mengele, the SS physician who tortured prisoners of the concentration camp. Hirt claimed to have escaped under an electric fence at the camp.

He added an extraordinary prologue and epilogue to the story, saying that he saw Adolf Hitler turn his back on Jesse Owens at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, and that he met Eleanor Roosevelt and Owens after his arrival in the United States.

In his letter, Hirt said that he realized “it wasn’t about me”, and that he was motivated to lie by his fears that the history and horror of the camps would be forgotten. He said that he was shocked to find that Auschwitz, now a museum and memorial, had become a “clean and polished tourist destination” where visitors laughed and joked about “propaganda”.

“Flagrant denial and ignorance of the truth made me determined to keep the memories alive,” Hirt said. “I used poor judgment and faulty reasoning, risking a sullying of the truth I was trying to share.”

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WHO ARE ALL THESE TRUMP SUPPORTERS?

Posted on July 6, 2016 by Luke Ford

George Saunders writes in The New Yorker: After the San Jose rally in early June, protesters bullied and spat on straggling Trump supporters. Sucker punchers lurched up, punched hard, darted away, hands raised in victory. A strange little protester, mask around his neck, mumbled, as he scuttled past a female reporter conducting an interview, “Fuck you in the pussy.” Some sick genie, it seemed, had been let out of the bottle. I had to pull an older white woman out of a moblet of slapping young women of color, after she’d been driven down to one knee and had her glasses knocked off. When I told the young African-American woman who’d given the first slap that this was exactly the kind of thing the Trump movement loved to see and would be happy to use, she seemed to suddenly come back to herself and nearly burst into tears. The slapped woman was around sixty, tall, lean, sun-reddened, scrappy, a rancher, maybe, and we stood there a few minutes, recovering ourselves. Seeing something unsteady behind her eyes, I suggested that she be sure to take a few deep breaths before driving home. She said she would, but a few minutes later I saw her again, at the edge of the crowd, watching the protesters in fascination, as if what had just happened to her made it impossible for her to leave.

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How Does The FBI Look Now?

Posted on July 6, 2016 by Luke Ford

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* I call it the “John Roberts’ Solution.”

* Comey said that no reasonable prosecutor would bring a case. He is right about that. Hillary wouldn’t be prosecuted unless they had video of her running someone down in her car, and even then, only if she backed over the guy a couple of times.

* In most cases of people sending classified information over unsecured channels, they lose their job and their security clearances. Only in rare cases do they face criminal charges.

The Petraeus case was unique because they actually have a taped interview showing that he knew that the information he was giving his mistress was classified.

It was pretty unlikely that they would find evidence that Clinton was intentionally leaking classified information, and wasn’t just incompetent.

* “‘extremely careless’ in her handling of ‘very sensitive, highly classified information.’”

Trump should write that down on an index card and use it as a prop in the debates. In fact, he should carry it with him from now until the polls close on election day, and he should make a show of pulling it out and reading from it every time he talks about Hillary. The idea being, that these are Hussein’s FBI director’s words, and he wants to make sure he gets the quotes right every time.

He should call her “extremely careless” Hillary from now on. His catchphrase can be “Obama’s FBI director said she was extremely careless with very sensitive, highly classified information.” Then he can say, “wait, here, let me quote Obama’s FBI director, to make sure I’ve got that right,” and read from the card. Then wrap up with “Secretary Clinton is too crooked and incompetent to be PotUS. She’s too crooked and incompetent to be the president of Venezuela.”

* The Dark Enlightenment is not a worldview that people can be talked into or convinced to be believed purely abstractly or rhetorically. It takes events and circumstances making people ask themselves WTF. And there have been a lot of those in the last 14 months. The only reason they haven’t begat more converts to the Dark Enlightenment and #NRx is because Trump came along and temporarily gave some of us the impetus to give this voting thing one more chance.

* Can we all please stop pretending now that the FBI is competent and uncorrupt?

Seriously, after Orlando and San Bernadino, the FBI’s reputation should have been on extremely shaky ground. Unfortunately, the news media wasn’t smart enough the notice that the FBI should have nipped those thugs in the bud—they even had the suspects on their radar, but didn’t bother following up. And the public—especially the right wing/Trump wing—is too enamored of the cops/law enforcement to admit the gross incompetence displayed.

This non-indictment for her crimes is just proof how much the FBI is nothing more than a controlled entity of the political hacks in Washington. Historically, this will mark a point where future scholars will say that the FBI officially became merely a secret police organization without any fidelity to principles or law, only to their political leaders.

And Comey’s reputation is truly trashed—he will come out extremely poorly in terms of how historians note his character. He’s now a known yes-man for the power brokers and the money men.

After the Whitey Bulger revelations—where the FBI was working hand in glove with organized crime and allowing it to get off scot-free—the FBI should have become a distrusted organization and looked at skeptically. But there is a profound disconnect in this country between the massive fuckups and corruption of the G-Men–stretching at least back to Hoover refusing to investigate or even admit organized crime existed, on the fear of being outed as a homosexual—and the public/media perception of them.

The FBI guys are hacks.

* This really is an irrelevant distraction to me, and not in the way that Steve means it. Hillary is bad because she’s in the pocket of neocons and banksters, not because of anything that happened to any e-mails or, to take another distraction, to ambassador Stevens.

The policies she supports, the crowd that’s gathered around her, will kill thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Middle Easterners if she wins. This will increase the incidence of terrorism and refugee flows. THAT’s what’s important.

Her computer illiteracy or carelessness are utterly irrelevant. I bet that no foreign intelligence service learned anything new from this, but even if they did, that would also be irrelevant next to the policies which Hillary supports.

* I worked for the intelligence community (as a technical person, not a “spook”) in the late ’80s and much of the ’90s.

Had I done what Hillary did, I am quite certain I would have gone to jail.

I was in fact present at a meeting when an intelligence breach occurred. Although the breach was not my fault, I pointed it out immediately, and the meeting was immediately ended. I had a clear legal obligation to point out the security breach — again, even though I was not the cause of that breach.

One of my co-workers in fact went to jail for security violations.

I agree with other commenters here that Hillary’s unbridled militarism is a much serious crime than her malfeasance concerning classified information.

On the other hand, Comey does nicely demonstrate how corrupt the system is: he admits massive breaches on her part, but she gets away scot-free.

Any ordinary American should feel like throwing up. We’re not citizens; we’re just peasants serving the elite.

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Setting the Record Straight: Longtime Partner of Jared Taylor Addresses White Nationalist Criticism

Posted on July 6, 2016 by Luke Ford

Heidi Beirich writes:

For nearly 30 years, Evelyn Rich, the longtime romantic partner of white nationalist Jared Taylor, has been attacked by white nationalists accusing her of being Jewish. Recently, Rich contacted the Southern Poverty Law Center after being viciously attacked by the notorious anti-Semite, John DeNugent.

Editors’ Note: Rich wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on the Ku Klux Klan in the late 1980s. She lives with Jared Taylor, who runs the white nationalist group American Renaissance in northern Virginia. They have two children together. In the past, Taylor has distanced himself from anti-Semites and been heavily criticized in the movement for it. Rich, though not an anti-Semite, asked Hatewatch to publish this letter. The unrelenting attacks accusing her of being Jewish and an infiltrator offers an interesting glimpse into the virulent anti-Semitism that motivates many members of the movement.

It was March 1985, thirty-one years ago, in Groton, Massachusetts, when I got behind the wheel of my little Datsun 310 hatchback and began the first of two extended trips to the Southern states and Washington, D.C.

I was a doctoral student at Boston University and my dissertation topic was the ideology of the modern Ku Klux Klan. I had met and interviewed my first Klansman back in October 1980, when Bill Wilkinson, Imperial Wizard of the Invisible Empire Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, arrived In Boston from Louisiana and held a rally in Connecticut of all places. The New England news media went on a feeding frenzy.

I was 23-years-old and had lived in Britain my entire life. (I came to the US for the first time in August 1978 as a Foreign Exchange Student.) I was intrigued by this garrulous man who took me to dinner and talked to me for several hours. I was surprised to learn the Klan still existed. Everything I knew about it came from the book and film versions of “Gone With the Wind.”

I was a doctoral student at Boston University and my dissertation topic was the ideology of the modern Ku Klux Klan. I had met and interviewed my first Klansman back in October 1980, when Bill Wilkinson, Imperial Wizard of the Invisible Empire Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, arrived In Boston from Louisiana and held a rally in Connecticut of all places. The New England news media went on a feeding frenzy.

Who joined the Klan? Why? What did Klansmen believe? Everything I read in the press implied or stated that Ku Klux Klan was a self-explanatory term. Like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of pornography –– “I will know it when I see it” –– the Klan did not need to be defined. Klansmen were just plain nuts. End of story.

Before I pulled out of the driveway I had arranged a couple of months of research opportunities. (These were the days before the Internet and mobile phones). I wanted to interview as many Klansmen and former Klansmen as possible. I wanted to talk to as many anti-Klan groups and individuals as possible. I wanted to go everywhere! I wanted to talk to everyone! I did my best. I interviewed Klansmen, I went to Klan rallies and cross “burnings” or “lightings.” I talked to anti-Klan groups and individuals, I went through the FBI’s files in Washington, DC and I talked to everyone who would talk to me. I went everywhere I was invited and tried to get invited everywhere else.

Through these initial contacts, I met more and more people and was given all sorts of opportunities. David Duke suggested I attend an Institute for Historical Review conference. Thanks to David’s sponsorship I was able to attend my first conference and because I was a student, Willis Carto was kind enough to waive my registration fee. Thanks to that first IHR conference I met Mark Weber and was invited to the next one. Thanks to the next one I met Jared Taylor, who was there as a Japanese interpreter. Thanks to Jared I have two wonderful children.

So, why am I writing this? Why now? Why at all?

After 30 years of listening to discussions about me by people who do not know me, I have finally had enough. I would not care what rot is said about me were it not that I am a mother. Recently a despicable Internet bully and notorious fruitcake has begun “wondering” about my daughters. My daughters are off-limits. I need to let them know I will never submit to bullies and loonies, I also need to let them know I will not put up with lies and rubbish. Not all adults are grown up.

All of this comes down one question: Am I a Jew?

The answer is no, I am not a Jew. I am not a Jew by religion, ethnicity, race or any other criteria or definition. My accusers, and they are accusers, give the following reasons for thinking as they do. Here they are and here are my replies:

• I look Jewish. – If I look Jewish to you, then I look Jewish to you. That was an was an easy one!

• My surname is allegedly Jewish. – I am not American, and no one in my family is American. Plenty of people have told me that in the USA Rich is a version of the German surname “Reich”. Nobody in my family has ever set foot in Germany. (Okay, I once changed planes in Munich). It is nonsense to assume that the German surname Reich has any connection to the ancient and venerable ENGLISH name of Rich. There have been English people named Rich as long as there have been English people. In addition to the Earls of Warwick, possibly the most famous branch of the Rich family, we also boast an Archbishop of Canterbury, Edmund Rich (1175–1240). I do not know of any English people named Reich, let alone any English people who changed their names from Reich to Rich. If Americans do this weird stuff, that’s their business.

• I am a Jewish agent or “Honeypot” whose houri-like fascinations have forced Jared into a philosemitic trance and caused him to refuse to attack Jews. What utter rot! If anyone knows how to make Jared do or not do anything, please let me know. I’ve failed for 25 years! This is such a load of codswallop I refuse to believe any rational person could even consider it! (The rational and interested might like to know I married a German-American, surname of Klumpp. Maybe I could have saved myself a lot of trouble by calling myself Klumpp?)

Finally, I am attaching a number of documents for those who prefer to “Trust but Verify.”

• My Christening certificate from November 1957.

• My Bible presented to my at school. C of E is the officially taught religion in English schools.

• My father’s Christening certificate from 1929

• My father’s Royal Navy records stating his religion as Church of England. (God Bless him for his service to his country)

• My grandfather’s Royal Navy records stating his religion was also C of E. (God Bless him for his service to his country)

• My great great grandparents’ C of E Marriage banns – James Rich and Lucy Morris who were wed in1852. (Morris is my dad and grandpa’s middle name.)

I could go on, but this message and these documents are intended for the lucid and rational. Others who accidently stumble upon them will disregard them and proceed as usual.

Evelyn Beatrice Mackenzie Rich
Oakton, VA
April 18, 2016

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