The Fair Witness: Evan Osnos and the Hero System of the Even Voice

Posted on June 17, 2026 by Luke Ford

NPR, a morning in the spring of 2025. Steve Inskeep asks Evan Osnos (b. 1976) whether he understands what passed between Donald Trump (b. 1946) and Xi Jinping (b. 1953). Osnos does not reach for the answer a host wants. He says it might take a few more days. The pause is the performance. He treats his own uncertainty as a finding and offers it the way another man might offer a scoop. He lands on his nouns. He keeps his voice low, because in his world the man who raises his voice has already lost the argument he came to win.

What he performs in that pause has a name. He is being fair. Fair to the facts not yet in, fair to the men he has not yet heard out, fair to a reader who trusts him to wait. Fairness is the sacred value of his life and his trade. It earns him the National Book Award, the New Yorker masthead, the Brookings chair, the seat at the table when the next administration wants a sympathetic chronicler. It also does deeper work than any prize. It is his bid against death.

Ernest Becker (1924-1974) argued in The Denial of Death and Escape from Evil that men build immortality projects to outlast the grave. The project has to feel cosmic. It has to let a man believe he counts beyond his span, that he stands on the side of something that does not die. Cultures hand out these projects ready-made, and a man earns his place in one by performing its central virtue with skill. The warrior earns it by courage. The saint earns it by purity. Osnos earns it by fairness. The lasting account, judicious and cool, places him in a line that runs back through his father Peter Osnos (b. 1943) to I. F. Stone (1907-1989) and the old Washington Post, a line of men who wrote the first draft and trusted the future to ratify it. The byline on the shelf is the relic. Fairness is what makes the relic holy. To be fair is to deserve to last.

His dread sits one layer under the grave. He can bear to die. He cannot bear the verdict that the witness was a courtier, that the calm was capture, that the man who thought he stood above the fight stood inside it the whole time. Wildland, Age of Ambition, the Biden book, the yacht dispatches: each is a deposit against that verdict. Each says, read me later and find me sound.

Here the trouble starts, because fairness is not one thing. The word is a coin that buys a different good in every hero system that mints it. Walk it across a few of them and watch his version shrink from a law of the universe to the house rule of a particular set.

Take the umpire behind the plate. His fairness is the strike zone and nothing more. He does not care who he roots for, and the better he works the less anyone sees him. His fairness has no memory and no afterlife. When the last out lands he packs his gear and renders no portrait of the men he judged. He carries no sympathy into the parking lot. For Osnos that is a poverty. His fairness has to do the opposite of vanish. It has to produce the long sympathetic profile, the hundred interviews, the man read through his appetites and his griefs. The umpire is fair by withholding judgment until the pitch and then ruling without appeal. Osnos is fair by suspending judgment across three hundred pages and letting the reader feel he reached the verdict on his own. Same word. One man enforces. The other absolves.

Now set him beside a Reformed preacher in a cold church, a man who reads fairness off the justice of God. Fairness here is desert. He shows no respect of persons. He weighs the rich man and the poor man on one scale and finds them both wanting, and the cross is the only thing that tips it. To this preacher the New Yorker virtue looks like a dereliction. The reporter sits with the billionaire in his bunker and grants him an inner life, his anxiety, his books on collapse, his architect. The preacher hears a man being excused. Fairness, for him, demands that the bunker be named for what it is, a rich man building an ark for himself and letting the flood take his neighbors, and that the builder be told so to his face. The even voice strikes the preacher as moral cowardice in good manners. Osnos hears out the man God has already judged. The preacher counts the hearing-out as a refusal to side with Him.

Carry the coin to a union hall and hand it to a Marxist organizer. He laughs at it. Fairness, in his account, is the alibi of the comfortable. The impartial witness is the class doing its work in its Sunday clothes. The man who hears all sides with equal patience hears them from a chair the present arrangement built and paid for. His calm is a property of his safety. Real fairness, the organizer says, starts with the abolition of the conditions that let one man hover above the fight and sell the hovering as virtue. Osnos’s portrait of the anxious billionaire is, to him, the purest specimen of the disease, a wealthy man rendered as a soul in torment so the reader forgets to ask whose labor built the bunker and whose votes removed the rules that might have stopped it. Fairness without a side is, here, the most partisan act of all, because it leaves the scale where it sits.

Put the word in the hands of a surgeon in a field hospital. Her fairness is triage, and triage is unequal by design. She does not give the dying man and the scratched man the same hour. She gives the worst the most. Equal treatment, in her ward, is malpractice. Now read Wildland through her eyes. Greenwich and Clarksburg and Chicago each get the same patient, sympathetic attention, the same measured prose, the same withheld verdict. The hedge-fund town and the opioid town arrive at the reader’s bedside with equal billing. To the surgeon this is the betrayal of fairness, not its fulfillment. Fairness asks her to look at who is bleeding and to spend herself on him first. The even hand that treats the extractor and the extracted as equally interesting cases is, in her ward, a hand that lets a man die for the sake of the chart’s symmetry.

Last, hand the coin to a man from an honor country, a Pashtun elder or a Corsican grandfather, and watch him turn it over with contempt. Fairness for him is balance restored. An insult unanswered is a debt unpaid, and a debt unpaid is a death by a slower road. The man who absorbs the blow and keeps his voice low has not shown patience. He has shown that he can be struck without cost, and a man who can be struck without cost is already finished. Osnos’s refusal to raise his voice, which his own set reads as the height of the virtue, reads to the elder as the absence of it. The fair man, here, is the man who answers, who makes the offense expensive, who keeps the ledger of blood and face level. Calm is not fairness. Calm is what a man does when he has decided not to collect.

Five men, one word, five worlds, and in each the word beats back a different death. The umpire dies into the blown call the replay remembers, and his fairness is the clean game nobody can reopen. The preacher dies into damnation, and his fairness is alignment with the Judge who will not be mocked. The organizer dies into irrelevance, into History moving on without him, and his fairness is to stand where the future will be standing. The surgeon dies into the patient lost on her table, and her fairness is the right body saved first. The honor man dies into a name spat on after his burial, and his fairness is the answered wound. Becker’s point holds across all of them. The sacred value is the rope each man throws across the pit, and the rope is woven out of the death he most fears.

Osnos’s death is the courtier’s death. The dread that the fair witness was the house priest, that the cool was a flag for his own faction all along, that the line he joined was a guild guarding its gates and not a fellowship of truth. His fairness is the rope thrown across that pit. The judicious portrait, the refusal to know fast, the voice that will not rise, all of it argues, read me in the next decade and find that I served no master. The wager is the one his own prose names. He would rather be right next week than loud today.

The wager has a flaw. Next week has scorekeepers, and his fairness counts as fairness only before the jury that shares his definition of it. To the umpire he absolves too much. To the preacher he judges too little. To the organizer he hovers. To the surgeon he treats all wounds alike. To the honor man he eats his insults. Each of these is a coherent reading of fairness, held by serious men, and under each of them Osnos fails the value he has built his immortality upon. His calm registers as fair only inside the educated set that has raised calm to the mark of seriousness, the set of his father’s imprint and his wife’s newsroom-funding project and the Friday roundtable where three writers talk as peers while the listener overhears the people who supposedly know. That set is his jury. It is also his faction. The fairness it certifies is the fairness it was trained to certify, taught at the same schools, rewarded at the same festivals, priced into the same prizes.

Half the country sits outside that jury, and to them the even voice is not the sound of fairness. It is the sound of the enemy keeping his composure. They watch the patient witness grant the senator his grief and the billionaire his anxiety and the foreign autocrat his complexity, and they hear a man absolving the powerful in a register too smooth to argue with. They are not confused. They have impaneled a different jury, with a different reading of the sacred word, and before that jury the verdict reverses.

Ernest Becker’s last turn is the one Osnos cannot fold into a profile. Every immortality project rides on the survival of the culture that scores it. The warrior needs a people who still sing of courage. The saint needs a church that still keeps the calendar. The fair witness needs a readership that still hands its highest honor to the man who refuses to raise his voice. Osnos has bet his account on the survival of the set that prizes the even voice, and he has placed the bet in the years that set has watched its center give way.

So he sits in the studio and says it might take a few more days. He lands on his nouns. He keeps his voice low, fair to the facts not yet in, fair to the men not yet heard, fair to a reader he trusts to wait. The pause is still the performance. The open question is whether the jury he performs for will still be seated when the verdict he is waiting for comes in.

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The Hero System of UC Berkeley School of Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky

Posted on June 17, 2026 by Luke Ford

Ernest Becker (1924-1974) held that every culture answers one question. What makes a life count once a man knows he will die? The answer arrives as a hero system, a scheme of significance that promises a place outlasting the body. The scheme runs on sacred values. A man earns his standing by serving them and forfeits himself by betraying them. From inside the system the values feel absolute, woven into the structure of the world. They are coordinates inside one scheme. The proof sits in the scheme next door, where the same word carries different cargo.

Erwin Chemerinsky lives inside his sacred values with a consistency few men reach. He defends the speech he hates. He keeps his friendships with the men he fights, John Eastman and Eugene Volokh and Nadine Strossen and Doug Laycock, across lines that broke most academic friendships of his generation. He takes the heat and stays at the work. Whatever the deflationary readings find under the performance, the man has held faith with the things he calls sacred, and faith at that scale is honorable. This essay does not contest his values. It asks what they mean, and finds that the meaning lives only inside the hero system that holds them.

Start with his central word.

The rule of law. For Chemerinsky the phrase names a wall. He grew up on the South Side of Chicago in a working-class Jewish home, and he took from that childhood the lesson his cohort took: a society keeps Jews safe when it keeps everyone safe, when it has an independent judiciary, civil liberties with teeth, equal protection a court will enforce against a legislature. Behind the lesson stands the camp and the pogrom, the thing the wall holds back. So when he says the rule of law, he means predictable rules applied without favor, courts that bind the strongman, a document that outranks the man who holds office this year. He made it a deanship priority. He posts videos titled “It’s the Law.” When he warns that the rule of law stands under threat, he sees power escaping the courts, and the camp behind the gap.

Set him beside a Qing district magistrate in his yamen. For the magistrate order rises from li, from ritual propriety and the cultivated virtue of the ruler, and law, fa, is the sovereign’s instrument for managing the unruly. The good official rectifies names and restores harmony among unequal stations. A rule that binds the ruler reads to him as the tail commanding the dog, a sign that virtue at the top has failed. The same three words name his nightmare, not his wall.

Set him beside a Reformed elder who holds that the moral law is God’s decree, written into creation before any parliament sat. Human statute is a dim copy of a binding order that does not pass through committee. The rule of law for the elder runs straight up to Him, and a procedure that produces an unjust statute has produced no law at all, only the look of one.

Set him beside an old man in Naples raised under omertà. The state’s law is the law of the people who came to take, and a man who runs to the magistrate to settle a wrong has shamed his house. Real accounts settle in silence, inside the family, outside the courthouse Chemerinsky built his life to keep open. Same words. A different god in each mouth.

Take a second word, one Chemerinsky owns more than any man alive. Standing. His treatise Federal Jurisdiction lays out the doctrine of who may sue, whose injury a federal court will see. He argued against TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez because the Court narrowed who counts as injured, and the narrowing closed a door. For him standing is the threshold of being seen by the law, and his hero system widens that threshold. The Guantanamo detainee, the child in the underfunded school, the consumer carrying a false terrorism flag in a credit file he never read. The hero argues their standing into existence and makes the law reckon with them.

A Maori elder hears the word and thinks whakapapa. His standing is descent. He rises to speak on the marae because of the line of ancestors behind him, and no court grants it and no injury confers it. The line is the title.

A trader on a derivatives desk hears the word and thinks of his book. His standing is the number from last year, the profit and loss that decides whether the room turns when he speaks. The desk reckons with the man who made money and forgets the man who lost it.

A field physicist hears the word and thinks of priority. His standing is the citation, the effect that carries his name down the decades after the body quits. Each man uses the one syllable to answer the death-question. How do I count. Who must reckon with me. What of me survives. The answers do not translate.

Take a third word, the one that cost him most. Free speech. His honor move is to protect the voice he loathes, because he holds that open contest sorts truth from error and that a trained mind can weigh a vile claim and set it down. He hosted graduating students at his home, a protester reached for the microphone, his wife took it back, and he still defended the right to protest in the proper venue. He paid in standing with part of his own coalition and kept the principle. The cost is the measure of the value. A value with no cost buys a man nothing.

A guardian of the tongue from the traditional Jewish world hears free speech and recoils. In that world speech is danger and lashon hara, the evil tongue, is a grave sin, and the sacred discipline guards the mouth rather than freeing it. Free speech raised as a banner reads as a license for slander, a permission to do the harm the law of the tongue exists to prevent. The tradition that produced the dean also produced a value that runs against his.

A Carthusian in his cell hears free speech and hears noise. Silence is his discipline. The hours at the Grande Chartreuse pass mostly without words, and the renunciation of speech is his road to God, so the freedom to say anything looks like a freedom worth surrendering.

A signals officer hears free speech and thinks of the leak. Speech is classified, operational security is the sacred thing, and the man who talks is the traitor whose words get other men killed. To him Chemerinsky’s free contest of ideas is a breach waiting to happen.

Chemerinsky prizes neutrality. He built his casebook to sit on the shelf at Berkeley and at Notre Dame, to be adopted by the Federalist Society professor and the progressive one, and he calls the absence of his own voice from the doctrinal sections a kind of neutrality. The umpire holds the same value. He calls the pitch as he sees it and roots for no team, and his honor is that the crowd cannot read his loyalty off his arm. A war correspondent holds the word and bleeds on it, because at the massacre neutrality and witness pull against each other, and the reporter who stays neutral between the killer and the killed has chosen the killer. An arms broker holds the word too, and for him neutrality is the business model, the reason both sides buy from the same warehouse. The umpire’s virtue, the correspondent’s agony, the broker’s ledger, one word.

This reframes the fractures that have marked Chemerinsky’s late career. October 7 and its campus aftermath, the Trump administration’s war on the firms that crossed it, look from inside his system like assaults on his values or like his values failing him. Becker reads them another way. They are collisions between hero systems that happen to share a vocabulary. The student who took the microphone in his backyard and the dean who watched it leave his wife’s hand both said justice, both said speech, both said home, and the words did not carry the same freight across the few feet between them, because the schemes of significance behind the words were not the same scheme. The strongman in Washington and the dean in Berkeley both say the rule of law and point at opposite walls, one at the wall that binds the office, one at the wall that protects the man who holds it. Two sacred orders meet at a podium and each hears the other profaning a word.

The tragedy Becker names is the honest man who thinks he argues about a value the world shares while he defends a god the world does not. Chemerinsky took the local for the universal. He had to. A hero system trains a man to take its values for the structure of reality, because a value that announced itself as local could not anchor a life or hold back the camp. The training that made him faithful is the same training that hid the locality from him. He could not have served the wall so long while seeing it as one wall among many.

His honor is that he served his god well. His limit is the limit of every man who has loved a sacred thing. The casebook in the next student’s hands is his bid against the death that started the whole question, and it is a worthy bid, a durable one, the kind a scholar leaves behind. The words inside it will travel as far as his hero system travels and no farther. That holds for the magistrate and the elder and the man in Naples, for the Maori elder and the trader and the physicist, for the guardian of the tongue and the monk and the officer at his console. It held for the student at the microphone, who carried his own sacred words into a room that could not hear them as sacred. It holds for all of them, and it holds for him, and the holding might be the most human thing about any of them.

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The Hero System of WSJ Editor Emma Tucker

Posted on June 17, 2026 by Luke Ford

Stand in the Journal newsroom an hour before the page closes and watch the life cycle of a scoop. A reporter has something no one else has. An OpenAI deal, a hospital chain in the Justice Department’s sights, a number that moves a market. The desk lights up. Editors crowd a screen. For an hour the room holds one object at its center and the charge runs high. The story goes up. By breakfast every rival has matched it, the cable shows are chewing it, and the thing that owned the room last night is common property. By the next morning it is landfill. The reporter is already chasing the next one, because the only currency the room respects is the one that spoils fastest.

Emma Tucker runs this room, and she has given it a creed. News is what is new. She tells the staff the subscription run was not an accident, not luck, not the Journal’s turn. She says it twice, three ways, to land it. She built a method on a single sentence, and the sentence points forward, always forward, toward the story no one has yet.

Ernest Becker (1924-1974) wrote two books about why men build things like this. In The Denial of Death he argued that man is the animal who knows he will die, that the knowledge is unbearable, and that he spends his life refusing it. The refusal takes the shape of heroism. A man earns the feeling that he counts, that his days add to something, that he is an object of primary value in a universe that means something. He earns it by attaching himself to a hero system, a structure of value larger and longer-lived than his body, and by playing a part in it that wins him a name. The system promises what the body cannot deliver. It promises that some piece of him outlasts the worms. In Escape from Evil Becker took the argument one turn darker. The hero systems collide. My path to significance asks me to deny yours, and the denied become the scapegoats whose expulsion pays for my immortality.

Set Tucker inside this and the biography turns. She is not only an editor managing a transition in the press business. She is a mortal attaching her name to a body she hopes will outlast her, and the body she chose is 136 years old and might die on her watch. Advertising, which paid for papers across the twentieth century, collapsed into Google and Facebook. The Journal could have followed the titles that did not adapt. Her terror is the editor’s version of the universal one. She might preside over a death and be remembered as the custodian who held the chair while the thing went dark. Against that she set a second fear, subtler and more personal, the fear of the steward who changes nothing and leaves no mark. She refused both. She set out to be the one who carried the paper across, and the carrying would be her monument.

Here the trouble starts, and it is the trouble worth dwelling on, because it sets her hero system apart from almost every other one men have built. The systems that promise permanence usually worship the old. They reach back. The eternal, the founding text, the precedent, the score, the tradition handed down without a break. Tucker’s guild worships the new. It stakes its whole claim to value on the perishable. She wants a monument and pays for it in the one coin that turns to dust by morning. The cathedral built of yesterday’s front pages.

Watch how the sacred words change meaning when you carry them across the border into other rooms.

Take independence, the word the guild says most and prizes highest. In Tucker’s house it means the news answers to no proprietor and no advertiser, that the firewall holds, that the editor is never cowed. The free press guards the public and bends to nothing. Carry the word to a litigator and it inverts. The trial lawyer’s honor is partisanship. He is bound to the client, sworn to him, and a lawyer who drifts toward some independent sense of the truth betrays the man who trusted him. His virtue is the loyalty Tucker’s virtue forbids. Carry it to the conductor on the podium and it inverts again. The conductor who asserts himself against the score is a vandal. His glory lies in submission, fidelity to a dead composer’s marks, the effacement of his own will before a text he did not write. The same word that crowns Tucker’s freedom condemns his. Carry it to the man bent over a page of Talmud and it splits in half. He prizes the lone reading, the chiddush, the insight no one reached before him, and yet he may have it only inside the chain. He is not free of the masorah, the transmission. To stand outside it is not independence but exile. Four honorable men, four meanings, one word, and each meaning makes sense only inside the system that holds it.

Take the new, the thing that organizes her whole order. For Tucker the new is the holy. The scoop sits at the top of the value stack, above the Pulitzer and the Polk: the new thing, reported first, that changes what a reader does next. To be beaten to a story is the small daily death. Carry that to the man learning Talmud and the new turns suspect. There is nothing new under the sun. His novelty earns a place only as a fresh reading of an eternal text, never as a break from it, and a teaching with no root in what came before is not insight but error. Carry it to a surgeon and first loses its glamour. First means the first cut, the irreversible one, the thing you do not get to do again and cannot scoop. Carry it to a central banker and first becomes a vice. His virtue is to move last, slow, only when sure, to be the deliberate body that the fast world checks itself against. Now carry it to the founder in the room down the road from Tucker’s old beat, and the word snaps back into her register. First to market. First mover. He too runs toward the new and counts the same way she counts, in cohorts and churn and the number that tells him whether the thing is alive. He too treats growth as proof of life. The difference hides in what the growth serves. The founder grows to sell. His immortality is the exit, the cash-out, the next company. The institution is a vehicle he abandons at the off-ramp. Tucker grows to keep. She wants the body she feeds to stand long after she is gone, with her name in the record of the people who kept it standing. Same dashboard, opposite faith.

Take courage, which the guild dresses in a single line. Tucker says her team ran toward the fire on the Epstein story, the one that drew a ten-billion-dollar suit from Donald Trump (b. 1946) and survived a federal judge’s dismissal in April 2026. She means a fire of lawyers and reputational heat and pre-publication threat, real costs, paid in money and nerves. Carry the phrase to a battlefield medic and the fire is fire. Running toward it is how the body ends. The figure of speech she reaches for is, for him, a description. Between the rhetorical fire and the real one stands the man the whole set venerates, Evan Gershkovich (b. 1991), the reporter Russia jailed in 2023 and held sixteen months until the prisoner swap brought him home on August 1, 2024. He is sacred to the guild because in him the figure came true. The fire stopped meaning a hard week and became a cell. The campaign for his release ran hot for over a year and bound the newsroom tighter than any product launch could, and when he walked off the plane the room had its martyr and its proof that the words about courage were not only words. Tucker spoke of him with care, weighing the duty to cover the news against the safety of the people she sends toward the actual fire. The veneration is honest. It also does quiet work for the rhetorical kind of courage, lending the cell’s seriousness to the lawsuit’s.

So far the frame stays warm, and it should, because Tucker is an honorable steward of an honorable thing. The paper she runs broke real stories, faced down a president, and spent a year and a fortune to bring a colleague home from a penal colony. None of that is theater. Becker does not ask us to sneer at the hero. He asks us to see the creature under the heroics and to grant that the creature’s fear is our own. Strip the mission language from Tucker, the talk of independent journalism and of telling readers what they need to know about the world, and you do not find a fraud. You find a mortal manager who chose a worthy body to attach her name to and races the clock to keep it alive. The race is the most human thing about her.

But Becker wrote a second book, and the second book is where the warmth has to make room for the cost. Escape from Evil says a hero system flourishes by expelling those who no longer fit the new shape of it, and that the expelled pay the bill for everyone else’s significance. The Journal newsroom shows the ledger. Tucker brought her own lieutenants across the Atlantic and moved old hands out to seat them. Karen Pensiero, thirty-seven years in the building, a defender of the women on the staff, went out to make room. A deputy known for cutting earned the nickname the angel of death. Staff learned to ask who gets Tucked next. The layoffs came dressed in the soft words the growth language keeps on hand, reconfiguring, restructuring, the price of great work. Read through Becker, the soft words are not deception so much as the rite every hero system performs over the people it sheds. The charge that makes the front page hum, the energy the young digital hires carry into the morning meeting, is bought in part with the expulsion of the people whose habits were tuned to the old signals. Their grievance is real. So is her need to clear the room to save the body. Both hold at once, and in Becker’s account they usually do. Evil here wears no villain’s face. It is the arithmetic of one immortality project running over another.

Which returns us to the perishable coin, and to where the thing might break. The conductor’s score will be played in a hundred years. The Talmudist’s text outlasted empires. The litigator’s precedent binds courts not yet convened. These men buy permanence with permanence. Tucker buys it with the new, and the new has a half-life measured in hours. Her monument is a daily that is wrong or stale by the following dawn, that must be rebuilt from nothing every twenty-four hours, that confers her immortality only so long as the next charged story lands on time. She built the most fragile of the great hero systems, the one that dies the moment it stops making the perishable thing. The reservoir of prestige from the homecoming and the won lawsuit drains. The question her tenure leaves open is whether a structure built on what spoils can ever hold the permanence she reaches for, or whether she pours herself, with real courage and real skill, into a vessel that by its nature cannot keep what she puts in it.

Three places to watch.

Watch the soft words around the next round of cuts, because there the cost of her immortality shows on other people’s faces, and there the gap between the martyr she venerates and the veterans she sheds opens widest.

Watch what the guild does the next time the fire is real and not rhetorical, the next jailed correspondent, because the campaign will tell you whether the courage in the creed bears weight or only decorates, and Gershkovich set the bar.

Watch the half-life. Watch whether the charged story keeps arriving, because the day it stops is the day the monument begins to fade, and an editor who built her name on the new has no older, slower thing to fall back on. She tied her permanence to the one currency that cannot sit still. That is the wager. It is honorable, and it is exposed, and the worms are patient.

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Report: Rabbi Eliyahu Haimof, Accused in Lawsuit of Sexually and Physically Abusing Child, Threatens ZA’AKAH with Lawsuit, Then with Din Torah

Posted on June 17, 2026 by Luke Ford

Zaakah posts March 10, 2026:

In January ZA’AKAH posted about a lawsuit against Beis Yaakov of 18th Avenue for failure to report abuse allegedly committed by Rabbi Eliyahu Haimof, rabbi of Kahal Lema’an Achai in Boro Park. The complaint alleged that Haimof (named in the suit as Aleksi Khaimov) fondled Plaintiff’s genitalia, digitally penetrating her at least twice. The complaint further alleged that Haimof repeatedly beat and threw objects at the alleged victim. Plaintiff alleged in the lawsuit that she appeared in school with visible bruises and twice disclosed to two principals that Haimof had beaten her, but neither of them ever reported it.
In response to ZA’AKAH’s posting the allegations against Haimof, he found a lawyer who specializes in debt collection to send ZA’AKAH not only a cease and desist, but a threat that if the post wasn’t taken down by the next day ZA’AKAH would be hit with a lawsuit. In its response to this threat, ZA’AKAH reminded this lawyer that not only was the coverage of the case covered by the Fair Reporting Privilege, but that New York has very strong Anti-SLAPP protections, and that the frivolous filing of such a lawsuit would result in steep monetary penalties against his client. No lawsuit was filed.
Instead, ZA’AKAH received a summons to Badatz Mishpitei Yisroel on behalf of the plaintiffs, Rabbi Eliyahu Haimof, and his shul, Khal Lemaan Achai, for defamation, lashon hara, and rechilus. The beis din that issued the summons proudly boasts that it was established by Yisroel Belsky. The same Yisroel Belsky who publicly advocated for Yiddy Kolko despite his notorious abuse of dozens if not hundreds of boys in Camp Agudah and Yeshiva Torah Temima. The same Yisroel Belsky who very publicly destroyed the lives of Yosef Kolko’s victim and his family.
This same beis din also summoned the victim of Nechemya Weberman and her husband to a din torah in 2022 so Nechemya Weberman could sue them for compensation and damages. Notably, not too long after that, UTA paid a very large amount of money to the victim to settle the civil lawsuit against itself, Bais Rochel, and Weberman.
In the beis din’s latest summons they issue an ikul against ZA’AKAH not to continue being motzie shem ra on Eliyahu Haimof. This is a fundamentally incompatible order with allegations of Lashon Hara which is a statement that is true but nonetheless considered harmful to its subject. If ZA’AKAH doesn’t remove its posts about Haimof, the beis din threatens to issue an ex parte Heter Arkaos to Haimof and Lemaan Achai allowing them to pursue action in civil court. Haimof must not have informed them about his initial threats of civil litigation against ZA’AKAH before seeking such a Heter Arkaos.
Finally the beis din summons ends with a threat of seruv against ZA’AKAH. The text reads: If you continue ignoring the beis din, left with no choice it will issue a seruv against you to inform the public of your brazenness toward the beis din.
The chutzpah is all theirs.
The work continues.

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Report: Oberlin Chabad Rabbi, Shlomo Elkan, Removed Banned from Campus for Allegedly Engaging in Online Conversation Describing the Sexual Abuse of Children

Posted on June 17, 2026 by Luke Ford

Zaakah posts March 18, 2026: In a letter sent to students last week by Oberlin president Ambar, students were informed that Rabbi Scott Shlomo Elkan, co-director of Oberlin’s Chabad, had been banned from campus. Her letter stated that according to a police report Elkan admitted to egregious actions in his personal life, including engaging in online sexual conversations concerning children, and objectionable behavior.
The Forward reported today, based on a copy of the police report that it obtained, that Elkan had allegedly received sexually explicit texts, photos, and videos through Kik concerning three young people, ages 7, 12, and 13. In December, the Forward reported, Elkan allegedly been talking to someone who sent Elkan photos of himself giving a child a bath, alluded to himself touching the child’s genitals, and said he had been aroused when the child was sitting on his lap. The forward further reported that according to the report Elkan had shared photos of girls as part of that conversation.
Elkan, for his part, claimed to the Forward that his messages were not based on real events, but were between him and an adult and based on fantasy. He did not, according to the forward, address the photos.
According to the Forward Elkan resigned from his position with Chabad last Friday, per a Chabad spokesperson.
In her letter, Ambar acknowledged that no charges had been filed against Elkan, but nonetheless acknowledged the violation of basic morality and civil norms that were incompatible with Oberlin’s values. The letter stated that Oberlin had become aware of the matter after Oberlin police had reached out to the college as part of its ongoing investigation, and after filing a public records request with the police department, the college became aware of the precise nature of the allegations.
The letter announced an investigation into Elkan’s behavior and a campus climate assessment to determine the impact, and provided contact information for the investigators.
Below is the full text of the letter:
This is a very difficult message to deliver. I write to you in this moment not only as the President, but also as a member of our community and as an Obie parent. I hold close my commitment to the safety and welfare of our students, faculty, and staff, and the values that make Oberlin the precious place that we love. It is this commitment to the welfare of our community and our shared values that requires this message.
Today, Oberlin College severed its relationship with Rabbi Scott (Shlomo) Elkan, based on information in an Oberlin Police Department report. As many of you are aware, Elkan was a longtime volunteer at our college, certifying our kosher kitchen and sometimes leading Passover services and other religious celebrations. However, in the police report, Elkan admits to egregious actions in his personal life—including engaging in online sexual conversations concerning children and objectionable behavior. This behavior violates Oberlin’s values, shocks the conscience, and makes it clear that we cannot allow him continued access to our campus and community. Consequently, we have banned him from campus, from attending college events, and from representing himself as connected to Oberlin College in any way.
As abrupt and difficult as these measures will be—especially for those who sought spiritual leadership and guidance from Elkan—the seriousness of this matter requires clear and swift action. While no criminal charges have been filed against Elkan, his behavior and the language he acknowledged using violate basic morality and civil norms and are incompatible with the values of our institution.
We became aware of a matter involving Elkan when the Oberlin Police Department reached out to the college as part of an ongoing investigation. Based on this outreach, we filed a public-records request with the Oberlin Police Department to learn the substance of the matter. On March 5, we received the police report revealing that Elkan had engaged in online sexual conversations and behavior concerning children.
While the college has not previously received reports of this nature regarding Elkan’s behavior, we have asked a third party to conduct an inquiry and a campus climate assessment to determine if there are members of our campus who have been impacted. To begin this process, we are asking anyone in the Oberlin community who has concerns or information about Elkan that they wish to disclose to reach out to INCompliance at [email protected] or 216-523-5472.
During this challenging moment, we also want to ensure that our community has the guidance of counseling services and the Multifaith Chaplaincy staff. It is understandable that this news may be upsetting, and I encourage you to seek the support you need.
If it would be helpful to talk, process, or simply be in a supportive space, please stop by to see our campus counselors. Counseling and Psychological Services will offer drop-in sessions in Dascomb from 10 a.m. to noon on Saturday and Sunday, March 14 and 15, and again on March 21 and 22. Drop-in hours will also continue from 9 to 11 a.m. and 1 to 3 p.m. Monday through Friday. The Multifaith Chaplaincy staff also invites those seeking connection and support to join them at Lewis House until 5 p.m. today (Friday) and between 10 a.m. and noon on Saturday and Sunday. Other campus resources include the Office of Religious and Spiritual Life and Student Support and Outreach.
We have worked hard to build a rich and robust Jewish life at Oberlin, as evidenced by our strong Jewish Studies program, our religious and spiritual student life support, our vibrant and growing engagement with Jewish-centered organizations, the numerous Jewish student groups on campus, and our kosher kitchen. I am committed to maintaining the various programs that our students, faculty, and staff enjoy. To help our students through this time and provide spiritual guidance, we have asked Rabbi Allison B. Vann to work with our community through the remainder of the semester. Rabbi Vann was last on campus to lead High Holy Day services in 2025.
I can appreciate that receiving this message will engender a range of emotions: disbelief, sadness, concern, frustration, and many sentiments in between. I am experiencing this range of emotions myself, but they are tempered because I have been a part of this community for many years, and I can speak directly to our resilience. Be assured that the strength of our community will endure, and I look forward to the day when our current emotions are replaced by trust, joy, reassurance, and peace.

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Substack Article: ‘Poking a Hornet’s Nest: Breaking the Silence on Akiva Roth, EBJC, Camp Ramah and Cover-Up Culture in Conservative Judaism’

Posted on June 17, 2026 by Luke Ford

Alex S. Kaufman writes March 11, 2026: Today is a big day—a day that I’ve anticipated for decades. Following the settlement of the lawsuit that I filed in October 2021 against Akiva Roth, the predator who abused me as a child, and against the East Brunswick Jewish Center (EBJC) and its former pulpit rabbi, Chaim Rogoff, who covered for him, I am revealing my identity and telling my story publicly for the first time.

My name is not John Doe. It is Alex Kaufman. And I am a survivor of child sex abuse and a cover-up that spans the Jewish experience.

My settlement represents a milestone in the world of child sex abuse cases because it includes concrete and meaningful restorative steps that EBJC—my childhood synagogue in East Brunswick, New Jersey—agreed to take to make that institution safer for children. Schools, camps and houses of worship can reduce the likelihood that a predator will target or thrive in their community by implementing simple, but often non-obvious, protective measures.

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Manny Waks Abuser Sentenced

Posted on June 17, 2026 by Luke Ford

The Canberra Times reports March 19, 2026: The battle is over for a prominent victim advocate after his abuser was sentenced for sexually exploiting him at a Jewish holy festival close to four decades ago.

Manny Waks was aged between 10 and 12 when Zev “Velvel” Serebryanski assaulted him at the Yeshiva Centre in Melbourne’s southeast sometime between 1986 and 1988.

Serebryanski, who was in his early 20s at the time, had developed a sexual interest in the then-child and cornered him upstairs one night during the religious Shavuot festival.

The man sat down on a bench next to the pre-teen and groped at his groin before pulling him into a bathroom and sexually assaulting him.

In sentencing the now-62-year-old to a suspended jail term, Victorian County Court Judge John Kelly described Serebryanski’s actions as transgressive and predatory.

“It is an attack on innocence, an attack on childhood,” he said on Friday.

“You said you were only following your victim’s lead … that is a transparently absurd proposition.”

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Report: Lakewood Resident, Shemuel Shalomchaim, Charged with Rape

Posted on June 17, 2026 by Luke Ford

Zaakah posts March 19, 2026: Shemuel Shalomchaim is a resident of Lakewood and owns a trucking company there. He surrendered to the NYPD on Tuesday to face charges of rape in the first degree, sexual abuse in the first degree, rape in the third degree, sexual misconduct, and sexual abuse in the third degree. According to the complaint, in 2022 Shalomchaim raped a woman while she was asleep. He is currently out on $10,000 bail.
Shalomchaim reportedly also learns in Rabbi Aron’s yeshiva, Yeshiva Nesiv Hatorah, in Tom’s River.

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Report: Saul Len Changes His Story Again, Claims He Unwittingly Uploaded All That CSAM to Google Drive, Claims to Start Organization to Help People with Porn Addictions

Posted on June 17, 2026 by Luke Ford

Zaakah posts April 12, 2026:

In an Instagram post last night, Saul Len has changed his story from claiming that he was innocent of everything he was charged with, to claiming that he did upload all that CSAM to Google Drive – but only by accident – from a porn-filled Telegram group he voluntarily joined. According to his new post he developed an interest in porn from a young age that got out of hand and became an addiction. As time went on, Len wrote, he joined large porn oriented chats on WhatsApp and Telegram where porn was being shared constantly.
According to the complaint filed at the start of his criminal case, there were 15 specific videos found on his Google Drive depicting the rape of children between the ages of 3 and 13. An additional 126 files of a criminal nature were found in his drive by law enforcement, according to the complaint. He was charged with 15 counts of felony possession of CSAM.
He was given a sweetheart plea deal for all that CSAM. He pleaded guilty to 15 felony counts related to CSAM as well as one misdemeanor for Unlawful Modification of a Computer. Adjudication was withheld on the 15 felonies, and he was only convicted of the misdemeanor, and sentenced to 6 months in jail and 10 years of supervised release.
Not satisfied enough with that slap on the wrist, he requested that the entire record of his plea hearing and conditions be sealed by the judge. The prosecutor didn’t object because prosecutors rarely object to such requests. He likely made this request for the express purpose of setting up the lie he immediately told to his community after his plea hearing concluded.
In a WhatsApp message sent widely to members of the community, Len claimed that the State had investigated the initial CSAM charges and had found that they were without basis. He claimed that he was taking a plea to a single misdemeanor that carried a 6 month jail sentence to be rid of the case.
While Len is now admitting that what he said in that message wasn’t true, he never had any intention of coming clean. This statement from Len comes on the heels of him losing a legal battle against ZA’AKAH over the unsealing of his plea transcript.
Immediately following Len’s initial WhatsApp statement, ZA’AKAH challenged the sealing of his plea hearing in court. Len fought hard against the unsealing request, repeatedly claiming throughout the 6 months of initial litigation that ZA’AKAH intended to misrepresent the details of his plea if the record would be unsealed. The judge, however, repeatedly noted that the only party who had ever mischaracterized the plea and expressed an interest in continuing to mischaracterize the plea was Len himself.
He lost, and the records were ordered unsealed in June of 2025. That wasn’t enough for him. He immediately filed an appeal to the unsealing decision which delayed their release for another 10 months until his appeal was finally denied. It was only after ZA’AKAH exposed the truth of his plea – that he had pleaded guilty to 15 CSAM related felonies and a misdemeanor but received a withheld adjudication on the felonies – that Len saw fit to release this statement.
Which brings us back to this new statement. Len claims that the CSAM only wound up on his Google Drive because he accidentally had automatic uploads for WhatsApp and Telegram chats enabled on his phone, but that he never really knew that CSAM was shared in the group, never saw it himself, and didn’t deliberately save it.
Aside from Len’s repeated lies and deliberate attempts to hide the truth of his plea, this new claim is implausible on its face. By his own admission he joined these chats voluntarily. As noted above, the files on his Google Drive included 15 videos of the rape of children as young as 3, and an additional 126 files of a criminal nature. Len is asking us to believe that all of these files went through a porn group that he, a porn addict, deliberately joined, presumably for the purpose of watching and enjoying the content being shared, and that he never noticed all of the videos showing children as young as 3 being raped.
Whether he deliberately uploaded them to his Google Drive or not – which itself is a dubious claim – it strains credulity to claim that he somehow never saw what was being shared in these groups he deliberately joined as a porn addict. As if legal porn is a scarce commodity on the internet and that he never had a real interest in this very specific series of groups he joined.
Saul Len repeatedly lied to hide his crimes, attempted to abuse the legal system to keep his community in the dark about the risk he poses, and now, only when exposed, is spinning another implausible story that admits the barest minimum he can no longer deny while attempting to minimize the severity of what he did.
That such an unrepentant liar wants to start an organization to address men’s mental health is alarming. This isn’t teshuva. It isn’t coming clean. It’s yet another attempt at manipulation by a liar and criminal who got caught lying.

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Report: North Miami Beach Resident, Yona (Shaya) Lunger, Arrested Twice, Charged with Multiple Sex Crimes Against Children

Posted on June 17, 2026 by Luke Ford

Zaakah posts April 21, 2026:

Yona Lunger is a resident of North Miami Beach. According to News reporting over the years, he is very involved in a number of community organizations, including one that he founded called Chessed of South Florida. He is also a chaplain, and has served on a number of city advisory boards.
According to a criminal complaint filed on March 25th, Lunger entered a teenage girl’s bedroom and closed the door. The complaint alleges that during the interaction he had with her he told the victim to “put away her sexy things” referring to her breasts, and then proceeded to hug and kiss the victim multiple times. He allegedly kissed her multiple times near the lips, asked her to kiss him, and then left the room. The complaint alleges that Lunger, on multiple occasions, expressed a desire for the victim to turn 18. He was arrested and charged with felony lewd and lascivious conduct with a child under 16.
While out on $7,500 bail for that alleged offense, Lunger was arrested again yesterday on new felony charges, lewd and lascivious molestation of a child under 16 and lewd and lascivious conduct with a child under 16. Bail was set at $5,000 each but he is currently incarcerated until his next hearing. The complaint is not yet available for the new charges but we will post an update when it becomes available.
According to Local News 10, after his first arrest another victim came forward and accused Lunger of putting his hands on her breasts for a minute when she was a minor. According to the report, Lunger had come to her family’s home and offered to restock grocery items for her family. He then allegedly took the girl to a supermarket where he held her hand. On the drive home, according to the report, Lunger made inappropriate comments toward her, eventually putting his hands on her breasts and trying to kiss her on the lips.

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