Esther Jungreis, Orthodox Jewish Outreach Pioneer, Dies at 80

Posted on August 29, 2016 by Luke Ford

She had a gift, she had passion, she was a mighty warrior for her people and she did all her campaigning within the strict confines of Orthodox Judaism. There can be a public role for women in Orthodox Judaism.

Esther Jungreis never claimed to be a rabbi. She believed in separate roles for men and women.

(JTA) — Esther Jungreis, a pioneer in the Jewish outreach movement and founder of the organization Hineni, died Tuesday. She was 80, according to the Vos Iz Neias blog.

An announcement published in October on the site Only Simchas indicated Jungreis was “in serious condition” and fighting an infection, but did not specify her ailment.

Jungreis was born in Szeged, Hungary, in 1936, where her father was chief rabbi. A child survivor of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, she and her family resettled in 1947 in Brooklyn, where she married her distant cousin, Rabbi Meshulem HaLevi Jungreis, according to the Yeshiva World. She and her husband, who died in 1996, founded the North Woodmere Jewish Center/Congregation Ohr Torah on Long Island in 1964.

Jungreis, known universally by the honorific rebbetzin, founded Hineni in 1973 in order to bring young Jews closer to Orthodox Judaism by offering Torah classes, singles events, and Shabbat and holiday services. She spoke to audiences across the United States, including at Madison Square Garden in 1973.

She was known for her work in outreach to young Jews, as well as for self-help books about a variety of topics, including marriage and relationship advice, as well as how to deal with challenges in life.

Jungreis drew inspiration from her experience as a Holocaust survivor to fight for Jewish continuity and against intermarriage. But her statements comparing assimilation to the Holocaust sometimes sparked controversy.

“To be a Jew is the greatest privilege,” she implored at a speech in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1999. “To be unaware of it is the greatest catastrophe — spiritual genocide.”

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What Orthodox Women Wear to the Beach Is No Different From a Burkini

Posted on August 29, 2016 by Luke Ford

The beach is a key part of Australian culture. If you won’t go to the beach and have a swim, you’re not a real Australian.

I guess the ancient Greeks said that anyone who does not compete in the nude is not a Greek.

So how much, if at all, should Jews and Muslims compromise their traditions to fit in with their gentile host countries?

Forward: Moshe Sebbag, the rabbi of the Grand Synagogue of Paris, announced this week that he supports the French ban on burkinis, the modest swimwear some Muslim women wear to cover up on the beach.

Wearing a burkini, he said, is not “innocent” and it sends a message.

But, we ask Sebbag, what difference exactly is there between the garb Orthodox Jewish women wear to the beach than the burkinis that some Muslim women wear?

And why should one religious group of women be allowed to follow their traditions over another?

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Op/Ed: Quit Your Liberal Condescension Toward Jews Who Love Trump

Posted on August 29, 2016 by Luke Ford

Forward.com: As a Jewish immigrant from the Former Soviet Union whose family came to the United States in 1980, I’ve been dismayed to see so many liberals looking down their noses at Russian Jews who support Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

Writing in the Forward, Margarita Gokun Silver recently asked, “How Can Russian Jews Be So Naively in Love With Donald Trump?” She suggests that we’re naïve, but her own view is ill-informed. Worse, it’s condescending.

In her essay, Gokun Silver asks this question about Russian Jewish supporters of Trump: “How can people who left their homeland to escape anti-Semitism — and whose families include victims of both the Holocaust and the Gulag — not see the signs?”

Maybe I can provide some answers.

It was because my family stuck to our Jewish roots and followed our traditions while we lived in the FSU that, in 1949, my maternal grandfather was sentenced to 10 years of Gulag camps. Later, in the mid-1950s, he was released with “full rehabilitation.” But in the ’60’s and ’70s, my father received repeated rebukes for hiring Jewish professionals, my uncle received continuous pressure from the KGB (he was a computer scientist and they wanted him to become an informer), my sister received a rejection letter from university (despite stellar grades), and my cousins and I received several physical assaults over our ethnicity. All this prompted my family to seek a better life in the U.S.

And what happened when Jews from the Soviet Union arrived in the U.S.? They received an immense amount of invaluable help from the members of the American Jewish community — and faced a major cultural misunderstanding. The majority of immigrants from the FSU were not, as many American Jews expected, the simpleton Tevyes and backward Goldes who needed to be shown how to turn on the lights or how to use toilet paper. The people who immigrated were mostly professionals, with college degrees and good (although skewed) knowledge of history, arts, geography and politics. We were, and are, educated Jews.

Most important, we had — and have — enough reason and good sense to evaluate political options and make informed choices out of our own preferences. Expecting us to follow a liberal agenda that’s been highlighted for us is as absurd as expecting us to follow Lenin’s raised hand toward the glorious Communist future.

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Meet the Jewish ‘Paleoconservative’ Who Coined The Term ‘Alternative Right’

Posted on August 29, 2016 by Luke Ford

The Forward is doing more reporting and opining on the Alt Right than any other Jewish publication. Unfortunately, the quantity of their reports are rarely of quality.

What could make for some quality writing is comparing Jewish nationalist movements with gentile nationalist movements. Where are they similar? Where do they differ?

Forward.com: The term “alt-right” is a hipper-sounding version of the original notion of the “alternative right,” which Paul Gottfried, a Jewish academic, coined in 2008.

In 2008, Paul Gottfried, a Jewish academic, created the term “alternative right.” Today his notion — of a new home for conservatives who saw themselves as too extreme for the mainstream movement — has become the “alt-right,” whose adherents include a range of racists, from white separatists to neo-Nazis. Here’s a few facts about the Jew behind the coinage so cherished by anti-Semites…

Gottfried did his undergraduate work at Yeshiva University, Modern Orthodoxy’s flagship institution, and received his doctorate from Yale, according to the website of Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, where he spent much of his career and is still listed as an emeritus professor.

He’s a political philosopher and intellectual historian who over the course of his academic career published prolifically with mainstream and elite presses: “The Strange Death of Marxism: The European Left in the New Millennium,” by University of Missouri Press, in 2005, for example, and in 1999, “After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State” by Princeton University Press.

He also devised the term “paleoconservative” for conservatives who value limited government, tradition and Western identity, according to the “Conservapedia,” a Wikipedia-type website. Gottfried and a colleague tacked the prefix “paleo” onto “conservative” specifically to contrast themselves with “neoconservatives” who emphasize an interventionist United States over most other policies. Paleoconservatives favor an isolationist foreign policy, restrictions on immigration and controls on free trade.

Indeed, Gottfried’s background comports with that of many neoconservatives in that he is Jewish and was born in the Northeast and educated in an Ivy League institution. He is, however, their sworn enemy, castigating them for being so insufficiently conservative as to defend the welfare state. He also called their movement out as a Jewish one, “closely identified with the personal and ethnic concerns of its Jewish celebrities.”

In 2008, he founded and still runs the H.L. Mencken Club, to create conferences that would provide a regular gathering place for conservatives like himself. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, these conferences have from their first meeting served to bring together racists and white nationalists.

In his speech at the Mencken Club’s inaugural meeting, Gottfried wrote approvingly of “sociobiology,”: the “cognitive, hereditary preconditions for intellectual and cultural achievements.” He reminded his listeners that “not everyone enjoys the same genetic precondition for learning.”

Jared Taylor, editor of the white nationalist magazine American Renaissance, has addressed the Mencken Club. His magazine features stories about eugenics and the genetic roots of human inferiority and superiority. Taylor told the Forward that “White Jews are white.” Some Jews, he has written, “see themselves as men of the West who will fight to preserve European civilization.”

COMMENTS:

* Founded the H.L. Mencken Club? Mencken was a vicious anti-Semite and only a self-hating Jew could honor him. This one fact gives away the true character of Gottfreid. The sort of Jew we ought to shun and denounce.
Here is a quote from the LA Times:
The previously secret diary of writer and social critic H. L. Mencken discloses virulent anti-Semitism, racism and pro-Nazi leanings, shocking even the sympathetic Mencken scholar who edited it.

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6 Media Pillars of the ‘Alt-Right’

Posted on August 29, 2016 by Luke Ford

Forward.com has apparently turned off its comments for its Alt-Right articles.

Forward.com:

1. Breitbart.com

The conservative news site Breitbart has quickly become recognized as the leading publication in the push to take the views of the “alt-right” into the mainstream. Andrew Breitbart, one of the founding editors of the Huffington Post, created the site in 2007. Its latest chairman, Steve Bannon, was just hired to be the manager of the Trump campaign.

2. American Renaissance

Jared Taylor founded AR in 1990 as part of his New Century Foundation, an early center of pseudoscientific ideas about race. It has been both a print magazine and an online publication. It claims to promote a free flow of ideas about segregation, education and immigration, but “regardless of its calm tone and academic look and feel, the magazine openly peddles white nationalism,” according to the watchdog Southern Poverty Law Center.

AR hosts conferences that bring in many white supremacist speakers, many of whom hide behind euphemistic terms like “racialism,” “white advocacy” and the “alt-right.”

AR is unique among the movement’s publications in that it has demurred on the subject of Jewish inclusion. In a 2006 op-ed, Taylor wrote defended his decision to publish articles by Jewish writers as a way to broaden the movement.

“AR has taken an implicit position on Jews by publishing Jewish authors and inviting Jewish speakers to AR conferences,” he wrote. “It should be clear to anyone that Jews have, from the outset, been welcome and equal participants in our efforts.”

3. Radix Journal

Richard Spencer, the leading voice of the “alt-right,” founded Radix Journal in 2012. It is a publication of the National Policy Institute, the Washington think tank that is the center of the movement’s push into mainstream politics. Spencer is the chairman of NPI, and contributes regularly to Radix.

Biannually in print and in several posts a day online, Radix posts long format, personal essay-style pieces promoting white racial heritage, decrying the tragedy of multiculturalism and attacking mainstream conservatives as “cuckservatives” — a Republican who makes a concession of any kind to the Democrats.

4. Daily Stormer

Billing itself as “The World’s Most Visited Alt-Right Site,” the Daily Stormer is the most openly neo-Nazi media outlet of the “alt-right.” Andrew Anglin, an avowed neo-Nazi, started the site in 2013 after shuttering his year-old site, TotalFascism.com. Total Fascism published long-format articles promoting white supremacy, while Daily Stormer’s articles look a lot like classic Buzzfeed articles in style: lots of GIFs, snarky comments and embedded Tweets and Youtube videos.

5. VDARE

Named for the first white person born in North America (Virginia Dare), VDARE is a white supremacist website that the SPLC has described as “an anti-immigration hate website.” Both Jared Taylor and Richard Spencer have contributed to VDARE.

Peter Brimelow, a self-described “paleoconservative,” founded VDARE in 1999. Brimelow believes that immigration is to blame for the September 11 attacks.

6. The Right Stuff

The Right Stuff is an anti-Semitic blog run by Mike Enoch, who has been a speaker at National Policy Institute events. A virulent anti-Semite, Enoch has said that the movement is one based around “ethno-nationalism, meaning that nations should be as ethnically and racially homogeneous as possible.”

The Right Stuff also runs the podcast The Daily Shoah, which created the parentheses, or (((echoes))) meme, in a 2014 podcast. The meme was created because “all Jewish surnames echo throughout history,” an allusion to the age-old conspiracy that Jews run the world through a secret network of power.

After the (((echoes))) meme came to widespread media attention in May the Anti-Defamation League added it to their list of recognized hate symbols.

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