Rectify posts: “Let me ask you – you and some others are so concerned about the censorship of the bare breasted and otherwise revealing images – so perhaps you should adorn your books with them, such vital parts of the Jewish past after all, and not buried somewhere inside, but right in the beginning, on title pages, as they appeared in the past, to rectify the terrible historical crime perpetrated against them? Maybe you should similarly adorn Milin Chavivin of YCT and/or your articles there. Do you think your feminist and female backers would like it? If you say they wouldn’t mind, I challenge you to do so then. Consider the gauntlet as hereby having been thrown down!”
Marc B. Shapiro responds: It would be a good experiment, to see if they would censor me. But believe me, I have no feminist backers. They actually don’t like me very much (as I can explain in another post). In terms of being provocative, it’s all about keeping it interesting. I could write a detailed post on an obscure bibliographical point, but I think that would put people to sleep. I don’t think I try to be provocative, but the things that interest me are, well, provocative.
The sort of things I put on the blog do not lend themselves to to appearing in Milin Havivin (pictures and all). But I can tell you that so far, they have not tried to censor me in the slightest (and stay tuned for a future post in which I describe the censorship that led me to stop writing for Tradition).
Nachum Lamm: “Don’t I remember you once complaining over dinner that JOFA hadn’t invited you to participate in a panel on R’ Weinberg?”
Marc: “I submitted a proposal to speak (thinking it was an academic conference since I saw the call for papers at the AJS) but they turned me down. I learnt then that what they wanted at their conference was, much like EDAH, a group of people preaching to the converted. My paper was going to argue that the methodology of Orthodox feminism was a complete break with what had been the practice until then, and that therefore it is questionable if the word “Orthodox” can even be applied to it. My book on Weinberg had just come out and it was one of the few books JOFA was selling at the conference (since Weinberg is so important to Orthodox feminism due to some of his teshuvot). At the dinner (which I don’t recall) I probably said that it was ironic that the book on Weinberg was being touted at the conference but the author of the book was not welcome.”
