Noah Feldman’s recent attack on Modern Orthodox Judaism was built on a platform of half-truths, and cherry-picked scholarship designed to place halacha, Jewish law, in the worst light possible. As we pointed out, the motivation for the article was a personal bitter experience.
But as it turns out, Noah Feldman was lying about this experience. Not only did he lie, but the New York Times knew that he was lying — and went with the story anyway.
We observed that in writing this unfair attack in Torah Judaism Feldman was acting as judge, jury and executioner; some said we were too harsh, that our remarks were unwarranted ad-hominem attacks. We also accused the New York Times of Jew-hatred for they refused to run the Muhammed cartoons "out of respect for Islam" yet they ran Feldman’s outrageous attack against Orthodox Judaism with no counter argument to balance out Feldman’s venemous and untruthful screed.It seems that our remarks were not only precise — but far too generous.
Noah Feldman and his non-Jewish girlfriend were not cropped out of his class photo as he so self-righteously claimed in The New York Times Magazine. Feldman knew it before the article went for publication, and so did the editors of the New York Times.
The problem with Avrech’s writing is that I never know where he stands on an issue.
