May 17, 2016 Love, Marriage & Orthodox Judaism Luke Ford No sacred cows.

Love, Marriage & Orthodox Judaism

Posted on May 17, 2016 by Luke Ford

Marc B. Shapiro blogs: The Yated “translation” omits anything about R. Shulman and R. Sher’s daughter “falling in love.” This is because there is no such concept in the haredi world (and in traditional Jewish societies, in both the Ashkenazic and Sephardic worlds, such a notion was hardly found at all). Any love between husband and wife is said to come after marriage, and the biblical support for this concept, repeated in numerous texts (both haredi and pre-haredi[4]), is found in Genesis 24:67: “Isaac brought her into the tent of his mother Sarah, and he married Rebekkah. So she became his wife, and he loved her.” This verse states that Isaac loved Rebekkah, but only after he married her.[5] R. Gamaliel Rabinowitz goes so far as to state that any love that is found before marriage arises from sin, as there is no room for “feelings” before marriage…

R. David Cohen, the Nazir, is an example of one who fell in love before marriage. In fact, his relationship with his future wife, Sarah, is a great love story. They were separated from each other for twelve years. He was in Europe and Eretz Yisrael and she was in Russia and later trapped behind the Iron Curtain. Throughout these long years they remained committed to each other, and the Nazir kept her picture on his desk.

… the Rav fell in love with his future wife in Berlin. R. Ronnie Ziegler writes as follows here:

“The Rav’s most important and fateful encounter in Berlin was that with his wife, Dr. Tonya (Lewit) Soloveitchik (1904-1967). A student at the University of Jena, where she obtained a Ph.D. in education, she was introduced to Rav Soloveitchik by her brother, a fellow student at University of Berlin. Although a scion of the illustrious Soloveitchik family was expected to conclude a match with the daughter of a prominent rabbi or at least a successful businessman, Rav Soloveitchik fell in love with Tonya Lewit and married her in 1931 despite her family’s undistinguished lineage and lack of means.”

R. Ziegler continues by describing the deep connection between the Rav and Tonya.

As mentioned in the previous lecture, the Rav’s relationship with his wife was one of the two most significant relationships in his life. He had unlimited esteem for her – his dedication of “The Lonely Man of Faith” reads: “To Tonya: A woman of great courage, sublime dignity, total commitment, and uncompromising truthfulness.” He respected her opinion and heeded her advice, both in practical and in intellectual matters. It was on her advice that he changed the topics of his annual Yahrzeit (memorial) lectures for his father, which attracted thousands of listeners, to matters which non-scholars could relate to (such as prayer, Torah reading, and holidays). [The halakhic portions of some of these lectures are collected in the two volumes of Shiurim Le-zekher Abba Mari z”l.] In a poignant passage in a teshuva lecture delivered after his wife’s death, he recounted how he used to consult her before speaking:
“The longing for one who has died and is gone forever is worse than death. The soul is overcome and shattered with fierce longing. . . . Several days ago, I once again sat down to prepare my annual discourse on the subject of repentance. I always used to discuss it with my wife and she would help me to define and crystallize my thoughts. This year, too, I prepared the discourse while consulting her: “Could you please advise me? Should I expand this idea or cut down on that idea? Should I emphasize this point or that one?” I asked, but heard no reply. Perhaps there was a whispered response to my question, but it was swallowed up by the wind whistling through the trees and did not reach me.” (On Repentance [Jerusalem, 1980], p. 280)
Rav Soloveitchik’s wife was his best and perhaps only real friend. His natural proclivity towards loneliness, which we will encounter repeatedly in his writings, was heightened in his philosophy to an ideal, which expresses itself in an invigorating sense of one’s own uniqueness. One can be lonely even, or perhaps especially, when surrounded by friends, colleagues, and family. This is a constructive force which propels a person toward his individual destiny, while also propelling him to seek a depth-connection with God and with his fellow man. Aloneness, as opposed to loneliness, is a disjunctive emotion – it is a sense of lacking companionship, of being abandoned and forlorn. The passage above highlights the Rav’s almost unbearable sense of aloneness following his wife’s death in 1967 after a long struggle with cancer. He is reported to have said, “After my father’s death, I felt like a wall of my house had fallen down. After my wife’s death, I felt like the entire house had collapsed.”

Concerning the matter of falling in love before marriage, it is noteworthy that the great R. Hayyim Joseph David Azulai (the Hida) was in love with the woman who would later be his wife, and whom he knew for a number of years before they were married…

I am quite surprised by the example the author uses. In commenting on the rabbinic derashah connecting the words מורשה and מאורסה,[21] he uses an example that portrays a romantic relationship. He tells of a rich man, apparently newly married, who loved his wife and tried to woo her by telling her how greatly he loved her. “His love for her increased in quantity and quality beyond how other grooms love their brides.”
This type of description would be unusual enough in a rabbinic work. Yet it gets even more unusual when R. Fried continues by telling us that the rich man showered her with hugs and kisses and placed an expensive necklace around her neck as a sign of his love. R. Fried also elaborates on why, despite all these signs of affection, the woman did not reciprocate with any feelings of love. Later he explains that since the Torah is to us like one bound with erusin, that is why we show it love, decorate it with silver and gold, and even kiss it, just like a groom does with his bride! It happens to be a clever derashah, and ends with how if you want the Torah (i.e., God) to love you back, it is not enough to only support the Torah. One must also support the poor Torah scholars, the “relatives” of the Torah.
Is it just me, or is anyone else surprised by this derashah? I can’t imagine using the imagery found here as part of a derashah before a haredi audience in order to inspire them to be generous with their support of Torah scholars. With the mention of hugging and kissing the bride, I don’t even think this would go over well in front of a Modern Orthodox audience. [22]
I am doubly astounded by the fact that the derashah we have just seen was written by an outstanding student of the Hatam Sofer, one who also showed his halakhic expertise by authoring a volume of responsa titled שו”ת מהרא”ף…

R. Samson Raphael Hirsch, in his commentary to Gen. 24:67, writes as follows:

“Like the marriage of the first Jewish son [Jacob], Jewish marriages, most Jewish marriages, are contracted, not by passion but by reason and judgment. Parents, relations and friends consider which young people are really suited to each other, bring them together, and then love grows more and more, the more they get to know each other. But most non-Jewish marriages are made by what they call “love”, and one has only to glance at the novels depicting life to notice what a gulf there usually yawns between the “love” before marriage and after, how rapid and insipid everything then seems, how different from all the glamour one had imagined etc. etc. Such “love” is blind, every step into the future brings disappointment. But of Jewish marriage it says: ויקח את רבקה ותהי לו לאשה ויאהבה. There the wedding is not the culmination but the seed, the root of love!”

Reading all of these passages shows us how much has changed both culturally and sociologically. I don’t think there is a parent in the Modern Orthodox world who would support a child’s marriage if the son or daughter was not convinced that he/she loved the future spouse.

The phrase חולי האהבה is used by Maimonides in Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Teshuvah 10:3 (חולת אהבה appears in Song of Songs 2:5). He states:

“What is the love of God that is befitting? It is to love the Eternal with a great and exceeding love so strong that one’s soul shall be knit up with the love of God, and one should be continually enraptured by it, like a love-sick individual, whose mind is at no time free from his passion for a particular woman, the thought of her filling his heart at all times, when sitting down or rising up, when he is eating or drinking.”

Although some have described Maimonides as akin to Spock when it comes to emotions, anyone who reads the passage just quoted will see that Maimonides understood very well what being in love is all about.

The most recent book to appear in my series with Academic Studies Press is Maxine Jacobson, Modern Orthodoxy in American Judaism: The Era of Rabbi Leo Jung. Anyone with an interest in the history of Orthodoxy in America will want to read this book, and I am very happy that I was able to include it, together with other high quality works, in my series, “Studies in Orthodoxy.” Rather than offer my own description of the book, here is an “official” description, which appears on Amazon.

This work presents the issues of Modern Orthodox Judaism in America, from the decades of the twenties to the sixties, by looking at the activities of one of its leaders, Rabbi Dr. Leo Jung, pulpit rabbi, community leader and writer, whose career spanned over sixty years, beginning in the 1920s. Jung is a fulcrum around which many issues are explored. Rabbi Jung’s path crossed with some of the most interesting people of his time. He worked with Chaim Weizmann, the first president of Israel, with Albert Einstein to promote Yeshiva College, with Herman Wouk, American author and Pulitzer Prize winner, and with Pearl Buck, a Nobel Prize laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner.
Modern Orthodoxy went from being a threatened entity on the American scene to a well- recognized and respected force in Judaism. Orthodoxy, at first, was seen as alien to the American environment. Marshall Sklare, perhaps the most influential exponent of this notion, wrote in the 1950s that the history of Orthodoxy in America could be written in terms of a case study of institutional decay. He realized the errors of his ways in the 1970s. This is the story of the renaissance of American Modern Orthodoxy, from the disorganization of the older Orthodoxy to the new spirit of confidence that emerged after World War Two. The phenomenon of Modern Orthodoxy is examined in the context of Orthodox invigoration and change. This book has relevance for further studies in various areas. It is part of the study of religious acculturation, of the conflict between tradition and modernity and of religious reinvigoration in a secular society.

Another noteworthy recent book is Michael J. Harris, Faith Without Fear: Unresolved Issues in Modern Orthodoxy. In my blurb that appears on the back cover, I write: “A proud and sophisticated manifesto of Modern Orthodoxy, one which builds on past thinkers but does not hesitate to chart new ground as well.” Rabbi Harris deals with a number of issues such as the role and status of women, mysticism, academic biblical scholarship, and religious pluralism. He generally comes down on the more “liberal” side of what is known as Modern Orthodoxy. (An exception to this generalization is his chapter on academic biblical scholarship.) Anyone who is interested in the intellectual trends of Modern Orthodoxy will want to read Harris’s book, as it is engaged scholarship at its best…

After the retirement of R. Israel Brodie, Herzog was offered, and accepted, the position of British Chief Rabbi. The common view is that Herzog’s health problems prevented him taking up the post, but the truth is more complicated. See Bar-Zohar, Yaacov Herzog, ch. 13.

Since I have spoken in prior posts about religious men not wearing kippot, Herzog should be added to the list. Not only did he go bareheaded when representing the State of Israel in the Diaspora (and also in his famous debate with Toynbee), but as you can see from pictures in Bar-Zohar’s book, he also did so in Israel, while at work in various important government positions. Bar Zohar writes, “Even as a very young man, when he was working at the Foreign Ministry and then in the Prime Minister’s office, Yaacov did not wear a skullcap, except when saying blessings or praying.” (Yaacov Herzog, p. 111) Because of the vast changes that have taken place in Israeli society, it is hard for us to appreciate why, in the early decades of the State of Israel, some religious men, even those who were not of German background, felt that government work required removing their kippah.

You can listen to the Herzog-Toynbee debate here.

In a previous post here I referred to Yitzhak Nebenzahl as not wearing a kippah, and I mentioned that this German practice continued into his old age. In 1974 Nebenzahl was a member of the Agranat Commission which investigated the Yom Kippur War. In pictures of him from this time you can see that he was still without a kippah. A couple of people emailed me to say that by the 1980s he had abandoned the galut custom and indeed wore a big black kippah. One of them even sent a picture of him and Nebenzahl together.

In the post referred to in the previous paragraph, I also discussed Aharon Barth, who like Nebenzahl came from Germany and did not wear a kippah while at work. Subsequent to the post I found that Zorach Warhaftig mentions that after the death of Chaim Weizman, Ha-Poel ha-Mizrachi recommended to Ben Gurion that Barth be a candidate for president of the State of Israel. Warhaftig reports that Ben Gurion rejected this since Barth was too religious and thus not an appropriate representative for the average citizen.

COMMENTS:

* See R. Daniel Eidensohn’s post on the Daas Torah blog titled, “Sex as a metaphor for love of Torah & G-d”(6/14/12):

“In researching my present sefer on sexuality – it has become obvious that the current attitude towards sexual issues is different then it was in Biblical and Talmudic times. Then it was not only more openly discussed and used as a metaphor in Biblical and Talmudic texts as well as Kabbalistic writings – but there was also a very positive appreciation of sexual attraction and pleasures. In fact love of Torah and love of G-d are expressed as sexual feelings. Is it just a metaphor or is it that intense spirituality is on a continuum with human sexuality? Below is just a small sampling of texts….”

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Google Proclaims Today: ‘Proud supporters of the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia’

Posted on May 17, 2016 by Luke Ford

Great!

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Who Are Our Leading Public Intellectuals?

Posted on May 17, 2016 by Luke Ford

Comments at Greg Cochran’s blog West Hunt:

* How about Jason Malloy? He did a brilliant defence of James Watson years ago, and is collecting and analysing IQ data in a very productive way. Perhaps even more obvious, Ian Deary, for his monumental work on intelligence.

* Steve Sailer is incredibly productive and interesting. Two other interesting characters are jewamongyou (that is his chosen nom de plume) and Linh Dinh on Unz.com. Also, John Derbyshire.

* Somebody like Steve Pinker seems pretty solid model in my opinion.

-Charles Murray is another. Brought some realism to the understanding of the welfare state in the 80’s, to broad societal problems with the Bell Curve, human achievements in the 00’s, the social decline of America with Coming Apart.

-John McWhorter as one of the few(if any) public intellectuals who have addressed the most stunting ideology in America.

-Jonathan Haidt for a very interesting book to address the increasing political and social hostility in America, his campaign for intellectual diversity, his campaign against PC-culture and micro-aggressions.

-I personally I enjoy historian Niall Ferguson quite a bit. Brought some much needed correction on the past study of empire which had been bogged down with moralising.

* J. Michael Bailey of Northwestern University, whose subject of study is gender identity. His popular writing on this charged subject is thoughtful and civil. Sailer’s summary of Bailey’s becoming embroiled in charges of academic misconduct, here.

* Peter Thiel: Guy is clearly a full blown heretic on issues of equality, gender, race, democracy, etc. I think he’s regularly converting close confidants to his views based on what I’ve heard from many in interviews. Track record – check. Public talk/prediction is sparse because he’s got businesses to run, but I expect we’ll hear more from him over the years.

* Theodore Dalrymple. I thought his books about culture and the “worldview of the underclass” were very good. Here’s a good quote from Dalrymple:

“Of the thousands of patients I have seen, only two or three have ever claimed to be unhappy: all the rest have said that they were depressed. This semantic shift is deeply significant, for it implies that dissatisfaction with life is itself pathological, a medical condition, which it is the responsibility of the doctor to alleviate by medical means. Everyone has a right to health; depression is unhealthy; therefore everyone has a right to be happy (the opposite of being depressed). This idea in turn implies that one’s state of mind, or one’s mood, is or should be independent of the way that one lives one’s life, a belief that must deprive human existence of all meaning, radically disconnecting reward from conduct. A ridiculous pas de deux between doctor and patient ensues: the patient pretends to be ill, and the doctor pretends to cure him. In the process, the patient is wilfully blinded to the conduct that inevitably causes his misery in the first place.”

* Hitch had a head full of batty ideas, but he he could hold your interest because he was very good at expressing them.

One of the problems many HBD bloggers have is they post 5,000 word essays loaded with jargon. The message they are sending is that they don’t know the material well enough to be brief and they are more interested in signalling than attracting new people to their banner.

* Steve Sailer is an updated George Orwell, but with a better sense of humour and wider range of interests. And he likes Evelyn Waugh.

The late Larry Auster was no good on science but very good in other ways. See for example: LAPD coins new phrase for rampant black homicide of non-blacks. He would have been rich and famous if he’d taken the course that you might have expected from his genetics (cf. Charles Krauthammer, Jennifer Rubin, et al).

* I don’t think somebody counts as a public intellectual if his only platform is a blog that respectable people won’t mention. A PI writes newspaper columns and goes on talk shows and that kind of thing. Otherwise he’s just an intellectual.

* For an amusing read I’d recommend Paul Johnson’s ‘Intellectuals’ which essentially sets out the appalling person failings of several prominent figures who have been seen in this category.

Steven Pinker, Jon Haidt, & Richard Dawkins are some of the better PI’s. Dawkins has obviously become quite controversial since he started including Islam in his polemics against religion.

Otherwise it’s easier to think of ones who have managed to outrage the progressive consensus. Examples, include Martin Amis (on Islam), David Starkey (London riots). Actually, Cambridge historian Starkey seems to have caused outrage to various groups going on this quotation:

“This is not the case for Dr Malachi McIntosh, director of studies in the English department at King’s College, who said: ‘David Starkey is widely known for his racist, sexist and classist comments and because of that does not represent a community composed of people from all places and walks of life.’

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Beit T’Shuvah board sets emergency meeting amid dispute between new CEO and longtime leadership

Posted on May 17, 2016 by Luke Ford

Jewish Journal: The board of directors of Beit T’Shuvah, one of the nation’s premier Jewish addiction treatment centers, has scheduled an emergency meeting for Tuesday following an email sent to all employees by new CEO Bill Resnick on the morning of Sunday, May 15.
The email, titled, “Cleaning house,” informed Beit T’Shuvah’s 116 employees that its key leadership, including founder Harriet Rossetto and spiritual leader Rabbi Mark Borovitz, had been fired.
Resnick’s email, which was obtained by the Journal, also announced the firing of three other top-level officials at Beit T’Shuvah: alternative sentencing coordinator Carrie Newman, director of administration and admissions Brandon Berry, director of clinical training Rebecca Share, as well as Beit T’Shuvah’s attorney, Eve Wagner. Resnick also wrote that he would sue Wagner for malpractice, as well as board chair Russell Kern and board member Jon Esformes for “illegal and unethical behavior.”

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Becoming the People of the Talmud: Oral Torah as Written Tradition in Medieval Jewish Cultures by Talya Fishman

Posted on May 17, 2016 by Luke Ford

“Zachary Braiterman teaches modern Jewish thought and philosophy in the Department of Religion at Syracuse University.” He writes:

About a year ago, I penned online at Zeek Magazine a vicious attack on the Tikvah Fund and the Jewish Review of Books, which is funded by the Fund. In it, I attempted to expose the Tikvah Fund as a neoconservative organization that attempts to press conservative cultural content into the liberal American Jewish bloodstream, and that they do so by stealth, hiding ideological hash behind academic formats and content. The piece received a lot of negative attention from some colleagues, mostly from those who have participated, for pay, at Tikvah Fund centers and who argue that the program is on the up and up. But at last year’s conference of the Association of Jewish Studies (2011), I received almost only positive feedback from colleagues, who are concerned about the kinds of distortions introduced into the academic study of Judaism by the Tikvah Fund and its many, subsidized platforms it sponsors.
Some of my colleagues were persuaded by the article, some not. For evidence, I culled two sources: [1] the first 7 runs of the Jewish Review of Books, all of which, I argued, display a conservative orientation and an anti-liberal animus as regards Judaism and Jewish culture, and [2] remarks found online in in-house materials explicating the donor strategy as developed by Roger Hertog, who is the big Wall Street money behind the Tikvah Fund. (For some reason, these were posted on obscure parts of the internet which I dug up on the twentieth or thirtieth page of multiple Google searches.)
This time, however, the Jewish Review of Books, and by extension the Tikvah Fund, might have bitten off more than it can chew by publishing the very caustic review of Talya Fishman’s award winning Becoming the People of the Talmud. The review was written by renowned historian Haym Soloveitchik, who has a reputation. The review was about as nasty as it comes.
All of this was the very big gossip at the Association of Jewish Studies conference this year (2012). Most of my colleagues at were upset by the tone of Soloveitchik’s review. Many have speculated that the invective is fueled by a long feud between Soloveitchik and Fishman’s mentor at Harvard, the late, legendary Isadore Twersky. Certainly, there was blood in the water, but I’m not sure whose. I know for a fact that the editor in chief of the Jewish Review of Books took a lot of heat for publishing a review which was actually rejected by numerous scholarly journals. That being the case, lots of people wanted to know why this piece was published. There was a lot of anger about it, not because the review was critical, but because of the invective. Maybe gender had something to do with why Haym Soloveitchik chose to attack Talya Fishman, something that might have passed notice at the the Jewish Review of Book, where gender is not an operative category. Who knows?
When the Jewish Review of Books pushes an over-the-top attack piece, there’s usually an ideological agenda behind it. There’s a pattern –the rip-downs of books on independent minyanim, Jewish secularism, contemporary spirituality, the New American Haggadah. The attack mode is supposed to hearken back to the founding ethos of and mimic the intellectual blood sport at Commentary Magazine back in its heyday, right before it went neo-conservative. But here, the point is to push a conservative viewpoint against a more liberal one.
Previously, the Jewish Review of Books, when they decided to publish destructive, acrimonious reviews, chose relatively easy-moving targets. Not this time. Fishman is a respected historian at the University of Pennsylvania, and it seems that this time, something wicked has been allowed to scutter into the close-knit of the Association of Jewish Studies. Since I never subscribed to and no longer read the Jewish Review of Books, I picked up a free copy of the offending article at the conference. I tried to read it charitably. Maybe Soloveitchik had a point if you could sift a main line of substantive argument; none of my friends were having it, and I gave up.
For me, the critical upshot is this. It might be the case that prior to the modern period Jewish society was not universally “orthodox,” as we understand the term today as meaning “dedicated to rabbinic law and rabbinic authority,” that these forms of authority came relatively late as a cultural, historical, social, and textual set of constructs. While proof has been tendered by Soloveitchik that Fishman may have made this or that mistake, no proof has been offered to prove that her thesis is not true in some basic ways. It seems to me that Soloveitchik sought to score points in order to knock down Fishman’s thesis without himself providing any evidence for the standard, traditional view regarding the social history of Jewish law and authority, i.e. the traditional version that he himself not only supports, but which is also the version that his storied family embodies in the world of modern orthodox Judaism.
While I can’t comment on the bona fides of this dispute, I am going to have to trust that the Jewish Studies scholars who awarded Fishman’s book the National Jewish Book Award’s Nahum M. Sarna Memorial Award for scholarship knew what they were doing. As to what is right and wrong about the book’s claims, that’s a topic best left to cooler heads, and to publishing venues whose ideological agendas are not, in my opinion, so politically skewed as is the case over at the Jewish Review of Books.

By Haym Soloveitchik | Winter 2013:

“The People of the Book” Muhammad called the Jews, and by the “Book” he meant the Bible. Observant Jews nowadays don’t live by the Bible, but by the Talmud—but how long has that been the case? When did Jews start to live by the complex regulations of the Talmud; when did its regimen achieve its decisive hold? In brief, when did the reign of the Talmud begin?

Talya Fishman’s new study on this central issue has awakened wide interest and received high honors. Last year, the Jewish Book Council gave Becoming the People of the Talmud: Oral Torah as Written Tradition in Medieval Jewish Culture its prestigious Nahum M. Sarna Memorial National Jewish Book Award for Scholarship. The book is gracefully written, heavily documented, and advances a revolutionary argument. In fact, it challenges every notion of the past millennium about this fundamental problem and, by implication, overturns many of the most basic assumptions about the history of halakhah.

The standard version of when, where, and how the Talmud attained its normative standing runs like this: Sometime between the years 600 and 725 C.E. a group of mostly anonymous scholars known as savoraim collected and edited a vast number of the halakhic discussions that had taken place in the rabbinic academies of Mesopotamia from 200 until the middle of the 5th century. The result was the Babylonian Talmud (the Bavli). Parallel halakhic discussions had taken place in Palestine that eventuated in a Palestinian Talmud (the Yerushalmi). As Palestine was in the Byzantine Empire and Mesopotamia in the Sassanian one, the two different compendia scarcely competed. But when the Muslim conquest in the 7th century united these two worlds, the authority of the caliphs stretched from Persia to the Pyrenees, and struggles between the heads of the Palestinian academies and those of Babylonia for hegemony took on sudden urgency.”

JEREMY ROSEN WRITES:

This winter edition of the Jewish Review of Books reminded me of what a brilliant and forthright man he is. He wrote one of the most scathing reviews of another academic’s work I have ever come across. And believe me the academic world is a hotbed of rivalry, vicious infighting, and cruel nastiness. Still, this review is all the more remarkable because most reviewers pull their punches, offer sycophantic plaudits, and at most damn with faint praise, usually with a view to being asked to contribute again. Publishers and their running dogs do not take kindly to having their stars demolished.

The object of Haym’s scorn is a book written by Talya Fishman, professor of Religious Studies and Modern Intellectual History at the University of Pennsylvania. It is entitled Becoming the People of the Talmud: Oral Torah as Written Tradition in Medieval Jewish Cultures. Her thesis is that, unlike conventional wisdom, neither the text nor the authority of the Talmud we have today were fixed until the Tosaphists, the generations succeeding Rashi (R. Shlomo Yitzchaki 1040 – 1105) who wrote analytical and legal commentaries to supplement Rashi’s more textual work. They benefited from the change in European intellectual life from an oral to a written authority around the 12th century. The work is contentious from both sides.

Haym builds his rebuttal on Fishman’s own confession that she is neither a medievalist nor a Talmud scholar and relies almost entirely on secondary scholarship. Had she been able to study the primary texts, she could have avoided the catalogue of basic errors she made that completely undermine her theory. The texts themselves refute her assertions. You have to read the article to get a sense of how comprehensively he demolishes her position.

He also reveals that, having seen an early draft of a crucial chapter, he wrote to Dr. Fishman urging her not to publish the work as it would simply mislead English speaking readers about the historical and textual facts. He goes on to express his amazement that the book won the Nahum M. Sarna Memorial National Jewish Book Award for Scholarship. He concludes that the panel of judges simply could not have read the work, or if they had then they themselves were so ignorant of Jewish texts that they lacked the wit or expertise to judge its merit.

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Jewish security patrol trio accused of beating gay black man likely to avoid prison

Posted on May 17, 2016 by Luke Ford

Chaim Amalek writes: “Old Cossack joke about America: In America, the Hassids beat YOU!
I just want all of your liberal goy readers to know that Judaism is actually very tolerant when it comes to gays. By which I mean you would need at least two eye witnesses to an act of buggery between men for the death sentence to be carried out on them.”

New York Daily News: The three Orthodox Jewish men accused of brutally beating a gay black man and leaving him partially blind will likely not serve prison time under an expected plea deal, the Daily News has learned.

The case largely crumbled once at least two witnesses to the December 2013 beatdown changed their version of events after initially implicating the members of the Shomrim volunteer Jewish security patrol, sources said.

Also, surveillance video from the Williamsburg, Brooklyn, scene is limited, people familiar with the case told The News.

Taj Patterson, 25, was walking down Flushing Ave. in Williamsburg in December 2013 when he was set upon by a gang of men shouting anti-gay slurs, prosecutors said. Patterson suffered severe injuries including a broken eye socket and a torn retina that has left him permanently blind in one eye.

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Ashkenazi Jews Least Likely To Date Blacks, Asians

Posted on May 17, 2016 by Luke Ford

PRINCETON REPORT: “Specifically, we see that whites who identified as Jewish were dropped from the analysis of black exclusion because it was a perfect predictor; that is, all white men and women who identified as Jewish excluded blacks as possible dates; all white women who identified as Jewish also excluded Asian men as possible dates.”

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Jews On The Alt-Right

Posted on May 17, 2016 by Luke Ford

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* I suspect a lot of the Jews ‘on our side’ just don’t make a lot of noise about being Jewish and do whatever else is required. Heck, Drudge has been beating the drum for Trump this whole time.

* I’d like to see the [Jewish] leadership make a deal too, but Kevin MacDonald is not going to usher in an American Holocaust. The country as a whole just isn’t antisemitic enough, dictatorial powers are harder to assume with Congress fighting the President, and Americans don’t follow orders as well as Germans, for better or worse.

* This is actually has happened more than you might think, also in right wing movements in E. Europe. The Nazis believed (and in this they were probably not wrong) that Jews would rise to the top of any organization that does not take active measures to bar them. This makes sense given the gap in IQ, especially verbal IQ.

The cream of the (1/2) Jewish crop doesn’t usually look for work in the leadership of right wing anti-Semitic organizations, but compared to the toothless dimwits that form the bulk of the membership, even an average mischling is a rocket scientist.

* LF: Every strongly identifying group holds negative views of outsiders, or what is called “racist” or “bigoted” or “nasty” or “ugly.” Jews no more or less than the Japanese, the Australians, the Tibetans, the Muslims, etc.

When a goy strongly identifies with his race, religion or nation, he will be likely to hold some anti-Jewish views, just as when a Jew strongly identifies with being Jews, he will likely hold anti-goyim views.

That’s how social identity works. It is normal, natural and usually healthy.

If people are arbitrarily divided into teams, they will quickly identify with their team and develop a filter that makes their team superior.

Every people view themselves as specially chosen, the center of the universe, etc.

* Drudge is a non-fem gay Jew. Such people often have off-the-charts verbal/creative skills. He was broke and poor in LA for a few years, and just by working 60-hour weeks, week after week, built a simple website that made him millions of dollars and huge influence.

While Drudge is not technically a paleo given that he gets caught up in pro-war fevers, he’s closer than most other right-wing online people with big audiences, and does provide plenty of links to anti-war conservatives. He has always been a generous linker to Pat Buchanan and Ann Coulter. As well as the very dovish Republican Bob Novak when he was still alive.

The anti-semite crowd, which presumably has the goal of getting the broader paleo right to adopt its views, really has no plan to replace the sizable Jewish talent like Drudge currently working for us.

Drudge’s really unique contribution is finding and promoting the articles that provide the best possible hard-right spin on the story of the day, plus promoting under-the-radar stories that have the potential to help our narrative, whether it is a Clinton scandal or news-worthy crime by blacks or illegals the MSM wants to avoid.

* As a Jewish person, it’s taken me a long time to get around to this position but at this point I agree. Anti white, anti-Christian sentiments are arguably considerably worse at this point than anti-Semitism.

* Radix is not “anti-Semitic”, that most certainly isn’t their focus. An occasional article has some (((references))) but reminding readers of the disproportionate number of Jews in the media or government, which is normally why these are used, is not in itself anti-Semitic.

Your further point about degrees of anti-Semitism is really important. I’m Jewish and know people that:
1. Think Jews are disproportionately influential
2. Think they use that influence for their own gain
3. Think they also use that influence to attack their host societies
4. Think that all Jews should be exiled or exterminated as a result.

For me, only #4 is truly anti-Semitic. #1 and 2 are obvious, and #3 has enough of an empirical and theoretical basis that it needs to at least be taken seriously and debated, not dismissed as some kind of irrational primal hatred.

* I also am beginning to wonder if we should start thinking in terms of “JewE,” that is, of a Jewish establishment that produces “official Jewish thought” that does not necessarily reflect how rank-and-file Jews think. JewE would be the AJC, the ADL, etc.

The question here is whether most Jews really support the ideas of JewE. Granted, a large number of them seem to support these ideas on the surface – but how many really believe in the foundational ideas, and how many just sort of go along for the same reason goodwhites in general do? (And of course, there are many who are opposed – Paul Gottfried, Nicholas Stix). If large numbers of Jews in Europe are supporting the “right-wing” parties, as I have heard they are, perhaps there is as large a gulf between JewE and rank-and-file Jews as between GOPe and rank-and-file Republicans.

* But most American Jews actually do support all this anti-white silliness, though mostly through guilt rather than genuine animus. ‘We have been oppressed, so we have the duty to defend the oppressed’–that sort of thing. Whether George Soros or Bill Kristol is thinking things out three steps ahead and swamping the country with nonwhites to prevent an Aryan uprising, I can’t say–wouldn’t surprise me the way some of these guys work but they could be sincere too. Mostly the rank and file are SWPL liberals, though unsurprisingly more pro-Israel. (But not absolutely–look at J Street.)

In Europe, I think things are changing, but there is no large Muslim population to scare people here. It’s kind of ironic since the right wing really did kill a lot of Jews in Europe and hasn’t done much damage on this side of the pond. (Leo Frank–maybe?) Of course, over there avoiding antisemitism is a nice way to put some air between you and the Nazis, who really f***ed things up.

* Everyone knows that Pollard was doing it primarily for the money but but he has wrapped himself in the Israeli flag for decades and he has rabid supporters in Israel naming streets after him (or trying to) so, yeah, dual loyalty.

I remember when he was arrested some of the people who were most angry at him were Jews, at least in the NYC area. Which is part of why he got such a long sentence.

I realize that Pollard didn’t do as much damage as Ames or Hanssen, but I also find the various apologia on his behalf distasteful. He will be sent to Israel soon enough; they have already given him citizenship and are also apparently offering him a pension for the rest of his life.

* I used to hold that opinion, but reading the comments at sites like this blog and Radix (the educated Jew-haters) convinced me that hatred of Jews was palatable to a much broader segment of society than I had previously supposed. You’re a half-Jew and so possibly more protected than I am – the Nazis left the final disposition of half and quarter-Jews in Germany for after the war (though the East European mischlings were targeted for extermination). But if I were you, I’d keep my passport up to date and a packed bag in the closet just in case. What is so sad is that it didn’t have to be this way. If the Jewish community could have controlled its radical social justice warriors and pro-immigration fanatics, there would have been less reason for a backlash against us, not to mention a nicer country in which to live.

* “Gendered Racial Exclusion among White Internet Daters.”

Relevant portion: “Specifically, we see that whites who identified as Jewish were dropped from the analysis of black exclusion because it was a perfect predictor; that is, all white men and women who identified as Jewish excluded blacks as possible dates; all white women who identified as Jewish also excluded Asian men as possible dates.”

* While you, personally, may not be “wary of guns in the least,” many, perhaps most, Jewish-Americans are. They are certainly vastly overrepresented in the anti-gun movement. This isn’t about you personally – it’s about group tendencies. A part of the reason may be that Jews are largely urban and suburban dwellers in the U.S. Another reason might be more in the way of an ingrained culture of fear of “men on horseback.” I think I am not the only one to think that many urban, elite Jews see, unreasonably in my view, a vast horde of armed “flyover country” Christians as potential “cossacks” on the pogrom in the making. It seems to me many Jews share the idea that a divided – multicultural, if you will – gentile population is far safer for Jews than being amidst a monolithic and massive Christian white majority.

Look, I am someone who is ethnically East Asian who spends most of his free time riding horses and hunting on his West Virginia farm. But that doesn’t mean I am typical of Asians in America. I don’t have a problem accepting reasoned critiques about Asian immigrants in the U.S., toward whom, to be frank, I do not feel any great affinity, and, about whom, in fact, I make some of my own critiques frequently.

I did not “learn to dislike Jews.” It would be more accurate to say that, as I matured, I no longer saw Jews in an overwhelmingly positive manner as I did in youth. That doesn’t mean I “dislike” Jews. I welcome all Americans of good will (yes, “even” blacks).

As a group, Jews are what Amy Chua called “a market-dominant minority” – one of a different religion, to boot – with all that entails. As Michael Barone wrote in “New Americans,” Jews are always “voting against the Czar,” which means that, overwhelmingly, they vote against my team in domestic politics.

Second, I have a high degree of admiration for Sabras (native Israelis), and have told my Sabra friends so. You might be surprised to hear that some of my Israeli colleagues actually have a pretty dim view of American Jews. They told me that they don’t usually criticize the American Jewry in public given the latter’s enormous political and economic importance to the State of Israel. But their private cricism – shared over many nights of drinks – seems to be that 1) many American Jews are “all talk, no action” types (van Creveld’s “men without chests”) whom they do not respect; 2) meanwhile some of the overrought ones who made Aliyah and settled in West Bank (Judea/Samaria) seem to be unhinged people who want to play cowboys and Indians with the Arabs… unlike many Sabras who have grown up next to ordinary Arabs and want to live in peace with them at some point.

Third, I did speak to van Creveld at length, but it was about counter-terrorism, which was the reason I spent time in Israel.

“And what the hell is that long paragraph supposed to mean?”

I wrote of Jewish fear of, and contempt for, gentiles – especially non-Jewish whites and Asians earlier, to which you seem to take great offense. But here is a Jewish writer, on a major U.S. newspaper, clearly expressing that anxiety: “Was I, a Jewish-American writer, driven to pique, in part, by a member of a group that threatens Jewish-American cultural domination, just as American Jews once threatened the WASP mandarinate? Well, maybe… Will the verbal brio and intellectual bent of Jews, their edgy irony and frank super-competitiveness give way to Asian discretion, deference to the community, and gifts for less verbal pursuits like music, science and math? Will things become, as they once were under WASP hegemony, quieter?”

He seems to view WASPs as a defeated rival group and see Asians as a future rival group, a sentiment that I heard more than once from other Jews in America.

Your overreaction to my general criticism of Jews as a group, rather than about individuals among them who vary, seems to confirm what I wrote rather than invalidate it. It seems that unless I spoke about Jews in only the most positive terms, a swift reaction of personal attacks is in order. Again, that’s the very point I made earlier when I wrote the following:

“I don’t think anyone is implying that ALL Jews hate Christians. The sentiment seems to me to be more about the double standard/hypocrisy now common in the media and mainstream popular culture – that the accusation of “anti-Semitism” is utilized frequently by Jews, true or not, but any critique of ant-gentilism by Jews is immediately denounced as anti-Semitism/racism/irrational and ignorant prejudice.”

Posted in Alt Right, Jews | Comments Off

Birthday Cake Hate Hoax Crumbles, But Without Legal Consequences

Posted on May 16, 2016 by Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* Since when did Black churches accept openly LGBT pastors? I blame it on the crossdressing Madea films.

* He acknowledged his actions, but did he actually apologize?

He sounds mentally unstable:

“For me, it was humiliating,” he said then, “because being a pastor who is also openly gay, I’ve had to deal with this in the past and literally the feeling that I had just resurfaced a bunch of painful memories of things that have happened to me.”

Apparently, self-inflicted fake accusations are humiliating and painful–because he’s had to deal with self-inflicted fake accusations, in the past.

* A fraud wrapped in a hoax inside a light crust of stupidity.

* Whole Foods probably didn’t want the stigma of prosecuting someone who was gay. The problem is, if scammers get caught and realize that all they have to do to avoid trouble is apologize, then they won’t quit. You need to start making examples out of these crooks and sticking them in jail to make them stop. People who have decided to scam don’t just do it once. If it pays off, they’ll do it again. A lot scammers try to do their work below the media radar so they don’t become notorious enough to be found out. They target small businesses instead of nationally known companies, and the lawsuit may not even make the local paper.

Do you know how many people run car accident insurance scams? Mountains of them.

* As to whether criminal charges are appropriate, it depends on whether the complaint was signed under penalty of perjury. Certainly not, however, because otherwise the People would prosecute.

In most jurisdictions this complaint constitutes instituting a (now admittedly) frivolous lawsuit, which is subject to monetary sanctions on motion by the defendant.

If Whole Foods has abandoned this remedy, there was no doubt a deal made not to pursue it in exchange for the “pastor’s” admission.

[Based on personal experience (including clinical experience), I think male homosexuals are prone to lie capriciously.]

* I have seen news reports where some women who have filed false rape reports have been charged for just that — filing a false report. This probably varies by jurisdiction, but I do not think there was any police involvement here.

Looks like straight up extortion to me, but I think Whole Foods vigorously defending itself by counter suing may sober up some of these morons. He was probably expecting them to roll over and offer him $$ just to go away. Kudos to WF.

* Gay man here; as part of the social compact for protecting gay people from targeted violence, I support punishing this hoaxer, possibly much more than he’d be punished for committing a hate crime.

The legal reasoning for creating the category of hate crimes is that the crime is intended to hurt or terrorize an entire community. Their target extends beyond the immediate victim, much as terrorism is felt to be worse than conventional crime. The same reasoning must apply to hate hoaxes, which damage the reputation of the community and the credibility of reports of actual hate crime. Some research on the extent of the community-reputation damage done by high-profile hoaxes would help in determining an appropriate punishment, but it doesn’t seem impossible that hoaxes could have a much worse effect than actual hate crimes. Perhaps the death penalty would be appropriate.

* The idea that a Whole Foods bakery in Austin, TX would be a hotbed of homophobia strained credulity to begin with. Imagine if it were a mom & pop bakery without surveillance cameras in, say, Dallas? They might have found it harder to fight a false claim like this.

* The Gay Black pastor broke one of The Ten Commandments, which is thou shall not bear false witness.

* Because he was making an accusation that likely cost WF hundreds of thousands (if not millions) in sales. If he had gotten away with his hoax, there’s little doubt that WF’s reputation would have been tarnished for years, again causing the loss of millions of dollars.

WF should be allowed to destroy this guy financially, including garnishing future wages because he nearly cost them millions. What’s the difference if the guy managed to destroy a million dollars worth of WF inventory? Nothing, except in that case he would go to prison. In this case, you can’t send him to prison so you should be able to bankrupt him.

That would send a clear message to other hoaxers.

Sicking evil lawyers on people works, just ask the ACLU.

* Perhaps iSteve may choose to comment on the latest in “misogyny”: an LA weather girl who was forced to put on a sweater, because she’s so darn cute. This, too, is being blamed on the patriarchy:

In reality, both of these cases are about women, and about women who are having trouble coping with other women who are better looking than they are, on the one hand, and women who aren’t even women but who want to pretend that they are.

I think we should support modern women to work it out, all by themselves.

Justice Kennedy’s future supreme court decision: “The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity by relieving their bladder and bowels in a place of their own choosing.”

* Mental illness in the African American community is something no one on the Left wants to talk about. To them it is a taboo subject just like Black crime.

* …the black community is also riddled with one man church operations that are basically scams. I suspect he’s one of them. He’s probably just starting out hence the hoax for attention.

Posted in America, Homosexuality | Comments Off

Underearners Anonymous

Posted on May 16, 2016 by Luke Ford

I listened to some of its programs online and heard these gems:

* If I fear down deep that I am a horrible person, then of course I will keep sabotaging myself. I won’t allow myself to be successful because I believe I am bad.

* When I don’t make my bed, I am choosing under-earning. When I don’t put things away, I am choosing underearning. When I live like a slob, I am choosing underearning.

* Addicts are wounded animals. We want to go hide in a cave. What happens when you try to bring a wounded animal out of its cave? It bites you.

* Underearning is a disease of hiding. Prosperity means being authentically visible in the world.

With these realizations, I want to cry. I walk around with a guillotine over my neck. I can live free only through the maintenance of my spiritual condition. I get a daily reprieve from my destructive tendencies only if I keep turning my life over to God and live a life of service to others.

I want a woman who is willing to walk through fire for me and who can do so without sustaining any injury.

Darren: “I’m pretty sure any woman who is with you long enough, will jump into the fire!”

Susan: “Why don’t you seduce yourself into greatness like you did those innocent girls of PUC?”

Posted in Addiction | Comments Off