ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL SCHOOL NEW YORK COMPENSATION

I went to Guidestar.org and found this 990 form filed for 2013, which listed salaries as follows:

Roanna Shorofsky (head of school): ~$2,142,000
Charles Levy (CFO): ~$409,000
Carol Weintraub: ~$384,000
Linda Holof-Saposh: ~$303,000
Dina Bray: ~$204,000
Lon D. Skop: ~$300,000
Livia Ahuva Alberstam: ~$350,000
Richard Wisnewski: ~$265,000

The 2012 filing indicated Roanna Shorofsky made about $600,000. The 2011 filing said she made $557,229.

Is there any other head of a Jewish day school who makes more than two million in a year? Not even Rabbi Marvin Hier does this well. Who says you can’t make good and do good at the same time?

I hope she goes on a speaking tour emphasizing the material rewards in addition to the spiritual ones in giving one’s life to Jewish education.

I wonder what kind of retirement package Moshe Rabbenu got?

It is important for Jews to respect their leaders and Jews can’t respect anyone who makes less than $500,000 a year.

Sascha writes: Interesting. But I suspect that the major bump for Roanna Sharofsky was part of a succession and retirement package: she retired at the end of the last school year. So much as Philippe de Montebello and others in similarly long-term positions got an incentive package to stay on and help with transition, that is probably the case here. I could be wrong, but I don’t think Roanna’s successor is making $2.1 mil/year.

I’m not arguing the validity of the $550, though I think one can. (She completed a major capital campaign, got two new buildings built and consolidated the three parts of the school onto a single campus in real-estate-intense NYC, not to mention successfully launching the high school, which did not exist as part of the original school…) But the $2.1 number does have a context to it and I think that’s important to understand.

Luke: Look at all these folks who head major Jewish organizations but don’t seek to cash in from their service:

On the other end of the spectrum are the Jewish executives who, according to the Forward analysis, should be getting much more.
Jennifer Gorovitz, 48, was the first woman to head a large Jewish federation, and today she remains the only one. But breaking the glass ceiling as CEO of the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco did not translate into an income equal to that of male federation leaders. Earning $311,000 for overseeing 117 employees and $134 million in expenses, Gorovitz is underpaid by 38% compared with the predicted salary in the Wharton analysis…

Robert Wexler, 62, has been serving as president of the American Jewish University in Los Angeles since 1992. The non-sectarian Jewish higher education institute runs a budget of $25 million and employs 728 faculty and administrative staff members, but pays its top executive a lower salary than expected. With $225,560 in 2012, Wexler’s salary is lower by 36% than the predicted salary.

Also on the list of underpaid Jewish executives is Scott Kaufman, CEO of the Jewish Federation of Greater Detroit. Kaufman, 47, was a real estate developer and a lay leader in the Jewish community before joining the federation. The federation spent $43 million in 2012 to provide services for the Jewish community of 80,000 in the city and its surrounding suburbs. Kaufman’s salary of $254,042 for running the organization represents a 36% underpay compared to the prediction.

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BNOS DEVORAH HIGH SCHOOL SALARIES

I went to Guidestar.org and found this 990 form filed for 2012, which listed salaries as follows:

Shulamith May: $100,000

I presume she is Rabbi Mayer May’s wife.

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A Christian State In The Middle East?

On his radio show today, Dennis Prager said: “When Ann Coulter said after 9/11 that we should go to the Middle East and convert everyone to Christianity, I ask, if the Middle East would we have Christian states doing what the Islamic state is doing? Would there be peace or would there be torture and mayhem?”

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Breakaway Minyan From Pacific Jewish Center

I hear the old guard (the Rabbi Daniel Lapin crowd) broke away from the Pacific Jewish Center (which owns about five million dollars worth of real estate, debt-free) and started their own minyan in their own space with their own rabbi on Rosh Hashanah, reducing PJC’s numbers by about a third. PJC was one of the first shuls I attended in LA. It’s located on the Venice boardwalk and I have many wonderful memories of the place. Its rabbi Eliyahu Fink is among the three most active Orthodox rabbis on FB. He graduated from Loyola Law School a few years ago but has yet to pass the California bar.

Rabbi Fink blogs regularly about controversial issues such as why people leave Orthodox Judaism. In one post, he writes: “My theory is that belief in God and Torah m’Sinai is not the primary factor in one’s choice to join, abandon, or remain in Orthodox Judaism. The primary factor is how one feels about Orthodox Judaism.”

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Michael Horowitz Settled With The SEC

Link:

A broker charged with scouring nursing homes and hospices for terminally ill patients so wealthy clients could reap death benefits from annuities contracts agreed to pay $850,000, admit limited wrongdoing and be barred from the securities industry, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission announced Thursday.
Los Angeles broker Michael Horowitz used unwitting patients in a scheme designed to reap short-term benefits for his clients, who designated the terminally ill as annuitants whose death would trigger a benefit payout, the SEC said.
Variable annuities are supposed to be long-term investments, typically used to provide income after retirement. But many also provide death benefit and bonus credit features if the annuitant—who need not be a relative—should die.
“Horowitz devised a scheme in which he used terminally ill patients’ private information for personal gain, and misled his brokerage firm into approving the variable annuity sales,” said Julie Riewe, co-chief of the SEC Enforcement Division’s asset management unit, in a news release.
According to the SEC, Horowitz paid associates who set up fake charities or organizations to identify dying people and obtain their Social Security numbers and dates of birth—information that was necessary to name them as annuitants.
In one instance, the SEC said, the fake charity paid for a woman dying of stomach cancer to take her children to Disneyland—but first required her to give them her personal information. Horowitz then allegedly arranged for the associate, Harold Ten, to buy a $1 million annuity on the woman’s life. She died a few weeks later, and Ten made $50,000.
Ten settled with the SEC in March, agreeing to pay disgorgement of $181,000, prejudgment interest of $21,000 and a penalty of $90,000.

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I Should Be More Masculine

When I got in my car this morning, I found the roof upholstery was sagging down. Probably from the heat.
My coworker loves cars. So at the end of the day, I told him about the problem and asked his advice. So he took me to a store, got some spray glue, then he gently undid the upholstery and I sprayed it with glue and stuck it back to the roof. The whole time he was upraiding me for my slovenliness and the way I treated my car and I kept placating him with the incantation, “I should be more masculine.”
We have this routine when he talks about how upset or angry he is with someone or something and I say, “That must be very frustrating.” And he says, “You don’t care.” And I say, “My therapist wants me to start caring about people.” And he says, “You don’t care. You’re too damaged. You have ice water in your veins.”

The upholstery is 80% fixed now and just 20% saggy. Let’s see how it holds up.

Tal posts: “Do you feel you lack empathy? Or is your empathy just more limited in order to enable a more effective focus? Too much empathy could possibly allow chaotic fucked up “users” to enter into, damage, and compromise your well being with their sympathy generating needs, and maybe thereby even render you incapable of offering anybody any effective help whatsoever.”

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Why Do We Have Women As Law Enforcement Officers?

Women, in general, are easier to overpower than men. If strength matters for a job, you want a man in it.

NYTIMES.com: “Omar J. Gonzalez overpowered a female Secret Service agent inside the North Portico entrance and ran through the East Room before he was tackled, according to a congressional official.”

Steve Sailer writes: “Wasn’t there a big feminist putsch a couple of years ago, using a prostitution scandal as a pretext, to turn the Secret Service over to female control? How’s that working out for the Obamas? Sounds like Michelle Obama’s feelings of feminist solidarity evaporated at the thought of her family being murdered in their home by some random male loony who can overpower a female Secret Service agent.”

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We Have A Means To Defeat ISIS

Do we have the strength to do what it takes to survive as a nation and to conquer our enemies?

Should we turn to corporate punishment against the family and relatives of those commit massive acts of terror against us such as 9/11?

The first question for Americans is — do we have the strength to do what it takes to perpetuate our people? If we say yes, then everything falls into place. If we can’t say yes, we might as well plan America’s funeral now and execute our individual escape plans from a sinking civilization.

Philip Jenkins writes:

In theory, a recipe does exist for decisively ending the Islamists’ run of victories. Through means of collective and family punishment, which explicitly targets individuals who have done no wrong, governments and armies must introduce a brutal deterrent regime that will even outweigh the massive temptations of martyrdom and an instant road to Paradise.

No U.S. government would ever introduce such a policy, and if it did, it would cease to be anything like a democratic society. The U.S. could only adopt such avowedly terrorist methods following a wrenching national debate about issues of individual and group responsibility, and the targeting of the innocent. Could any U.S. government avowedly take hostages? We would be looking at a fundamental transformation of national character, to something new and hideous. But what other solutions could or would be possible?

Given that U.S. administrations are not going to fight the Islamic State by the only effective means available—and thankfully, they aren’t—why are they engaging in this combat in the first place?

Why start a war when you don’t plan to win it?

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I’ve yet to be charged with ‘abduction with intent to defile’

By following the dictates of the Torah, I avoid this tsures (trouble).

Camille Paglia writes:

The disappearance of University of Virginia sophomore Hannah Graham two weeks ago is the latest in a long series of girls-gone-missing cases that often end tragically. A 32-year-old, 270-pound former football player who fled to Texas has been returned to Virginia and charged with “abduction with intent to defile.” At this date, Hannah’s fate and whereabouts remain unknown.

Wildly overblown claims about an epidemic of sexual assaults on American campuses are obscuring the true danger to young women, too often distracted by cellphones or iPods in public places: the ancient sex crime of abduction and murder. Despite hysterical propaganda about our “rape culture,” the majority of campus incidents being carelessly described as sexual assault are not felonious rape (involving force or drugs) but oafish hookup melodramas, arising from mixed signals and imprudence on both sides.

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Could somebody please explain to me the Ashkenazi discussion style?

As I encounter it, the Ashkenazi discussion style is usually heavy on personal attack tending to the complete and utter destruction of the opposing person, it is usually filled with contempt, “Nazi” is one of the first slurs thrown, and the Ashkenazi argument style usually has nothing to do with the topic at hand but instead aims at intimidation of anyone who disagrees by threatening them with complete annihilation, even if the argument is over sports or the weather.

This email I received is representative of this style: “You went to speak to the John Birch Society? Dude, I recommend you join AA and speak to a 12 step meeting, it would serve a better purpose. The Birchers are unrepentant white people who think that being a white christian anglo saxon protestant somehow makes one morally superior over all others. Kind of like right wing orthodox judaism but the difference is that they do not have a 5000 year tradition of higher IQ, survival against genocides, and the birchers have this irritating desire to spread the message to anyone who will listen – orthodox jews just speak about world domination at the shabbos table. You must be getting desperate for facetime in front of intellectuals, or pseudo intellectuals. Maybe you should join Ikar the pseudo affiliated jews of the westside.”

I love this phrase, “unrepentant white people.” So all white people should be sorry for being white? Every group with spirit and ambition (from Jews to the Japanese) believes it is morally superior. That’s a good thing. You can’t have a proud people if they don’t feel a special calling aka superiority. Jews don’t have a 5000 year tradition, Abraham goes back at most 4000 years. We don’t have much reason to believe that Jews had superior IQs back to Moses. The civilizations they created, aside from their writings, weren’t spectacular. Everybody who believes in their values tries to get out the word.

As for the Ashkenazi style of arguing, I’m told:

David: “Also known as point and sputter.”
Jack*: “What is it with you people?”

I find the origins of this discussion style in the Torah when the Jewish people, after the Exodus from Egypt, complain to God it would have been better if they had never left Egypt because in Egypt there were leeks.

Chaim: Please provide examples of this. Are we talking online or in real life, off-line? Who tried this on you in real life? I’ve not encountered it. Online, yes, but online is not real life.

I see it from youngish gentile white hipster types defending their diversity creed. But isn’t this what goyim call self righteousness when they use it? I think you are encountering it with some Jewish characteristics as an overlay.

Counter-arguments: “Jews like you paved the way for Hitler by driving the goyim into a corner.”

“Calling your opponents Nazis is beyond the pale. Shame on you!”

“That’s how the Nazis fought their enemies. By damning all who disagreed with them as Bolsheviks. I expect better of a Jew.”

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