I don’t drink or smoke or lend my bum to other blokes, but I have a weakness for sex, money and power, particularly when they’re combined in one alluring scenario with a secretary in a power suit, black fishnet stockings and high heels who doesn’t want to lose her job despite her atrocious typing and poor filing skills.
Dennis Prager said on his radio show Friday: "Last night I saw The Twilight Zone. It was probably the most morally serious series ever made for television. People don’t think of it that way. I have seen most of the episodes. Last night it was about a man fixated by a slot machine in Las Vegas and it ruins his life… Anybody who has a gambling problem should be shown this Twilight Zone.
"Why do people get into gambling, drugs, a lifestyle of constant sexual addiction? There are criminals who do it for this reason — excitement. There is an adrenalin rush that is achieved here that people love. It’s physiological. Kids particularly love this. They love to be excited. They feel alive when the adrenalin is rushing."
I get my biggest adrenalin highs from scoops. Nail me a big one and I walk around Pico-Robertson muttering, "There’s a new sheriff in town and his name is Levi."
My fingers twitch and I know that if I apply them to my keyboard and let my psyche free, I will shift people. I will move them around. I will get some people fired and other people hired and give others sleepless nights. I feel big and manly and important. I feel like nothing can touch me. That the ordinary rules don’t apply to me. I’m special. I’m on a mission from God. I’m on earth to deliver divine karma.
Sweet!
I no longer fear approaching women.
I feel like there are no consequences for what I’m doing. Oh, the smooth soft tropically-scented flesh that ripples under my hand…and I can say anything if I touch her just right, touch my keyboard just right, make the keys sing, make the Jews dance, oh what wild ecstasy when I play the Jewish piano.
The rabbis line up on Pico Blvd and they posken:
Sing us a song, you’re the piano man
Sing us a song tonight
Well, we’re all in the mood for a melody
And you’ve got us feelin’ alright
Dennis: "Much of what brings us happiness is not fun and much of what is fun does not bring us happiness.
"What’s true about fun is even more true about excitement.
"I think we are born with a tendency to need or not need these adrenalin rushes of massive excitement."
"One of the problems of excitement is that the next dose has to be more exciting or it is not exciting. In the movie Carnal Knowledge, the Jack Nicholson character is addicted to sex. After a certain time, it got to the point where almost nothing that would generally excite him would excite him. He couldn’t be excited by simply making love to a woman, it had to be a specific variation of a variation of a variation or he couldn’t get excited."
"If excitement is the goal, you are in trouble. There is only so much excitement that life can afford. One of the reasons that criminals do what they do is the rush for excitement."
"There are many things that make people feel joy and alive. They can feel it walking through a botanical flower garden. For other people, that is boring.
"Can we train ourselves to be excited by the non-adrenalin producing?
"I believe that almost addictions are a pursuit of excitement and a dulling of pain."
"There’s nothing wrong with excitement, it’s what you need to feel it. Do you have to jump off buildings because the 3,000 sky jumps are no longer exciting?"
"It’s a good test of your own emotional make-up."
The jumper said he found relationships boring by comparison.
"A bad excitement — there are people addicted to emotional crises. There are people who sew crisis in all the lives of the people around them. They don’t even know they do it… The person who sews chaos…are as addicted to adrenalin as the guy who jumps off buildings."
It’s a sloppy endeavor, says Todd Templin, but he and others who perform nasal rinsing swear by its sinus-soothing powers.
"I figure with all of that water shooting up my nostrils, there has to be something good going on," says Templin, an executive vice president for a Fort Lauderdale public relations firm, who suffers from chronic allergy and sinus problems.
Also called nasal washing or nasal irrigation, the practice is believed to have roots in ancient yoga traditions. But now, an increasing number of people with sinus woes are expressing interest in the age-old treatment, say doctors and makers of saline rinse products.
Dave Gallo, CEO of Med-Systems, Inc., the makers of SinuCleanse nasal washing systems, says: "Sales and the number of stores we’re in have been doubling every two years for the last decade."
Annie Lent, an allergy and immunology specialist at National Jewish Medical and Research Center in Denver, says patients are interested in saline rinsing because it’s homeopathic. "It appeals because it doesn’t involve drugs, it’s all natural," Lent says.
I wish there was a SinuCleanse for the mind. I have such dirty thoughts. I was watching The Karate Kid this weekend. Elizabeth Shue was so pure in that movie, and in Adventures in Babysitting, that I have this overwhelming desire for someone like her, some wholesome lass, to babysit me, and no matter how much davening and tehillim and tefillah and downward dog yoga I do, the feelings aren’t changing. Sheesh, it’s been 72 hours now, and I should go see a doctor but my doctor is a bloke and would be no help at all.
Normally I’d just think about my rabbi’s pure love for me but these days I don’t have a rabbi and I don’t have any pure love in my life, except for my mom’s and how can I think about her at a time like this? Oy, what would Rebbe Nachman do? Take a few lithium and say it is a great mitzvah to always be happy?
1) My brother-in-law — he’s a Shaar Yashuv Yeshivah guy — made the best comment about the Newsweek list: "It depends on how you define influential."
That’s my feeling too. He wanted the Rabbi of the New Square community to be in the top ten. I wanted Reb Zalman to be in the top ten. What is influence? It depends on what issues matter to you, etc. Jeffrey Goldberg from The Atlantic wrote what I think is a concise and accurate commentary on the rabbis on the list and their influence or lack of it.
What does it mean for me personally to be on the list? At the least, it is some recognition for the work that my colleagues and I are moving forward at Birthright IsraelNEXT. It is more a vote on my work than on my personal influence I imagine.
Overall, I am uncomfortable with these sorts of lists — doing top rabbis is to me like doing top artists or top novelist or top musician — it is kind of ridiculous to rank them like NCAA sports teams or like American Idol. But playing brackets would be fun, no?
2) Is Steinlight talking about Reconstructionist and Reform seminaries or about Liberal education in general??? Sounds to me like the argument my brother-in-law (see above) makes about why there should be no funding for public universities. Liberal seminaries are Liberal -lots of Clinton/Gore bumperstickers in my day – but the institutions acutally foster more critical thinking than you might imagine. At RRC, we had professors like Neil Danzig and Joel Hecker and others who were Yeshiva educated and intellectual heavyweights. They certainly did not reduce issues to party platforms or politically correct blah blah. It is true that I also had a Radical Lesbian teacher who had the idea that men should be limited in the time they are allowed to speak in class. I made a point of speaking and in the end she backed off. But that was an isolated incident in what was an exceptionally good educational experience. And to be honest, being in her class was a good educational experience because it helped me to see the schisms within the LGBT world.
On the particular issue he is harping about, I think that he and the supposedly homicidal- tendency Lesbian rabbi are equally unbalanced. If you are Shoshone or Souix or Cherokee and the year is 1760 then the illegal immigrants that have ruined your country are the Founding Fathers and their buddies. Do American Indians have to see Washington as great? That sounds like imposing one’s politically correct idea onto someone else. My sense is this: Steinlight is deliberately trying to upset people. He gets a kick out of it. If this is the case, he should not be shocked when he goes to a Liberal synagogue and ends up watching rabbis defend crying children.
That said, immigration is an issue that is incredibly complicated and does not fall into the same political lines as others do because of — unions, the Catholic Church, Agri-business — so therefore it is a mess. I credit those who are raising the issue for discussion.
And then, a couple of weeks ago, from out of the blue, we got a Facebook message from Teresa, explaining why she hadn’t accepted our “friend” request.
We won’t reveal the exact contents of the note or the exchange that followed, but will say that we rarely get feedback from celebrities and that she dropped us a note because Luke Ford had vouched for us. We’ll also say that Teresa Strasser is not a phony, manufactured sob sister. What we heard on the radio is apparently what she is in life.
Teresa Strasser is a very nice woman.
She’s now a Tabloid Baby pal. And we are her pal.
Teresa, by the way, is married and, we’re very happy to announce, expecting her first child.
She writes about the impending birth, and reveals that Meredith Vieira smells of “powder, lilacs, and poise” (we’d have expected Grey Goose, Dermablend and Jeff Zucker), in her latest column, which you can read here, and which we hope will lead to a book.
Check out Teresa Strasser’s website here. She celebrates the typewriter, which makes us like her even more.
Luke: "I’d like to toss a moral issue to you from out of left field just to hear the way you think a moral issue through. What interest, if any, does our society have in channeling the way people express themselves sexually and consensually? I’m only talking about adults."
Stephen: "In matters like gay marriage?"
Luke: "That would be one example."
Stephen: "I’m very torn about that. I don’t really have an answer for you. I have two dear friends of mine, women, who married a year ago. I’m enormously fond of both of them. They’ve been in a committed relationship for 30 years. In terms of fidelity and decency, they’ve shown at least as much as you would expect to find in the best marriages between men and women, probably a lot more than in most cases. I see no harm in that.
"I have wrestled with this. My father was pretty homophobic. I’m 60. I grew up in a country that was pretty homophobic. I was used to calling people faggots and all the rest of it. I had to be slowly educated out of my homegrown suburban homophobia.
"There’s a part of me that says that if there is a God, God creates people as they are. Obviously no one becomes a homosexual. People are born that way. Anyone who believes that you can be taught to be homosexual is an idiot. If that person is decent and upright, why should that person be denied the right to enter an institution like marriage?
"There’s a wonderful New Yorker cartoon of a husband and wife sitting on a couch. It goes gay marriage approved. He says to his wife, ‘You’d think those people had suffered enough.’
"I’m divorced. I was married for 22 years.
"Part of me has to say to you that there’s something lesser about it. There’s part of me that believes that creating children is one of the primary reasons people marry. When people marry and don’t have children, I’m always a little puzzled. I’ve always wanted to have children and I was delighted that both of my daughters are heterosexual. One is married. She’s 29. One is 23 and has been living with her boyfriend. All the signs are that there’s a shidduch there, and I will be very happy. In both cases the young men are Jewish. That matters to me.
"I was around when AIDS went through the ceiling. There was something I found dreadful about promiscuous male, particularly gay male, activity that was rife at that time. It struck me as a desecration of the basic dignity of the human being to let oneself be used in that way and to use other people in that way.
"I remember that the only time I really spoke to my daughters about sex was when they were around 13. I said to them, I am not going to give you an anti-sex lecture. That sex is a nice part of life. There’s no hurry to do it. It’s not something that should be rushed into. The longer you put it off, the better. The main thing is that you should never do anything that you feel degrades you. That nothing takes place that makes you feel like your humanity is in any way compromised, that your personhood is not offended. I didn’t know what else to say without sounding hypocritical."
Luke: "You would never say when coming to your position on immigration, I know these two lovely people who are illegal immigrants…"
Stephen: "I know a lot of lovely people…"
Luke: "I know. We both know a lot of lovely people who are here illegally. That would never influence your position on immigration for America."
"Where do you find the most reasoned discourse in your area of specialty?"
Stephen: "In my own thinking."
"The general coverage of this subject is appalling. I wrote a long essay analyzing coverage of immigration as a literary genre… The mainstream media is on the other side… There’s a monolithic mindset. Of all the aspects of the politically correct mindset, this seems to be the holy of holies. If you think of the crazy hysterical editorials that the New York Times runs. ‘Hazelton Against Humanity’. You’d think the town were engaged in the Final Solution. ‘The Nativists Are Restless.’ All the newspapers of record are vociferously our opponents — the Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times. Every news story is a stealth editorial. Every editorial is a crazed jeremiad.
"If comprehensive immigration reform were ever to pass, Heaven help us, it would have the most enduring and palpable impact on this country of any piece of legislation since the Emancipation proclamation. The heart of that legislation is not amnesty. That’s a weapon of mass distraction. The heart of that is doubling legal immigration. Given the way the system works, the engine of extended family reunification, chain immigration, it will mean 60 million to 100 million more Mexicans here in 20 years.
"The Census Bureau asked CIS to do a projection based on all the models we have now for population growth, mortality rates, where we would be given the current population in 2060. We came up with a 56% increase in population. We’d be half a billion. We’d be 167 million more people, 103 million of them immigrants, that’s the equivalent of 13 cities the size of New York.
"Not a single newspaper of record, not public radio, not PBS, has ever unpacked or written a story about what’s in the comprehensive immigration reform bill. The fact is they don’t want the American people to know. What the American people do know about the bill they hate. They hate amnesty. They reject it every single time. It was the American people who defeated comprehensive immigration reform on June 28, 2007.
"What you do get are sob stories about nativists being unkind or tragic stories about a family being separated as a result of a raid by ICE. I would make the moral argument that if it were not for those ICE raids at, for example, Agriprocessors or the one in New Bedford, Massachusetts, nobody would know of the hideous conditions of exploitation that this is all about. This is all about cheap labor."
"Now you get Nancy Pelosi saying that ICE raids are anti-American. Since when? I grew up watching Eliot Ness. I thought federal agents knocking a door in with an axe was really cool and coming in with tommy guns.
"You get the FOX attempt to answer it but most of those people are pretty stupid. The one person who is pretty good is Lou Dobbs. He’s probably the best we’ve got out there. Every once in a while, you get a pretty good piece in the Times. Paul Krugman has made the case that we can’t afford this immigration and in 20 years Social Security would be bankrupt. Nicholas Kristoff, the Times’ resident humanitarian, has made the same argument. This is compassion we can’t afford. Mickey Kaus on Slate. It’s hard to find people who will speak out on this. The taboo for being on the wrong side is that people won’t invite you to their next party."
Luke: "It seems to me that the primary reason for the near unanimity opinion on this issue is that elites are so conditioned that anything that has the slightest smack of racism is to be fled from and abjured."
Peter: "Yes. Also, they’re post-Americans. That is the great dividing line between people who take my side, we believe in the rule of law, we believe in legal immigration, in something like the Canadian point system, something more meritocratic, but a lot of folks in the elite…they tend to think of themselves as multilateralists, universalists. They regard the nation-state as old fashioned and done with. I don’t think they see themselves as American. One’s fundamental sense of civic identity, how one sees oneself in relation to the polity, is the driving force in this debate.
"I am an American. My first identity is as an American. My primary identity is as an American. My first concern is the well being of my fellow citizens. That is not to say that I don’t believe in human rights. I worked as the executive director of the American Anti-Slavery Group. I was involved in issues in Chad and the Sudan. It doesn’t mean I am not concerned about Israel. My moral sense doesn’t stop at the border but I believe that one’s ethics begin at home.
"I fail to understand why Gideon Aronoff at HIAS is so particularly concerned about the fate of illegal Mexicans who have crossed our border rather than the impoverished or or unemployed or working poor in this country whose jobs are being threatened by them.
"Immigration is a zero-sum game. You have to pick sides. For me, it is simple. I pick first my countrymen. I think that those on the other side don’t care. Or it goes much more the other way, that there is an animus against this country. Their over-sympathizing with Mexicans or Central Americans is an expression of their disdain for America even though that disdain is impacting the least among us."
Luke: "Where do you think happy Americans come out on the immigration issue?"
Stephen: "I think they’re with me."
"Even people who feel aggrievement because there is no group in this country more opposed to immigration than blacks, because it is killing them. Zogby did a poll for CIS that found that 77% of hispanics do not want the immigration of any more unskilled labor. That is to say, any more of their own. It threatens their own very tenuous hold on the bottom of the socio-economic ladder.
"Those people who fall over backwards to want to be loved by people of color, by Muslims, by anyone who’s skin tone is darker, who feel fundamentally ashamed to be Americans, who feel we need to apologize for who we are, whether it is because we’re white or because we belong to this culture, those people are all in favor of this because it is some kind of justifiable retribution.
"God spare us all from tikkun olam Jews. The rural white poor in this country, they despise. They no longer particularly like blacks because their self-loathing love was not requited. Right now they think they can patronize hispanics. I’ve got news for them — it ain’t going to be for long.
"I wish they’d stop and think for a minute. Their support of this particular group, someone else is paying the price. You’re not. You’re probably college educated and have a decent job, and if not, mommy and daddy is going to take care of you. But what about folks who work for a living and have no expectations of inherited wealth? Those people are being slaughtered.
"What they are always soliciting is the approval of the other, of the foreign. They see themselves as borderless humanists, the last group of people in the world I would trust to do anything. Why is it that their passion always increases in direct proportion to the distance between themselves and where the tragedy is taking place? If I were to fall down in the street and smash my head, they would walk over me. It’s the kind of Jews who can’t stand to be loyal to other Jews. They’ve got to be more supportive of Palestinians than anyone else, more understanding of Muslim grievance.
"How is Muslim grievance? They’re crazy because they’re Muslim. It’s not for any other reason. They’ve always been crazy.
"Jews are disproportionately involved in every kind of insanity."
"Certainly the foundation culture has encouraged this kind of multi-cultural disdain for the dominant culture… It’s no surprise that virtually every organization in the National Immigration Forum, including the Forum itself, is a creature of the Ford Foundation, an elitist left-oriented foundation."
Luke: "What, if anything, has surprised you in this attempt to silence you?"
Stephen: "A lot of things have surprised me and been extraordinarily painful and disappointing. It reveals something deplorable in the heart of the Jewish establishment. That someone could come out and conduct a surreptitious poison-pen campaign based on lies supplied by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a whole tapestry woven together of quarter-truths and happenstance, to describe me as a white supremacist. Where was David Harris of the American Jewish Committee where I worked for eight years? Why didn’t he stand up and say, ‘That’s outrageous! I’ve known this man. This guy has stood against bias and bigotry and racism all of his life.’ Where were the voices of outrage in the Jewish community? They’ve run along like sheep.
"Hadassah cut off a speaking engagement. Now my guess is that I will never be allowed to go there or if I do go, it will only be to debate some idiot from the JCRC and I’ll make fools of them.
"There are hundreds of Jewish newspapers in this country but almost none of them reacted. If I were an editor and I got a letter telling me who I could publish and who I couldn’t publish, I would tell the person to go f— themselves.
"I had about four or five editors get in touch with me. This wonderful guy named Seth Mandel who publishes two papers in Jersey got in touch with me. He was by far the best. He’s also Orthodox and conservative. He turns out to be a relative. His grandmother and my mother are first cousins.
"I was tremendously disappointed that nobody in the establishment who matters stood up and said, ‘In the Jewish community, we do not indulge in this kind of character assassination, this kind of McCarthyism. If you want to debate ideas, go out and debate them.’
"Gideon Aronoff can’t debate an idea because he can’t write a sentence and he can’t speak a sentence. He’s hopeless. He’s an idiot. I’ve made mincemeat of him before congressional committees on one occasion and I’ve made mincemeat of him on other occasions. He’s a horse’s ass. I’m sure he dislikes me intensely. But you don’t do what he did.
"I only now understand why bearing false witness against one’s neighbor belongs in the Ten Commandments and how important it is and how ugly and horrendous it is when one is victimized by false witness.
"That no one spoke out is a source of enormous pain and anger on my part.
"I made an appointment with the number one apparatchik in the Jewish world who knows me quite well, Malcolm Hoenlein. He’s the executive vice-chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, the most important sounding organization in the world.
"One thing that happens when you work in American Jewish organizations is that it really destroys your language. After working at the American Jewish Committee for a few years, I realized that I couldn’t describe anything that I was doing or planning if there was a noun in it without the adjective ‘major’ in front of it. I realized that my English started improving after I left.
"I’m going to say, ‘Malcolm, I want you to say something. This is bearing false witness and this has no place in our community.’
"This happens. Ten days go by and now we have the Department of Homeland Security using the Southern Poverty Law Center again to start identifying conservatives by belief as potential terrorists. I see what is going on at Homeland Security as a tremendous threat to liberty in our country. Hold your breath waiting for any Jewish organization to speak out against it. They have lost any sense of right and wrong. It’s just what is politically correct. If some left-wing organization’s ox was gored, they’d all be bellowing, but they’re not going to go to bat for people over federalism or Second Amendment rights or immigration or people who are opponents of abortion.
"The notion about single issue people [are potential terrorists]. It’s such horses—. People may have a strong set of convictions about an issue, but I’m interested in lots of issues. I know people who are Second Amendment people who are interested in lots of issues. I don’t know anyone who only spends his time thinking about abortion.
"What’s happened here is that the entire conservative side of the cultural divide has been demonized as potential extremist terrorists, leaving aside the atrocious insult to veterans coming back., while you can’t find euphenisms soft enough to describe Islamic terrorism. Man-made disasters? I agree that Islam is a man-made disaster. They can’t come up with euphemisms preposterous enough to describe the real danger but these chimerical dangers that are really all about politics…
"It’s interesting that this is happening at the time that Obama has said he is going to bring back comprehensive immigration reform. It’s all about stigmatizing opponents as bigots, racists and potential terrorists. This is really dangerous stuff.
"I believe that what has happened with CIS and HIAS and the SPLC, is that we were the miner’s canary. What’s happening with the DHS is this story writ large in a much more dangerous way. I’ve had people get in touch with me and say, ‘Purge your emails. Watch what you email people.’
"My sister sent me an email: ‘Steve, we really think you should be careful.’ I emailed back: ‘Of course. Don’t worry. I’m always careful.’ Then at the bottom in gigantic gothic letters, I wrote, ‘Heil Hitler!’ I’ve been sending letters to myself, ‘To Osama Bin Laden from Adolph Hitler.’
"I just like pushing their buttons.
"I’m thinking that one day a group of FBI agents will come to CIS and want to go through our files.
"When I talk about illegal immigration and say this is a wholesale violation of the rule of law, Jews ought to understand that societies that become lawless are not good places for Jews. When civil society crumbles and anarchy results, we end up on the receiving end."
"The vice-president of HIAS is this woman Roberta Elliott Wantman. She’s on the board of JTA. That was one of the things that got me nervous. Having acknowledged that these accusations were false, she repeated, we feel that people have a right to know where people are coming from and what their organizations represent. The implication is that I represent racism.
"Sorry mam. I represent the belief that we need secure borders. That we need the rule of law. That immigration should be legal. I want to protect working Americans from unfair competition. I don’t believe in racism or any of the s— you attribute to me. You can’t argue any of these points with me and win, so instead you smear me.
"I don’t think there’s anything more to it than that. Gideon Aronoff? Have you read anything he’s written? He’s hopeless. Just for your own amusement, you might want to read a piece he wrote called ‘Postville, A Clarion Call.’"
Published early in the unfolding scandal – presumably to be an authoritative and reassuring expression of Jewish ethics – was Gideon Aronoff’s “Postville: a clarion call.” The op-ed is so far from “clarion” that it would charitable to title it “Uncertain Trumpet.” It more closely approximates a cacophony of unrelated and frequently contradictory points: characterizing them as comprising anything resembling argumentation would be an act of generosity, and the equivocating Aronoff doesn’t deserve any. He piles up clichés and tosses in snippets of potted “history,” hoping against hope they add up to something. No such luck. He derived no benefit from getting his licks in first – au contraire. As revelations have unfolded, his piece appears even more disconnected from reality, if not simply ludicrous. With the indictments of September 9, he looks like an imbecile.
To be fair, not all his sins are merely personal. He’s an apparatchik in the American-Jewish Establishment whose wall-to-wall position on immigration policy is thoroughly dishonest. Jewish agencies pretend to believe immigration should be legal (such language remains in their official policy statements) but in fact they support open borders, amnesty and, “comprehensive immigration reform.” This shift occurred within the last decade. Establishment agencies once distinguished between support for “generous legal immigration” as opposed to “illegal immigration.” They made this case to deaf ears in the National Immigration Forum, the leading national lobby for higher immigration. When the National Immigration Forum, a bastion of Balkanizing identity politics and Post-Americanism, erased that line, Jewish member organizations abjectly surrendered. They should have shown principle and quit the coalition, but they practiced casuistry upon themselves and remained. But even by the ethically challenged standards of this monolithic, transparently self-deluded position, Aronoff’s piece is shocking.
Stephen: "It was word salad. He ended up endorsing Rubashkin’s pay scale. The guy got so turned around in his argument… If I was still teaching English, I’d use it as an example of really bad argument.
"HIAS — the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society — is Jewish in name only. Basically it is involved in immigration and supporting illegal immigrants. It has no particular Jewish focus.
"We were testifying to a Congressional panel bringing faith perspectives. It was one of those typically unbalanced (nine witnesses on their side and only two on ours, Jim Edwards and me)…under John Conyers, who’s basically senile, and Zoe Lofgren, who’s got an IQ of 60, and Luis Gutierrez, who’s absolutely monstrous. One of the worst things you can ever do is testify before Congress. Afterwards, John Keeley, my best friend at CIS at the time, and I went to Dubliners and I immediately had four Guinesses. He said, ‘I know how you are feeling, Steve. You think monarchy would be better. You think anarchy would be better.’
"Aronoff ended up quoting Leviticus 19:33: ‘You shall love the stranger.’ I did some rabbinics. What’s really being said here? What’s the translation? What else does the Torah say? That wasn’t a charter of independence for people dwelling among them. One law for everybody. You better conform to our laws. If you put up idols, we will stone you. If you want to become one of us, you have to undergo circumsicion. It’s saying that if you dwell among us, you have to obey our laws.
"What could be more difficult than what you are proposing? We will allow you to remain even though you entered illegally, even though you’ve committed no end of crimes to remain here and we will reward you for it. That is not in the spirit of Leviticus."
"There was a really disgusting moment at the end when we watched a cardinal and a member of the National Council of La Raza and someone from a meat packing company go out the door together for lunch."
Luke: "All the mainstream religion elites seem completely on board."
Stephen: "Big religion is completely on the other side. For the Catholics, it is very clear where they are coming from. This is their big chance. They will become a majority religion in this country essentially overnight. American Catholics have become obstreperous. They don’t like priests fondling their children. They believe in married priests. They’re not very good about a lot of the dogma. They’re very independent and very American and a lot of them have voted with their feet and left. And now those pews will be filled, with women admittedly. The divide in observancy among hispanics is gender based. The men don’t go to church, the women do, but there are gazillions of them. For the church, this is quite simply a power grab."
"If we were to identify four or five of the most politically correct groups in this country who are celebrating diversity all of the time… Why are they always celebrating it? Why don’t they do something else with it? Wanting to be loved by the Third World and feeling that the Palestinians have suffered the most in immigrant history… That’s the group. Clergy. They’re among the worst. These are a bunch of ignorant, narcissistic, self-righteous people who feel like they are answering a higher calling.
"I’ve had some very dark moments over the past couple of weeks. I’ve held up pretty well because I’ve got good friends, but it’s been tough. It’s not nice being called a racist, a bigot, and a white supremacist, particularly finding nobody who’s willing to risk anything to show any kind of civic courage to stand up and say this is horrible."
"Do you know Roy Beck? He’s head of Numbers USA. He is a fantastic human being. You know how it is when you meet certain people and they have light coming off them? He’s an enormously decent, ethical, kind, good guy. He wrote me an email at 3 am and he talked about growing up in the Ozarks. His great wish was to have some cause he really believed in and to do something. He said, I should have also prayed for good publicity.
"One of the most painful things for me, he said, is that I am a religious man and in the Methodist church, I am held up as an example of a Methodist gone bad. It’s excruciating for me.
"Roy said in his letter that there is a reason why bearing false witness is in the Ten Commandments. He made a point of buying houses in mixed neighborhoods and sending his kids to bussed schools to show his genuine commitment to integration and to commity between the races.
"He said, don’t descend to their level. We’re on the right side of the issue. We should keep our own ethics clean. Right now you are in the pit being beaten and it will last for a certain amount of time. Eventually our movement will get bigger and their ability to do this as long as they do this will be lessened."
Luke: "How did we get to the point where the slightest hint of a consideration of race ends all discussion? That seems to me to be the crux of why all elite opinion is against you."
Stephen: "It’s been good business…for people who’ve played this card."
"When people are hollow to the core, it is easier to get to them. There are a lot of hollow people. If they are hollow, then they are easily guilt-tripped. This stuff does pay off beautifully for the ones who are able to work it. You can work the system when you have enough hollow men out there. We’re full of hollow men, people who will not stand up and say anything.
"I’m not like that. If someone shoves me, I shove back. If I am on the subway and a 6′ black man shoves me, I shove him back and say, ‘F— you, buddy. I will not put up with it.’ I don’t give people of color a pass, anymore than I would give any other rude person a pass… I have a belligerent nature. I don’t put up with s—. I don’t care where it is coming from. I am an equal opportunity belligerent guy."
"The one time I spoke at a Reconstructionist synagogue was in Maryland. Of course there was a woman lesbian rabbi. She obviously didn’t like me because I’m sort of a guy’s guy. She was interrupting me all the time. I finally said, ‘Will you please shut up? If you want to say something, say it afterward.’"
"Then we were sitting outside. She just looked daggers at me. If she could’ve killed me, she would’ve done it.
[Stephen emails me after the interview: “Luke:
I need to make a correction. The woman rabbi that showed very considerable hostility to me and was more extreme in her political correctness than any other I’ve encountered turns out to be a Conservative Rabbi and also a married one with a child.
I don’t wish to use a name.”]
"I don’t know how we got into this discussion of the Founding Fathers. I said something like, they were all children of their time. Some owned slaves. I don’t think there’s any country blessed by a more spectacular group of people, guided by 18th Century principles, some of which are a bit thin, as a set of beliefs that guided people in the right direction, they were very good.
"Then the rabbi turned on me with fury and this young woman 14 years old sitting next to me began to cry and I was told how horrible I was because she was a Native American. And these people had annihilated her people and how dare I speak in defense of George Washington?
"This was Monty Python material. This was Family Man material. If I wrote this as a skit, if I did this as stand-up, no one would believe it.
"When I said, I’m really really sorry. I’m really bummed out about what happened to the Native Americans, I’m sorry that you are so upset, but I am not going to back away from saying that George Washington was a great man, the rabbi walked away, the girl burst into tears again and she and her friends all ran away.
"I was left waiting for two hours until the car service came and took me out of there."
"If the rabbi could’ve gotten away with it, if she had a Saturday Night Special with tape on, she would’ve blown my brains out. She really really hated me. She saw me as the most loathsome enemy she could’ve ever imagined."
Luke: "How much do you blame the Reconstructionist, Reform and Conservative seminaries for the idiot rabbis you encounter?"
Stephen: "They have to be responsible. I was a professor. I believe that good teaching makes a difference. That you can take a student and do some marvellous things with that student. You can expose people to different ways of knowing and thinking and debate. You make them literate. I’ve changed peoples lives as a professor. I know how much good it can do, so I don’t doubt for a minute how much bad teaching can do. My guess is, and this is pure conjecture, I know nothing about the seminaries, my conjecture has to be that they must be doing a tremendous disservice to their students if they are turning out crop after crop after crop of people who unbelievable arrogance and who are this narcissistic and this sure of themselves and have a decided left-wing, multiculturalist, politically correct orientation. It seems to me that it is the job of universities to break people free out of dogmas and challenge them so that they don’t emerge thinking that they know everything.
"My guess is that [those in the Reform and Reconstructionist seminaries] are taught similar orientations and given unending courses on Jewish teachings on social justice, which is basically about being a liberal Democrat.
"A lot of the time when I go to speak to a congregation, I’ll wear an old Adlai Stevenson button. Someone will say, why are you wearing that button? I say, when I was growing up, that’s who all the Jews around me thought that’s who God was — a celestial version of Adlai Stevenson. That’s who they were worshipping. It’s like the Democratic party at prayer. It is a set of beliefs that are never to be challenged and to even raise a question about them is to show oneself to be monstrous. These institutions must be reinforcing this in a severe way or there is no other way to account for it. They all go to them and they all seem to emerge with views that are identical so the institutions are failing to turn out people who can think for themselves and who are willing to entertain opposing ideas and learn from them."
"When I was called by JTA journalist Eric Fingerhut, this was when I first found out about this horrible stuff, and he says, ‘Are you aware of the charges raised against you by Gideon Aronoff of HIAS and do you have anything to say in your defense?’
"I said, what’s your name? Fingerhut? Back up, buddy. Start again. I am not on trial. The Southern Poverty Law Center and Aronoff are not the prosecuting attorneys. I haven’t committed any crime. You’re not the judge. So now start again. What’s their beef? I’ll respond, but don’t put me in the docket.
"The problem with dealing with Jewish organizations and the Jewish press is that they are all on the other side."
Luke: "What are the chances Gideon Aronoff wins this battle with you?"
Stephen: "No. He’s picked the wrong person. I am not going to go away. I’ve gotten speaking invitations as a result of this."
"I’d love to start speaking to some Orthodox groups."
"You don’t want to be thinking about your bubbe and zede’s immigration. You want to be thinking about how immigration is going to affect your grandchildren."
"I like going to places that are hostile and I end up converting people. That’s why Aronoff wants to shut me up."
WASHINGTON (JTA) — The leading Jewish pro-immigration group is attempting to discredit its most outspoken opponent in the Jewish community by attempting to link his employer to a white nationalist.
HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, issued a media release hailing a new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center that seeks to tie several organizations, including the Center for Immigration Studies, to John Tanton — a retired Michigan opthalmologist who the law center says supports white nationalist ideas and has long carried on correspondence with key leaders in the white nationalist movement.
I grew up in Sopranos country in northern New Jersey, went to James Caldwell High School in Caldwell, and was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Columbia College, Columbia University, where I received a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and Kellett Fellowship at graduation. This made up for the several arrests and beatings I endured during my radical days in SDS when I was on the Strike Coordinating Committee when we seized the university (all too briefly) in 1968. I needed to get out of America for a time, and I did my doctorate as a Marshall Scholar at the University of Sussex in England.
I am so bloody wonderful I was made a Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and I’m now an Associate Fellow of Timothy Dwight College, Yale University, which permits me to hang out with smart Yale faculty types, drink heavily and listen to good speakers and occasionally the Tokyo String Quartet. One of the most courageous men of my time, I was a member of a team of conflict resolution experts sent to Macedonia by the Soros Open Society Institute and the US Conference on Peace to help preserve the ceasefire in that country’s civil war. (I never flinched at gunfire and told my colleagues, "Stand behind me: I’m bullet proof." Just remembered it was Rommel who said that. Whatever.)
The best thing in my life without question are my two brilliant, kind, loving, and beautiful daughters, Emily (28), newly married and a Ph.D candidate in English at Brown, and Alexandra, a history/government major who will be graduating from Wesleyan University this year. (I confess to paganism: I worship the ground they walk on.)
Though I works for a DC-based think tank I don’t like DC (too much a company town) and as the Executive Director of my outfit likes me I am very sensibly allowed to reside in NYC, going down to DC for conferences, lobbying and when I’m called as a witness at Congressional hearings. I dabble in art (I was a member of the Art Student’s League where I was good enough to know I wasn’t good enough) and love chamber music, swimming,the ocean, hiking, and travel, and just hanging out with good friends. I am a dyed-in-the-wool Zionist and have been to Israel many times and speak Hebrew.
I suppose it’s mandatory to add that I am a lover of Tuscany and Umbria, gentle, elegantly handsome, sensual, and a womanist. I’m very funny — relentlessly so (even humorless people manage the stray half-smile), and I find humor in just about anything –excluding enormities. I must confess to finding terminally politically correct people insufferable.
My politics are difficult to describe other than to say I’m "post-ideological" and despise all "isms," group think and superficial intellectual fashionability. I remain progressive on some issues, less so on others. I take my political stands on issues rather than as a function of party loyalty.
Oh — almost forget to mention it — I’m Jewish though not especially observant. I’d define my Jewishness largely as a matter of culture and a set of predilections and assumptions about the nature of the world, the great questions that will always vex us and people that derive significantly from a Jewish historical consciousness. I suspect this mini-bio makes me sound like a pompous ass. You’ll have to trust me when I say I’m not.
I interviewed Dr. Steinlight for two hours and 40 minutes Friday afternoon.
Luke: "Stephen, when you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?"
Stephen: "When I was very little, I wanted to be a garbageman. I wanted to drive one of those big trucks. When I got a little older, I toyed with the idea of going into the diplomatic service. I used to read all of those Praeger books about foreign affairs, but unfortunately, at the time I was going off to university, the Vietnam war broke out and I got involved in the anti-war movement, so working in the diplomatic service was no longer an option."
Luke: "What’s been your relationship with Judaism? What level of observance were you raised with if any?"
Stephen: "Oh, lots. Lots. First, I grew up in a Zionist Hebrew-speaking home. My family was long involved in the Zionist movement. Two of my great uncles fought in the British legion for Palestine. My mom and her brothers and her mother and her grandmother went to Palestine in the 1920s and helped lay the stones for Tel Aviv. They lived there for years. I was raised in an observant kosher Conservative Jewish home and I went to Camp Ramah for ten summers. People think that Osama Bin Laden’s training camps make devotees. I can tell you that Camp Ramah really does.
"I absolutely loved it. I started out in bunk number one. I ended up being a director on the waterfront taking people out on canoe trips in Camp Ramah, Canada.
"I speak Hebrew almost fluently. I spent two summers working on a kibbutz in Israel. My Judaism is very firmly rooted. One of my brother-in-laws is a Reform rabbi. I was very much immersed in Jewish culture in a general sense of Yiddishkeit. We were on the secular side of some people but very very deeply imbued in Jewish values and certainly observing all of the holidays and again Hebrew was very very important and a sense of Jewish peoplehood was really a great foundation of my bringing up."
Luke: "What are Jewish values?"
Stephen: "I don’t know. That’s a very good question. Some of it sounds terribly prosaic but I think a sense that the purpose of life is service. I was never taught that what mattered was to make money. My mother was a teacher. My father was a civil servant. The notion that I had a responsibility to the community. The notion that justice was what defined a life worth leading. The notion of loyalty to my peoplehood and to my country as an American. My dad was an immigrant. I’m a first-generation American. That was an important piece of the puzzle. I grew up in a town in New Jersey that now has tons of Jews but when I lived there, we were among the only Jews in town. Everyone else was ‘normal’ and we were seen as different and strange and ethnic. There was a separation that was in some sense enforced, but I felt a deep sense of allegiance to things that went beyond the every day.
"I became aware at an early age of the Holocaust through watching the Eichmann trial on television, going off to Israel on my own as a teenager…
"I shared allegiances with classmates, we were all Americans, but I was the strongest one in support of civil rights. I know that that came very very much from being Jewish."
"I’m 61. In some ways, Jews of my generation were Americanized through the Civil Rights movement."
Luke: "I want to challenge you on one thing simply as an invitation to get you to elucidate more. You mentioned that your involvement with civil rights grew out of your Jewish values. It’s curious that the most Jewish of Jews, which I will say are the Orthodox, have been and are the least involved with civil rights while those Jews who have been the most involved in pushing for civil rights have been the least involved Jewishly. How do you understand that?"
…If support for blacks is an ineluctable result of Jewish values, then one would expect that the most Jewish of American Jews — the Orthodox of Brooklyn — would be the most sympathetic towards blacks. The exact opposite, however, is true. Secure in their Jewish identity, they do not require close relations with blacks to define it. Their Jewishness rests on more substantial grounds.
…If the most Jewish of Jews are the least receptive to blacks, the Jews most supportive of blacks have often been alienated from Jewish culture and religion. (pg. 240)
…One can imagine the psychological impact on blacks of Eric Hoffer’s comparison of blacks and Jews. The example of Jews, Hoffer wrote, “shows what persistent striving and a passion for education can do…even in the teeth of discrimination. This is a fact which the Negro vehemently rejects. It sticks in his gullet… The Jew impairs the authenticity of the Negro’s grievances and alibis. He threatens the Negro’s most precious possession: the freedom to fail.”
…Jews needed blacks to authenticate their image of themselves as liberals, but blacks did not need Jews to authenticate their image of themselves as blacks. (pg. 243)
Blacks have resented Jews not because they did not do enough for them but because they did too much. (pg. 244)
In academia there is not one black scholar, apart from Julius Lester, a convert to Judaism, whose major field of interest is Jewish studies.
Stephen: "I would challenge your definition of Jewish. You are defining Jewish in terms of religious observance. I don’t believe that Judaism can be defined in one way or another in exclusion of other forms. I go with Mordechai Kaplan’s notion that Judaism is a civilization. The civilization is composed of many parts — peoplehood, ethics, religious observance… The American Jewish Committee does an annual survey of how it is that Jews define themselves as Jewish and they [give] them such choices as peoplehood, the pursuit of justice, Israel, and religion. Religion comes in last every time. What comes in first is peoplehood and what comes in second is a sense of justice.
"I do not accept the notion that Orthodox Jews are more Jewish than I am or that any Orthodox rabbi is more Jewish than my Reform Jewish brother-in-law who is a rabbi, or more knowledgeable for that matter. I reject that claim completely. In fact, in many ways, I find it the most intellectually confined form of Judaism and the one that has produced in some respects the least interesting thought."
"It strikes me as extremely presumptuous on the part of Orthodox Jews to say of other Jews, ‘We are less Jewish than you.’ By what standard? If you want to make religious observancy the be-all and end-all, yes, that’s true."
"…I would’ve thought that the pursuit of justice is equally important as keeping kosher, for example, or shaking a lulav or sniffing an etrog, which strike me for the most part as in the end really rather quaint and in the great scheme of things, terribly unimportant."
Luke: "Do you ever question what you just said or is that like set in stone at Sinai for you in its definitiveness?"
Stephen: "No, it is not set in stone, Luke. Like many Jews, I grew up in Camp Ramah. I can daven everything by heart. There is part of me that always remains a seeker. There’s part of me that responds very powerfully to prayer and I would define myself certainly not as an atheist. I guess I am an agnostic looking for the Jewish God.
"If I sounded glib, please forgive me, I only felt a little offended by what struck me as a tone of superiority, and it’s a tone that I frequently encounter from Orthodox Jews. It bothers me especially when jokes like that are made about Reform rabbis. My brother-in-law is one of the most brilliant and knowledgable men I know and when people make these idiotic jokes about Reform rabbis not knowing as much Judaism as Orthodox rabbis, it’s just preposterous."
"I understand the importance of observancy and I understand it is important for the survival of the Jewish people that certainly a core of people remain faithful to these things but I don’t think that means all of us are required to express our Judaism in the same way. Let a thousand blossoms bloom. There are many ways in which one can be faithful to one’s Judaism on a basis of equality. It’s really the notion that one can be equally Jewish that is important to me.
"Look, there are plenty of Orthodox Jews who refuse to accept Israel’s existence. When I marched in the Israel parade, I watched Orthodox Jews wave Palestinian flags. I regard those people as traitors. In what way are they Jewish? There are ultra-Orthodox Jews who believe that a dead rabbi in Brooklyn is the Messiah. To me, those people are heretics. They are people who look like Jews but really aren’t Jews.
"I’m not minimizing nor showing disrespect for Orthodox practice, I just would like Orthodox Jews not to show disrespect for those of us who show a very strong sense of our Judaism but which doesn’t necessarily express itself in saying the Amidah 20 times a day."
Luke: "Why would you care what Orthodox Jews think about the authenticity of your Judaism?"
Stephen: "Only because you asked me. Actually, I don’t tend to think about it very much. When it comes up, it annoys me, just the way when you walk into a subway car and someone throws an elbow at me, I react to it. But no, I don’t waste any time worrying about this. It offends me when the issue is raised. That’s all. It’s not something that engages me. Among the issues that matter in my life, it would be down to 10,321 or something. It really is a very unimportant issue for me."
"I’m struck because I’ve never noticed much concern among the Orthodox over what the non-Orthodox think of them while I hear all the time when I interview non-Orthodox Jews, they’re constantly referencing how they feel the Orthodox are judging them."
Stephen: "It’s hard to react… I live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. This is a Jewish neighborhood. Increasingly, there are a lot of young Modern Orthodox people living here. This used to be the bastion of secular Jewish liberalism. Now it is a much more mixed neighborhood. I do notice, for example, every once in a blue moon when I need to visit the Judaica shop on Broadway (to replenish my yarmulke supply when I’m off to do some speaking in Conservative shuls) that the Orthodox guys who are in there really do give me a disdainful look. There’s no question about it. They barely make eye contact. There’s a want of basic civility. This is not some neurotic over-reaction on my part… I think it’s there. There’s this sense of who are you and what are you and what are you doing here. This is not an irrational or neurotic reaction. Anybody, anyone would recognize that what I am reacting to is genuinely occurring… This Judaica shop on Broadway on the Upper West Side just drips with hostility to Jews who are secular and who don’t walk in with yarmulkes on their head."
Luke: "Do you feel most comfortable with the Conservative movement of Judaism?"
Stephen: "No. I grew up as a Conservative Jew. Over the last years, I have mostly attended my brother-in-law’s temple. He’s now an emeritus rabbi. At the moment, I’m unchurched. I just look for places on the holidays. I don’t pray on a daily or weekly basis. I’m a sorta holiday Jew. I’ve spent most of the last years in a Reform congregation…that uses a great deal of Hebrew and uses a lot of the melodies that I am familiar with. It’s not high-church Reform. I’ve got a sister who works at Yale who is president of her frum Conservative congregation. It’s very nice but the services for me are interminably long. The tallises (prayer shawls) are getting bigger and bigger. I feel like I am in Tehran with the tallises over the heads and all that. It feels a little alien.
"I spend a lot of time in shuls because I speak about immigration to Jews. I spend a lot of Shabboses in shuls. It ended up being part of the job. There’s not really a whole lot to choose. I can’t stand three-and-a-half hour services with very little English. On the other hand, I can’t stand 25-minute Reform services with no Hebrew. I’m fairly ecumenical in where I am ritually comfortable."
Luke: "As someone who has been in a lot of shuls, what have you noticed is inspiring Jews to be Jewish? What is working and not working?"
Stephen: "Things are not working well in the Reform and Conservative movements. That’s clear. You don’t need me to tell you that. All the data is there. Conservative Judaism in particular is in a crisis. It was overtaken years ago in terms of numbers by Reform Judaism. I don’t think it ever figured out what it was."
"All mainline religions are experiencing tremendous loss in this society. Mainline Protestantism is basically dead. With Roman Catholicism, they are losing out to evangelical and rapturous versions of Christianity. Reform and Conservative Judaism are having the same problems as Presbytereans and Methodists. They’re having problems attracting young people… The rabbis have grown up in the social justice tradition and are weak on the ritual side. The younger Jews tend to be more spiritually inclined. They find the experience inside a lot of Reform and Conservative places unsatisfying. Reconstructionist Judaism I can’t speak authoritatively about except to say that it has provided a way to be Jewish for a lot of gay Jews. My experience in Reconstructionist settings has been mostly negative because they are so violently autonomically politically leftist. I find myself lost in that setting."
"I see in my neighborhood on Shabbos all these young attractive Jews going to [Orthodox] shuls and enjoying the Shabbos. The only movement that seems to be alive these days is Modern Orthodoxy. Obviously it is providing some sort of spiritual answer.
"Younger Jews tend to be politically more conservative. There’s a direct correlation between religious observancy and greater political conservatism across the board in all religions.
"Broadly speaking, we have the bowling alone phenomenon. People aren’t joiners. That includes young Jews for the most part. I’m delighted to see these young people go to Modern Orthodox shuls because I want people to remain Jewish… When I think of my own family, most young people don’t tend to be involved. I’m tremendously disturbed by the strong falling away of any strong tie to Israel that one feels among young Jews.
"The reasons are probably obvious — the university culture, what they’re getting from their professors and from the general environment, which is occidentalist and anti-American, which sees Israel as the marauding dog and the Palestinians as the oppressed. This culture of aggrievement. Israel’s fairing badly. These young Jews are pretty ignorant. They don’t know how to defend themselves. They’re easily convinced by hostile arguments."
Luke: "How do you decide what is right and wrong?"
Stephen: "I’ve had a very good education. I’ve read a lot of good literature and good philosophy. My own upbringing. I’ll often go talk to my brother-in-law who’s a rabbi when I am in a moral quandary. I rely like everyone else does on experience. I try to employ reason and to look at a situation with utilitarian ethics. I take a great deal of time weighing situations. I don’t come to situations with ideological presuppositions. I don’t believe in isms. When I was younger, I did. I try to look at issue each separately… I’m a great believer in knowing things. One of the things that is so appalling about the nature of discourse and debate, one feels that people have no notion that knowing things is important in coming to a conclusion. From 20 years as a university professor, I believe in doing research. I believe in reading things that I don’t agree with weighing things with great care. I don’t come to positions quickly or easily… I’ve probably learned more ethics reading Middlemarch than any other book in my life. Maybe my answer is insufficient for you because I am not saying the Tanach. I can do Hebraics pretty well when I have to. It’s not the first thing I turn to."
"I find myself amused when I go speak at synagogues, particularly Reform synagogues, when my worst antagonist is invariably the rabbi who will often interrupt what I’m saying and will jump on me and who has only three things to say — we were immigrants, he will tear Leviticus 19:33 totally out of context, and then say that anyone who disagrees with him is a nativist. And then he’s finished because he has nothing else to say.
"And then I will start posing questions. I’ve gone so far as to give congregational rabbis a ten-point quiz on immigration policy to show how ignorant they are.
"I’m a great believer in reading books. I tell people, come back when you have read this and we’ll have a conversation. I used to be a professor and students would want to talk about something and I would say, go away and read.
"I did my graduate work in England and I taught in England, where you have tutorials. You say to someone, you don’t know what you are talking about. Here are four books. Come back in four weeks. Let’s have a conversation.
"I don’t think that ethics can be separated from knowledge."
Luke: "The rabbinic response you elucidated, I would call it blithering idiocy."
Stephen: "That’s the gist of it."
Luke: "What do you think that blithering idiocy says about the wisdom of those rabbis in areas outside of immigration policy?"
Stephen: "My guess is that they don’t have any.
"The horrible day that we all have when we discover that the New York Times is a rag. When it is writing about something that we know a lot about and it is all wrong. Then, if you know a lot about more than one thing, which happens to be the case with me and I am sure it is the case with you, then you go to the next thing and you find out that the cup is empty. Then you make the assumption that there is something fraudulent going on.
"My guess is that those people who are willing to speak in grand rousing terms about things about which they are pig ignorant in one area are willing to do it in another. There’s almost a correlation between the degree of their passion and their ignorance. Ignorance isn’t a sin. You can correct it by study. It isn’t like stupidity. That bespeaks an arrogant narcissism that may be the reason they became rabbis… To be that arrogant and ignorant seems to me to be an absolute disqualification to stand in front of a congregation and to lead it in its tradition."
Luke: "I never forget when someone gets up in a pulpit and speaks passionately about a subject in which they know almost nothing. It’s hard for me to take that person seriously on anything when I’ve experienced that."
Stephen: "They are speaking ex cathedra. They are in the pulpit. They’ve got the Torah behind them. They have an enormous authority. And it is misused. One wants to stand up and yell, ‘Idiot! Heretic! Get out! You’re a disgrace!’
"I’ve had to encounter this again and again and again. More with Reform rabbis. The entire culture of the Reform synagogue is very different from that of the Conservative synagogue. I would love to speak to Orthodox congregations. I’ve never had an invitation to one. We’ve had ads in Jewish newspapers…
"My guess is that no more than 30% of a given Conservative congregation is politically correct while the number would reach 70% of a Reform congregation. Invariably the most left-wing person in the room in a Reform congregation is the rabbi. In Conservative shuls, yeah, the rabbi tends to be to the left of the congregation but the congregation makes its unhappiness known in one way or another.
"I’m writing a huge backgrounder for the Center for Immigration Studies describing the American Jewish establishment as one Potemkin village. The number of organizations that endorsed ‘Progress by Pesach.’ If I had been Gideon Aronoff, I would’ve thrown myself on my sword. Twenty six Jewish organizations claiming hundreds of thousands of members managed to get something over 3,000 people to sign the petition.
"The one thing that you feel again and again with the Jewish establishment is the outrageous way it has usurped the authentic voice of American Jews. Where that usurpation is most outrageous is where the Rabbinical Assembly of Conservative Judaism endorsed this and only a very small minority of their members would take such a position. I’ve spoken to at least 40 Conservative congregations. To say that 90% of the people are on my site is putting it mildly. They’re thrilled to hear me speak. They’re thrilled to hear a voice from the bima that is not politically correct, that is not some apparatchik from the Jewish establishment, that it is not their rabbi droning on about Leviticus 19 without recognizing the actual meaning of ger b’shovav. It does mean sojourner, a temporary resident.
"Reconstructionist Jews, I know they’re all politically correct. Reform Jews, yeah, they’re mostly politically correct. The usurpation of the voice of the community is most decidedly the case amongst Conservative Jews."
"African-Americans have fallen off [leftist Jews’] moral radar screen. They don’t exist anymore. The new fashion is Hispanics. In 1994, when I was vice-president of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, we did the largest survey of inter-group attitudes ever done. Hispanics are the most anti-Semitic group, other than Muslims, in the world. More anti-Semitic than blacks.
"Jews and blacks didn’t work out very well. So Jews ran on. Jews are always dying to dialogue and to be loved by everyone. Now they’ve gone running off to the next multicultural context. And they’re willing to put up with anything.
"When I worked at the American Jewish Committee, I had to be a part of a whole lot of coalitions. Some of these places, I was quite happy. The black-white issue remains the great unsolved issue in American life. I believe it must be solved. I was also AJC’s representative at the National Immigration Forum, the chief body in this country pushing for open borders and amnesty. It’s a really bad group of people. I rarely use the word unAmerican. I was brought up in a home where that was associated with Joseph McCarthy, but I will use ‘unAmerican’ to describe these people.
"The constituents of this body are mostly ethnic identity groups that are all separatists. They don’t believe there is any such thing as America or Americans or American cultures. It’s merely a bunch of aggrieved diaspora communities and sometimes they fall out with each other because they argue about who is more aggrieved. The only white people who were members of this were Jews.
"These poor sodding Jews would go to these meetings and we would say such things as, ‘You really should make a distinction between legal and illegal immigration.’ And they would all scream and yell at us. You could just sense the absolute hatred in them.
"When you look at AJC’s position on immigration, it says we support generous legal immigration. Since that was not what they were doing, the Jews should’ve shown some principal and walked out, but instead they put their tail between their legs and went along. They sit in a group of people that hates America, that believes that open borders immigration is the punishment that this country should accept for living too high on the hog and controlling the world and having hegemony and having all these dirty wars in Central America. We are the great Satan. That is where they are coming from.
"My views on immigration evolved. I didn’t start out believing in lower levels of immigration or change in criteria for immigration. Jews are pathetically ignorant of their own immigration history. Jews for the most part were refugees, not immigrants. My father fled the pogroms in the Ukraine during the Russian civil war [circa 1920]. Jews are the only group of immigrants that only migrated in one direction because they risked being killed.
"I started out thinking that immigration is the great American story. It was all very emotional. Then going to those meetings at the National Immigration Forum and seeing who those people were pushing for open borders… I would become sickened going to those meetings and I would leave trembling with rage. That’s rare for me. Usually I have a fair amount of equanimity."
Luke: "Did you ever go through a stage where you disliked, even hated, America?"
Stephen: "No. I’ve always been a patriot."
Luke: "Many of those you ran with at SDS were filled with rage at America."
Stephen: "Yes. Some of them did. I’ve always loved this country. My opposition to the Vietnam war was based on that this was not what America was about… I hated it when I saw Vietcong flags. I always thought we should march with American flags. I hated the disparaging talk about America. I was purged from SDS in my Junior because I was considered a bourgeois liberal, not really a full-boned radical. And they were right."
Luke: "Did you feel queasy that many of the people you were running with did hate America?"
Stephen: "Yeah, although there were a lot of people to run with and I stayed away from those."
"I’ve always believed that this is the best society in the world."
Luke: "Did you ever go through a stage where it was really important to you to be loved by blacks and/or latinos?"
Stephen thinks.
Luke: "Have their good will? Be affirmed by them? Considered a brother?"
Stephen: "It was important for me. Loved is going too far. That would put me in the category of people I find nauseating. It was important to me that African-American people I liked and respected saw me as someone who was a friend and ally, which I was."
Luke: "Were you naive?"
Stephen: "I don’t think so. I think blacks have had a raw deal in this country. That is not to say that everything that is wrong in black life is a result of systemic racism."
"I’ve never had the same feelings about hispanics. African-American history is deeply tied to my own history. The history of hispanics coming in from other countries is not. I don’t feel the same sense of moral obligation."
Luke: "Would it be fair to say that almost all of those Jews who yearn to be loved by blacks, latinos and Muslims are not ritually observant traditional Jews?"
Stephen: "I’m sure you’re right."
Luke: "My thesis is that those who are the most secure in their identity as Jews are the least desperate to be loved by blacks, latinos and Muslims."
Stephen: "I think you are right. I would only add that I am secure in who I am as a Jew even though I don’t practice the same kind of Judaism that you do."
Luke: "I didn’t say anything about observance in my follow-up."
Stephen: "Jews who feel no need to apologize for who they are… They’re infinitely healthier and don’t need to make fools of themselves and end up…being complicit in doing things that are dangerous and stupid."
Luke: "Jews who lose their sense of Jewishness are not just in danger of looking of foolish, they’re a danger to America."
Stephen: "Yes."
"If I say to someone that I am a patriot, or I go to an event and wear a flag pin, I know that these kind of people think fascist. They can’t separate the notion of patriot from fascist."
"If I talk about the need for border protection in the name of national security, or protecting sovereignty, they look at me as though I am from another planet. ‘Jews aren’t concerned about American sovereignty, are they? We’re not. We’re too liberal. We’re too hip for that kind of thing. Patriotism? Are you crazy?’
"These are the kind of Jews who want to be citizens of the world. They want to be cosmopolitan, and we know how cosmopolitanism ended up for Jews under Stalin. I wish these Jews would understand that even if you want to be that, they’re not going to buy it. They’re not going to take you. They’re not interested in you anymore. They hate your guts."
"They don’t understand that this country is pretty much the only place we’ve got apart from Israel where we are not tolerated guests in somebody else’s house. Where we are home and we are equal.
"Showing love to this country is appropriate and not doing it is blind ingratitude and incredibly stupid and endangering Jewish interests."
Luke: "What are American values?"
Stephen: "This is a country where you can become whatever you want to become. Americans, for the most part, are enormously tolerant decent people… This country has essentially been invaded by tens of millions of illegal foreigners and yet there’s scarcely been an act of violence by Americans. It’s extraordinary… Despite what you hear from groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center, FBI statistics show that ‘hate crimes’ against Hispanics have gone down proportionately for ten years. You are still far more likely to be a victim of a hate crime if you are a Jew or black."
The very idea of a "most influential rabbis" list is of questionable value in the first place. But Newsweek does seemingly everything in its power to make sure we all get the joke. For starters, it’s an annual list in its third year, and there are still rabbis this year who are appearing for the first time – like #17 Menachem Genack, whose job title and responsibilities haven’t changed in decades. And truly, by what measure can Newsweek assert with any seriousness that the past year has seen David Ellenson rise from #8 to #5? Or Uri Herscher drop from #6 to #9? And yet, Newsweek prints all these changes in parentheses next to each ranking, so that we can follow them like baseball statistics.
Then, in typical Jew-face, Newsweek loves to tout its panel of judges as its "machers" (it’s funny ’cause it’s Yiddish?) – a Sony Pictures executive, a NewsCorp executive, and finally at least one panelist who knows something about the Jewish community, JewishTVNetwork.com’s Jay Sanderson. If Newsweek were trying to be taken seriously, it would assemble a panel that at least gave the impression of knowing what’s going on in the broad swath of the Jewish community. Maybe it could assemble editors of the three most influential Jewish news publications – Forward, JTA and the New York Jewish Week. Or it could take any number of alternative approaches that at least suggest it cares about engaging in a meaningful analysis; unfortunately, it doesn’t.
And in case any of us were left wondering if this still should be taken as a joke, and if so who’s the butt of it, Newsweek Religion Editor Lisa Miller let us all in on it in her introduction to the list’s second version, when she wrote:
The fallout from last year was impressive. Rabbis who were on the list, having memorized their ranking and, in some cases, issued press releases, proceeded to pretend they didn’t care.
Miller’s holding up these rabbis for ridicule — when none of them asked her to make the list in the first place, and yet many of them could have their careers noticeably altered by their ranking in this national magazine – is appaling.
I’ll be the first one to expose rabbinic wrongdoing and to shine light on the underbelly of the Jewish community. I’ve fought for journalists to do real work to expose the real concerns in this community, and never to ignore the warts.
* Are there particular jobs blind people are best suited for?
Tom Lange: Well, let’s put it this way. There are jobs that obviously require vision and you wouldn’t want a blind guy performing them. When is the last time you saw a blind fireman, cab/bus driver or commercial pilot?
Seriously, though, when we met at EmpowerTech recently, we talked about the high unemployment rate in the blind community. There are a number of factors at work here. Some of the unemployed blind lack the motivation and/or sufficient incentive to go to work.
Some lack sufficient training in the required job skills and assistive technology. We at EmpowerTech can help with that.
Other people have sufficient qualifications to perform a number of jobs but have been unable to find work because many employers are operating under misconceptions that the blind are unable to live and work equally well as their sighted peers. Thus they (the employers) dismiss the possibility that there are blind people out there who have the qualifications and access to the appropriate technology to help them get the job done. Furthermore, they are unaware that statistics have shown that disabled people, including the blind, exhibit a higher level of motivation and will in fact perform better then their nondisabled peers. It’s up to employers to learn about our abilities and these statistics, but, it’s equally important if not more so for blind people to get out and really sell themselves, thereby promoting that awareness.
* Are there any jobs where blind people have an advantage over the sighted?
Tom Lange: I’m not sure that I can give you a definite answer to that one. However, I’m certain that there are some examples where increased hearing, sense of touch, smell et cetera can contribute to better performance. I know a guy who had developed a knack for diagnosing a variety of mechanical problems by hearing alone, and he used that ability effectively as a Porsche mechanic for a number of years. As I come up with other examples I’ll pass them on to you.
Dennis Prager said on his radio show last week: "If there is no difference between a man marrying a man and a man marrying a woman, then there is no ultimate difference between man and woman. That’s what we’re fighting about here… That’s why transgendered is part of gay activism."
"I’ve never gotten a response to this. You may be morally right, but isn’t there an arrogance in saying that all those who lived before me were immoral on this issue? There’s no other example of this. My Judaism was wrong, every rabbi, every prophet, my Protestantism was wrong, every Pope was wrong, Jesus was wrong, Jesus didn’t call for undoing male-female marriage, all the secular thinkers were wrong, the age of Enlightenment was not enlightened enough…"
Caller: It’s not a big deal. Conservatives should just lead a good life. You can only teach by example.
Dennis: "That’s not true. That’s one way you teach."
"We have to have rules for society. We have thousands of rules. One rule is the way we define marriage. I didn’t marry my brother? So follow my example? It’s meaningless."
…Israelis don’t observe the distinction between the public and private realms. They treat strangers as if they were their brothers-in-law and feel perfectly comfortable giving them advice on how to live. One Israeli acquaintance recounts the time he was depositing money into his savings account and everybody else behind him in line got into an argument about whether he should really be putting his money somewhere else. Another friend tells of the time he called directory assistance to get a phone number for a restaurant. The operator responded, “You don’t want to eat there,” and proceeded to give him the numbers of some other restaurants she thought were better.
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
