Luke Ford | No sacred cows.

Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller Profiled In The September Issue Of Los Angeles Magazine

Posted on August 22, 2007 by Luke Ford

I love how Jesse Katz focuses on how the case became a "Jewish American Rorschach test, its interpretation shaped by ideology, by identity, by religious and partisan agendas."

I could never become upset about the case. The rabbi felt verbally assaulted and he lashed out.

I’ve covered the case but never taken a side.

Now I understand what happened and why.

"Seidler-Feller attacked [right-wing Israeli activist Rachel] Neuwirth, clawing, hitting, and kicking her until students pulled him away."

"Seidler-Feller dug his nails into Neuwirth’s hand, leaving a pair of small red scratches. He drove a shoe into her calf, raising a purple welt. He wrenched her upper arm — the pattern of bruises would match his grip — then pushed Neuwirth so forcefully that she almost tumbled down the terrace stairs leading to Dickson Plaza. Several young Hillel associates put Seidler-Feller in a bear hug, but he broke free and his face flushed and contorted, tried to go after her again."

"Witnesses described him as an overbearing figure on campus, petulant, confrontational, jealous of his turf."

In addition to an abject apology written for him by Neuwirth, Chaim ended up paying her $200,000 to make the case go away.

"Stop showing up on my campus!" Rabbi Chaim yelled at several Stand With Us (pro-Israel group) when he saw them at an Israel-Palestine forum.

Chaim showed up uninvited to a Beverly Hills fundraiser for Stand With Us and heckled the speaker (Ben Shapiro), sparking a shoving match.

"When he fails to receive the proper deference, he can also bristle. In these moments he has been described as pushy, even boorish, his vaunted dialogues reduced to harangues. A few months after he was thrown out of the Stand With Us meeting, Seidler-Feller disrupted another forum…"

Chaim used to be married to the niece of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik. It was over by 1975, when Chaim moved to Westwood. The two kids from it are not acknowledged in Chaim’s Hillel biography. They don’t carry his last name.

After his assult of Neuwirth, Seidler-Feller did not try to contact Neuwirth.

UCLA students Debra Greene and David Lazar began work on a story for UCLA’s Jewish magazine Ha’Am about Chaim’s UCLA legacy. When he found out about their investigation, the rabbi became furious. He branded their work as "evil." He got the story killed.

Posted in Jewish Journal, Jewish Journalism, Jews, Los Angeles, R. Chaim Seidler-Feller | Comments Off

How Desperate Am I?

Posted on August 22, 2007 by Luke Ford

Bob emails:

I remember a TV program that featured women who were attracted to convicted killers. One of the Menedez boys hooked up with a former Playboy model. How desperate are you for a mate?
ps No female nibbles from the cover story in Jewish Journal? I’m really surprised.

Posted in Personal | Comments Off

Dating Advice From My Mom

Posted on August 22, 2007 by Luke Ford

She emails from Australia:

Get a nice hair cut and a new outfit. Be nice when you ditch the old ones, they talk to each other.
Don’t you find your friends in the same boat? I think young women want to get married less and less? I read a Japanese article on the BBC News some time ago. Japanese girls are buying pets and marrying later, if at all. I am just finalizing my assignment on the history of the stigma of illegitimacy in Australia. The things we have to read about family and marriage and divorce and de facto relationships show how things have changed. I found it depressing (mainly the way single mothers have been treated). We thought things were way out in the 60s, but more children were born out of wedlock in the 1930s. Do you still read history?
The sea is presentely a churning fury, the first cyclone for years here (stage 2 only), will have lasted three or four days by the time it’s over.

Posted in Personal | Comments Off

LA Times to ERS News: Cease and Desist/ERS News to LA Times: Make Your Reporters Stop Copying Us

Posted on August 22, 2007 by Luke Ford

Kate Coe writes for Fishbowl LA:

ERS News.com enjoys a good game of cat and mouse with the LA Times lawyer. The exchange is long, but very worthwhile, and it all started with a cease and desist demand.
First email from Karlene Goller, Vice President and Deputy General Counsel:
I am an attorney for the Los Angeles Times. Your website is currently displaying without authorization and without proper attribution or copyright notices copyrighted photographs and captions owned by the Los Angeles Times:http://www.ersnews.com/mayor_chick/Mayor_LATimes.htm
You do not have permission to post or display our copyrighted material and section 107 of the Copyright Act does not provide you any defense to posting the photographs and captions without our permission. Together with the Washington Post, we successfully litigated that issue years ago in federal court.
Please remove our material from your site immediately and refrain from posting or displaying our photographs, articles, or other material in the future unless you obtain our prior written consent.
You are welcome to refer and link to material on our site,www.latimes.com, within the boundaries of Fair Use, of course.
ERS fires back:
Dear Ms. Goller,
You are mistaken, we are not posting any LAT material on our site, we are only linking to it as you state.
I assure you we have no need of any kind to post any material of the LAT on ERSNews.com.
She tries again:
Thank you for your response and thank you for clarifying for me that you are not posting. Your framing of our photo gallery is a problem, however. It suggests a connection between your site and the Los Angeles Times and its copyrighted material. You know that the connection does not exist, but the public does not know, especially given your motto and stated mission, and that leads to a likelihood of confusion among other problems–it is a violation of our intellectual property rights. Please cease and desist immediately from framing without our permission, as well.
(emphasis ours)
ERS lets loose:
I want to be clear–ERS News would never suggest an affiliation with the LAT–that would be determental to ERS’s mission as journalists of the highest ethics, credibility and integrity.
As you should have known when you accused us falsely the first time we were only linking to the LAT as is allowed under fair use provisions. Although we do not agree with your assessment of the way in which we
were framing ( we clearly indentified the photo gallery as that of the Los Angeles Times) your entitled to your opinion, as to are we and our lawyers.
I would suggest you cease casting your bogus aspersions at ERS News. I would suggest you focus your attention on the flagrant acts of non attribution and what amounts to plagiarism on the part of some at the LAT, so called journalists, relative to this particular story over a period of weeks.
As a highly experienced attorney for the LAT, I am sure such actions on the part of your employees can and would have much more serious consequences than any legal and legitimate and ethical "framing" of a photo gallery clearly labeled as such and linked to by ERS News.
We have removed the link, as its continued existence on our site was a mere oversight due to the unfolding nature of the particular story about the Mayor of Los Angeles and his girlfriend Mirthala Salinas, which your reporters did a good job of reporting on by reading ERS News all the time.
Don’t get us wrong we appreciate the views/hits, as LAT was in the top 5 on the traffic stats on this story throughout, but we don’t appreciate the unethical, uncredible actions of some of your so called journalists.
BTW..we also don’t take to kindly to hollow legal threats, as investigative journalists, we thrive on them. Your lack of knowledge about the journalists behind ERS News is severely wanting. Although
we didn’t take your insults personally, we do take them professionally as you intended.
FBLA wonders why the lawyer thinks that readers are so dumb as to confuse ERS News with the LA Times? Didn’t she read Tim Rutten?

Posted in Eric Longabardi, Kate Coe, Los Angeles Times | Comments Off

I’m Falling In Love With Rachel Sklar

Posted on August 22, 2007 by Luke Ford

While working out this morning and listening to Heart’s "Who Will You Run To?", I watched Fox News with the sound off and I was highly impressed with Rachel Sklar.

Great hair.

Is she married? I’ve been Googling her and I can’t find out. I figure I should know before I let my feelings make a fool of me.

I wonder if she’s still a virgin. If so, do I have a chance to be the one?

(The embarrasing thing is that I’ve read her on and off for years and never thought twice about her. Then I saw her on TV today and was smitten.)

I want to interview her. Her forthcoming book is called "Jew-ish."

Posted in Rachel Sklar | Comments Off

How Is The Nearly Ad-Free ‘New Republic’ Surviving?

Posted on August 22, 2007 by Luke Ford

From Gawker:

A profile of the magazine’s new editor, Columbia alum and "journalistic wunderkind" (their words) Frank Foer, in the latest issue of the Columbia alumni magazine reminds us that new owners CanWest expect TNR "to turn a profit in three years, which is unheard of for an opinion magazine." Yikes.
Perhaps someone at CanWest should heed the words of New Yorker editor Henrik Hertzberg, who told Columbia, "I hope they don’t expect it to make money… In that respect the New Republic has been an almost constant failure since 1914"—the year it was founded.

Posted in Journalism | Comments Off

Time For Action

Posted on August 22, 2007 by Luke Ford

And yes, I mean THAT kind of action. Jews need to breed more, and toward that end, would it not be a mitzvah if every meeting of Jewish bigshots began and ended with a few dozen naked fertile ovulating young Jewish women (selected for their looks as well as other traits) marching into the room, demanding sperm from the gedolim there assembled?

The survival of the Jewish people depends on the Jewish woman receiving sperm when she is fertile, and not aborting the result. EVERYTHING else is bull.

This public service announcement comes courtesy of Chaim Amalek.

Posted in Jews | Comments Off

Amalek Opines on What’s Wrong with Jewish America and JDate

Posted on August 22, 2007 by Luke Ford

If I can’t land a lady via JDate, then there’s obviously something very wrong with JDate.

My inner Amalek writes:

You don’t see Mexicans trying to meet one another through "Mexdate" or Palestinian women fretting about the ticking of their biological clocks. The problem is that too many Jewesses go to college and graduate schools (this generation’s demographic crematoria) at exactly the moment in their lives when their fertility mandates that they be having procreative sex. Then they waste still more years trying to make it in corporate America or in law firms or in medical practices. By they time they are "ready" to mate, the men they might have married have long since moved on and married younger shiksas, and what’s left for them is on this board. That’s the problem, the real problem, and there is nothing that a service like Jdate can do to fix it. Instead of making Jdate "better", better to obviate the need for its existence by encouraging Jewish teenagers to marry young. The job can wait.

I fear that if a man wears a condom too long, even when he takes it off, he can only fire blanks.

Posted in JDate, Jews | Comments Off

A World Gone Mad

Posted on August 22, 2007 by Luke Ford

Monica Osborne blogs:

I used to say that one of the main (though there are many) differences between Indiana and California is the fact that people in Indiana fry everything, and love every second of it, while Californians turn up their nose at fried food and opt instead for trendy plates of low-calorie, high-sodium sushi. And it’s true in some sense — the evidence of this is the fact that in Indiana, at 5’6" and 115 lbs I’m considered runway model thin, but in California I’m an easy candidate for the Jenny Craig weight-loss program.
But I’ve changed my stance, ever so slightly.
In California we do have our fair share of people who like everything fried. But the difference is that they do not do it out in the open. They know that it is shameful, and so they enjoy their grease-laden fare in secret, in the privacy of their own homes. It’s like porn — most people won’t admit to watching it, yet many are secretly addicted to it. But in Indiana, there is no shame in frying anything and everything. It’s a world in which deep-fryers occupy daily counterspace with the coffee-maker and toaster.

Posted in Monica Osborne | Comments Off

JDate Party Bust

Posted on August 22, 2007 by Luke Ford

Danielle Berrin writes:

The August 18 cocktail mixer and "Lost 80s" Live Concert was supposed to be the centerpiece event of JDate’s Schmooz-a-Palooza, a weekend-long extravaganza beginning with an oh-so-LA poolside party on Friday night at the Hyatt and ending with a swanky hotel brunch on Sunday morning-ish.
I didn’t make it to the early evening munch-and-meet, but according to one of the very few JDaters who stuck around for the rest of the night, it was, eh. Shelby, a bright, friendly and confident 23-year-old, verbally expressed her disappointment at the paltry turnout to Joel, one of the JDate representatives running the Palooza (we’ll get back to him in a bit). Shelby was also shocked and offended that the potato skins served at the reception had gasp! bacon on them! What is it with Jewish organizations serving blatantly non-kosher foods at their events (recall the Justice Ball)? Is it really that difficult in the land of abundance to find food options that aren’t treyf?

Posted in Calendar Girls, Danielle Berrin, JDate | Comments Off