Luke Ford | No sacred cows.

Annulling A Conversion

Posted on July 31, 2007 by Luke Ford

In February, Ashdod Rabbinic Court judge Rabbi Avraham Atia issued a ruling that shocked many outside the rabbinic establishment. Basing his verdict on the fact that a woman who came to him seeking to divorce her husband was not observing Shabbat and the laws of ritual family purity, Atia annulled her 15-year-old conversion, retroactively ruling her and her till-then Jewish children non-Jews, and automatically annulling the marriage.
In his decision, Atia also attacked the state Conversion Authority and its courts, which operate under the formal direction of the widely-respected Rabbi Haim Druckman. "These ‘courts’ permit 100 percent gentiles to marry into the Jewish people," Atia wrote. "And they cause many people to sin terribly. They have turned conversions into a joke. The judges are nothing less than blasphemers and evildoers. And since the judges are criminals, none of the conversions they perform should be recognized."

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What do you think about during shmona esray [Judaism’s main prayer]?

Posted on July 31, 2007 by Luke Ford

From FrumSatire:

Jacob posts: "I always wander off and start thinking about hot babes. Before ya know it, I’m finished and commence doing the 3 step backup."
Not Frum posts: "I look around and wait till at least three people are finished until I sit down, so no one thinks I didn’t actually daven. I never actually say it, just trim my nails and try and think about life."
Daniel posts: "You know the old joke about the guy who was just getting to sleep when he gets woken up by this tapping on his chest, only to realize that it’s his right hand, and he’s davening shmonah esrei? Yeah, well, it’s not just a joke."

Joanna Angel replies to my email: "I usually thought about what to eat for dinner, or what to wear out that night, or maybe where I could score some weed."

Mel writes:

We’ve all been there. It begins with one small step, than 5 more. Three backwards, and Three forward. Slowly the world fades away, we are there carefully concentrating, as we stand before the One Above.
Suddenly, the plane crashes and we are stuck on a deserted island, I have no time to worry about my own injuries as I rush to tend to a pregnant woman who… wait no it was just a disguise, that’s wierd, I am looking eye to eye at Jack Bauer, out of nowhere Mr. T, yells, " Don’t be a Fool, it’s time for ressurection of the dead.
I look around me and think, uh oh, I think I am shukkeling too much, better tone it down a bit, speaking of which, that guy over there looks like he either really needs to use the restroom, or arnold shwartzeneger is shooting up the floor around his feet. FEET, Damn, I think I forgot to bend my knees… maybe no one noticed, as I non-chalantly pull off a mini-bow hoping I can play it off as a misstep in my Shukkle if anyone asks…

For some reason, I often think about things I shouldn’t during the shmona esreh. That’s why I prefer to study Torah rather than allow my mind to wander to the things missing from my life.

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Do you have SADD (shul attention deficit disorder)?

Posted on July 31, 2007 by Luke Ford

From FrumSatire:

You have read the shull announcement sheet 5 times, but still guard it against any folks who seek to borrow it;
You hoard those torah email sheets from the OU and random places in Monsey so you have a stack of parsha thoughts from the last 5 months;
You know exactly why Viewpoint magazine exists;
You can scream out the dates and times when the president fumbles during their announcements for the week;
Your shull has not changed the bulletin board in weeks yet you walk out of shull and read it for 15 minutes every shabbos;
You look forward to the time when they do put a new newspaper clipping or thank you note on the bulletin board;
You carefully select your seat based on ability to keep switching the direction you cross your legs, the view the Rabbi has of you sleeping during his speeches, the view over the mechitza, and the ability to keep walking out of shull at every episode of SADD;
You leave shull at the appropriate time to avoid getting any jobs handed out by the gabbi;
You pass over any offer of hagba and claim old football injuries, but you just don’t want to have to sit with the Torah for many moments of Israel and America prayers;
You do not have kidney problems yet you have gone to the bathroom ten times during shachris on shabbos;
People give you strange looks because your staring over the mechitza and the women are those 80 year olds with white doilies;
You shuckel extra violently to keep from falling asleep;
It’s the only time you learn tanach and really get into it as you can compare the stories to something out of Braveheart;
During an uf-ruf you pick up bags of candy that fall near you, even though you have kids who are also doing it;
You pace the back of the shull during every lull;
Finding a full real newspaper left over by a janitor makes your day, even though it is 3 weeks old;
You find yourself cheering when you realize there is no speech after musaf;
You moan when the rabbi busts out one of those pre-haftorah run downs;
You find old copies of the Yated and feel like you discovered the holy grail;
You speak to people during shull you would never speak to during the week;
During laining you can be seen flipping through the pages to see how many are left;
If you walk in late and they are not up to laining yet, you ask someone whats taking so long;
In shulls with folding shtenders in back of seats- you are constantly playing with them, folding them up and down listening to the high pitched squeak until someone always tells you to be quiet;
Do you look through people talis bags in the drawers underneath the benches hoping to find something interesting?
If there is no Kiddush after davening you fall into a deep depression, since you have nothing to look forward to.

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Born in the U.S., Lanaro competes for Mexico and would like to hear that anthem at the Pan American Games

Posted on July 30, 2007 by Luke Ford

From the Los Angeles Times:

Lanaro has since left swimming and is now a pole vaulter — the seventh-best in the world, in fact. But if he climbs to the top of the medal platform today during the final full day of competition of the Pan American Games, he won’t be hearing "The Star-Spangled Banner." Instead they’ll be playing the Mexican national anthem.
"Ever since I was young I wanted to compete for Mexico," said Lanaro, who was born in Los Angeles to an American father and a Mexican mother, qualifying him for dual citizenship. "My whole family, everyone’s Mexican. We live in the U.S., but the culture is a Mexican culture and that’s what I grew up around.
"So that’s what I’ve always wanted to do, compete for Mexico."
He’s not the only one. No fewer than nine athletes named to the Mexican Pan Am team — including East L.A. boxer Anthony Mosquera and former UCLA middle-distance runner Martell Munguia — were born in the U.S. but choose to compete for their parents’ homeland instead.
"I live in the States. Everything I do is in the U.S.," said Lanaro, the Mexican champion and national record-holder with a best of 19 feet 1 inch. "[But] competing for Mexico, it’s a big deal for my mom. And my dad too. For them, it’s important for me to represent Mexico."

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A War We Might Just Win

Posted on July 30, 2007 by Luke Ford

About six months ago, I gave up on our efforts in Iraq. Since then, things have been getting for our side.

Two blokes from the liberal Brookings Institute writes in the New York Times:

In war, sometimes it’s important to pick the right adversary, and in Iraq we seem to have done so. A major factor in the sudden change in American fortunes has been the outpouring of popular animus against Al Qaeda and other Salafist groups, as well as (to a lesser extent) against Moktada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army.
These groups have tried to impose Shariah law, brutalized average Iraqis to keep them in line, killed important local leaders and seized young women to marry off to their loyalists. The result has been that in the last six months Iraqis have begun to turn on the extremists and turn to the Americans for security and help. The most important and best-known example of this is in Anbar Province, which in less than six months has gone from the worst part of Iraq to the best (outside the Kurdish areas). Today the Sunni sheiks there are close to crippling Al Qaeda and its Salafist allies. Just a few months ago, American marines were fighting for every yard of Ramadi; last week we strolled down its streets without body armor.

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I Need A Model To Feed Me Grapes And Wipe My Furrowed Brow

Posted on July 30, 2007 by Luke Ford

I’ve got a video camera coming over Tuesday afternoon to make a short on my glamorous world of blogging and I want some eye candy to liven things up. I wish I knew some attractive women. Instead all the chicks I know are more focused on eternal reward rather than bestowing temporal mercies.

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Tabloid Prodigy Marlise Elizabeth Kast

Posted on July 30, 2007 by Luke Ford

I first heard of Marlise on LAObserved.

After I read Tabloid Prodigy (Marlise worked at the tabs from October 1997 to March 2001), I went looking for a review that articulated my confused feelings about the book. I found it on popmatters.com:

If they gave a prize for the most confused book of the year, Tabloid Prodigy would have to be a top contender.
…[H]her book is written in a simple vocabulary and sentences so basic that I was left wondering if she was still dumbing things down for the kind of audience that wants to learn about celebrities. Either way, the result is confusing. While she writes well about day-to-day details of her job, her attempts at describing wacky office antics or the crazy dynamics of her family fall completely flat.
Kast, a proud Christian, left the Globe after two years because, after being “plagued by doubts” about the ethics of her job, she realizes she’s been “lying about who she really is,” and needs to come “face to face with her conscience.” If this is the case—if she’s really ashamed of how she led her life, of the lies she told and the people she harmed—it’s hard to understand why the book cover is laid out like a tabloid and covered with flashy pictures of the beautiful young author amid celebrity headlines? Most people who feel they’ve made shameful ethical compromises don’t usually write books about how thrilling it all was.
Even more confusing, Kast has dedicated her book to “my heavenly Father, in whom I put my trust.”

Another horny guy beat me to her interview. Normally I wouldn’t allow my hormones to pour into my interview, but Marlise does write a lot in the book about preserving the treasure of her virginity.

On page 117, she writes:

Casual dates became routine, sometimes four or five different guys in one week. It was dinner and dancing, or drinks and a movie. Whatever the combo, it was always at night and only went as far as my front doorstep.
Nearly every second date ended in a kiss. And then I never called them again. I provoked with my lips, over-glossing and brushing four times a day, becoming a mouth tease without morning regret.

I had to find out if her virginity was still in tact, and if so, did I have a chance to take it.

(WaPo interview.)

Checking out Marlise’s site, I found this self description: "Now based in California, Marlise continues her quest for liquid mountains and untracked terrain as she innocently wanders the world with blissful contentment."

What kind of adult writes like that? I had to find out. I emailed her for an interview and she called me back Monday afternoon. Audio.

Marlise says she’s kept journals since age seven. "After I graduated college, there was never a question about what I was going to do with my life. I just needed an avenue to make that happen."

"I loved the risk, the adrenalin and the adventure of [working for the tabloids]. It was very entertaining."

"I felt like part of my job was to catch celebrities behaving badly. Public figures have to realize that they are always under scrutiny. At the same time, there were these episodes when I realized I was destroying lives. Look at the Leonardo DiCaprio story. All my sources lost their jobs overnight and Leonardo DiCaprio had to move to a new home."

"At the end of the day, it was unfulfilling. Going into porn shops after Don Johnson, you don’t sleep well at night. I pushed away any voice of reason and judgment. My friends, my family, my faith. Anything that would cause me to question what I was doing."

"It’s something I have to give credit to Christ for. I feel like my life has been spared on so many occasions. …I feel like I was protected on some level so I could go and tell my story. Now I attend church regularly and I read my Bible and try to stay focused on my purpose in life and that is to change lives and touch people through my pen."

Luke: "What Christian denomination do you most identify with?"

Marlise: "I characterize myself as non-denominational. I usually attend non-denominational churches. I focus more on the Word and the raw truth…"

Her father, who has a PhD in Philosophy, was a long-time minister for the Assembly of God.

"There were moments when I felt like I was going to marry the editor mentioned in the book — Caelan Dunmore… Every woman in my family had walked down the aisle on her wedding day [as a virgin]. In giving that away, I think that was part of the reason I began to push Caelan away at the same time."

Luke: "I don’t know how I missed that."

Marlise: "In the book, it talks about how I released my power and completely abandoned myself and gave myself to that relationship and everything that goes with it."

Even with these clues and the amazon.com "search inside the book" feature, I still can’t find in the book where Marlise gives it up at age 23.

When I ask her for the page, she can’t find it either.

After our phone interview, I email Marlise for the page where she loses her virginity. She replies late Monday night:

Luke,
I just read your blog and was somewhat saddened by your introduction to the interview. Although I considered your questions extremely insightful, I’m not sure I quite understand your ultimate purpose in including me on lukeford.net. The fact that you "wanted a chance at my virginity" is not only insulting but extremely rude and unprofessional. Perhaps you can understand why I have no intention of answering any more of your questions.

Spurred by her email, I eventually found the passage I sought on page 251:

Refusing to play my mind games, Caelan simply called me on my actions. He was forcing the relationship to either bloom or die. And so I surrendered, giving my emotions the freedom to move toward a predictable outcome: a committed relationship and all that entailed. Little by little I knew I was losing my identity by falling in love, but I didn’t care. For years, I had been ruled by guilt and pride and religion, something which I could neither explain nor justify to those on the outside.

It reminds me of when at age 18 I was similarly frustrated by the lack of explicitness in the rape scene in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Ubervilles.

At 32, Marlise has never married. "I move around quite a bit. I’m pretty independent. I’ve never had to rely on anyone. That might cause some men to be intimidated."

On page 269, she writes: "I would forever remain a bride-stalker and never a bride."

Luke: "How do you like being a part of a close-knit community?"

Marlise: "I’ve always lived on my own so I haven’t had to deal with that."

"In Tabloid Prodigy, I lay everything on the table. I have nothing to hide. If there’s anything someone wants to know, I’ll tell them. I’m not hiding behind any mask. I’m very truthful and open."

Luke: "Are you still an adrenaline junkie?"

Marlise: "Definitely."

Marlise’s mom was born and raised in Ghana and her father was born and raised in Losoto, near South Africa. "We never had a lot of money…but my parents would put aside money so we could travel."

"My parents were always risk-takers. The stories they have surpass anything I’ve gone through."

"They met at age 18 at Bethany Bible College in Calfornia. They married and went back to Africa."

"Embrace who you are and never surrender your uniqueness. I came so close to doing that and in the end I realized my goal was to work my way up the corporate ladder. And once I had done that and arrived at the top, I realized that this is not what it is all about. For me that contentment could only be found in Christ."

"It took a year [after quitting the tabloids] to get my [writing] voice back."

"I look at a lot of my friends and I see that they are stay-at-home moms or in these careers they can’t get out. I love my life. If it wasn’t me, I’d envy myself. Some people are envious and say, ‘I wish I could live that life that you’re living.’ I say, ‘Why can’t you?’ A lot of people are afraid. It’s just about finding what you want to do and completely embracing that. I’m able to find what works for me and make it happen and survive off it. Of course you have to make a lot of sacrifices. I have a home in Carlsbad. A beautiful home, but because I don’t receive any royalties off my book until October, I’m living off my savings and my freelance writing. It’s difficult. I had to rent out my house and move back in with my parents at 32 years old. It’s been great. I love being with my parents and I consider them my closest friends."

"The training ground the tabloids gave me for journalism was incredible. I covered an event Saturday night and I stayed awake until 3:30 to finish the story way ahead of deadline just because I’m deadline driven and I like to turn in my stories really quick."

Luke: "You say that if you were in the same position in 1997, you’d do it all over again. How can you say that knowing the amount of pain your decision gave to your family and it caused you to do all sorts of unethical things?"

Marlise: "If I didn’t go through that, I wouldn’t be the person I am today. My parents learned a lot about what I went through when they read the book. My mom would walk in and say, ‘I can’t believe you went through this. I can’t believe this happened to you. I can’t believe Bobby Brown did this to you.’ She’d be angry at what I had to go through but at the same time she is so happy with what I am today."

Luke: "How much pain did it inflict on your family? It certainly seemed to alienate you from your sister."

Marlise: "I pushed them away so I don’t think they realized. They were based in Monterey and I was based in L.A., so we were pretty far apart. I don’t think they realized everything I was going through until there was that Fugees party and they received a call that I was missing [Marlise writes on page 219 that she passed out in her own vomit in a handicapped stall and wasn’t found until eight the next morning] and that I wasn’t going to church and that I wasn’t doing anything to feed my faith or to strengthen who I was spiritually.

"The person who was hurt the most through all of this was myself. Of course my sister took a big beating as well."

Luke: "Do you think you’ve been permanently warped by your time working for the tabloids?"

Marlise: "No. I can walk away from it. I’ve had a lot of time to heal. I can look at it as a chapter in my life that was detrimental to me at the time…"

Luke: "What do you love and hate about your life today?"

Marlise: "I don’t think I hate anything about my life. I would love to live in my house. The career path I’ve chosen, it’s difficult to make a good living off of that. I love my freedom and that I get to do what I love."

Luke: "What stories are you most passionate about?"

Marlise: "I like writing about extreme sports. Travel. Human interest stories. Investigative pieces. Going undercover."

Luke: "What percentage of the time are you content?"

Marlise: "Ninety percent. There are times when I get sad and question what I’m doing. I’m working on my next manuscript and it’s all in journal format. Five hundred and seventy pages. I have cleaned up and edited a hundred pages of that. I’m thinking, ‘Does anyone care about this? Is anyone going to read this?’ I start to doubt myself. I start to doubt my writing. I asked my mom, ‘Why would anyone want to read this?’ She said, ‘Because people want to live vicariously through you.’"

Posted in Book Reviews, Journalism | Comments Off

Remembering Bill Walsh

Posted on July 30, 2007 by Luke Ford

I covered Bill Walsh and the San Francisco 49ers from 1985-1987 for KAHI/KHYL radio. I was 19-21 yo.

Bill was always calm and cerebral. He never lost his temper. He didn’t try to be popular. We journalists were a necessary evil. Everybody knew that Walsh was at the top of his profession. He had the above-it-all aura of a great professor.

After the 49ers lost to the New Orleans Saints in 1985 to fall to 0-2, I ran off the field with the Saints. "Some genius!" yelled a Saints player.

Coming out to the news conference, Walsh said, "It’s good to be among friends."

I relayed the Saints’ comment and asked Walsh if the pressure was getting to the team. "I’d be happy to match our record with anybody’s," he replied.

I never asked Walsh anything that made him think. I felt out-classed by the beat reporters around me (I was usually the youngest reporter there and on the weekends at KAHI I had an open mic to the world) and I didn’t say much. I broke no stories (though I didn’t make any major mistakes either).

The 49ers trained during the summer at my community college in Rocklin – Sierra College.

During these years, I lost most of my ardor as a sports fan. My main team was the Dallas Cowboys and they were in decline. My main concern was to further my ambitions.

I grew frustrated with the limits of radio news and decided to go into academia.

When I quit my job in September 1987 to concentrate on my 21 units at college (I secured straight As), it would be my last time working for a professional news organization.

Posted in Journalism, Personal | Comments Off

The Orthodox Paradox

Posted on July 30, 2007 by Luke Ford

Paul Shaviv (father of blogger Miriam Shaviv and director of the Hebrew Academy of Toronto) writes about Noah Feldman’s New York Times article:

7. The question of how to handle an embarrassing ‘b’dieved” situation – as happened at the now infamous reunion – is a matter of school management and decision-making process. It is not clear where the ‘edit them out’ decision was made. But a school should have a culture where everyone recognizes problems when they arise, and instead of deciding on the spot, refers them to a wider decision-making body who can work out a strategy for resolving them. Making arbitrary and deeply insulting decisions to airbrush a grad out of the reunion photo is guaranteed to cause deep hurt and offense. The action was breathtakingly insensitive, and the lasting hurt – the complete depersonalization – seems to have been the catalyst for the public action. Not to publicly humiliate your fellow is a Jewish value. Where was it in this situation? The penalty for one who is ‘Malbin et pnei chavero b’rabbim’ is more severe than for one who intermarries….

8. The question that transcends the school is, of course, the overall question of how the Jewish community, and in this case the ‘Modern Orthodox" community, relates personally, communally and institutionally to our fellow Jews who marry non-Jewish partners, or otherwise are clearly ‘crossing red lines’ in their public lives. Many commentators on Prof. Feldman point out that the "community" is much more tolerant of individuals who transgress halachah in other ways. I can only give one observation here: I come from the UK, where the Orthodox community, even the ‘mainstream’ Orthodox community, has from time immemorial maintained the most stringent boycotts and ostracism of non-Orthodox Jewish movements, the ‘outmarried’, the heretics (real or imagined) and every other non-conformist, to a degree undreamed of by the most rigourously Orthodox in North America, and all but the most rigourously Orthodox in Israel. It hasn’t worked. It hasn’t deterred anyone from marrying non-Jewish partners; it hasn’t inhibited the growth of non-orthodox movements (it may have stimulated them). It has resulted in schism, divisiveness and ‘sinat chinam’. On this issue I am wholeheartedly with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach. In our age, we should reach out to every single Jew with kindness, tact, courtesy, understanding and love.

Posted in Noah Feldman, Orthodoxy | Comments Off

What Ails The MSM

Posted on July 30, 2007 by Luke Ford

I write for the Los Angeles Times to KTLA reporter Eric Spillman in the last edition of our "Dust-Up":

Dear Eric,

I expect that in a hundred years people will look back on our dialogue as the great leap forward in moral thinking for 2007.

With that legacy in mind, I now present my five-point diagnosis for what ails American journalism.

• Failure of imagination

MSM journalism is too predictable. It rarely catches the reader off-guard. To hold attention, you have to constantly defy expectations. You have to play peekaboo with the reader.

First-person news accounts written with attitude can be more powerful than the familiar objective stance. There’s no inherent reason why the journalist writing a story has to be less interesting than the people he’s writing on.

• Lack of clarity on mission

You can be kind. You can be truthful. You can be ethical. You can investigate. You can shape the community. You can produce compelling and profound reporting. But neither an individual nor a newspaper can do all these things equally well. News organizations need to decide if their primary mission is to report or if it is to shape the community in the light of a certain agenda (such as compassion and opposition to racism, sexism and homophobia).

• Lack of technique

It’s rare to read the newspaper and lose yourself in a story. Instead, papers rely on the Inverted Pyramid tradition of news-telling (where the important facts go first), a method most appropriate for transmitting information over a telegraph.

To rivet the readers attention, the writer must:

Take the reader somewhere. There should be a beginning, middle and end to every story and every scene. There must be scene-by-scene construction leading to a climax. There must be desire, struggle and realization for protagonists.

Use realistic dialogue instead of canned quotes from official sources.

Reveal attention to status. (I been pimpin’ my appearance in the Los Angeles Times all week.)

Use multiple points of view.

• Unwillingness to treat religion with the same seriousness that it treats politics

Clergy deserve at least as much scrutiny as high school football coaches.

• Sanitizing the news

If a subject says various slurs, they should be quoted exactly. Spare me the "n-word" and the like. If members of one racial or religious group pour scorn on another group, quote the hate in all its glory. Capture how people really talk.

• Poor interviewing technique.

Posted in Blogging, Journalism | Comments Off