For almost three decades, the National Havurah Committee has been convening Summer Institutes to catalyze grassroots Jewish life across North America. Since 1985, the Institute, like any Jewish event of note, has produced an annual T-shirt. Each T-shirt features original artwork on that year’s Institute theme.
Fabric artist Amy Smith of Blue Feet Studio has created a quilt that incorporates 14 T-shirts from past Institutes, going all the way back to the first one in 1985:
This quilt will be raffled off at next week’s Institute and go to one lucky winner, but you don’t have to be present at Institute to enter and win. You can buy raffle tickets online until Wednesday, August 8, at midnight. Buy one, buy two, buy fifty, and take home a piece of artwork that encapsulates several decades of independent Jewish innovation.
Jakarta: “A dozen Christian men were convicted Thursday and sentenced to up to 14 years in jail for beating to death and beheading two Muslims.”
“More than 10,000 academics [including 32 Nobel laureates] signed a petition demanding a halt to the campaign by Britian’s academic union to boycott Israel.”
Israel: State commission recommends 1000 NIS (~$250) monthly living stipend for Holocaust survivors; State gives 100 NIS (~$20) instead, proclaims own generosity.
Khaled Abu Toameh rightly asks, where is the outcry over the Lebanese army’s recent decimation of the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp?
According to Reuters, a new study from researchers at McGill University, published in The Journal of Sexual Medicine, have revealed what lots of people have known all along: circumcision has no effect on sexual sensation.
There’s lots of things I could say here, but the truth is, this study doesn’t much matter. For those who are determined to stop circumcision, this won’t make any difference – they’ll go on touting the flawed studies they’ve been using (one big problem that I noted a while back with those studies- they relied on men circumcised as adults, and also several of them on men who were unhappy with their circumcisions. Um, durr) and for those who are commanded to circumcise, well as they ought, they’ll go on circumcisiing. Because in the end, that’s the reason one does it. Not because it’s healthier for their sexual partners, or because it lowers the (relatively miniscule anyway) risk of penile cancer. Circumcision for Muslims and Jews is because God commanded it. That’s it. Move along now.
How else can one explain Paris Hilton’s “success,” other than to declare G-d nonexistent? What just and merciful creator would allow such a lowly creature to thrive in His world?
Uch. I’ve taken to reading the eleventh blessing of the Amidah, îìê à åäá öã÷ä åîùôè, sarcastically, as a challenge to G-d.
What significant purpose could she possibly serve in bringing the world closer to redemption? That her name should cross more lips than words of Torah ever shall? Where is justice?
Party princess Paris Hilton is $60 million out of pocket after her billionaire grandfather – appalled by her jail term for drink-driving offences – axed her inheritance.
[...]
Hilton senior, the only member of the family left with a sizeable stake in the huge hotel chain, has let it be known that he intends to donate to charity the $2.4bn he will gain from this month’s sale of the company to private equity firm Blackstone.
It would seem that even creatures as contemptible and vile as Paris Hilton serve their purpose in this world. The former heiress just delivered a small fortune into the hands of the needy by being egregiously despicable.
It’s been said that the Lord works in mysterious ways… Perhaps now I can doubt a little less.
My friend Dan is in China teaching English for the summer. He just sent over this pretty amusing anecdote. I thought you might get a kick out of it…
Dan,
So I have been teaching an advanced group of English learners over here. We’ve been talking about religion, philosophy, science, ethics, logic, art, politics, etc. I had my students research different religions and write papers.
This is from an essay a student of mine wrote on Judaism:
“Eating should obey laws. For example, Jews can never be eaten at the same time.”
I definitely agree. They taste terrible together.
Also from an essay on Christianity:
“Because Jesus was died on a cross, when we see crosses we must remind him.”
I also agree. Jesus is always like, “God, I know already!”
According to the Jpost, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert called Sunday on religious and secular cabinet ministers to reach a compromise on legislation that would expand Rabbinic Court jurisdiction in divorce cases. “Feminists,” which apparently means any women with a grain of sense, are protesting this bill as discriminatory against women.
It seems to me that this is somewhat of an understatement. The Rabbinic Courts have long been er, discriminatory against women; that is to say, they tend to arbitrate in favor of the husband, and extort money (that is, money that would normally be part of her financial rights in the divorce, such as child support) from a woman before granting her release from her husband. That is, in cases where he will grant her a divorce at all, since by and large the religious courts don’t much force the issue (there have been a few exceptional cases where the husband has been jailed for failing to give a get, but by and large, this problem – which could be halachically solved, and has been by the Masorti movement, and will not be, by the Orthodox, because the options that they once considered acceptable were adopted by the Masorti movement, making them treif by association- remains an enormous one for Orthodox women, in which the courts demand that she submit to all sorts of craziness in order for them to pressure the husband to give her a divorce).
According to the JPost article
Rabbinic Courts Administration spokeswoman Efrat Orbach said the proposed legislation would simply maintain the status quo.
“The Supreme Court recently overturned decades of precedent during which the Rabbinic Courts litigated in monetary matters connected with the divorce process, even after the husband gave his ex the divorce writ,” Orbach said.
“This bill simply anchors in law what has been common practice for a long time now.”
Because Israeli law needs to have more religious control. the hegemony not being yet complete. This is a terrible idea. The status quo is not such a beautiful thing that it needs to be “anchored in law.” To the contrary, the status quo is quite broken and needs to be fixed.
The son of a good family who stole apples from a cart did not become a thief overnight. The deed has its roots in previous generations. Perhaps his very pious grandfather hid behind the bimah of the synagogue in the name of humility, but the act contained a trace of deception (geneivas daas) because he was acting more pious than he really was. His scholarly son went a step further and “stole” chiddushei Torah from other scholars by reciting them in his own name. The grandson, in turn, became an apple thief.
–Rabbi Nosson Tzvi Finkel, the Alter of Slabodka
***
If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I’m the dictator.
Last week the BBC uncovered evidence of President George W. Bush’s grandfather Prescott Bush‘s involvement in a 1933 plot to overthrow FDR in a famous coup that would have replaced American democracy with a fascist dictatorship. The coup was the subject of the acclaimed 1973 book The Plot to Seize the White House.
Document uncovers details of a planned coup in the USA in 1933 by right-wing American businessmen.
The coup was aimed at toppling President Franklin D Roosevelt with the help of half-a-million war veterans. The plotters, who were alleged to involve some of the most famous families in America, (owners of Heinz, Birds Eye, Goodtea, Maxwell Hse & George Bush’s Grandfather, Prescott) believed that their country should adopt the policies of Hitler and Mussolini to beat the great depression.
Mike Thomson investigates why so little is known about this biggest ever peacetime threat to American democracy.
The BBC’s revelation is compounded by the fact that Bush and his partner E. Roland Harriman served as allies of Fritz Thyssen, the German industrialist who financed Hitler’s ascent to power and the Nazi war machine. Bush and Harriman’s bank, the Union Banking Corp., was seized under the Trading With The Enemy Act in 1942. Harriman was also a major financial contributor to the American eugenics movement, which advocated, among other things, the forced sterilization of non-white Americans.
The current president’s policies seem to be an extension of his grandfather’s thinking. Bush’s latest string of Executive Orders are so disconcertingly undemocratic and un-American that even the Right-wing is growing leery. Last week, Bush signed an order that would enable him to seize the financial assets of anti-war activists. And in his most troubling move to date, on May 9, Bush signed an order that states that in the event of another terror attack on U.S. soil, the legislative and judicial branches of government would become subservient to the executive. This move is precisely how Hitler concretized his power following the Reichstag fire.
Of course, this is not to say that Bush is a genocidal maniac, but rather that his policies pose an existential threat to American democracy.
Welcome to the new fascist era, kids.
Don’t say we never warned you.
[Update 7/29 10:15PM]
From: Daniel Sieradski
Subject: Question on Godwin’s Law
Date: July 29, 2007 3:59:52 PM EDT
To: Mike Godwin
Hi Mike,
My name is Dan Sieradski and I’m the editor-in-chief of Jewschool.com [...] I contacted you once before, I believe, with regards to a panel I had attempted to put together that explored the question “when is it okay to call someone a Nazi.”
Sadly, it never came together. Nonetheless, this issue is still pertinent, especially now with Bush’s passage of an executive order on May 9 that would make the legislative and judicial branches of government subservient to the executive in the event of another terror attack on U.S. soil. (Details here.) As you may be aware, following the Reichstag fire, this is precisely the procedure Hitler used to concretize his power.
I was just wondering if you could offer a perfunctory statement to my readers on this matter, seeing as how that, in response to making a comparison between these two policies, I have been accused of violating, well, your law.
The question is, essentially, why is it out of bounds to draw comparisons between specific policies of the Hitler and Bush regimes that achieve the exact same ends (in this case, eradicating constitutional checks and balances and enshrining the authority of the executive)?
I’ve CC’d Rabbi Dr. Michael Berenbaum, former director of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, who has taken the position that it is never acceptable to draw comparisons to Hitler, and who on this subject, I also invite to offer his thoughts.
___
Daniel “Mobius” Sieradski
***
From: Mike Godwin
Subject: Re: Question on Godwin’s Law
Date: July 29, 2007 8:04:36 PM EDT
To: Daniel Sieradski
Hi, Daniel.
I get requests like yours from time to time, and my best answer has been to refrain from telling anyone whether it’s appropriate to cite or invoke Godwin’s Law (which, like any other 17-year-old, tends to operate independently from what its parent may dictate).
I will say that I crafted Godwin’s Law with an eye to keeping the memory of the Holocaust and other horrors of the Nazi era alive and in perspective — I was worried that the overuse of Nazi comparisons would trivialize a historical effort that we’d do better to remember in all its magnitude and detail.
That said, I have watched the progress of the Bush Administration with great fear and trembling, and of course I disapprove of many and perhaps most of its policies.
–Mike
Alright kids — question: How can we uphold the credo of “never again” if we view the Holocaust as a singularly unique event to which there can be no parallels ever drawn? How do we learn the lessons of the Shoah if we cannot refer to history in order to identify consistencies between history and current events, particularly when such comparisons may serve as a warning signal that may help us evade another tragedy? And with regards to the politicization of the Shoah, why is it acceptable to make comparisons between Ahmadinejad and Hitler, but not between Bush and Hitler? Discuss.
As someone with very mixed feelings about day schools, I’m always interested in hearing about creative, serious Jewish education alternatives for pre-college kids. (Anyone know the fate of the New Haven public school/Yale/Jewish studies program?)
Along those lines, South Florida appears set to become the location of America’s first Jewish charter school. This article is definitely intriguing, but the school still sounds a bit sketchy. If the article is correct, the school has hired as its head an Orthodox rabbi whose only educational qualification is having run a yeshiva and who is promoting the school through Chabad channels. Maintaining strict church-state separation becomes increasingly tricky in situations like this, with many quoted in the article raising fears that such a school will ultimately harm the Jews through weakened church-state barriers. On the other hand, school officials say they won’t be teaching “Judaism,” but rather Jewish history and culture, and Hebrew.
What do you think?
Ben Gamla’s charter was approved in March, but the school was still the hot topic at a July 24 school board meeting that drew a standing room-only crowd. Supporters of the school say it could serve as a national model for providing families with a financially accessible option at a time when the overwhelming majority of non-Orthodox households are opting not to send their children to Jewish day schools.
Some critics, on the other hand, worry that the school’s main contribution will be to serve as a road map for religious communities seeking to lower the wall separating church and state.
“In other countries, we Jews were forced to support religious institutions of the dominant religions,” said Rabbi Allan Tuffs of Temple Beth El, a Reform congregation in Hollywood. “The Jewish community has succeeded in America largely thanks to the principle of separation of church and state.”
“But with charter schools like Ben Gamla, we are opening the door for public money to be used to support all sorts of religious ideologies across America,” Tuffs warned. “What will we say to the imam down the street who says he wants to teach Arabic within an Islamic cultural setting? Or the fundamentalist Christian group that wants to start a school to teach Christian culture?”
Sometimes Modern Orthodox women resist being forced to sit at the back of the segregated buses. The haredim don’t like it when they perceive that to be happening. And now, yet another incident of an Orthodox woman being assaulted by haredim has occurred. This one a true threat to tznius (modesty, the numero uno mitzvah for women according to the right-wing ultra-Orthodox), a seventy year old grandmother trying to help seat her grandchild.
“This is from an Areivim list member and it so important that it needs to get wider exposure. It happened yesterday.”
Sorry to bring up an old topic; but it hit close to home this time. This is addressed at all those readers who don’t believe that this happens without provocation:An hour ago my brother left my parents in Ramat Bet Shemesh and got on a Mehadrin bus with 2 of his kids – and my Mother came on behind him with the baby, intending to put the baby down and get off before the bus leaves.
A Kanoi [zealot] jumped up and pushed my 70 year old mother (holding a baby) backward and pinned her to the front of the bus, yelling at her to get off, ignoring her explanation of why she was on the men’s side. Of course she couldn’t get off because she was being pinned against the front of the bus.
Her arms are aching so badly so can hardly function; and the only person who intervened on a full bus of Frum Yidden was the Arab bus driver!!!!
Haredi apologists will rush to note that “daas Torah†does not approve of violence to achieve their goal of bus segregation. They will insist we should not condemn the many for the actions of the few.
It may be the actions of a few, but it is the inaction of quite a few more, because they are implementing the will of the haredi leaders and their masses . These assaults are happening because of the goal of achieving compliance of this new chumrah (stringency).
The condemning posters in Ramat Bet Shemesh B put up by the Edah HaCharedis have been pointed to as evidence that the rabbinic leadership is strongly opposed to violent protest. But those posters in the same breath endorsed the very goals sought by those violent demonstrators.
When I was growing up as one of the only Jews in most of the places I lived, including college at a Catholic university, I would frequently attract as friends converts-to-be who wanted to ask me all about my faith. Why these people wanted to convert was always a mystery to me. Jewish culture inherits so much baggage, I felt, and so many nonsensical rules that are outside the realm of normal American, nominally-Christian frameworks. They were converting depite the barriers because it called to them spiritually. But noticeably, health was never a reason why.
Yet KosherToday and newspapers everywhere report the soaring demand for kosher food. Ynet reports today, “In the last decad, [sic] kosher food sales in American supermarkets have reached a growth rate of 15 percent as opposed to a four percent growth rate for food that is not kosher. Eleven million Americans buy kosher food, and they are responsible for a yearly turnover of $9 billion. What’s interesting in all this data is that there are only just over six million Jews in America and even fewer keep kosher.” And why? 55 percent of kosher shoppers do so because they believe it’s healthier.
So this week’s New York jewish Week chronicles the fall-out over Matisyahu’s revelation that he “no longer identifies” with “the Lubavitch sect” of Chassidus. The revelation, to quote the Jewish Week, “lit up” the Orthodox blogosphere.
Well I wouldn’t call the frum blogosphere “lit up” but there is definitely spirited dialogue.
Rabbi Levi Brackman — a rabbi who I have continuously held in extremely high esteem since I began reading his (often the sole) frum perspectives on YNet — voices his regret for ever having backed Matis:
His lyrics no longer really reflect deep Jewish spirituality and his behavior on stage is becoming increasingly secular. Now that he has publicly distanced himself from Chabad/Lubavitch I am admitting that I was wrong to ever promote Matisyahu. It is my hope that he keeps his faith and does not go off the deep end and thus take others with him.
In his “Life of Rubin” blog, Chaim Rubin, blogging from Crown Heights, writes in his abrasively titled piece “Matisyahu No Longer Lubavitch. Enjoys Jay-Z and Sipping Wine” that he finds Matisyahu’s re-affiliation “alarming” and opines:
It makes it even worse when you hear how irresponsibly he speaks. We don’t want our kids listening to Jay Z and sipping wine to relax. Thats not how a frum yid should act….I think Shluchim might need to reconsider how involved they get with him or his shows. I think we have to worry about what he could still say or do…
I really hope that Matisyahu does well. Both phy$ically and spiritually. I hope and wish him well, but I’m officially OFF the Matisyahu fan club train…because of his comments and his attitude. He may be doing a lot of good for the non religious world and maybe even the goyish world. But for the Frum world I’m afraid that he can only do harm.
First let me preface everything by saying that I have nothing but the highest levels of respect for Rabbi Brackman, and I love to read Life of Rubin.
Perhaps there’s a kabbalistic term for the emotional source of all these blog posts. Perhaps we could call it “Olam ha’Overreaction.” As Yossi B (future hiphop stage name?) writes on his blog ChaBlog-Lubavitch, Matisyahu is being misunderstood and overly criticized, and Yossi blasts Rav Brackman’s equating Matisyahu with a “secular Jewish” musician saying:
You know, [you're] right. Bob Dylan and Matisyahu are pretty much the same. One barely licked the edge of Torah his entire life, and one says Chitas and Davens every day, but no, your right he is like every other secular Jewish singer. Matisyahu is not made for your little kids in your house, and I hope you don’t have a problem with your teenage ones listening to him because that’s just… odd.
…I think you need to ask yourself who is the good Jew in this situation. No disrespect intended.
I think this entire argument is symptomatic of a far deeper and far more insidious cause — a cause affecting all of us trying to break into the mainstream with our beards and jackets. Matisyahu, as far as I know, hasn’t changed very much. Isn’t he still “very religious”, isn’t he still singing “treif wine clouds the heart”?
I think this is symptomatic of a breakdown in understanding between those religious Jews who were raised religious (FFB) and ba’alei tshuva/converts. More »
Hey, for those of you who didn’t know this, San Francisco has the oldest Jewish film festival going. I’m a major fan and multiyear devotee, despite the balagan of long lines and anxious ticket holders. I love the lineup of weird little documentaries, new Israeli features and especially, the films from around the world looking at Jewish stories through Mexican, French, Egyptian, and Russian lenses.
I missed much of the festival this year due to travel, but caught two films. The first was 9 Star Hotel, an overly long but totally compelling Israeli documentary about the lives of Palestinian workers hiding out in the hills near Modi’in to make a living building that city. Ido Haar’s film showed you the human side of these illegal workers without any angry posturing about the conflict or who’s right and wrong.
The unbelievable thing to me was that he made this film without any knowledge of Arabic. During the Q&A, Haar talked about how the subjects didn’t really start relaxing around him until he stopped bringing his translator along, so he was forced to just shoot hours and hours of footage and work with a translator in the edit. Wow. Painful.
This film relied on talking heads in a way that generally puts me to sleep, but did its job admirably: exposing me to the riches of the Archive – clips of old Yiddish theater and film, and rare filmed performances shot “before the war.†The vignettes of six women were inserted between clips of a Katz’s Deli schmoozefest of contemporary women comics, including Judy Gold, who revved up the crowd at the Castro with a short set of gay, Jewish, and born-to-a-negative-mom jokes before the film.
Obviously, the producers could have looked at any of hundreds of women comics. They focused on Molly Picon, Fanny Brice, Sophie Tucker, Joan Rivers, Wendy Wasserstein and Gilda Radner. With the exception of Wasserstein (whom I’m going to go out on a limb and call a playwright), these were excellent choices. I’m embarrassed how little I knew about the insouciant Picon and the hilarious Tucker, and my familiarity with Brice was limited to Streisand imitations. The audience was crazy for the Gilda sequences (it seems that it might be illegal, or at least inhuman not to love Gilda Radner) and the film gave me the heart-wrenching back-story on Joan Rivers. I’d had no idea why she is so fierce (and so weird) until I saw the often very sad and surprising story of her life. More please!
More or less a good time. Sure, I could have done without the line wrapping to Noe Street, the cranky volunteers who didn’t believe I was with the press (too sexy, huh?), the inconsolable bitch at the end of my row too busy shushing people to watch the film, the male editor on the stage who took most of the Q&A before Heather Gold called him out for hogging the mic from his three women colleagues, and the general oh-my-g-d-there-aren’t-going-to-be-enough-seats anxiety level that my fellow Yidden supplied.
Here’s my question: What will we be watching from the Archive when *I’m* a senior? (Please don’t tell me it’s going to be a white-haired Sarah Silverman telling doodie jokes.)
Dan Wanders, pastor of Aldersgate United Methodist Church, Juneau, Alaska:
The religion that Karl Marx knew was indeed embodied in institutions that maintained oppression of the people, and it is cause for anguish to see how forms of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are oppressive. It is painful to see how much religion is little more than an approval of narrow ethnocentrism and dreaming of the good old days when ignorance is remembered as bliss.
But all of the spiritual movements I have mentioned above – Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Baha’i – really are intended to be transformational rather than conformational. No expression of any of them should be a confirmation of the status quo or a cultural buttress. All of them are intended radically to move our world toward greater mercy, kindness and justice. All of them are true to themselves only when challenging societal values and practices.
Though some might be uncomfortable with the language, many of us see that it is from God that come the calls to a greater sense of kinship among the world’s peoples; concern and compassion for the downtrodden, oppressed, and outcast; wariness with institutions and systems of power; and opposition to appeals to the baser human predilections.
In a recent post on Jewschool, I explained the issue of Ben Niddah (Jews whose souls are considered by the ultra-Orthodox to be defiled by menstrual blood. Such a category includes the vast majority of liberal and secular Jewry) in the baal teshuvah world, and why this encourages and justifies discrimination against Jews from liberal and secular Jewish backgrounds who join the ultra-Orthodox ranks.
In an essay in the Jerusalem Post, Rabbi Shafran seeks to minimize the problems of baal teshuvahs marrying into haredi families, even as he calls for an increase of such marriages. That is, unless the haredi family doesn’t want to, which just happens to usually be the case. He writes of an anecdotal case where a baal teshuvah (a person from a non-Orthodox religious background becomes haredi) named David marries into an ultra-Orthodox family. This is offered as a situation where a boy meets a girl, nothing more. But we should immediately have some questions even to this singular anecdote. Does the girl’s family have any known converts or baal teshuvahs in her lineage? Is “David†from an exceptionally wealthy family? If the answer is yes to either situation, this story is useless even as an anecdotal case, as in the former situation, the lineage of the ultra-Orthodox family is marred in the eyes of other ultra-Orthodox Jews, and in the latter case, the drawback issue of Ben Niddah was literally compensated for by a tangible positive–wealth, which is rare in the ultra-Orthodox world, particularly in Israel.
Rabbi Shafran writes,
David’s new in-laws were enamored of both him and his parents, and overjoyed at their daughter’s marriage. They hoped, moreover, that their example might perhaps, in a small way, inspire other traditional Orthodox Jews to entertain the possibility of such matches from outside their own community.
That’s very sweet, but it is also a concession that it does not happen very often.
The importance of “family” – i.e. the “pedigree” of a current and well-established Orthodox background – is an understandable concern for many, to be sure; and there are other Halacha-related issues that also come into play in such cases. To some, such concerns may even be paramount, and that stance is their prerogative.
This is an allusion to the Ben Niddah issue.
At the same time, though, it cannot be denied that there is something real and valuable that is gained, too, when an observant Orthodox Jew from an Orthodox family marries an equally observant Orthodox Jew from a different background – gained by the latter, by the former and by the Jewish people as a whole.
Some haredim might in fact deny that the observant Orthodox Jew from an Orthodox family gains anything valuable. But even if they do, what they will more likely be concerned about is whether or not said “benefit†is worth the cost and the risk of bringing in an outsider from a foreign background. Clearly, most do not believe this to be a compelling tradeoff.
“They had hardly been the first “ultra-Orthodox” Jews to welcome a baal teshuva and his family into their own.â€
They were not the first. And just as those before them did not change the norm, so too this family will not change the norm. And I’m not saying that this should be the norm. I don’t believe that it is usually appropriate for Jews from liberal and secular backgrounds to marry Jews from insular ultra-Orthodox ones. But then, I don’t believe ultra-Orthodoxy is appropriate for most Jews from liberal and secular backgrounds to start with. However, I certainly accept their choice, as well as the ultra-Orthodox right to recruit adults (as opposed to recruiting underage Jews under false pretenses), provided it is done candidly, and without deception, and they understand issues such as Ben Niddah going into haredism. Which they usually don’t. As I noted previously, the issue of Ben Niddah is not revealed until the recruit is far into the haredi “teshuvah†process. It is concealed, and even here, Rabbi Shafran does not directly address the issue of Ben Niddah, a status that justifies discrimination against and bolsters negative stereotypes about baal teshuvahs. And it is precisely why most haredim from normative haredi backgrounds will never feel a need to eliminate a general negative bias towards baal teshuvahs. All else is wishful thinking, an exception that proves the rule.
If Rabbi Shafran felt this was not such a difficult problem, he would not have been afraid to address the Ben Niddah issue directly. Well, defending a quasi-caste system to liberal and secular company based on the premise that a soul is tarnished by congenital defiled menstrual blood is certainly an undesirable task. But not addressing it directly is really no defense at all.
It should be understood that the issue of Ben Niddah is not pragmatically an issue in the Modern Orthodox world. Since it is not halachically binding, the Modern Orthodox world has little use for casting aspersions upon the masses of Jewry today. This is an ultra-Orthodox outlook, and generally the further right-wing one goes, the more intense the theologically based aversion to “b’nai niddah†becomes.
Never the less, all haredi outreach organizations seeking to craft haredim out of Jews from secular and liberal Jewish backgrounds are concomitantly creating “b’nai niddah.â€
The concept of a Jewish quasi-caste system surely seems something foreign and far away to the mainstream secular and religiously liberal Jewish community, which increasingly is giving a nod to the more visible success of instilling Jewish identity and Jewish engagement to teens that the Orthodox outreach groups offer.
But is Ben Niddahism really that far away?
The haredi organizations that attempt to assimilate baal teshuvahs into communities which view them as B’nai Niddah include (but by no means are limited to): Aish HaTorah Jerusalem (at least all branches in Israel), Ohr Somayach (all branches including Neve Yerushalayim), and Kol Yaakov.
NCSY directs secular and liberal American teenagers to all of these haredi organizations, and does not inform them or their parents about the issue of Ben Niddah, and how they wouldn’t assume such a status in a Modern Orthodox community. The Ben Niddah issue is just one of many problems that a baal teshuvah faces in joining an ultra-Orthodox community, but does not face when joining a Modern Orthodox community. There are so many others…the haredi rejection of scientific method, the haredi preference for maximum halachic (Jewish Law) compliance, the oppressive haredi garb (both for men and for women), haredi hostility to higher western culture, and socio-economic downward mobility. In the right-wing of the ultra-Orthodox world, who dominate the Israeli haredim and correspondingly comprise a large percentage of Israel’s baal teshuvah movement and its institutions, the work ethic itself is rejected.
Under its ecumenical front, the Jewish Student Union, NCSY is now operating in over 170 public schools. The primary youth group beneficiary of their work to whom students are directed is (no surprise), NCSY proper.
NCSY’s public school outreach organization, the Jewish “Student†Union, is increasingly funded by Jewish Federations throughout the country.
Although NCSY has been quickly creating and bolstering right-wing Modern Orthodox options to counter recent criticism that it has favored predominantly haredi options for their alumni from liberal and secular backgrounds, NCSY has declined to break their ties with these haredi organizations that offer a Ben Niddah status (and all the other problems) to their students upon successful integration into a haredi community.
It is ironic that a liberal and secular Jewish community that prides itself on its disproportionate role in the Civil Rights Movement apparently has no qualms about funding and facilitating a quasi-caste system for its own teenagers. Defenders will note that only a portion of the teens NCSY works with ever go to NCSY’s haredi partner institutions after high school. But what if a Jewish organization recruited black teens, and the most interested 5% of them were to become second-class citizens because of their birth status? Would that be okay? After all, it’s only 5%…the other 95% don’t have that problem, and they get so much out of it.
It is inconceivable that the mainstream Jewish community would greet such am operation with anything less than outraged protest. But apparently, not for our own. Not because we don’t care about our own, but because we simply don’t understand how real this stuff is to the haredim, or that NCSY directs our teens to these haredi institutions, or that the Jewish Student Union is NCSY controlled.
NCSY is burning the candle at both ends. They are rapidly infiltrating our public school system, even as they continue to work with organizations and direct their alumni to haredi organizations that recruit Jews into haredi B’nai Niddahism.
NCSY has to choose one or the other. Or the mainstream Jewish community must make that choice for them.
Slate magazine has a video which begins with the flap over the Farfour/Mickey Mouse-look-alike who advocates violence etc. We all know that story by now, but the video goes on to spend the bulk of its time on a more positive – at least signs of positive possibilities, if it isn’t quite there, anyway- Sesame Street in Israel and the Territories.
The venerable organization Mavoi Satum, an organization that fights for the rights of Haredi women to get a proper Jewish divorce in Israel, is having a demonstration this Sunday in support of the rights of Agunot and Mesuravot Get. They’ll be rallying against a proposed law to give religious courts jurisdiction over property rights, in *addition* to all the rights they already have.
Last week the BBC uncovered evidence of President George W. Bush’s grandfather 
So this week’s 
follow us on Twitter
follow us on Facebook
subscribe to our email