by masthead · Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008
guest post from Rabbi Rachel Kahn-Troster:
In the days that lie ahead, we’re going to hear a lot of rhetoric about restoring America’s moral standing after eight years of the Bush Administration, doing collective teshuvah for the sins of our nation.
President-elect Obama has been. And again, in his 60 Minutes interview, he stated that he wanted to end torture and close Guantanamo, that “[t]hese are part and parcel of an effort to regain America’s moral stature in the world.” He said something similar when he accepted the Democratic nomination. Part of the collective teshuvah is holding him to his word. Calls for an Executive Order against torture during the first 100 days of the Obama presidency have been issued by the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, Human Rights Watch, and the Center for Constitutional Rights, among others. An Executive Order would be more than symbolic. The Bush Administration’s expansive view of the powers of the Executive Branch allowed them to circumvent American laws and treaty obligations, including those outlawing torture.
But we shouldn’t assume that this is case-closed. Already, reports have appeared (and have been critiqued) that Obama may not revoke the CIA’s ability to use harsh interrogation techniques that the military is prohibited from using. This backtracking, if true, would be a major blow in the effort to end torture. After all, many of us in the anti-torture lobby used to quote John McCain (author of the Detainee Treatment Act) until he decided at some point during the Presidential campaign that it was okay for the CIA to torture. Torture isn’t suddenly effective because the CIA is using it.
I would also argue that ending torture is not simply a top-down cause. We all have to be part of the national teshuvah and take responsibility for what we, the people, have done. The limited public outcry against torture (and many other civil liberties issues such as wiretapping) gave no incentive to stop doing it. Torture happened over there, to someone else. And with all the depictions in popular culture of torture being effective, many Americans want to believe that torture keeps us safer.
I wish I didn’t believe that last sentence, but I do. I work to raise the awareness of the Jewish community about ending torture, and I’ve noticed something disturbing. On the one hand, many Jews I speak to understand that Judaism is against torture and that torture doesn’t work. They don’t want to talking about the halachic reasons—they just want to know what they can do to end it. But when I press deeper, something else is uncovered. If torture did work, if it truly gave real intelligence that kept us safer, if the ticking time bomb wasn’t just a mythical scenario…then its harder to get them to say they are against torture.
This is the moral legacy of the past eight years. Deep down, we’ve bought the message of the Bush Administration’s dark side. Now we need to do teshuvah. President Obama needs to hear from us.
And here’s how:
• Go to http://change.gov/page/s/ofthepeople.
• Fill out your contact information. Write “torture” in the “another issue” box.
• In the “Your ideas” box, explain why you believe torture is wrong. A sample statement might be: “As a Jewish American, I am deeply troubled by our nation’s use of torture. The Jewish tradition urges us not to oppress the stranger, because we were strangers in the land the Egypt, and implores us to honor the image of God in every person. Torture goes against these values and against everything America stands for as a country. Please act to end U.S.-sponsored torture by issuing an executive order based on the Declaration of Principles endorsed by the National Religious Campaign Against Torture.”
• Then click “submit form.”
Rabbi Rachel Kahn-Troster is the Director of Education and Outreach for Rabbis for Human Rights-North America, where she directs K’vod Habriot: A Jewish Human Rights Network.
by Justin Goldstein · Monday, July 14th, 2008
The New York Times has issued a searing (ha! pun not-so-much intended) editorial on the Postville affair, titled, “The Shame of Postville, Iowa”
In my opinion, skip the editorial and go straight to the source, an eye-witness essay of the handling of the workers. It is pretty disgusting and it’s too early in the morning to share any reactions, it’s really awful enough to stand on its own, no reflection necessary. read for yourself at your own risk of queasiness and rage.
inside the essay you’ll find joyful reports, such as:
Driven single-file in groups of 10, shackled at the wrists, waist and ankles, chains dragging as they shuffled through, the slaughterhouse workers were brought in for arraignment, sat and listened through headsets to the interpreted initial appearance, before marching out again to be bused to different county jails, only to make room for the next row of 10. They appeared to be uniformly no more than 5 ft. tall, mostly illiterate Guatemalan peasants with Mayan last names, some being relatives (various Tajtaj, Xicay, Sajché, Sologüí…), some in tears; others with faces of worry, fear, and embarrassment. They all spoke Spanish, a few rather laboriously. It dawned on me that, aside from their Guatemalan or Mexican nationality, which was imposed on their people after Independence, they too were Native Americans, in shackles
by Kol Ra'ash Gadol · Monday, July 14th, 2008
On a prior post this week, commenter balabusta linked us to a video from the NYT that I’m sorry to say I had missed. The video is disheartening in that it reveals quite a bit that generally has been missing from the whole Agri commentary on the Jewish side of the question. It’s not only our outrage at the workers being treated unfairly by Agri at this point (not to mention being abused, as is clear from the variety of investigations) but the very fact that the racial component is being ignored, but even more clearly that the illegal immigrants are actually being railroaded into pleading guilty for crimes which are almost certainly Agri’s.
While everyone following this story along with us here at Jewschool from the beginning, now years ago, can see that we nearly qualify at apoplectic at the combination of injustice and chillul hashem that’s being done, listening to the words of this translator, who in all his years has not been moved to speak out -until now- makes me sad and angry all over again.
It’s too early for the boycott to be called off. The workers are being charged with social security fraud and aggravated identity theft, the court is using the greater charge to browbeat the workers into pleading guilty for the lesser charge. If they refuse to plead guilty, they are told, instead of five months in prison and then deportation (forever, with no chance to return legally) they will have 6-8months in prison, with the possibility of two years more if they lose. Most of them are the sole economic support for their families and thus are choosing to plead guilty, despite the fact that many of them - according to the translator- clearly have no idea what a social security number is or what it’s used for (and are apparently ashamed of looking ignorant about it, most cannot read or write, and when asked what the number is say they don’t know, the factory people put it there.
In other words, of the crimes of social security fraud and aggravatedidentity theft, it is Agri who should be on trial, not the workers. If Agri wants their boycott lifted, some signs of tshuvah are in order. Confession (to God and to the victim(s), Apology, Restitution and Failure to Repeat the offense when given another chance. In order for us to even think about taking them seriously, they need to admit publicly that it is they, Agri, who are behind these offenses and not allow people who are innocent of these crimes to be tried and deported for them. The workers may be guilty of illegally entering the country, but they are almost certainly not guilty of what they are being accused. There are no signs of tshuvah yet from Rubashkin. Thus we should not be revoking the boycott.
I can’t even begin to say how disgusted I remain with this whole episode, how much harm the American Jewish community’s consumption of excess amounts of meat has done to other people, and that Agri will allow their workers to take the fall for them… well, it’s despicable.
by Justin Goldstein · Sunday, July 13th, 2008
This man has every reason to look this worried. In the latest news in the corruption scandal clouding Ehud Olmert’s questionable stint as PM, according to the Israeli Police, Olmert funded personal and family vacations on the dime of non-profits and charities.
According to one Ha’aretz report–
Responding to accusations he stole money from charities such as Yad Vashem and the AKIM association for the mentally disabled, Olmert said “these are institutions that I worked to advance and I invested immense energy into raising funds and I believe I made a significant contribution to them. Therefore, precisely against this backdrop, the exploitation in this way was particularly hurtful.”
more after the jump More »
by Kol Ra'ash Gadol · Saturday, July 12th, 2008
Failed Messiah and Gawker report on the latest (what? Not over yet?) scandal in the kashrut world. After the last round of scandals, Agriprocessors hired a PR firm - because as we all know, Public Relations is far preferable to tshuvah when a corporation sins- to restore its image. The firm, 5WPR, who has also represented the charming so-called “pro-Israel” pastor, John Hagee, (who hates homosexuals and Muslims and has had to apologize for sliming Catholics, oh, yeah and also blamed Jews for the death of Jesus, called liberal Jews “poisoned” and “spiritually blind,” and been relatively unconcerned that he hopes for a preemptive nuclear attack on Iran even though he believes it will lead to the deaths of most Jews in Israel) apparently has engaged in some antics of its own.
It seems that 5WPR has left multiple comments on several blogs, including JTA and Failed Messiah’s, under a variety of aliases, and also posing as Rabbi Morris Allen of the Hekhsher Tzedek, as well as JVNA officer John Diamond and another frequent FailedMessiah commenter (all, as FM points out, federal crimes). The comments were designed to support Agri, bolster one another and discredit Hekhsher Tzedek, the Conservative Movement and Rabbi Allen. Failed Messiah posts screen shots of the comments - well worth looking at, if only for their utter ridiculousness.
More »
by Danya · Friday, July 4th, 2008
Remember Mordechai/Marc Gafni? He was the guy who fled Israel two years ago to avoid charges of sexual misconduct and possibly rape after he was–once again–found to be using his charismatic rebbe-hood to exploit his female students and followers. It’s a pattern that had been going on for some time, with some of his past victims decidedly underage at the time of the abuse. (He was famously quoted in the NY Jewish Week as saying, in response to one woman’s claims that he had “repeatedly and forcibly sexually assaulted” her that “she was 14 going on 35…”) (The NY Post has some graphic accounts of abuse by some of his victims; Reb Zalman revoked his smicha; Gafni, when the story broke, wrote a letter to Aleph pleading mea culpa and referring to himself as sick–just as he was sneaking to the States and disappearing.)
Well, he’s back, like a bad penny–this time in Salt Lake City. Failed Messiah reports that he’s now in bed with a new age magazine called Catalyst, which has come to his defense. Evidently he’s been writing for them for a while under a pseudonym, and now Catalyst is coming out in support of Gafni, painting him as the victim of “sexual McCarthyism”; Gafni, for his part, is now denying his guilt with a bunch of New Age pablum:
“Sexuality creates wounds…but if we learn to live wide open even as we are hurt by love, the divine wakes up its own true nature…I believed that what we were doing was sharing love, and that therefore there was nothing ethically, and certainly not legally, wrong. I still believe that.”
According to the Catalyst article, he’s started to teach and has a couple of book contracts going (and, according to other sources, may be operating under the name “Marc Israel.”) He’s clearly positioning himself for another rise to guru-hood, and there’s no reason to believe that he won’t continue his pattern of exploitation and abuse. He must be stopped.
ETA: It looks like Gafni himself (or one of his supporters) wrote his Wikipedia page, and so, needless to say, it’s in need of some correcting–it’s nauseatingly sympathetic, and notably absent of links to news sources explaining the “allegations of impropriety” against him. Anyone want to have a crack at it?
by Kung Fu Jew · Sunday, June 29th, 2008
Profiled in all his ugliness in The New Yorker this week: Billionaire Sheldon Adelson is the third richest man in America, a huge funder of birthright israel, Bush’s election campaigns, the ZOA, the Republican Jewish Caucus (check out the new RJC Watch blog, by the way), One Jerusalem, AIPAC…the list goes on. You’re looking at the sugardaddy-Godfather of American (Jewish) right-wingery here.
More »
by Kol Ra'ash Gadol · Sunday, June 22nd, 2008
Haaretz and the NYT report on a local controversy regarding resistance to Westhampton beach Orthodox Jews wanting to put up an eruv.
You would think that wanting to tie some string to a few telephone poles would pretty much be ignored by the rest of the world, but it turns out that putting up an eruv has become a rather problematic venture over the past few years. A number of towns have begun to organize resistance to putting up an eruv.
The strangest part is that the resistance comes from both non-Jews living in the area… and non-Orthodox Jews, including, sometimes, Conservative Jews. It’s not as simple as anti-semiitism. Partly this stems from regions in New York where a few towns have gone from having few to having many Orthodox Jews, and in the process of becoming popular, sometimes the Orthodox community has made itself unpleasant by forcing some non-Jewish businesses out of business. Some of it is ignorance of what an eruv is by the non-Jews. But… you can’t say none of it is anti-semitism. For every five towns area where the Orthodox community has come in and refused to patronize non-shomer Shabbat businesses, are plenty of perfectly nice, normal Orthodox people who are just going about their business.
Ultimately the issue has become that people are protesting having a substantial Orthodox community in their area. The weirdest part for me is having liberal Jews mixed up in this. Okay, I can understand Reform Jews protesting eruvs in their neighborhood: some Reform Jews will stand on principal against any halacha if they are touched by it. (I’ve certainly had to occasionally work in situations where a Reform and Conservative shul will put on a joint program which, for logistical reasons, has to be in a Reform shul. And they will, as a matter of principal, refuse to provide kosher food. (BTW claiming that this is the majority of Reform shuls is as silly as claiming that all Orthodox communities are going to go around closing businesses that aren’t Orthodox owned) It isn’t the usual thing, but at least it isn’t peculiar.) In the case of any Conservative Jews involved in this, it’s downright peculiar, since Conservative Jews need eruvs as much as the Orthodox do: the prohibition against carrying on Shabbat has not been lifted, my Conservative chevre.
But the real story here is that the Orthodox are not always crazy when they start yelling about being picked on. In this case, it’s perfectly true, and in fact, the refusal of townships to put up eruvs because they don’t want the Orthodox to move in is not simple anti-semitism, but is also a form of internalized anti-semitism (I generally detest the use of that term, but it is, very occasionally, warranted). Friends, we need to start getting along better within the Jewish community. Granted, this is not all on one side. The Orthodox need to start working harder to not antagonize liberal Jews over their practices… and ought to be speaking up about Israeli refusal to separate synagogue and state. They could also work to make themselves better neighbors in a more public way. But in most places Orthodox Jews make fine neighbors, and finding ways to keep them out is just wrong, and bad for Am Yisrael, even if the Orthodox can’t meet the non-Orthodox halfway.
by feygele · Friday, June 20th, 2008
Reading the news on JTA, I came across this story.
In an effort to restore lagging production at its plant in Postville, Iowa, the country’s largest kosher meat producer has been hiring workers from homeless shelters in Texas to replace employees detained in a massive federal immigration raid last month.
Ok, this sounds decent. They’re helping people find employment, moving them to a town with housing. At first glance, this could be a positive step in restoring Rubashkin’s reputation.
But…
Several officials in Postville say the new arrivals have created problems for the town.
Postville Police Chief Michael Halse told JTA that his officers had arrested four plant workers for disorderly conduct this week.
Father Paul Ouderkirk, leader of the local Catholic church, which has played a lead role in helping former workers and their families after last month’s raid, said a mentally challenged woman from Texas had come to his church looking for help with prescription medications.
And in an interview Friday with Postville’s local radio station, Diana Morris said she spent three days on a bus from Amarillo only to discover she was expected to live with 10 men in a four-bedroom house that had no electricity or hot water.
“Amarillo’s homeless problem has become Postville’s homeless problem,” Jeff Abbas, who runs the KPVL radio station, told JTA.
Um… crap. And…
In her interview with Abbas, Morris described how she was recruited from Amarillo with about 15 others and given a Greyhound bus ticket and $15 dollars to pay for food during the 1,000-mile journey. She said she was promised 30 days of free housing as well as a $100 bonus upon arrival.
What made the offer so attractive, Morris said, was the $10 per hour that Agriprocessors is now offering. “Everything down there is about $6 an hour being paid, and that’s the minimum wage,” she said of Texas.
That’s not a lot of money for 1,000 miles of travel. A quick check on Greyhound shows that the trip from Amarillo to Waterloo, IA takes 1 day, 1 hour, and 55 minutes (and then another 77 miles to Postville). In other words, a couple coffees, sodas, and a bag of chips for 28ish hours. Nutritious!
It’s great to hear that Rubashkins will be paying their employees a better wage than before, but the living conditions are unacceptable. And, if you read the full article, you’ll see that the people are being shipped to Iowa and then being screened for hiring. Why not screen them in Texas first? Why are they using two intermediary agencies (a recruiting firm in Texas and a staffing firm in Iowa)? Couldn’t the recruiting and screening be done by the same firm in Texas, before these people are moved 1,000 miles?
Do we think Agriprocessors is actually going to make good on its promise to improve working conditions? 150 replacement staff were removed by their staffing firm a couple weeks after the initial raid. Within days of starting work, a group of Native Americans who had been brought in to staff the factory left, saying conditions were worse than expected. Now these Texans… were they recruited because word of the scandal hadn’t spread to them? Will they be able to leave if the conditions still haven’t improved?
[Full article on JTA.]
by masthead · Friday, June 20th, 2008
Those who remember the first conference two years ago can recall how incredible it was for a Jewish organization to finally speak out on torture, to offer serious approaches against torture from a Jewish perspective (Rabbi Saul Berman’s amazing session really stands out in my memory).
Once again, Rabbis for Human Rights North America is holding a conference. This one is to be open not just to clergy and students, but to everyone who is concerned about human rights from a Jewish perspective.
Also for a nice change of pace, it’s not to be in New York, but in Washington, D.C.
On International Human Rights Day last year RHR-NA launched a new initiative called K’vod Habriot, which is to be a Jewish Human Rights Network of Rabbis, Communities and Individuals dedicated to the human rights of all. The conference is intended to propel that work forward; at the conference there will be workshops and training and study sessions devoted to how to organize support for human rights in the various Jewish communities.
Some amazing presenters are already lined up, among them:
Sari Nusseibeh, President of Al Quds University
Avram Burg, author and former Speaker of the Knesset
Dr. Arnold Eisen, Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary
Dr. David Gushee, founder of Evangelicals for Human Rights
Imam Yahya Hendi, founder of Imams for Human Rights and Dialogue
Sammie Moshenberg, of the National Council of Jewish Women
Information here:
Register here
or download a registration form here
by feygele · Wednesday, June 18th, 2008
I may be in the USA these days, but I still get much of my news from Canada. Reading a CBC article this morning, I was disappointed that the reporter(s) didn’t add to the following:
Golubchuk and his family are Orthodox Jews who believe it is immoral to hasten death.
“When a person is born, it’s written down when they’re gonna die,” Golubchuk’s daughter, Miriam Geller, told CBC news. “So it’s God that decides this, not the doctors.”
The issue at hand is that Samuel Golubchuk, 84, “has no brain function” and three doctors at Winnipeg’s Grace Hospital have now refused to keep him “physically alive on a ventilator.” One of the physicians made the following case:
Last month, in a letter to the Winnipeg health authority, Golubchuk’s original attending physician, Anand Kumar, said he would no longer work in Grace Hospital’s critical care unit because it meant providing medical services to his former patient [Golubchuk] that were “grotesque.”
Golubchuk had developed bedsores, Anand wrote, and doctors were having to trim infected flesh from his body to prevent infections from spreading.
“To inflict this kind of assault on him without a reasonable hope of benefit is an abomination,” Anand’s letter said. “I can’t do it.”
Golubchuk has been “on life support” since “late last year,” and has no hopes of recovering. First do no harm. [Full article with comments here.]
I have found myself annoyed with many media for dropping in religious statements without explanations or any proof. Just because a subject mentions “my religion says foo” doesn’t mean foo is actually the correct or only interpretation/understanding/belief. And I want to see the media start to pay more attention to this. This article could easily have included a paragraph explaining the Orthodox perspectives on death and/or medically assisted dying. Instead, readers with no background on the topic will go away thinking that Orthodoxy (and Judaism as a whole by extension) is flat-out against taking someone without hope of recovery off life support. And, coupled with the moral and ethical conclusions found later in the paragraph, might also believe that Orthodoxy (Judaism) is unethical or immoral.
…Or, I’m completely overreacting and unreasonable to think the press has dropped the ball here. In which case, I’ve been reading too much GetReligion.
by feygele · Tuesday, June 17th, 2008
More, still, from the conversion files.
Rabbi Shlomo Riskin is crying. No, sorry, his Torah is crying. While I found his Jerusalem Post opinion piece a bit much, he did make some great points.
WHAT HAS happened to our Torah of late? An entirely different narrative is being written, the very antithesis of the love and compassion of the Scroll of Ruth. My Torah has been stolen away, hijacked, by false and misguided interpreters. My Torah is crying because of rabbinical court judges who have forgotten that the major message of the Exodus from Egypt is for us to love the stranger and the proselyte.
They have forgotten the 11 prohibitions against insensitive words and actions toward converts - and the talmudic stricture that we are not to be too overbearing or exacting toward a would-be proselyte (Yebamot 47). They have forgotten Maimonides’s ruling that even regarding a convert who merely went to the mikve (and became circumcised if male) - even if the conversion was for a personal romantic or venal reason, and even if the convert has returned to former idolatrous ways - he or she remains Jewish (albeit a Jewish renegade); her or his religious marriage remains intact, and lost objects must be restored to him or her. (Maimonides, Laws of Forbidden Relationships 13,14).
MY TORAH is crying because these judges have, in the name of Torah, disrupted and possibly destroyed hundreds if not thousands of families of converts, whose children and even children’s children were brought up and accepted as Jews - only now to learn that their forbears’ conversions have been retroactively nullified.
With a tip o’the hat to several blogs, including DovBear.
by Kol Ra'ash Gadol · Thursday, June 12th, 2008
Yes, those scare quotes are there for a reason.
B’tselem has begun a program called “Shooting Back” in which they have given out about 100 video cameras to Palestinians over the past year so that when settlers attack them, they can show footage of the attack, instead of just giving a statement to the Israeli police or army.
According to the BBC news,
“The difference is amazing,” says Oren Yakobovich, who leads the Shooting Back project.
“When they have the camera, they have proof that something happened. They now have something they can work with, to use as a weapon.”
We asked a spokesman from the Susia settlement for a comment on Sunday’s incident. He declined.
This video is being claimed by the BBC to be footage from an elderly shepherd and his wife of four masked men who are beating them for grazing their animals near a settlement (Susia).
I hope that this tool will offer a non-violent way for what’s going on to be brought out into the open and taken seriously. Of course, I know that naysayers will claim that it’s staged, or payback, or heaven knows what, but there’s enough evidence out there that, hopefully, we will start to see the necessity to stop denying the truth: that the violence of the settlers is a problem unchecked and vile.
by BZ · Wednesday, June 11th, 2008
This is a guest post by Jewschool reader “themicah”.
In the wake of the Postville ICE raid, a number of folks (myself included) reached out to our former summer camps to see if we could persuade them to avoid Agriprocessors this summer. In the case of Ramah Wisconsin (my former camp), we learned that all meat for summer 2008 had already been purchased and was from Agriprocessors, but that the camp was evaluating taking ethical concerns into consideration in future summers’ meat purchases, and that they would work on developing programming for this summer to encourage discussion among the camp community about the role of ethical standards in kashrut. This was disappointing, but given the camp’s tight budget, I felt it would be a mistake to push further on the point, and appreciated that they were making a real effort to address the issue (unlike so many organizations).
Over the weekend I was forwarded an update from the Ramah Wisconsin administration, however. Although the Agriprocessors meat was already delivered, upon inspection the camp found that some of it was substandard (too old, from what I understand). They have therefore made arrangements to return the entire order to Agriprocessors and buy a whole new supply of meat for 2008 that comes from a non-Agriprocessors source. The camp is also bringing Rabbi Morris Allen to camp during staff week to teach about the Hechsher Tzedek program, making good on their promise to create dialog on the subject.
Even better, however, is that it’s not just Ramah Wisconsin that is affected. Ramah Wisconsin purchases its meat as part of a group of seven midwestern camps (Chi, Beber, OSRUI, Interlaken, Moshava and Henry Horner being the others) that work together through a purchasing agent to obtain the best deal possible on kosher meat. The update I received suggested that all seven of these camps were dumping Agriprocessors for the 2008 summer. And apparently there are other Jewish camps across the country that work with the same purchasing agent, so there’s a chance this change may spread.
Would it have been better if they had made a stand as soon as the news from Postville broke and torched all their meat on the spot rather than searching for another excuse to get out of their contract? Maybe. But I’m very happy that campers this summer will not be eating meat that was known to have been produced in an environment many of us believe made it treif. And if summer camps across the country start actually demanding Hechsher Tzedek certified meat in future summers, it may create the kind of demand that’s needed for the Hechsher Tzedek program to take root.
So please, get on the phone to your summer camp (or any other institution that buys a lot of kosher meat) and ask what they’re doing about the situation. All it takes is a few phone calls to drive home that there is real demand for food that is ethically produced.
by Justin Goldstein · Wednesday, June 11th, 2008
Well, perhaps the man does have some sense after all. On the same day that impeachment papers were filed against him, George W. Bush gave a rare, exclusive interview to the London Times. Not surprisingly, Mr. Bush chooses to interpret worldwide protest and condemnation of his persona and policies in his own intriguing manner: “I must be doing something. I must be using my position to embrace change.”
While he’s changed many things I’d love to take the time to write about, one thing he has changed is the language of the American involvement in the peace process. Simply by uttering two words, “Palestinian state,” Mr. Bush actually ushered the peace process forward, even if only an inch.
And now, as he is concerned that his legacy may have be remembered as a “gun-slinger” (gee, wouldn’t it have been nice if he thought about that before the last 8 years?), he wants to focus his attention to “The six-party talks, for example, in the Far East, in dealing with North Korea, the Iranian multilateral framework, hopefully a Palestinian state defined by Israel and the Palestinians.”
And in other news, the man who brought us two Bush administrations is supposedly being tapped by Bibi to steal secure his next go as PM.
by Kol Ra'ash Gadol · Wednesday, May 28th, 2008
JTA breaking news: The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right to sue employers for retaliating against employees bringing bias complaints. Lots of Jewish organizations signed on as friends for this one.
It’s a pretty important ruling, but I wonder how this works together with the inability to bring suit for employment discrimination after 180 days (e.g. you discover after five years, that you, a woman, make less than any of your male co-workers…but can’t sue because your first paycheck is more than 180 days into the past). Just curious, anyone find this kinda odd?
by Rooftopper Rav · Wednesday, May 28th, 2008
Mazal tov to Rabbi Jill Jacobs!! The Conservative Movement’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards (CJLS) today passed Rabbi Jacobs’ teshuvah outlining the responsibilties of Jewish employers toward their employees. Check out our friends over at Jspot for a summary of the teshuvah’s conclusions; we’ll post a link to the full text once it’s available. This teshuvah has been several years in the making– yashar koach!
by Kol Ra'ash Gadol · Tuesday, May 27th, 2008
Week Six, Day Three
Tiferet of Yesod
Reported in Vos Is Neias, Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld, of Ohev Sholom the National Synagogue in Washington, D.C., has called for the Vaad Harabonim of Washington to temporarily suspend Rubashkin’s meat in the stores and caterers that it supervises. So far the Vaad has not responded; it will be interesting to see if they do. Why? A quick view at the comments section might be edifying: Rabbi Herzfeld is dismissed as “a talmid of ‘Rabbi’ Avi Weiss;” apparently in some circles that’s enough to have your smichah be questionable.
But more than that, Rabbi Herzfeld, despite his innovative programming, energy and, let’s face it, success in reviving a dying shul, has not won him the kudos of the local Orthodox leadership. Aside from a minor scrap over his shul taking the name “the National Synagogue,” Rabbi Herzfeld has also put himself outside the pale by becoming the first Orthodox rabbi in DC to join the Washington Board of rabbis and sit down at the table with non-Orthodox rabbis and call them colleagues.
I’d like to think that instead of him being tarred with yet another reason to keep him on the outside of his Orthodox colleagues’ circles, this would be an opportunity for them to show some leadership on this issue, and also offer the opportunity for them to show some spine over politics. Rabbi Herzfeld isn’t the only rabbi out there -Orthodox or Conservative- who is working on trying to get some movement happening, but I do hope that he might help the DC area to move on this matter more effectively.
In other Rubashkin’s news, the CEO of Rubashkin, Sholom Rubashkin, will resign as head of Agriprocessors Inc. after a search for a new CEO is completed
