Category Archives: Journalism

Unpublished Heroes

I think it’s time I came clean regarding my doubts about Judaism, about everything I was taught by my parents and rabbaim in yeshiva. How can we be sure that the Torah was really given to my ancestors at Sinai? Are its laws really eternal? Is halacha really G-d’s will? Are Jews in fact a special people? And are Orthodox Jews true examples of what a Jew should be?

I came across some very compelling literature that called traditional Jewish beliefs into question, and was disturbed by what I had read, and so I read more, and did a good amount of serious thinking and research.

As to Orthodox Jews themselves, yes, most seem to be fine people, but there have also always been “characters” – people with strange fixations or behavior patterns. And then there are Jews proven or rumored to be… not so nice.

The thought that the “outside” world might provide a more rarified and thoughtful community was an enticing one. And so I began to entertain doubts about Jewish beliefs, my religious identity and my community.

I was 14.

To my relief now, many decades later, there was no Internet then to intensify my confusion, and no examples of people who had abandoned Jewish beliefs and observance and written best-sellers about the fact. I had no opportunity at the time to capitalize on my doubts and gripes with a memoir that would garner me the media spotlight, interviews and royalties. Though I had what to tell, like how my second grade rebbe would rap my fingers hard with a ruler when I misbehaved. I would have had to have been truthful and admit that he didn’t do it in anger, and that I felt he loved me dearly throughout. But I could have racked that up to Stockholm Syndrome.

Lacking the commercial incentives, though, allowed me to take my time, do some critical thinking and research, and give Judaism a chance. I engaged my doubts with information, and was blessed to have parents who gave me space, who didn’t try to overly control my reading, dress or activities; and with rabbaim who didn’t consider any question off-limits.

And so I found answers to all the questions I had. As a result, even though I was raised in an Orthodox home, I consider myself “Orthodox-by-choice,” someone who made a conscious decision to accept the Torah, and the mission it bequeaths all Jews.

What reminds me of my intellectually tumultuous days is the spate of “I Escaped Orthodoxy and Lived!” memoirs that have appeared in recent years, practically a cottage industry. The autobiographies are celebrated and hyped for their anger and outrage, and an “enlightened” world considers their authors to be heroes.

Please don’t misunderstand. I don’t mean to disparage the true experiences of others, or to discount the special challenges some may have faced, especially in very insular and rigid communities. But there is much that is deeply suspect in some of the literary accounts. In one case, a writer was revealed to have entirely fabricated a terrible crime, a murder-mutilation of which there is no police record. Needless to say, that employment of creativity calls the rest of the writer’s impossible-to-confirm personal experiences into some doubt.

More recently, another writer has been making the rounds and has not only contradicted herself about a formative period in her life but admitted to having been mentally unstable and self-destructive since childhood. Her intelligence and eloquence at present is obvious. But her description of her far-from-New York, non-chassidic community is at wild odds with reality. Whether her personal memories are real or delusional thus remains unclear. Her publisher and the media, of course, don’t seem to care much either way.

Although I can rightly wax suspicious about some of the assertions in some of these ostensibly true stories, I have no right to deem their writers intentional fabulists. Perhaps their once-Orthodox environments, or some other life-experience, so damaged them that they became confused as a result. Or perhaps they suffer from some congenital emotional problem beyond their control.

But what I can do is reflect on the fact that adolescence brings all sorts of psychological and intellectual challenges, including to Orthodox adolescents. And recognize that a particularly powerful challenge is presented to young people these days by the Internet and social media, which provide easy misinformation, precarious camaraderie and false solace; and by publishers anxious to sell books – the more outlandish and prurient, the better.

Of little interest to blogs or editors, tellingly, are the vast numbers of intelligent, sensitive Orthodox youth, including many in the most insular communities, who stand up to the special, myriad challenges of our time as they forge their personal paths through life.

Those young Orthodox Jews are the true, if unpublished, heroes, for ignoring the contemporary, technology-empowered sirens of cynicism. They are heroes for having the courage to pursue resolutions for any doubts or confusion they may harbor, for realizing that there is balm for the wounds they may have suffered, and fulfillment in the religious heritage bequeathed them by their parents, and their parents before them.

Aggravated Journalism

Hella Winston was surprised that her name appeared at the bottom of the recent New York Post report about the murder of Brooklyn businessman Menachem Stark, indicating her “additional reporting” to the story. She had not written any of the article – and certainly not its tasteless, insensitive headline (which implied that an unlimited number of people surely wished the Chassidic businessman dead) or the article’s incendiary opening words: “The millionaire Hasidic slumlord…”

She had nothing to do, either, with the rest of the ugly piece, which was rife with unnamed “sources” and unsubstantiated innuendo. (It went so far as to dredge the cesspool of a rabidly anti-Orthodox blog to find what it apparently deemed a journalistic gem– an anonymous posting opining that the victim’s “slanted shtreimel on his head gives his crookedness away.”). She had not seen the article before its publication.

Ms. Winston, a sociologist by profession, had simply been contacted by the article’s main writers, she says, and provided them a small piece of information of no great consequence. Needless to say, the Post’s odious offering deeply hurt the murdered man’s wife, children and community. And I have no doubt that Ms. Winston is herself pained to have been associated in any way with the tabloid’s loathsome “report.”

What’s significant, though, is that the article’s writers cared to contact Ms. Winston, who has no prior connection that I know of with the paper.

What likely inspired them was the fact that she has some familiarity with at least part of Brooklyn’s charedi world (though Post reporters have no dearth of contacts who actually inhabit that world). She is best known, in fact, for a book she wrote several years ago that focused on young people raised in chassidic communities who abandoned their upbringings to pursue more culturally American lives. Through their words, the book portrays communities like those in Borough Park and Williamsburg as small-minded, constricting, suffocating environments.

What’s more, in 2006, Ms. Winston wrote an op-ed for The New York Times in which she described an unusual Pesach seder, whose participants were people who had “[broken] free of strictly Orthodox communities” and of the “myriad rules and regulations” that, in such places, “often [come] at the expense of the meaning of the holiday itself.” Passover, to them, she wrote, “embodies how strict Orthodoxy has become little more than social control.”

And in the Winter 2006-2007 issue of the Jewish feminist publication Lilith, Ms. Winston wrote of the “rigid gender roles” in Orthodox communities, the regulations that “control… women’s bodies and their mobility”; and of how yeshivos “can become breeding grounds” for deviancy.

Then there is the slew of articles Ms. Winston has written for the New York Jewish Week, practically all of which focus on (real, asserted or imaginary) unsavory happenings in the charedi world.

In 2011, for one instance, after the horrific murder of a little charedi boy, Leiby Kletzky, she wrote a lengthy piece in that paper contending that the Brooklyn charedi neighborhood volunteer security force Shomrim, which had played a major role in identifying the vehicle used in the boy’s abduction, had acted irresponsibly in the case and possibly hindered the police. The alleged critics of Shomrim quoted – “officials” and “sources” –were all unnamed. And “some,” the piece confides, believe that the murderer’s “violent tendencies… were known to people in the community who should have, but failed, to report him.” No evidence for any such knowledge was presented, nor has any emerged in the ensuing years.

The article then digressed into the halachic realm of mesira, or “informing,” on suspected pedophiles. There was no evidence of sexual abuse in the case, and no evidence was offered at the time (or has been uncovered since) that Leiby’s killer, currently serving 25 years to life in prison, is a pedophile.

So it’s not hard to imagine why those assigned by the Post to deliver the sort of article about the more recent murder that its readers savor – one filled with as much titillating information or misinformation as might be gathered on deadline – turned to a writer who has presented a negative picture of the Chassidic community in a book and numerous articles.

They could have turned, too, to any of a number of writers for Jewish media. Like Jay Michaelson of the Forward, whose anti-religious screeds seem to say much more about his wild anger at Judaism than about the community he regularly lambasts. Or to his colleague, the graphic artist Eli Valley, who seems to share Mr. Michaelson’s emotional agitation, although he is considerably more creative. Or to any of a number of columnists at organs like the Los Angeles Jewish Journal.

The unsavory exists, to be sure, in Chassidic (and non-Chassidic and non-Orthodox) communities, as it does in every non-Jewish community. That’s unfortunate and depressing. But so much of the Jewish and general media seem to relentlessly focus on Orthodox wrongdoing, and so often in in a journalistically irresponsible, if not libelous, way. Why that is so is something for a psychologist to ponder. For the rest of us, it should be enough to simply note the fact, and bemoan it.

No one really expects a New York tabloid to embrace accuracy and objectivity; such papers exist to titillate and scandalize their readers, not inform them.

But impartiality, fairness and truth shouldn’t be too much to ask of Jewish media. Unfortunately, the day when those ideals are respected by those organs has yet to arrive.

© Rabbi Avi Shafran 2014

Agudath Israel Condemns NY Post’s Lack Of “Basic Human Dignity”

Below is a statement issued today by Agudath Israel of America:

The New York Post crossed a line today, even for a paper specializing in the sensational, with its offensive front-page cover and equally offensive coverage of the vicious murder of a young Hassidic father of eight, Menachem Stark, Hy”d.

The paper demonstrated the poorest taste by choosing to focus on anonymous accusations rather than on the human tragedy of a wife and family’s sudden and terrible loss, and on their, and their community’s, grieving. Particularly at a time when Jews have been attacked on New York streets and are regularly vilified by hateful people around the world, the tabloid has demonstrated unprecedented callousness and irresponsibility.

Perhaps it is unrealistic to expect very much from a medium like the Post, but one should, we think, be able to expect some basic human decency in the wake of a family’s terrible personal loss.

Agudath Israel of America and its constituents, along with decent people of all religions and ethnicities, extend our deepest sympathies to Mr. Stark’s widow and children.

We, further, commend the New York City Police Department for its active pursuit of leads to Mr. Stark’s murderers, and pray that they be apprehended and brought to justice swiftly.

Where Are The Red Carpets?

The letter below appears in today’s New York Times

To the Editor:

I’m neither an “Israel right or wrong” person nor a supporter of what has come to be called “the Palestinian cause.” But one question keeps coming back to me when I read about objections to decisions by Jewish campus groups not to invite speakers hostile to Israel: Where is the push for Arab campus groups to roll out their red carpets to unabashed defenders of the Jewish state?

(Rabbi) AVI SHAFRAN
New York, Dec. 30, 2013

The writer is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.

A Lesson From Limmud

Even now that the recent much-celebrated Limmud gathering in the historic cathedral town of Coventry, West Midlands, England has concluded, the celebration continues, at least in many Jewish media.

The popular Jewish event, which attracts people from all segments of the Jewish universe (and some, like the Reverend Patrick Morrow, who led a Limmud session at this year’s, from the non-Jewish one), is always loudly lauded as an opportunity to access a broad gamut of theologies and practices that have Jewish devotees.

But this year’s Limmud conference, at least to the media, was particularly exultation-worthy, as one of the attendees was Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, the current chief rabbi of the United Kingdom, the first person holding that position to grace the proceedings with his presence.

Much, unsurprisingly, was made of that first. Rabbi Mirvis was warmly welcomed by those in attendance, and his speech was parsed by the press with the determination of high school teachers seeking puns in Shakespeare, in a quest to find hints of disdain on the rabbi’s part for the religious leaders of the more traditional Orthodox British community, who made clear that the rabbi’s attendance at Limmud was ill-advised.

Aside from celebrating and parsing, the media also, however, grossly misrepresented the reasons for the charedi rabbinic leadership’s opposition to Rabbi Mirvis’ participation.

One news service initially attributed the charedi objection to the belief that the chief rabbi’s appearance “represented a danger to British Jewry by suggesting it was acceptable for observant Jews to associate with less or non-observant Jews.”

After being called to task for not realizing the absurdity of the notion that charedim – with their innumerable (and rabbinically-endorsed) outreach organizations and efforts, personal friendships and study-partnerships with “less or non-observant Jews,” – somehow consider it unacceptable to associate with Jews different from them, the news agency, to its credit, quickly changed the version of its report and notified its clients of the change (for what that was worth; the amendment was largely ignored).

The replacement line read: “The critics had said the conference, which draws thousands of participants from all walks of Jewish life, represented a danger to British Jewry because of its inclusion of non-Orthodox religious perspectives.”

Closer but also misleading, as the charedi rabbis hadn’t issued any blanket condemnation of Limmud, but rather simply disapproved of a chief rabbi’s participation in it.

Those religious leaders’ longstanding and principled opposition to Orthodox rabbis participating in “multi-denominational” panels, rosters and such, derives from their feeling that being part of such events perforce promotes the notion that all “rabbis are rabbis,” equals in belief and scholarship, and that all self-defined “Judaisms” are legitimate forms of the Judaism of our ancestors. Many Jews may believe those things, but, in the eyes of charedi leaders, not only are those Jews wrong but it is wrong to do anything that could be construed as an endorsement of the error.

What’s interesting is something that somehow wasn’t widely reported about this year’s Limmud event. It seems that its organizers had originally scheduled two talks by one Marcus Weston, a trustee of the London branch of the Kabbalah Center, the Los Angeles-based purveyor of what it claims is a form of Jewish mysticism. However, after objections were raised – the Kabbalah Center has been accused of using mystical claims and promises to mislead people into supporting the group – Mr. Weston’s addresses were summarily cancelled.

According to the British newspaper The Jewish Chronicle, after the cancellations, the Kabbalah Center representative was impressively sanguine. He “fully respected the decision,” he said, although, he contended, “it would have brought great value to the event if participants were given the choice to learn and debate with us.”

Another reaction reported in the newspaper was that of London-born, now Denver-based, Rabbi Levi Brackman. He accused Limmud of having “caved in” to pressure and, with its declining to allow those attending the event to hear Mr. Weston’s views, being “unfaithful to its own mission.”

That mission does in fact include the conviction that “‘arguments for the sake of heaven’ can make a positive contribution to furthering our education and understanding,” and that “everyone can be a teacher and everyone should be a student.” Limmud, further, according to its literature, “does not participate in legitimising or de-legitimising any religious or political position found in the worldwide Jewish community.”

Apparently, though, Limmud’s leadership felt that a particular brand of Jewish expression had misled Jews and, if granted legitimacy by being included in the event program, would be empowered to further do so.

An entirely defensible, indeed proper and principled position. In fact, although Limmud may draw its lines in a different place, it is the very position of the much-maligned charedi leadership.

Letter to the Editor of the NY Jewish Week

Below is the text of a self-explanatory letter to the editor of the New York Jewish Week; it is published in this week’s issue of that paper.

December 21, 2013

Editor:

Rori Picker Neiss (op-ed, December 15) is “shocked” at my response to your reporter, who asked me for the rationale of esteemed rabbinical authorities’ opposition to pre-nuptial agreements focused on a future divorce. I explained that “there is a concern that introducing and focusing on the possible dissolution of a marriage when it is just beginning is not conducive to the health of the marriage.”

Ms. Picker Neiss contends that such focus is already introduced, in the traditional ketubah. I don’t know what version of the ketubah she is citing but the time-honored, halachically mandated one contains no mention whatsoever of divorce.

The pledge of support that the ketubah references remains in place in a case of divorce, or of the husband’s death. But that is simply a peripheral implication of the ketubah, which simply lists the husband’s obligations to his wife.

And so to compare the ketubah to the “prenup” used by some today is comparing apples to aufrufs.

Ms. Picker Neiss is entitled to embrace the prenuptual approach if she chooses. But I would only ask her to recognize that there are others who, for entirely defensible reasons, choose otherwise.

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Director of Public Affairs

Agudath Israel of America

Too Little Information

At the Sheva Brachos festivities this past summer for the marriage of our youngest daughter, my wife and I heard many wonderful things about our newest son-in-law. Friends and relatives spoke about his impressive Torah scholarship, his modesty, his sterling character. We had already known all that, although it was good to hear all the same. One testimonial, though, particularly impressed me; it was offered by one of the new husband’s brothers-in-law, who, in a short speech, recounted a long-ago lively Shabbos table discussion at his in-laws’ home.

Each member of the family, it seems, had vociferously put forth his or her perspective on some now-forgotten topic. Except, the speaker recounted, for our new son-in-law. When asked by one of the others for his opinion on the matter, the reticent family member’s simple response was: “I don’t have enough information to have one.”

I smiled broadly inside (probably outside too). If only, I mused, more of us were so thoughtful. Instead, our times seem to foster a diametric approach, that all of us must have opinions, with or without the assistance of facts. Call it a Contemporary Commandment: Thou shalt leave no issue uncommented upon.

And so, opine we merrily do, with or without the requisite information, the clay of which cogent opinions are molded – or objectivity, the furnace that forges them.

Whether the topic is gun control, the Affordable Care Act, immigration reform, Afghanistan or the agreement with Iran, we must speak up; full knowledge, let alone comprehension, of all the pertinent details is no requirement. (Mindless animus for the current occupant of the White House is much preferred – but that’s a different essay.)

Opinions have become something like fashion accessories (“Oh, what a nice opinion you have! Where can I get one like it?”), and too often are just purloined from pundits who make us feel righteous – or fearful or angry, the strange preferences of some.

Worse still is opting for “selective information.” Few if any important political or social topics lack two sides. Listening to only one of them because it’s where one has decided beforehand he’d like to land may be enticing, but it’s irresponsible. Shutting oneself in the echo chamber of (take your pick) “conservative” or “liberal” or Democratic or Republican (or Jewish or non-Jewish) commentary is a recipe for intoxication, not enlightenment.

Please don’t misunderstand. We are entitled to have and voice opinions, to take sides. (Some of us do it professionally.) But thoughtful judgment begins with seriously considering all sides of an issue. And yet, while it’s not exactly hard these days to find very different perspectives on any topic, too many of us purposefully avoid the marketplace of ideas (or limit ourselves to one stall). “Oh, I don’t read that,” we glibly say, or “I never pay attention to him” – simply because the “that” and the “him” represent points of view at odds with the speaker’s gut feelings. What somehow gets lost is the recognition that there’s great gain in confronting a different point of view – and none at all in just having one’s uninformed feelings seconded.

A little experiment: Write down the names of the media or pundits you make a point of reading. Now, examine your list to see if they are homogeneous or represent a broad variety of attitudes or perspectives. If the former’s the case, you’re cheating yourself.

Needless to say, there are ideas from which we observant Jews rightly insulate ourselves. But political and social issues don’t usually entail heresy or licentiousness. What they do entail, and require, is complete information, true objectivity and long, hard thought.

Consider, for example, the death penalty. On the one hand, why should taxpayers be burdened with housing and feeding bad people? Executions, moreover, deter other would-be criminals, and can provide victims’ families a measure of solace.

And yet, there’s another hand. Killing a human being is a grave deed, not to be undertaken lightly. And people, at least some of them, can change. And mistaken convictions have sent innocent people to their deaths.

It’s easy to just dismiss the first set of points as callous, or the second as weak-willed. What’s hard is weighing the two sides against each other. But that’s what’s necessary, in the end, to reach an informed, intelligent opinion.

And if the weighing is inconclusive – which happens more than seldom – and leaves an informed, intelligent person ambivalent, well, then, maybe he should just acknowledge the fact.

What? And remain opinionless? Heavens!

Sometimes, though, that’s necessary. And, as our son-in-law understood – and all of us should – there’s no shame in that.

Seeding the Right Cloud

Following the time-honored if somewhat irritating tradition of speechmakers who begin by announcing that they are departing from the scheduled topic, I informed those present that instead of focusing on the media’s coverage of Orthodox Jews, I would make my presentation on cloud seeding.

The venue was Agudath Israel of America’s recent 91^st national convention, which took place this past weekend at the Woodcliff Lake Hilton in New Jersey, where thousands converged to hear words of inspiration and admonition from some of the Orthodox world’s guiding elders.

And, for some of the attendees, to hear words of lesser gravity from people like me, at various smaller sessions. Still, the Sunday morning one in which I participated, along with Agudath Israel executive director Rabbi Labish Becker, the session’s chairman; respected educator Rabbi Aaron Brafman; and accomplished attorney Avi Schick, drew nearly 500 souls.

A few voices in the back of the hall demanded that I repeat myself, for surely they had misheard. So I did, but, before puzzlement could turn to consternation, I launched into a pretty funny joke. No, I’m not going to repeat it here. If you’re really curious, you can get the CD from zalmanumlas@netzero.net .

But I will offer here the gist of my words that morning. (I’d love to do the same with those of my co-presenters, but don’t have their notes. So, again, please just order the CD.)

Orthodox Jews seem to be in the news a lot, usually in news stories focused on the wrongdoings of Orthodox individuals. That usually begins with the Jewish media, which make yeomen’s efforts to find anything scandalous – or even innocent but which can be presented in such a way as to imply something dark – in the Orthodox community. And larger media pick up the baleful ball and run with it.

Needless to say, there are truly egregious crimes that have been committed by members of the Orthodox community, as by those of any community. But the powerful lens aimed at the Orthodox world is sui generis. (I’m not a psychologist, but have my suspicions about why some Jewish media are so bent on ferreting out Orthodox misbehavior; it has something to do with Jewish guilt. But let’s not go there.)

And yet, there are times when it seems a stream of positive news about Orthodox Jews seems to burst forth from nowhere.

Recently, we were treated to Professor Noah Feldman’s Bloomberg News ode to the scholarship and democratic meritocracy that is Beth Medrash Govoah, the Lakewood Yeshiva; and reports about the political alliance and personal friendship between a Chassidic woman (elected to a town council) and a Palestinian one in Montreal, a man with a yarmulkeh riding a New York subway who allowed a young man in a hoodie to use his shoulder as a pillow, and a Connecticut rebbe who discovered nearly $100,000 stashed in a desk he had bought and unhesitatingly returned it to its owner. (She had forgotten where she had put the cash, which is a lesson to us all: Whenever we stash a hundred grand somewhere around the house, we should write where on a sticky note and put it on the fridge.)

What, though, precipitates the negative Ortho-news, and what the positive? A believer in chance wouldn’t have the question. But a believer in Judaism does.

And “precipitates” is the right word. My stab at an answer was where cloud seeding came in.

I picture a spiritual cloud of sorts, an amorphous mass of minor acts of chilul Hashem, or “desecration of G-d’s name.” Any time a visibly Jewish Jew blocks traffic by double parking, or is impatient with a clerk at a supermarket or cuts corners while doing his taxes, a bit of malign moisture is added to that Chilul Hashem cloud. And when it is sufficiently heavy, it rains down on our heads, and into the media, in the form of a large and public desecration of G-d’s name.

And conversely, when enough visibly Jewish Jews are considerate, polite, scrupulously honest and proactively friendly to others in their daily lives, their actions feed another cloud, the cloud of Kiddush Hashem – “Sanctification of G-d’s name.” And then the media are presented with un-ignorable examples of public actions of Kiddush Hashem, and are forced to report them.

So by our own actions, each of us helps seed one cloud or, G-d forbid, the other; whether acid rain or blessed rain results depends, in the end, on us all.

The most valuable thing I shared with those present, though, consisted of a sentence from the Rambam (Maimonides), what I believe is his definition of Kiddush Hashem.

“Anyone,” he writes, “who refrains from a sin or fulfills a commandment not for any earthly reason, not fear nor trepidation, nor to seek honor, but [entirely] because [it is the will] of the Creator… has sanctified G-d’s name.”

And so, even – perhaps especially – in our quietest, most private moments, we all have opportunities to seed the right cloud.

The Way We Are

While those of us here south of the border (the Canadian one, that is) were focused on our own local elections, a Chassidic woman candidate in a Montreal borough was busy making history.

Mindy Pollak, a chassidic woman (from the Vizhnitz community) was elected – the first chassidic person to do so – to the Montreal borough council of Outremont, where there have been running tensions for years between non-Jewish residents and the growing number of Orthodox Jews living there. Her opponent, journalist Pierre Lacerte, had supported a borough councilor widely considered anti-chassidic (if not anti-Semitic) in the latter’s attempt to undermine the construction of an eruv and new shuls in the neighborhood. According to one report, supporters of Mr. Lacerte went knocking on doors without mezuzahs, distributing flyers and announcing that “We’re here to talk about the Jews.”

Ms. Pollak’s political ally and friend was, and is, Leila Marshy, a filmmaker of Arab ancestry who describes herself as a “militant Palestinian.”

An article in the Globe and Mail before the recent election quoted Ms. Pollak as saying that “if we focus on what we have in common rather than what divides us, then we can work toward solutions.”

So begins this week’s roundup of heartening Orthodox Jewish news. Unfortunately, the media tend to go for the negative or scandalous And so it’s good every now and then to highlight what, in a bad pun referencing one of the New York tabloids that see their role as highlighting real or exaggerated bad behavior, I call the “Daily Jews.” That is to say, the vast majority of observant Jews who live their lives in consonance with their religious convictions.

Exhibit B is the “subway guy,” the middle-aged man wearing a yarmulkeh whose shoulder became the makeshift pillow of a young black man in a hoodie who dozed off sitting next to him on the Q train. Someone snapped a photo of the pair and posted it on the web, where, within days, it garnered over one million “likes” and nearly 200,000 “shares” on Facebook.

Providing that courtesy to a fellow passenger on New York city transit shouldn’t be as surprising as it apparently was to so many. I remember once when my own shoulder served to provide a fellow citizen the same service, on a bus. And I’m glad no one had thought to aim a phone then at the sight of the dozing lady and slightly befuddled but unmoving bearded rabbi. But I’m glad the subway guy was snapped in action (or, better, inaction); I suppose that even doing something simple and decent, it seems, is impressive in our selfish, rude times.

And then we have the finally ended saga of Sarah Shapiro, a respected Orthodox writer in Israel, whose work had been shamelessly plagiarized by another writer, Naomi Ragen.

In December 2011, a district court judge in Jerusalem ruled that, in a novel she wrote, Ms. Ragen had intentionally used passages, often copied word for word, from a book written by Ms. Shapiro, ordering Ms. Ragen to pay Ms. Shapiro damages and court costs, and to omit the copied sections from future editions of her book.

Ms. Ragen appealed to the Supreme Court, which last week brokered an agreement that requires her to abide by the lower court’s order that she remove the plagiarized material from any new editions and translations of the novel; and stipulates that 97,000 shekels of the 233,000 shekels in damages and court costs awarded to Mrs. Shapiro be donated to charity.

Ms. Ragen’s response was to claim victory at that “compromise,” wish herself mazel tov, and rail against “people like Mrs. Shapiro.” For good measure, she also accuses the woman she plagiarized of plagiarism of her own (for including in a character’s ruminations the words of a well-known popular song from the 1970s, clearly assuming that readers would recognize them).

And Sarah Shapiro’s reaction to the closing of the case? She offered “a profoundly felt thank you” to the justices “for protecting my work” and called their “peaceful resolution” of the case “quintessentially Jewish.” She had words for her adversary too, embracing her “fellow American immigrant to the Land of our Fathers” as someone who “has done so much, with passion… to defend this country with her power of words…”

“I look forward to meeting you again someday, G-d willing,” her statement concluded, “as fellow writers.” And she quoted Dovid Hamelech in Tehillim:”Then we will be as dreamers… May we reap in joy what was sown in tears.”

And that wraps up our survey of this week’s “Daily Jews.”

Musing: Whistling Past the Maternity Ward

One of the many post-mortem dissections of the recently released Pew study of American Jews appeared in the Forward last week. It contended that the Orthodox community “isn’t growing nearly as fast as some of its boosters claim.” The 10% of the American Jewish population that identify as Orthodox Jews, the piece explains, is “up only 2% from 10 years ago.”

What’s more, the article notes, “only 48% of people who were brought up Orthodox remain Orthodox.”

As it happens, though, the Orthodox “retention rate” has risen considerably in recent decades. Whereas, indeed, only 22% of people now 65 and older raised Orthodox still call themselves that, fully 57% of people aged 30-49 raised Orthodox do. And for those under 30, the percentage of raised-Orthodox Jews who are still Orthodox is 83%.

As to the “up only 2%” observation, it would seem that some journalists could use a math refresher. Growth from 8% to 10% represents a rise of fully 25% – a rather impressive figure indeed.