Category Archives: News

Thanks (I think), New York Times

I can’t say with any certitude that my repeatedly bugging of the New York Times’ public editor (who sent the criticism to a different department — which never responded to me) had anything to do with it.  Or that my opinion piece last year (at http://hamodia.com/2014/08/06/ugly-times/ ) did.

But I’m happy to report that the “Times Journeys” offering of a tour to Israel with the theme “The Israeli-Palestinian Conundrum” seems to no longer feature Hanan Ashwari (who David Harris once said “is to truth what smoking is to health”) as one of its resident experts for the tourists.  (The come-on is at http://www.nytimes.com/times-journeys/travel/israeli-palestinian-dialogue/ .)

But it never hurts to be a squeaky wheel (and to encourage  others to squeak along); sometimes one may get the grease.   One thing is certain: every proper hishtadlus is worth the time and trouble.

And thanks, New York Times, if you did, for taking the criticism seriously.

Zoned Out

Challenging “pre-owned” and “correctional institution” for first place in the delicate euphemism rankings is “sensitive urban zones.”

That phrase, having barged into the news cycle in recent weeks, is the translation of “Zones Urbaines Sensibles,” a designation long used in France to describe neighborhoods characterized by high unemployment, high rates of public housing and low educational attainment, many if not most of the areas populated for the most part by Muslim immigrants.

It was the characterization of such areas in Western Europe as “no-go zones,” first by Fox News and then by Louisiana governor and presidential hopeful Bobby Jindal, that propelled “sensitive urban zones” into the news.

After terrorism analyst Steve Emerson contended on Fox News that “There are actual cities [in Britain] like Birmingham that are totally Muslim, where non-Muslims just simply don’t go in,” British Prime Minister David Cameron waxed apoplectic, and the network apologized repeatedly.  Similar claims about “no-go” neighborhoods in France prodded Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo to announce that the City of Light would be suing Fox. “The image of Paris,” she huffed, “has been prejudiced, and the honor of Paris has been prejudiced.”

A day after those apologies, Mr. Jindal told CNN that “In the West, non-assimilationist Muslims establish enclaves and carry out as much of Sharia law as they can without regard for the laws of the democratic countries which provided them a new home…” and added, “I think that the radical Left absolutely wants to pretend like this problem is not here. Pretending it’s not here won’t make it go away.”

There are indeed Sharia courts in some Western European countries, including England, where “Muslim Arbitration Tribunals” resolve civil and family issues through Islamic law.  There are also, l’havdil, batei din in our own communities that arbitrate disputes and rule on halachic questions.  Allowing religious communities to address legal issues among their willing members should not threaten anyone.  Multi-cultural democratic societies rightly respect religious communities’ right to practice their faiths, including to arbitrate religious matters and disputes among their members.  Thus, Mr. Jindal’s conflating of arbitration courts with incubators of terrorism is misguided and dangerous.

Equally misguided and dangerous, though, is the contention, much bellowed of late by the media, that “no-go” zones don’t exist in Western Europe.  The designation need not mean lawless, rebellious enclaves.  But it describes something real.

Neighborhoods that incubate the sort of evil that exploded in France mere weeks ago – and that has exploded so many times before – are indeed threats to civilized society.  Such areas breed and attract disaffected Muslims, often petty criminals seeking glory, like the brothers who massacred 17 people earlier this month.  Or the British soldier hacked to death by two Islamists in 2013.  Or the scores of other Islamist terrorist “incidents” in both countries over the years.  The “no-go” neighborhoods, whatever one chooses to call them, nurture such people’s malevolence, and send them on their wicked ways.

In Britain, one such enclave spawned a (now banned) group called “Muslims Against the Crusades,” which pledged to turn 12 British cities – including what it calls “Londonistan” – into autonomous Islamist enclaves operating entirely outside British jurisprudence.

Political commentator Daniel Pipes conceded that France’s “sensitive urban zones” are, “in normal times… unthreatening, routine places.”  He adds, though, that “they do unpredictably erupt, with car burnings, attacks on representatives of the state (including police), and riots.”

Such neighborhoods may not have seceded from their countries, as has been implied by some overreaching pundits and politicians.  But they are viewed by police, other emergency services and the public as dangerous places.  Because they are.  Dangerous not only to visit but to society at large, because of the hatred and violence regularly preached and promoted there.  Cancer cells can bide their time too.

After Fox News aired its reference to “no-go” zones, a French comedic program mocked the assertion in a video.  Two “correspondents” pretending to be American journalists ventured into a Muslim neighborhood and, in slapstick fashion, cowered when they spied a couscous restaurant and then fell to the ground in fright at the sound of a jackhammer.

The host of the program wouldn’t take credit for causing Fox’s apology.  But he said that “The important thing is that we really had fun.”

It’s nice that he had fun.  After the horrors of past weeks, Frenchmen deserve some comic relief.  But should the comedian happen to find himself for some reason in a Zone Urbaines Sensibles, and heard a loud, explosive noise, he will do well to, in all seriousness, drop quickly to the ground.

© 2015 Hamodia

 

Greed Is Gross

The carnival of carnage that seems a constant in the Islamic world proceeded tragically apace last week, with a suicide bombing at a gathering in Ibb, Yemen to commemorate Islam’s founder’s birthday.  At least 23 people were killed; an Al Qaeda affiliate is the suspected culprit.

Then, over in Afghanistan, at least 26 people attending a wedding party were killed, and 45 wounded, when a rocket struck a house during a firefight between government forces and Taliban insurgents

But what might rank as the week’s most senseless loss of life took place in a non-Islamic land, China.  At least 35 people were killed and 43 injured during a stampede in an area of Shanghai where tens of thousands had gathered to celebrate the advent of a new calendar year

The cause of that disaster is unclear, but it was reported that shortly before the crowd had grown restless, people in a nearby building had dropped green pieces of paper that looked like American $100 bills.

Now, there’s an awful metaphor for our covetous times.  The pursuit of money is nothing new, of course.  It has been the engine powering many a civilization, and the rot destroying many a human life.  And while it’s easy to decry the venality and greed of the worst that Wall St. and Hollywood have to offer, it’s considerably harder to check our own individual inclinations to grab what green we can.

It’s a silly inclination, of course.  Not only can money buy only stuff, not happiness, but a believing Jew should have well absorbed the truism that his financial status is, in the end, a function of what is decreed for him by Hashem at the start of each Jewish year.  To pursue money, then, for the sake of, well, pursuing money, to exert oneself in a quest to have more than one needs, is just to court expenses that one wouldn’t otherwise have.

Still and all, mindless greed somehow seeps into countless lives, even Jewish ones, even Jewishly educated ones.  Lavan, after all, is in our family tree.

Yet possessions are valuable things.

Yaakov Avinu, we all know, recrossed Nachal Yabok in order to retrieve small jars inadvertently left behind.  “From here we see,” Chazal explain, “that the possessions of the righteous are as dear to them as their bodies.”

That comment, of course, does not mean to counsel greed or miserliness; Yaakov, after all, is the man of emes, the forefather who embodies the ideal of “truth” or honesty.  It is meant to teach us something deeply Jewish, that possessions have worth.  And that is because they can be utilized for truly meaningful things. A dollar can be converted not only into a euro but into a mitzvah.

It can buy a soft drink or a packet of aspirin or part of a New York subway fare.   But it can also buy a thirsty friend a drink, or a get-well card for someone ailing, or part of the fare for the ride to the hospital to deliver it in person.  It can be put into the pushke or given as a reward to a child who has done something reward-worthy.

Possessions are tools, in their essence morally neutral.  Put to a holy purpose, though, they are sublime.  And so, the Torah teaches, valuing a small jar can be a sign not of avarice but of wisdom.

It’s unfortunate – no, dreadful – that some of us seem only to remember the importance of valuing money but forgotten the reason for its value.  Greed – all the more so when it leads to less than honest expression – is the very antithesis of the example set by the Jewish forefather associated with emes.  The righteous, continue Chazal in their statement about Yaakov’s retrieval of the small jars, “do not extend their hands toward theft.”  Truly Jewish-minded Jews see money not as an end justified by any means but as a means that can lead to a holy end.

And if it’s only the end that matters, as it should, the means cannot be of any inherent importance.  Means can take many forms.  A wealthy person can, as many do, use his financial resources to help others and support Torah.  But the financially unendowed are at no disadvantage.  They simply resort to what other wealths they may have, their time, their intellects, their talents.

And so should we find ourselves with dollars, actual ones, raining down upon us, the Jewish thing to do would be to perhaps hold out our hands, but to stand perfectly, happily still.

© 2015 Hamodia

Bricks For Bombs

A driver, reportedly shouting an Islamic slogan, rammed a vehicle into pedestrians in the French city of Dijon last Sunday, injuring twelve people.

Understandably, the attack (and several subsequent ones in France) brought back memories of this past autumn’s spate of vehicular terrorist attacks in Israel.  Although they seem to have abated in Israel (despite much Palestinian social media encouragement that they continue), the devil’s brew of blood-lust and creativity in some Arab and Muslim hearts continues to boil apace.

Spewed from the cauldron recently was one Yasmin Sha’aban, who, according to the Shin Bet, was planning to carry out a suicide attack in Israel.  She intended to receive a permit (“for medical reasons”) to travel from Jenin, where she lived, into Israel proper. There, she hoped to disguise herself as an expectant Jewish woman, with explosives hidden under her clothes, and create as much carnage as she possibly could.

That plot, baruch Hashem, was interrupted by Israeli security forces; Ms. Sha’aban and several compatriots were taken into custody.  It turned out that her friends had also planned to bomb a bus carrying soldiers and to kidnap a soldier.

The perennial question returns: How to discourage such savage determination to kill and maim?

Well, not by resorting to vandalism, as members of an anti-Arab group called Lehava seem to feel is the solution.  The group, which presumably also considers fires to be best extinguished with gasoline, has been linked to a number of attacks on Arab property, and, recently, on a school whose student body includes both Jews and Arabs.

For its part, the Israeli government has embraced a deterrent it had long abandoned (at the recommendation of a special military committee): the demolition of terrorists’ homes.  The day after the Har Nof massacre, the military turned the house of Abdel Rahman al-Shaloudy, who had plowed his car into pedestrians a month earlier, into rubble.

Such demolitions, however, are understandably controversial, as they effectively punish family members who may not have had anything to do with the terrorist act.  And while they may indeed give pause to some would-be terrorists, they may just as well encourage others who don’t particularly care for their family members (Not all Arab families, it’s rumored, are as close-knit and loving as the media portray them to be.)  Finally, many nations consider the policy to be collective punishment and a violation of human rights (although some of them show precious little concern for human rights within their own borders, but never mind that).  In any event, the Israeli Supreme Court is currently mulling the legality of the demolitions.

Sometimes, strangely, two problems can add up to one solution.  In addition to domestic terrorism, Israel faces, at least on the international front, the strong disapproval, even by some of her most stalwart friends (like the United States), of construction in the “disputed territories.”

Many supporters of Israel assert that the country has every right to build as it sees fit not only in greater Yerushalayim but in Jewish outposts in Yehudah and Shomron.  Indeed it does.  But not everything that one has a right to do is necessarily the right thing to do.  In 2009, Israel herself, and under her current Prime Minister, froze West Bank construction for a full 10 months, to coax the Palestinian Authority to resume peace talks in earnest (to no avail). For a number of reasons, largely having to do with internal Israeli politics, no similar subsequent action has taken place, despite the pleas and demands from others.

Enter my “Bricks for Bombs” plan.  Here goes: An immediate year-long freeze is put into effect on all construction in Yehudah and Shomron, to encourage meaningful peace talks (and remove the easy excuse for some of the Israel-aimed ire).  At the same time, a new policy is announced:  For each terror attack, or discovery and foiling of a credible attack, permission to construct a building (or a given number of buildings) will be granted, despite the freeze.

With that plan in place, Israel will have shown its good will and sensitivity to the concerns of the nations of the world (Klal Yisroel is in golus, let’s not forget); Arab acts of violence will be deterred (since few terrorists want to be the cause, Allah forbid, of greater Jewish presence in Eretz Yisrael).  And Israelis might go through their days feeling a bit more secure.

What’s more, the deterrent to terrorism will have taken the form not of destroying homes but of building them.

© 2014 Hamodia

Punditry With Prudence

“According to you,” a reader wrote me privately about a recent column that appeared in this space, “we can’t make any conclusions, because of the unknowns.”

The column, titled “Unknown Unknowns,” pointed out how, particularly in political affairs (like the current American administration’s relationship with Israel) we don’t always have the whole picture.  I noted as an example, how, at the very same time that many Jewish media were attacking President Obama for his ostensible hostility toward Israel, the president was determinedly working hand in glove with Israel in a secret cyber-project to undermine the Iranian nuclear program. As pundits huffed and puffed, Stuxnet was silently destroying centrifuges.

The reader was chagrined that I, as he read it, was counseling a moratorium on commentary about all political affairs.  I wrote back to explain that no, I didn’t mean that at all.  We can, and even should, express our concerns openly in the free country in which we’re privileged to live. But we must do so with reason and civility (maybe even fairness), not the sort of ranting that passes for dialectic on talk radio these days. I meant only (and perhaps should have written more clearly) that a degree of modesty when voicing our assumptions and opinions is in order, and is all too often in absentia.

Serendipitously, shortly after I wrote the piece, a bit of news arrived that well illustrated its point.

Back at the start of 2013, when Chuck Hagel was nominated to serve as Secretary of Defense, the reaction from various corners, including some in our community, ranged from deeply suspicious to apoplectic.  Several artless statements Mr. Hagel had made were fanned into four-alarm fires; taken in the worst possible way, they were waved around as evidence of the man’s disdain for Israel.  (That his nomination was made by the man in the White House made things, to the alarmists, even more distressing.

Elliott Abrams labelled Mr. Hagel an anti-Semite.  Abe Foxman insinuated that the nominee believed that the “the Jewish lobby controls foreign policy.” Charles Krauthammer blasted the new Defense Secretary for “pernicious blindness” when it came to Israel.  Magazines, newspapers and pundits in our own community readily hopped on the berating-bandwagon – and looked with pity (at best) upon those of us who, weighing the evidence objectively, just couldn’t work up a good panic.

Fast-forward to several weeks ago, when Mr. Hagel’s retirement was announced.  Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon, who had no reason to say anything at all about the transition, took the initiative to describe Mr. Hagel as a “true friend of Israel” whose “dedication to ensuring Israel’s security has been unwavering.”

“It is a real shame Hagel is leaving – he was great with us,” another Israeli official told Israeli reporter Barak Ravid.  Reporter Udi Sagal wrote that Hagel’s departure is “is bad news for Israel,” citing Hagel’s close personal relationship with Israel’s Defense Ministry.

The Jerusalem Post, no slouch when it comes to Israel’s security concerns, editorialized that Mr. Hagel “proved to be highly supportive of Israel” and imagined (likely unrealistically) that “some of the organizations that originally attacked Hagel quite viciously must now be embarrassed by their behavior.”

At least one erstwhile critic, Mr. Foxman, to his credit, seemed to come around to the realization that his fears had proven unfounded.  “Secretary Hagel’s energetic stewardship of America’s commitment to Israel’s security in a dangerous region,” he said, “has been vital.”

“His hands-on engagement,” the ADL leader added, “to ensure that our ally Israel can live in safety and security and maintain its rightful place in the community of nations will have a lasting impact.”

Yes, we can wax critical of political leaders.  But before we call them Israel-haters (and certainly Jew-haters), before we dump gobs of cynicism on their heads, or accuse them of flouting the law or the Constitution (when no court has rendered any such judgment), or pronounce them traitorous or stupid or evil, we need to pause, take a deep breath, remember a few things.  That there are at least two reasonable perspectives on most issues.  That there are things we can’t know with certitude.  And that, as Shlomo HaMelech observed and taught, “the words of the wise are heard” only when expressed “in calm” (Koheles 9:17).

The state of Israel, and Klal Yisrael, have all too many all too real enemies in today’s world.  We really don’t do ourselves any favor imagining, or, chalilah, creating, new ones.

© 2014 Hamodia

A Halachic Query of Jordanian King Abdullah II

Dear King Abdullah,

I’m quite sure you don’t remember me.  I was part of a sizable group of Jewish leaders, clergy, politicians and organizational representatives whom you, along with the Center for World Religions, Diplomacy and Conflict Resolution, invited to a gala lunch in a posh Manhattan hotel nine years ago.

To jog your memory, though, I was the fellow with the beard and black hat, and whose lips you may have noticed quietly moving when you entered the room.  I was reciting a Jewish blessing that is to be pronounced when one sees a king.  It goes “Blessed are You, G-d, Who has given of His glory to flesh and blood.”  It is, for obvious reasons, not a common blessing to make, and I was happy to have the occasion to invoke it.

I remember well your address to the crowd.  Its essence was your hope that Jews and Muslims might be able, despite political differences, to attain respect for each other’s religious beliefs.  Your message was a vision, of a human race unified by its members’ recognition of the worth and dignity of one another.  We, you may remember, applauded loudly and enthusiastically.

We learned, too, about how you had undertaken a brave and visionary mission: to marginalize Muslim extremism of the sort that continues to plague the civilized world.  You recounted how you had organized a conference of respected religious leaders from all the major schools of Islam to endorse a document that explicitly asserts the responsibility of Muslims to honor “every human being, without distinction of color, race or religion” and to “shun violence and cruelty.”  That last phrase particularly has stayed with me, and I recalled it recently.

It was when two Palestinian men, as you surely know, entered a synagogue in western Jerusalem where Jewish men were engrossed in prayer, and mercilessly hacked or shot four of them to death.  The attackers killed a police officer who rushed to the scene as well. And as they engaged in their slaughter of innocents, they shouted a declaration of Islamic faith, as so many murderers of Jews have done over recent years, months and weeks.  Eventually, police shot and killed the rampaging killers.

Your Parliament’s reaction to this rather striking example of religious “violence and cruelty,” to borrow your phrase, was to observe a moment of silence, in memory… not of the victims but of their murderers.  Verses from the Koran (“to glorify their pure souls,” a member of your Parliament helpfully explained) introduced the memorial moment.

Shortly thereafter, according to published reports, your Prime Minister Abdullah Ensour sent a condolence letter to the families of the murderers.

And then, in a broadcast interview, a member of your Parliament, Rudaina Ati, praised “the [Jerusalem synagogue] operation” for sending “a clear message to the Zionist entity…”; and called on Arabs to use violence to “liberate Palestine from the colonialist Jews,” the “filthy Jews [who live] on the land of Palestine.”

All of which leads me to my question.  According to Halacha, or Jewish religious law, the blessing that I pronounced when I saw you nine years ago is only proper and only permitted when the monarch one sees has true monarchial power over his subjects, when he is someone whose subjects would not dare stand up in violation of their king’s decrees or initiatives.

The utterance of a Jewish blessing, moreover, which includes G-d’s name, is considered by Halacha to be a very serious matter.  One may not pronounce a blessing unless it is truly required.  Otherwise it remains a bracha livatalah, a “pointless blessing.”

I have many sins to confess to my Maker, and indeed I recite a confessional prayer daily.  My question to you is whether I should include in my confession the sin, even if it was committed unintentionally, of having uttered a bracha livatalah when I saw you nine years ago.

Thank you in advance for your response.

A. Shafran

© 2014 Hamodia

Unknown Unknowns

Should you ever find yourself in an ornate, high-ceilinged room with a military-uniformed classical string ensemble segueing from a flawless rendition of a Bach concerto to an equally impressive (if less inspiring) version of “I Have a Little Dreidel,” it can only mean one thing: you’re at a White House Chanukah party.

I know, because during the George W. Bush administration, on behalf of Agudath Israel, I attended several of the yearly gatherings, which brought together assorted Jewish personalities, politicians and organizational representatives. One of the times when my wife didn’t accompany me, a major supporter of Agudath Israel was my guest.

I discovered then (aside from the fact that nothing compares to home-made potato latkes) that Mr. Bush is a mentch.

As we stood in the long line for the ritual photo-op with the president and first lady, my guest asked me if I minded if he alone stood next to the first couple for the photo.  Having already garnered the souvenir before (along with a presidential seal paper hand-towel from the White House restroom, now hanging on our own bathroom wall), I didn’t.  And so, when it was our turn, I stepped back to allow my guest to pose unaccompanied with the First Couple.  Mr. Bush motioned to me with a broad smile to join the photo.  I explained that I wanted my guest alone to be in the picture.

The president allowed the photographer to snap the photo but then, breaking assembly line photo op etiquette, insisted that a second photo be taken with me in it.  “Why shouldn’t you get a turn?” Mr. Bush asked.  I was a little embarrassed but, of course, heeded the Commander in Chief’s order.

Mr. Bush’s mentchlichkeit has been on more public display many times, most recently, during a Fox News interview.  The interviewer reminded Mr. Bush of his 2007 warning that withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq could be disastrous, and asked if he had criticism of President Obama for doing precisely that two years later.

“I’m not going to second-guess our president,” Mr. Bush said. “I understand how tough the job is. And to have a former president, you know, bloviating and second-guessing is, I don’t think, good for the presidency or the country.”

Mr. Bush wasn’t just being perfunctorily polite.  Having “been there,” he knows that there are factors that go into a presidential decision to which the citizenry is blissfully oblivious – and that, in the end good outcomes can only be hoped for, not prophesied.

A decision Mr. Bush made during his tenure was to authorize the secret creation of the Stuxnet computer virus, designed to infect and wreak havoc on Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities. When Mr. Bush left office, President Obama accelerated the clandestine program, ordering increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems at the Natanz plant.

In 2010, the plant was hit by a new version of the worm, widely regarded as having been designed by American and Israel cyber experts working together, and then another one after that. Nearly 1,000 Iranian uranium-purifying centrifuges were disabled. The virus continued to hamper other Iranian facilities through the end of 2012

During that same period, many media were brimming with indignation over Mr. Obama’s not having yet visited Israel as president; trumpeting charges that cooperation between Israel and the U.S. was at its lowest point in decades; bubbling with outrage over Mr. Obama’s opposition to Israeli construction in the West Bank; and castigating the president for mentioning Israel’s 1967 borders as a starting point (“with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established…”) for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

And yet, behind the scenes, unknown and unsuspected by all the righteously irate, Mr. Obama was pursuing a joint program with Israel to undermine the Iranian threat to her security.

Ex-President Bush is both wise enough and modest enough to know that even those who once sat in the Oval Office are not privy to all that’s happening at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  Kal v’chomer, the rest of us.

Predictably, though, in anticipation of news about a nuclear development deal with Iran, or of an extension of negotiations (this is being written before the deal-deadline), the usual suspects are cleaning their BB guns, ready to take their potshots at the president.  But the wiser among us do well to remind ourselves that we don’t know all there is to know, to not “bloviate and second-guess” the current president.  We could learn a little wisdom and humility from the forty-third.

© 2014 Hamodia

Strong and Subtle Slanders

The New York Jewish Week was understandably unhappy at the comparison that a respected Modern Orthodox rabbi seemed to make between the paper and the rabid Nazi tabloid Der Stürmer, which, from1923 until 1945, incited Germans with lurid fictions about Jews.

Rabbi Steven Pruzansky, spiritual leader of Congregation B’nai Yeshurun, the largest Orthodox synagogue in Teaneck, NJ, recently stepped down from the Beit Din of Bergen County he led for seven years, mainly, he wrote, because of “the negativity associated today with conversion, and the cynicism and distrust fostered by so many…towards the rabbinate.”

Rabbi Pruzansky, a member of the executive committee of the Rabbinical Council of America, was also critical of a decision made by that latter organization to appoint a new conversion committee that will include several non-rabbinical members in addition to five rabbis.  He expressed concern that the new committee may “water down the standards” for conversion and potentially lead to a return to “the old days of quickie conversions with little commitment.”

When the Jewish Week contacted him to elaborate, he declined to speak to its reporter, asserting that the paper is “one of the leading publications in the world of Orthodox-bashing and rabbi-bashing.”  And then he referenced Der Stürmer as another paper “that dealt a lot with Jews,” drolly adding that the latter periodical is “bad company to be in.”

The Jewish Week editorialized that the invocation of the Nazi publication was “outrageous,” leading Rabbi Pruzansky to subsequently write that he intended “no comparison” between the two publications, and that he “certainly regret[s] if [the Jewish Week] misconstrued my comment and anyone offended took offense…”

Whether the Jewish Week has accepted that apology isn’t known to me.  But one hopes that the paper’s umbrage won’t obscure what it was that so exasperated a genteel, intelligent Modern Orthodox rabbi that he would invoke, however rashly, a noxiously anti-Semitic tabloid.

The Jewish Week, after all, has never featured lurid fabrications about Orthodox Jews killing children to drink their blood, or offered gross caricatures of bearded, hook-nosed, slobbering rabbis in its pages.

But if the paper’s editor and reporters are interested in turning an insult into a learning moment, they might pause to consider the fact that subtle innuendo and generalizations can be even more powerful than gross, horrific fabrications.

Contemporary counterparts to Der Stürmer are rife in some Arab and Muslim sites (the word used in both its old and newer meanings).  And there are surely hateful simpletons who, as many Germans did during the Holocaust, accept the risible slanders against Jews those evil media serve up.  But don’t we all recognize that a greater danger may be posed by mannerly and reasoned “critiques” of Jews (or Israel, as a stand-in) that more subtly communicate slanders?

The Jewish Week cannot, unfortunately, so easily huff away charges of that sort of more delicate, oblique defamation.

It is a paper, after all, that, while it harbors some fine, unbiased columnists in its stable, has evidenced an inordinate amount of negative “reportage” about Orthodox Jews, largely charedim, and their institutions; and even seems to have assigned a reporter the beat of real or imagined scandals in the Orthodox community.  A reporter, it might be noted, who wrote a book that portrays communities like those in Borough Park and Williamsburg as small-minded, constricting, suffocating environments, and has characterized Orthodoxy, in the eyes of Jews she admires, as having “become little more than social control.”

The paper’s pages have included an assertion that “Some Orthodox label secular Jews Amalek”; a report about violent nationalist extremists in Israel that featured a large photograph of Har HaBayis in the background and a looming, ominous silhouette of a charedi man’s head in the foreground; a blatantly false assertion that a major charedi group “is opposed to… background check legislation” for Jewish schools.  It has, moreover, repeatedly portrayed a decidedly non-Orthodox Jewish congregation as Orthodox (in order to promote certain “innovations” as halachically acceptable).

There is also the disturbing but telling fact that, despite the abundance of top-notch writers in the contemporary traditional Orthodox world today and the unparalleled growth of the Orthodox community, the Jewish Week, which claims to represent the gamut of the Jewish world, does not feature, and never has featured, any charedi columnist.

So, rather than sleep tightly after taking its righteous offense at an intemperate comment, the Jewish Week’s editor and staff might do well to stay up a bit longer, to wonder at what evoked the rash comment, and to do some serious introspection.

An edited version of the above appeared this week in Hamodia

 

Agudath Israel Statement on the Massacre in Har Nof

This morning’s barbaric murder in Har Nof, Jerusalem of four Jews has left all caring people reeling – the tears are pouring this morning and our hearts are full of pain.

This vicious attack on people wearing tallis and tefillin and immersed in tefilla is ugly testimony to the depth of evil faced by Jews in Israel and the world over, in the form of brutal terrorists who revel in the killing of innocents.

The celebration of the murders in Gaza and elsewhere reiterates the despicable nature of those who wish the Holy Land to be Judenrein.

When cold-blooded murderers attack a makom Torah u’tefila in the Eretz Ha’kodesh, it is incumbent upon all of us to strengthen ourselves in Torah and tefila on behalf of our dear brethren in the Eretz Ha’kodesh. Imahem anachnu b’tzara.

We are mispallel that those who were injured in this brutal attack have a refuah shlaimah.

Our hearts go out to the families, particularly the almanos and the 26 innocent yesomim who lost their fathers – true kedoshim, holy men killed because they were Jews, who died with Jewish prayers on their lips.

May the families of the murdered, Rabbi Moshe Twersky, hy”d, Rabbi Kalman Levine, hy”d; Rabbi Aryeh Kupinsky, hy”d, and Rabbi Avraham Shmuel Goldberg, hy”d, be comforted amid the mourners of Tzion v’Yrushalayim.