Recently in Judaism Category

I had heard that a couple of South Carolina Republicans had gotten into hot water for making anti-Semitic comments in a letter to the editor. What on earth had they said? I wondered. Here it is, something that could have been ripped straight from the pages of Die Sturmer:

There is a saying that the Jews who are wealthy got that way not by watching dollars, but instead by taking care of the pennies and the dollars taking care of themselves. By not using earmarks to fund projects for South Carolina and instead using actual bills, DeMint is watching our nation's pennies and trying to preserve our country's wealth and our economy's viability to give all an opportunity to succeed.

Yawn. I have heard this sort of thing a million times. It's a patronizing stereotype, to be sure, and these men ought to have had more sense than to have said such a thing. But come on, doesn't the ADL have more important things to worry about than a couple of good ol' boys praising Jews for being smart with money? Peter Beinart, who is Jewish, and who is being somewhat snarky here, gets it right:

Given how widespread this form of anti-Semitism has become, even within the Jewish community itself, it is worth asking: What, exactly, did Merwin and Ulmer do wrong? They spread ancient and vicious stereotypes about Jews, of course. But where is the ancient and vicious stereotype? If it's anti-Semitic to say that Jews have disproportionately prospered in the United States, then let's condemn Nathan Glazer, Himmelfarb, and all the other sociologists who have studied the question. That Jews have disproportionately prospered in the United States happens to be manifestly true, which raises the question of why. Suggesting that they have done so by cheating gentiles--by prioritizing money over integrity, beauty, or patriotism--would indeed be anti-Semitic. That charge has gotten a lot of Jews killed over the millennia. But suggesting that Jews have disproportionately prospered because they're honest and frugal, which is what Merwin and Ulmer suggested, is the exact opposite. It is, in fact, the most benign explanation for Jewish economic success. Which is why Jews generally favor it themselves.

Up next: Professionally thin-skinned Asian activists cry to heaven for redress when Republican politician praises Asian "model minority" devotion to education. Film at 11.

UPDATE: Turns out that 139 of the Forbes 400 are Jewish. Who says that? Steve Sailer? Anti-Semite! Oh wait, he got that from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. I'm so confused...

Now this is news. Finally, the wall of silence within New York's ultra-Orthodox Jewish community over child sexual abuse has begun to crack, as ordinary Jews get fed up with a religious establishment allowing children to suffer to protect the image of the community.

"What we have witnessed in the past year is completely unprecedented," said Rhonnie Jaus, chief of the Brooklyn district attorney's sex crimes bureau. "This would be inconceivable just a few years ago."

Children in haredi families are no more or less likely to suffer sexual abuse than others, according to several recent studies. But Ben Hirsch, founder of Survivors for Justice, a New York group whose members include ultra-Orthodox Jews molested as children in communities nationwide, said the clandestine handling of molestation cases had kept leaders from dealing with the problem and made it easier for predators to operate.

Mr. Hirsch credits the Jewish press, therapists and rabbis in the Orthodox population itself, and organizations like his, with bringing the issue to light. Jewish blogs like FailedMessiah.com and theunorthodoxjew.blogspot.com, he said, have also been "a major catalyst," giving abuse victims their first opportunity to vent and connect without fear of being identified.

"People are rising up," he said.

Thank G-d! And why are they rising up?:

The father of a Brooklyn 10-year-old said in an interview that the mishandling, as he viewed it, of sex abuse cases by rabbinical courts had persuaded him to contact the police immediately when his son told him last year that a neighbor had abused him.

"I'm not one who believes rabbis are capable to handle this," he said.

Of course not. By now, everybody should have learned from the bitter experience of the Catholic laity in these matters. Go straight to the police. Don't give it a second thought. It doesn't make you a bad Jew, a bad Catholic, or a bad anything. Religious authorities are not to be trusted to handle these things justly. If, God forbid, something like this were to happen to one of my children in the Orthodox Church, I would let my priest and bishop know after I had already spoken to the police. Nothing personal there; I have no reason to suspect that my particular priest and my particular bishop would be anything but responsible in such a case. But I would take no chances.

I am reminded of a Latino immigrant father in one diocese about a decade ago -- I wrote about the case -- who arrived in the US to find that a nest of abuser priests at the local parish had set upon his young son, who had come earlier to this country with his mother. He went to the vicar for Hispanic affairs to report the situation, and was confronted by a bishop who pulled out a checkbook, and offered to write him a check for thousands of dollars, in exchange for the father's signature on a piece of paper giving the diocese's law firm the right to "represent" the boy in this matter. The father may have been an immigrant laborer, but he knew he was being had. He marched out, got a Jewish lawyer, and sued their sorry butts. Haredim parents might want to take a lesson from this, though I don't know about the hiring a Jewish lawyer thing in this context.

What this signals is a breakdown of trust within a community. It is wrong that any parent should feel compelled to seek recourse in the civil courts, or with the police, for crimes like this. But when religious authorities have failed in their duty to the victims, to their families, and indeed to God, what choice does the laity have?

Mark Oppenheimer writes to say he thought I was "a bit unfair" to him in my comments yesterday about his piece on why people should take their kids to pray, even if they're not sure they believe. I quote his e-mail with his permission. Mark's letter in italics:

To wit: I don't think it's fair to say that I am "fundamentally unserious about religion." I didn't spend six years getting a PhD in religion because I am unserious about it; nor do I go to synagogue every week--and sometimes for daily prayers on weekdays--because I am unserious about it; nor have I written two deeply sympathetic books about religion because I am unserious about it; nor did I spend a year going to synagogue almost every day to say Kaddish, the prayer for my dead, after my grandfather died because I am unserious about religion. I'm not saying there's any way you would know these things about me; I just want to correct a description of me that does not fairly describe who I am.

I appreciate the clarification from Mark, and I withdraw my characterization. Let me offer a clarification of my own, though. When I say the stance I perceived from Mark's piece looks to me like one that is "fundamentally unserious" about religion, I meant from the point of view of a religious practitioner. One can be very serious about the study of religion, or about religion-as-culture -- Mark is clearly "serious" in both ways -- but can one be serious about religion if one remains skeptical about the truth claims of that religion? I mean, if one observes the rituals without believing? I'm not asking in a rhetorical way; I really want to know. Mark's piece put me in mind of the kind of people Kierkegaard wrote about in his "Attack on Christendom": people who went to church because it was what one did, but who by their minimalist belief actually undermined the power of true religion. I apologize to Mark for mischaracterizing his POV, but I do think it's fair to wonder about how seriously a utilitarian orientation toward religion is.

But I think a closer read of my piece would have allowed for a more nuanced response on your part. To begin, I did not call myself "a Jew who's not sure he believes in God." Rather, I said that I was an "atheist...about half the time." That's very different. What that means is that sometimes I am a believer, while other times I feel out of belief--or, put differently, sometimes I feel the presence of a God, while other times I feel no such presence. That fairly describes, I think, every honest religious believer in the world, including the most orthodox and orthoprax. Do you know anyone who never waivers in his faith? How much of the time do they have to be certain to pass your test, if "half the time" isn't enough? Seventy-three percent of the time? I actually don't think this is a very important question, as how "serious" other people are is something that only God could know. But that's exactly why I wouldn't describe other people that way.

(Me again): I'm afraid this is a distinction without a difference to me. Why is it incorrect to describe someone who calls himself an "atheist ... about half the time" as someone who isn't sure he believes in God? Of course Mark is right to say that most of us (certainly Your Working Boy) often go through times when we feel God's presence more fully in our lives than in others, but that's something different. Half the day I do not feel the sun's rays on my face, but I do not doubt the existence of the sun, even when it is hidden. I think Mark could have done his own argument more justice if he'd used a different phrase to describe his ambivalence toward the existence of God.

(Keep reading past the jump if you're interested in our back and forth).

In a truly extraordinary and courageous essay of self-revelation, First Things' David P. Goldman, who outed himself recently as author of the "Spengler" columns, talks about his membership in Lyndon LaRouche's "gnostic cult," how he broke free of it, and how he eventually became a religiously observant Jew. Excerpt:

Around 1985, the ugly awareness that I had spent almost a decade in a gnostic cult coincided with a dark time in my personal life. Deeply depressed, I sat at the piano one night, playing through the score of Bach's St. Matthew Passion, and came to the chorale that reads: "Commend your ways and what ails your heart to the faithful care of Him who directs the heavens, who gives course and aim to the clouds, air and wind. He will also find a path that your foot can tread." For the first time in my life, I prayed, and in that moment, I knew that my prayer was heard. That was a first step of teshuva--of return.

...Still, it took me a long time to find my way back to religious practice. I began studying the Jewish sources and joined a synagogue in 1993. A.J. Heschel's book The Sabbath began my slow accommodation to Jewish observance: Reading his account of the Sabbath, I kicked myself for thirty-five wasted years.

Still, it was not until I began to study Franz Rosenzweig's The Star of Redemption during the early 1990s that I was able to reconcile my experience of prayer with my sense of the sacred in music. By then I had published academic articles on Renaissance music theory, including a 1989 study in the Vatican's music journal about Nicholas of Cusa's contribution. Studying the origins of Western classical music also helped me put religious things in perspective. Magnificent as it is, music remains a human construct, with a hint of divine inspiration in some cases, but not a substitute for God. The great works of Western classical music are not revelation, but they are perhaps the next best thing. Next best, however, no longer seemed good enough.

More:

In reviewing my own missteps in life, I feel that temptation to represent myself as a monster in order to cover up something even more painful: I was a coward. I was afraid of being Jewish. Everything else is rationalization. My intellectual life really began only a quarter-century ago when I reconciled myself to being Jewish. The truth is that I did not think my way into praying. I prayed my way into thinking.

I prayed my way into thinking. Really, read the entire essay, in which the author spares himself nothing.

Via Mark Shea, this fragment of an essay by a Jewish author lamenting the loss of Jews to intermarriage. The author began by citing a wedding, in a Catholic Church, of a young Jewish woman to a Catholic man:

American Jews have been occupied for four decades in a desperate attempt to stay the tide of assimilation and intermarriage (not to even speak of their more hideous confrere: conversion). I remember as a teenager in the early 1960s sitting through sermons where our rabbi pontificated on the various solutions to The Problem. Yet exactly what is the Jewish leadership trying to perpetuate? Jewish genes? Jewish culture? A fondness for kreplach and klezmer and Isaac Bashevis Singer?

If so, no wonder the Catholics are winning. They don't strive to inculcate in their children a love for Catholic culture. They don't try to whip up enthusiasm for the celebration of St. Patrick's Day nor spend millions to make sure that every Catholic child decorates an Easter egg. They are propagating a religion, complete with God and soul and afterlife. We are pushing a culture, complete with Sholem Aleichem and dreidels and lithographs of the Western Wall. But for a culture, no matter how engaging, no one is ready to sacrifice one's life -- nor the love of one's life. Against Christianity we have pitted not Judaism, but Judaica.[Emphasis mine -- RD.]

Words for all Christians to ponder, too, and indeed for pious people of all religions. I could easily see a Catholic writing something similar about losing young Catholics to Evangelicals (see Mark's remarks on this). If you do not give your children the real thing, but instead some cultural substitute, no matter how wonderful the stories and how lovely the smells and bells, you will lose them.