Agudah Watching

The Agudath Israel of America's annual Convention this past Thanksgiving weekend has provided much grist for the mill [here, here and here, for example]. Blogwise, I have held my fire on it, but that does not mean that I have not been following it with great interest. [For the uninitiated, the Agudath Israel is an "umbrella group" advocating the interests of the more insular Jewish factions in America.].

The main reason I did not attend the Convention myself is that the extended Thanksgiving weekend has become a time for my family to travel and visit our relatives and friends. The combination of geography and our family priorities do not facilitate my personal attendance.

But because I was not there personally, I must digest and assimilate second-hand information, and I want to tap diverse sources for that info, including but not limited to blogs, personal accounts of friends, clients and acquaintances who were there, and, of course, the newsrags. In the latter regard, the 2 December 2009 copy of Hamodia, and the 4 December 2009 copy of Yated Ne'eman, which take a circuitous route through many hands before coming into mine, reached me a bit earlier than what has been the norm for the past few months. Sure enough, each covered the Convention.

As discussed in several postings this past summer [15 July 2001, 31 July 2009, 13 August 2009, and, more to the point, 2 August 2009], the Agudath Israel is a troubled organization now in a state of flux. Rabbi Chaim Dovid Zwiebel, having recently been elevated to the position of Agudath Israel's Executive Vice President, now needs to kick butt and make some people uncomfortable. This he purported to do at the Convention, if only by the mere passing mention of the problems of domestic violence and sexual abuse in his plenary speech. This is a milestone for Agudath Israel; formerly, those issues were swept under the rug and their seriousness if not existence within the religious Jewish community denied.

The 2 December 2009 Hamodia's treatment of the Convention is interesting. Firstly, there is an editorial on page D37 entitled "Crisis in our Community: Under the Rug? Denial? Or Confrontation and Solution." This editorial reveals that, upon advice of the ranking rabbinical sages, Hamodia will "begin to address these topics, albeit in a sensitive and appropriate way." This, of course, is a tacit admission that Hamodia has heretofore taken pains to not address domestic violence and sexual abuse. And into the editorial's disclosure that Hamodia's challenge is "to balance the need to educate about what to beware of against the danger of enlightening the youth about things they should never know" one can read that its coverage will seldom if at all be front-page.

Indeed, elsewhere in the 2 December 2009 edition, the Convention was extensively covered, but mostly on the financial improprieties issues. The rabbis invariably are less uncomfortable and embarrassed over monetary scandals than sexual ones.

As for Yated Ne'eman, its coverage of the Convention was not as extensive as that of Hamodia, neither in verbiage nor photographs. Yated's references to the sexual abuse and domestic violence was indirect at best, a situation into which I do not read too much because (A) Yated's comparatively short article had to cover other matters from the Convention; and (B) it was Rabbi Pinchos Lipschutz, the Editor of Yated Ne'eman, who first broke ground by mentioning in a printed editorial the taboo subjects nobody wishes to discuss.

In my little Long Island community, we are one of a small group of families that comprise our congregation [I am uncomfortable using the word "Orthodox" to label Jews, but that is how our congregation is usually labeled.] For most of my life, I have never had the luxury of being able to squabble with my fellow Jews. Unfortunately, in many of the heavily populated religious Jewish communities, the residents frequently avail themselves of such pastimes, to the detriment of all involved. One of the more notorious of such shameful altercations involves one brother and his faction against another brother and his faction.

[We Jews are often accused by others of being clannish. Perhaps we are. When my family relocated and my sister and I enrolled in the local junior high school, we made it necessary to use two hands to count the Jewish students there. We all had to stick together. And, in the early 1970's, when my family was driving through the South towards Dallas, we needed some more rope to lash the luggage to the roof rack of the station wagon, so in a small Alabama town we stopped at a hardware merchant which happened to be the local "Jew Store" (seems that even the smallest of Southern towns often had at least one Jewish merchant). While we neither requested nor received any special discount, the proprietor and my father did spend more than a few minutes shmoozing, they let us all use the restroom facilities, and we received good advice as to places to go and to avoid along the remainder of our trek (this was before the Interstate Highway System was fully functional).].


There are various kulturkampfen within the big Agudath Israel kettle. Zwiebel needs to manage them (he certainly cannot halt them). So now, the question is whether Zwiebel is really trying to be a catalyst of change within Agudath Israel of America, or whether he is trying to put up a front by saying the right things, to delay the dirty work until the poor bastard who becomes the next Executive Veep gets stuck with the problem.

I would like to think that Zwiebel is genuinely trying to change the culture of the Agudath Israel so that it might better advocate for its constituency (of which I would like to think I am one). I cannot help but harbor a considerable amount of skepticism, though. One cannot ignore the fact that Zwiebel is an entrenched company man, and accordingly, there remains some question as to just how clean his broom can really be. But he is a highly intelligent and perceptive person, and he no doubt knows well that if he doesn't do some cleaning up, then the Agudath Israel of America may well cease to exist. This I really, really do not want to see happen.

And so, one may view the most recent Agudath Israel Convention as a turning point. Which direction -- upward or downward -- remains to be seen.

With that background, I now pose the following imponderable:

The Agudah [Hebrew grammatical and dialectical issues result in various spellings of the word] has been sullied by certain problems of many of its various constituents, namely, financial improprieties and tax scandals, sexual abuse scandals, and domestic violence. It is those fires that the Agudahniks have, of late, been scrambling to douse. The efforts so expended sap its strength to lobby the solons for favorable legislation, or, more commonly, against unfavorable legislation.

In this latter regard, the same-sex "marriage" measure that recently lost in Albany, and the one now going onto the table in Trenton, have been quite a consternation to the Agudath Israel. [For the record, I personally oppose quite vehemently giving legislative imprimatur to such abominations, but believe that two consenting adults should not have to abide the government insinuating itself into the bedroom.]. The Agudath Israel has been speaking to the various Assemblycritters in terms of public morality.

How can the Agudath Israel credibly make the public morality argument when they themselves have so long facilitated, through denial and sweeping beneath the rug, the immorality of sexual abuse and domestic violence in the religious Jewish community?

Publisher's Pitfalls, Part 2

As alluded to in the 26 July 2009 posting, my personal access to the publication Yated Ne'eman is not firsthand, and, because the publication does not have a website as such, there is almost always a time delay between the time the paper hits the streets and the time I get to read it. I now have the 31 July 2009 edition physically in my hand.

The aforementioned 26 July posting speculated as to how Yated Ne'eman would handle the story of the big bust in New Jersey, which stung certain rabbis, and expressed a confidence that Yated would handle the story quite well in light of the various attending issues, probable repercussions, and operative dynamics.

How did Yated Ne'eman handle the story in the 31 July edition? With pieces that essentially said that not enough information is known, and therefore, we should not jump to conclusions. This might seem, at first blush, to be a cop-out, but one of the articles details some recent events, including but not limited to President Barack Hussein Obama's recent loose cannon uninformed comments regarding a certain arrest in Massachusetts, events where people jumped to conclusions without having sufficient information.

All in all, I would say that my confidence in Yated Ne'eman's handling of the Big Newark Bust story was not misplaced.

But, out on the other Coast in Los Angeles, there was an actual guilty plea by the Spinka Rebbe in another tax evasion and money laundering scandal. The "other side of the story" is no longer missing to any significant extent. What is Yated Ne'eman's take on that one?

I haven't yet read the 7 August edition of Yated Ne'eman, but they now have their work cut out for them on this matter. And, given Yated's coverage of the Newark case, there is every reason to expect Yated to pull a passing grade on this latest development in the Spinka case.

One thing that works in Yated's favor is that Rabbi Weisz, the Spinka Rebbe, has already made public acknowledgment that he has erred, and seems to be accepting responsibility for his wrongdoing. In addition to making the story easier to report, this also makes it easier for the Judge to accord the Rebbe a modicum of mercy in the sentence, which is to be imposed this coming November.

A Publisher's Pitfalls

As this post is being written, a big scandal is unfolding regarding some New Jersey politicians, and also some rabbis. I shall not comment extensively on it at this time, other than to note that (A) the defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty; (B) if indeed the defendants participated in the bad acts as charged, then I vehemently disapprove of such acts; (C) if indeed the defendants are found guilty or plead guilty, then there will and should be significant consequences visited upon them; and (D) even if the defendants are eventually exonerated (as I do hope will happen), the arrests and indictments are a signal to the religious Jewish community that it must go beyond damage control, and change what have become popular notions as to what is and is not acceptable behavior.

In prior posts, including the one from 5 April 2009, this blog has had occasion to mention a publication known as Yated Ne'eman. [Actually, there are two such publications, one in Israel and one based in Monsey, New York. They formerly were connected; now they are divorced but still sleeping together.]. Yated Ne'eman presents some cogent viewpoints not found in other media. In any given week, several people read Yated Ne'eman before I get hold of a copy, and I now have read the 17 July 2009 edition.

As mentioned in the prior post, Yated Ne'eman has what they would like to think is a strict policy against publishing photographs of women. Again, this is a decision I respect, given the social values of the niche of Yated's primary market, the insular religious Jewish community. Nevertheless, I now note an ironic, and, I find, comical malfunction of this strict policy. The front page of the 17 July 2009 edition carries a photo captioned "The Senate Judicary [sic] Committee is holding hearings this week for the confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor to serve as a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. See Page 90." The photo was procured from Getty Images.

Any other publication would feature a photograph of the nominee, Sonia "SoSo" Sotomayor. But because Judge Sotomayor is a woman, Yated did not place her photograph on its front page. Instead, the photo features the Judiciary Committee itself, and a whole group of photographers with their lenses trained ahead to a spot behind the photographer, where Judge Sotomayor is obviously seated. So instead of a photograph of Sonia, there is a photograph of photographers photographing Sonia, so that Sonia is totally out of the photograph.

This is amusing enough. But if one looks at the very left side of the photo on the front page of Yated Ne'eman, it seems that one of the photographers in the press pool is a w-o-m-a-n, whose lens is directed towards the Committee. We see the side view of her head, but her face is mostly obscured by her straight long black hair. But the woman's entire arm, up to the shoulder, is exposed by clothing which, in the social groups that typically read Yated Ne'eman, is deemed immodest, provocative, and even whore-like. Given Yated's penchant for not showing a woman's face, and given the mindset of Yated's core readership, the depiction of a woman's arm above the elbow -- on the Front Page of Yated Ne'eman, just below the top banner -- is nothing short of a hilarious irony!

The 24 July edition of Yated has obviously been published. I have not yet seen it, but eagerly await its arrival in my hands to see if there is any mention of reader criticism of the Sotomayor photo without Sotomayor.

The Sonia photograph without Sonia will now be among the least of Yated Ne'eman's consternations. Yated now has to report the Jersey scandal to a readership that has a well-ingrained reflex for defending their own (as do I), and a distaste for negative comments about their own, as well as an aversion to the public airing of internal controversies. The mere mention of the scandal will touch many sore spots of Yated's readership, and non-mention of the scandal would severely impair Yated's credibility.

But, given Yated Ne'eman's past stances in other matters of controversy in the insular religious Jewish community, I do expect Yated to meet the challenge quite well. We shall see!

Portraying the Wrong Picture

The news story now making the rounds (as in here and here and here) is about how certain newspapers in Israel photoshopped the women out of the news photo of the new Israeli Cabinet.

The fact is that in some religious circles, portraying a woman in a photograph is considered immodest. The newspapers at issue here are published by and for such segments of the population, therefore, they do not publish photographs which portray women. In fact, some have been known to insist that all photographs of people, even of males, are prohibited.

This posting shall not now get into the issues of whether pixelating or airbrushing out the women out from the group photo is or is not more journalistically ethical than rearranging the positions of the entire group so as to exclude the women, or whether it would or would not be better to not publish the photo at all.

What this post WILL address is the implication, in news stories such as the one at issue, that those Jewish people who eschew photographs of women are somehow "more religious" than those who do not.

Imprimis, I detest the use of the term "ultraorthodox" to describe any Jewish person. The use of the "U" word serves only to fragment the Jewish people, and to subject those of us who adhere to the Torah commandments to ridicule.

There are many groups of religious Jews who, for many generations, chose to stay isolated to one extent or another from society at large. Even when contact and communication could not be avoided, such groups have retained costume and custom which differs from the general norm. They are, in a word, insular. They have always been around, but in today's world of rapid transportation and communication, these groups now are noticed by more and more people who, even twenty years ago, would have been oblivious to their existence. Many of their practices are based more upon group traditions than upon any mandate from the Torah.

I have no particular quarrel with such groups; indeed, I regularly interact with many to one extent or another. And I read several publications whose intended readership is such groups [N.B. The Israeli "Yated Ne'eman" mentioned in the story officially split from the American publication of the same title a number of years ago; let us say that they now are divorced but they still sleep together.]. Such newspapers -- and their readerships -- have the right to decide which photographs will or will not be published in their pages.

As for my religious observance, I daven (pray) three times each day, keep the Sabbath and the dietary laws, and, in a few days, will observe the Passover. For the record, I personally have no religious issues with photographs of women who are decently clad. And, not that it really, really matters, but I wear a kippah and my wife covers her hair with a wig or a snood. Those who happen to wear the black hats but who are sex offenders, tax cheats, womanizers, or even ordinary murderers may well be more insular than I am, but they are not more religious!

Do not confuse insularity with religiousity!

Black Hats on Empty Heads

Seems that the Jewish community in Lakewood, NJ, was duped by a man named Ted Floyd, who stole the identity of deceased veteran Nathaniel James Levi. Floyd/Levi has pleaded guilty of identity theft. The whole thing is now a big scandal in Lakewood.

With that in mind, the following Letter to the Editor of Yated Ne'eman has come to my attention [Yated Ne'eman, 13 Nissan 5768 / 18 April 2008, page 8]. The letter writer, who, like so many, does not give his real name, signs it as "A Yeshivaman in Lakewood." For the uninitiated, Yated Ne'eman is a publication directed towards the more insular elements of the religious Jewish community, many of whom object to the garbage in the common English language tabloids (a position certainly not without merit).

Yated Ne'eman recently began posting photos of the authors of its columns -- the male authors, at least; there are many who fear that pictures of females will cause men to have impure thoughts, so there are no pictures of women in Yated Ne'eman (though a few years ago, I did see an advertisement that featured a photo of the Statute of Liberty).

The essence of "Yeshivaman's" letter is that Yated Ne'eman's use of the author's photographs has a salutary effect because "The photos of the writers who pen the opinion and haskafa [rough Hebrew translation: Approach to life, world view, etc.] columns underscore the background of the writers. When we see the noble Bnei Torah who the Yated entrusts with the holy mission of conveying the ideals and outlook the Torah requires of us, we are assured that the message is as authentic as the messengers themselves."


English translation: Like so many in the Lakewood community, this "Yeshivaman" will blindly accept the authenticity of anyone who sports a beard and a black hat.

Which is exactly why Ted Floyd was able to pull one over on them!