To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.
--- George Orwell
Friday, December 19, 2014
Sabrina Rubin Erdely, Rolling Stone’s UVA Rape Writer, Has A 'LOL’ LinkedIn Account
Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s LinkedIn page offers some
inadvertent humor in light of the train wreck her article about the “rape
culture” at UVA has produced for Rolling Stone.
The RS contributor sees herself as a “feature writer and tireless
reporter” whose work has appeared in a long list of impressive national
glossies, as well as "possibly some other publications that don’t come to
mind right now.” She adds that she specializes “in narrative nonfiction, with a
particular focus on crime, health & society -- and anything, it seems, that
requires about a thousand interviews.” Her work, she also notes, “has won an
armload of prestigious awards.” In conclusion, she declares “I love what I
do."
As the UVA rape story enters its second month of controversy, the
LinkedIn lulz stand in stark contrast to the Rolling Stone’s editorial
agony. The magazine has been to forced to launch an “internal review” into
where it’s reporting, editing and fact checking procedures fell down, which
follows two different “Note to Our Readers,” both of which left critics and
readers growling. The first focused on “Jackie,” the victim, who was the
primary focus of much of the RS account, explaining that “Our trust in her was
misplaced." Amending the note after an uproar for “blaming the victim,”
the magazine took responsibility for reporting errors, saying "These
mistakes are on Rolling Stone, not on Jackie."
So far, even without the results of the internal review, there’s
mounting evidence that Rubin Erdely failed to do the due diligence required to
verify that the main character in her Rolling Stone article on campus rape at
the university of Virginia was in fact assaulted by seven men at a frat party,
or to verify that there even was a frat party to begin with. She also seems to
have misrepresented what the friends who came to her aid after the rape said
and did when she called them out in the middle of the night for help. In the
article, Rubin Erdley portrays the three friends as being more worried about
the social repercussions of helping the victim than in getting her to the
hospital and alerting authorities.
The
Washington Post, the AP and others have all reported that Rubin Erdley
seems to have fallen fatally short of her “1000 interviews” claim, and made an
agreement with the alleged victim not to contact the “perpetrators” for their
side of the story. And other news organizations have also reported that Rubin
Erdley did not interview the three friends who she said came to the alleged
victim just after the supposed attack, despite reconstructing their encounter
and the conversation at its center for the article she wrote.
Such revelations give the pronounced impression that Rubin Erdley may
have lied about her efforts to contact them and instead lazily relied on the
alleged victim for a reconstruction of the post-attack encounter, which did not
remotely happen as Rubin Erdely reported. As one of these students told
the AP: "I couldn't help but notice that everything that the article said
about me was incorrect.” One of the other students told CNN that "That
whole entire conversation about debating the social price of reporting a rape,
and any sort of detriment to a reputation that might come around from reporting
a rape, absolutely never happened." This student added that the
description of the victim standing barefoot in a bloody dress was at odds with
what he saw firsthand: "I didn't notice any sort of physical injuries. I
didn't notice a lack of shoes. I really didn't notice anything that was
consistent with the physical description that was in the article."
The tone of the LinkedIn page, which manages to be glib and grandiose at
the same time, is noteworthy ---the many publications for whom she
has written and "possibly some other publications that don't come to mind
right now." In fact, it’s kinda bi-polar. Which is an adjective that
certainly captures the ups and downs Rubin Erdley has experienced since her
piece came online November 19 for the December 4th issue of RS. In the week
immediately after her piece was published, Rubin Erdely was the toast of
the national media, profiled by the Washington Post and booked as a
guest on public radio, PBS and MSNBC. The Atlantic’s Jeffery
Goldberg, like Rubin Erdely a University of Pennsylvania alum, tweeted that
“Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s story on UVA’s culture of rape is astonishing. A superb
reporting job.”
But once critics like Worth editor Richard Bradley, who had once
been rooked by infamous New Republic fabricator Stephen Glass when
Bradley was editor of George magazine, began to poke holes in her
reporting, Rubin Erdely became a media piƱata. The Washington Post
was relentless, sending reporters into the field to speak to the subjects whom
Rubin Erdley, it turns out, never did. The Post’s media reporter and its media
critic added to the coverage which produced a string of devastating reports and
commentary in the first half of December. PBS wound up appending a note to
their Nov 21 interview with Rubin Erdely. Jeffery Goldberg, whose own badly
sourced reporting on Iraq’s WMD in 2002 still haunts his credibility as the “official
therapist” of the US-Israel special relationship, promptly tweeted that his
“week’s biggest regret” was “praising that Rolling Stone piece.” Choosing to
throw Rolling Stone under the bus and not his fellow alum even as
he seems to have forgotten how fact-checkers at the New Yorker allowed his
erroneous WMD reporting through the editorial gate, Goldberg added: “It never
struck me that a magazine with fact-checkers on staff wouldn’t use them.“ Rubin
Erdely retreated into a bunker, refusing to answer questions from journalists
and even put her busy (and also boastful) Twitter feed to sleep.
Rubin Erdley’s LinkedIn account also cites the many journalistic awards
the now disgraced writer has won. Among them is a 1993 “Rolling Stone College
Journalism Award” for a profile of the “Christian rocker” Michelle Shocked.
What Rubin Erdley did not share however is she “borrowed” from other
news organizations for the facts she “reported” in that story, which is also
called “plagiarism” --- and that most of those “facts” in that award-winning
story turned out to be bogus.
In a video
clip of an October 2012 presentation she gave at her Ivy League alma mater,
Rubin Erdley explained that she had missed a press conference Shocked had given
and had “fused” her story together from other media sources. "I went to
the library and pulled up tons of clips on her, borrowed whatever facts I could
find. It turns out that those facts, which were in mainstream publications and
magazines, were not actually factual. Which completely shocked me. I just
assumed those were real and legit but they were not at all."
Erdley told her interviewer, RS contributing editor Anthony De Curtis,
that Michelle Shocked’s husband at the time, the well-known music
journalist Bart Bull called her up at home and stepped her through her errors.
He did so less to scold her than to help her in a avuncular kind of way, she
explained. “He had read the story and just about everything in the story was
wrong," Rubin Erdley told De Curtis somewhat matter-of-factly.
Despite the factual inaccuracies of the profile, and its dubious
methodology, which for the record entailed no interviews at all, Erdely took
the RS award as a "sign from God" that she should be a journalist
instead of a psychiatrist. She switched from pre med to major in English,
graduating in 1994. She was immediately hired at Philadelphia
magazine by Eliot Kaplan, another Penn alum, who is now head of
“talent acquisition” at Hearst.
Rolling Stone isn’t commenting right now
about the UVA rape fiasco, or about Sabrina Rubin Erdely. I’m sure though that
its editors now wish the magazine had noticed problems in her work long
ago---and never gave her the award that she took as divine
encouragement.
Of course, a psychiatrist with a loose sense of the truth and a loose
sense of professional ethics can do a lot of damage too. But it’s usually one
patient at a time, and not anywhere near the broad damage that Rubin Erdley has
wrecked on the reputations of a university, on a fraternity system, on nearly a
dozen individuals who were defamed, slandered and libeled by this bit of
“execrable” journalism, as the Washington Post has called it, and on the
journalistic credibility of Rolling Stone, especially its rigorous
fact-checking process.
And that’s not even getting into the harm done to individuals and
institutions at the center of Rubin Erdley’s other pieces for RS, as
well as the ones she has written for well-known magazines such as The New
Yorker, Philadelphia, Self and Cosmopolitan. Many of
these pieces, which I’ve read over the last week or so, give off the same
problematic odor as her dubious UVA rape story. They are overreliant on
anonymous sources who make outlandish claims and offer ringing quotes that are
“too good to be true.” They’re also focused on traumatized victims who may
become objects of solicitude or hypersensitivity for fact-checkers, if the
fact-checkers were even allowed direct access to them, which in the case of
UVA’s Jackie I’ll bet did not happen. I reached out to Philadelpha to
see if they were planning an audit of the pieces Rubin Erdely did for them and
was told they weren’t sure if they were planning on one but would get back to
me. I spoke with Nicole Scott, the managing editor who said she was a Penn grad
too, from the class of 2013. Penn grads seem to move up the ladder pretty
quick.
The Rubin Erdely pieces I found troubling epitomize the very “radical chic” sensibility
that Tom Wolfe, a Rolling Stone writer for some time, once satirized. These
pieces take a sensational approach to the presumed moral and institutional
failings of the Catholic Church, Christian evangelicals and the American
military, with ideological feminism functioning as a pole star and filter,
edged with ethnic snark and cultural prejudice.
The UVA story, for instance, is filled with what the cultural studies
majors might refer to as Anti Wasp “hate signifiers,” ---“dog whistles,”
as ethnic guardians like Jeffrey Goldberg call them. Rubin Erdley describes
”the toned, tanned, overwhelmingly blonde” members of the UVA student body, as
well as the university’s “aura of preppy success,” “old money” and “privilege.”
UVA is a place “where social status is paramount,” she writes, with the
university’s “cherished Party culture” fusing “the decorum of the Southern
aristocracy with binge drinking.”
Rubin Erdely has acknowledged that she had considered using other
schools as her focus for an examination of campus “rape culture”---Harvard,
Yale and her alma, Penn among them---“rape shopping,” it’s been called. But she
chose UVa instead, a place where Scott McConnell
of the American Conservative explains, “the perpetrators could unambiguously
presented as white Christian males—a group which would likely be
underrepresented at any other prestige college.” Indeed, you can say what you
will about Penn, where the ethnic and religious composition of the student body
is much, much different than UVA’s, but it’s hard to see anyone ever describing
that school as “overwhelmingly blonde” or being Aryan Highball Heaven.
Likewise the aroma exuded from “The Catholic
Church’s Secret Sex Crime Files,” a 2011 expose of the “secret”
archives that the Philadelphia Archdiocese maintained on its clerical abusers
and their victims. The piece, accompanied by an illustration of bloody Jesus on
the cross, focused on a former Philadelphia altar boy who claimed that two
priests and a Catholic schoolteacher “raped and sodomized” him when he was ten
years old in 1998, “sometimes making him perform stripteases or getting him
drunk on sacramental wine after Mass.” Rubin Erdley based this piece on a
grand jury report that was found to have at least 20 factual inaccuracies, and
failed to acknowledge that every time the victim told his story he changed it,
in the end dropping the most lurid accusations at trial. As former
Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Ralph Cipriano reported in Newsweek,
Rubin Erdley also failed to tell readers of the accuser’s extensive criminal
record and history of drug abuse that impugned his credibility, and that every
witness who police interviewed, including the boy’s mother, brother and former
teacher, contradicted the boy’s account.
On TV, Bill Donahue of the Catholic League often comes across a bit
under-medicated. But his letter of complaint to Rolling Stone that Erdely’s
clerical sex abuse piece inspired was spot on, especially about the article’s
conspiratorial tone. Wrote Donahue
As with any form of prejudice, there are staples that are commonly
employed by bigoted writers. Anti- Catholics, for instance, like to play on the
stereotype that the Church operates in secret, as a top-down organization, run
by Rome. True to form, not including the title of Erdely’s piece, the term
“secret” appears 16 times in her article… This is the kind of melodramatic
language that is important to Erdely’s agenda; it invites the reader to think
the worst about the Church.
And let’s not forget Rubin Erdely’s 1998 Philadelphia piece about
a high end suburban prostitute, who has come to be known as the “Mainline Madam.” This
yuppie hooker/mother, Rubin Erdley claimed, was bothered by the fact that some
people thought prostitution was immoral. The hooker, Erica, Rubin Erdley
explained, was “a devout Catholic who goes to church twice weekly and considers
herself an exemplary human being with a strong sense of values.” Like many
other rubin Erdley pieces, this one too has a central character who was given a
pseudonym (“Erica”) and whose claims, particularly about the frequency of her
mass-going, were difficult if not impossible to fact check.
Some journalists are now speaking of Rubin Erdley in the same breath as
Stephen Glass, the New Republic’s serial fabulist and fabricator who,
incidentally, also wrote for Rolling Stone before scandal brought him down in
1998. Some think RS, which was lackluster in reviewing the work Glass had done
for them, and even went so far as to hire him again for a 2003 piece on
Canadian marijuana laws, might be experiencing karmic payback.
In fact, Rubin Erdley
was a classmate of Glass’s, who was the editor of the Penn student newspaper
when Rubin wrote for it. In a Penn alumni magazine piece about Shattered
Glass, the film made from that 1998 episode, Rubin Erdley said she had once
regarded her fellow student journalist as an endearing if “pathetic
weenie," but began to realize he was a “sociopathic creep.”
I wonder whether Rubin Erdley doth protest too much about Glass. In
fact, if she would ever respond to my efforts to contact her, I would have to
ask whether Glass may have coached her in putting together the piece that won
that 1993 RS student prize--the one she admits to plagiarizing and getting
wrong--- just as her victim Jackie might have coached her in inventing so many
of the fraudulent details in Rubin Erdley's most recent, and probably her last,
Rolling Stone article. As they say, it’s hard to make all this up. But
it gets a little easier when you have help.
Interestingly, it seems that Jackie might have employed some of
Glass’s manipulative methods to establish the persona of “Haven Monahan,” the
UVA upperclassman she told her three first-year friends was interested in her
and who took her on the ill-fated date that ended in the frat house gang rape.
According to the Washington Times, the numbers Jackie gave her friends
for “Haven Monahan” were from online texting services, like Pinger, which make
it easy to hide or invent an ID and scam the unsuspecting. It’s also possible
that Jackie used Glass-like digital tricks to fabricate an email account for
“Randall” the friend in the story who came to her aid that night in 2012, who
Rubin Erdely said in her article refused to talk to her “out of loyalty to his own
frat.” Jackie may have even employed dummy emails for the two other rape
victims who were said to have also been attacked at the same frat as Jackie who
Rubin Erdley claimed “chose not to speak to RS.”
With RS staying mum about it’s “internal review,” we’ll have to wait to
find out whether Jackie created any fake websites along the lines of the one
that Stephen Glass used concocted for “Jukt
Micronics,” which led to his downfall. We’ll also have to wait to
see what what lessons RS may draw about the kind of writers it hires and the
rigor of the editing and fact checking they get. For now though, it’s safe to
say that one of the important lessons of writing a LinkedIn profile is to be
careful what you brag about. Especially the number of interviews you routinely
perform in the course of your award-winning work.
Monday, December 1, 2014
Friday The Rabbi Spewed Hate: Cleric At Upscale New Jersey Synagogue Says 'Vanquish All Arab Enemies Of Israel --- And Bury Their Ashes With Dead Pigs’ (Updated)
Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem |
As someone who has been immersed in the reactionary religious nationalisms of the former British Raj---Sri Lanka and Burma for the most part---I’m no stranger to militant clerics and the bloodcurdling things that can come out of their purportedly holy mouths.
In Sri Lanka during the long civil war there, is was
not uncommon to hear Sinhalese monks cite verses from the ancient Buddhist narrative
called the Mahavansa
in which monks salve the conscience of a triumphant Buddhist king by noting
that the Tamils that the king’s army had just vanquished were not in fact “believers”
and therefore not full human beings. In Burma
right now, Buddhist monks belonging to the militantly nationalistic movement “969”
preach the most virulent hate against the Muslim minority, demanding it be
stripped of citizenship and/or driven out of the country in the name of the “land,
the race and the faith.” This is so this small minority of about 5% can’t join
forces with other Muslims in the region to “engulf” Burmese Buddhism, as
happened centuries before in other formerly Buddhist lands like Afghanistan and
Indonesia.
Still, there is something shocking about hearing
this kind of bloodymindedness from American rabbis. In fact, some of the most
deranged things I’ve heard in the two years I’ve been immersed in the American
debate about Israel have come from some of these “men of the cloth.” Some of
them have a streak of atavistic, Old Testament wrath so strong you’d think they
were Biblical re-enactors psyching up their troops for battle against the
Amalekites or the Canaanites. We’re talking ugly here, and we’re talking
vengeful. And we’re talking hate.
The latest addition to this lengthening list of
toxic rabbis is Rabbi Steven Pruzansky , the chief rabbi of Congregation Bnai Yeshurun, a “modern
Orthodox” synagogue in upscale Teaneck NJ. Bnai Yeshurun is considered a
leading light in the “modern Orthodox” movement, which is gaining numbers and
influence in America. The modern Orthodox are the sect that Times columnist
David Brooks, observing affluent and educated groups of modern Orthodox
shopping at a luxury kosher supermarket in Brooklyn, touted last year as
representing the Jewish future, what he called “The Orthodox
Surge.”
Pruzansky is an Ivy League graduate, Columbia 1978,
and practiced law for 13 years as a litigator before assuming his “current
pulpit” as his bio
says. He was trained in “yeshivot” in Israel and the US, is on the Executive
Committee of the Rabbinical Council of America and has served as the American
co-spokesman for the International Rabbinic Coalition for Israel. His
institutional affiliations also include the board of the Temple Reclamation
Project, a messianic Zionist group with a long record of Jewish moral
chauvinism and disdain for Islamic religious sensitivities which is working
to establish the Third Temple in Jerusalem. Shumley Boteach, "America’s
Rabbi" who is also Zionist moneyman Sheldon Adelson’s chief clerical
contact in the US, calls Pruzansky
“a lion” who possesses the kind of “moral courage” needed to make rabbis “relevant.”
Though it’s hard to tell from Pruzansky’s resume whether he himself is a dual
US-Israeli citizen, the bio does say he has four married adult children, three
of whom live in Israel.
On Friday last week Pruzansky used his personal
blog to publish an essay he titled “Dealing With Savages.” According to Pruzansky, “there is a war for the
land of Israel that is being waged, and the Arabs who dwell in the land of
Israel are the enemy in that war and must be vanquished.”That enemy “rides our
buses, shops in our malls, drives on our roads and lives just two miles from
us,” he says, and is capable of inhuman acts of violence. Referencing
the recent massacre at an Orthodox synagogue in Jerusalem in which three
rabbis, two of them dual US-Israeli citizens, were killed, Pruzansky asked
rhetorically: “How does a human being (or two) walk
into a synagogue and begin hacking at worshippers who are immersed in prayer,
leaving behind a trail of blood, victims, grief and horror? He argues that in
fact
The question is misplaced because no “human being”
could do such a thing. It would have to be a beast in human form, a relic from
primitive times before true humans became civilized. The Arab-Muslim animals
that span the globe chopping, hacking and merrily decapitating – from Iraq to
Jerusalem to New York to Oklahoma, and places in between and beyond – are a
discredit even to the term “animal.” Most animals are not that brutal.
The real issue “confronting Israel for decades and
the civilized world today," Pruzansky explains, "is what to do about
the proliferation of savages who lust for blood and derive inspiration from
their religious texts?” At a certain point he argues, “the unrestrained
behavior of unruly animals becomes the fault of the zookeeper, not the animals.
“Little can or should be expected from Obama or from the Europeans," he
says, “mired as they are in cultural deterioration, moral relativism,
population decline and Muslim-inspired Jew hatred." He adds that “we
should be clear, as the wave of recognition sweeps Europe in the coming year:
any country that recognizes a 'Palestine' is endorsing the mass slaughter of
Jews."
While Pruzansky furtively maintains that “many
things can be done that should not be in print,” he does quite openly advise
that:
*Israel should make clear that a Palestinian state
will never be created between the river and the sea. There will be no
non-Jewish national entity tolerated. The Muqata in Ramallah should be
destroyed and “President” Abbas should be incarcerated as a war criminal.
*Terrorists will be killed, not captured (no great
loss, as their fondest wish is for martyrdom). Their bodies will not be
returned to their families but will be cremated, and perhaps the ashes buried
with deceased pigs.
*The homes of the extended family (up to and
including first cousins) of the terrorist will be destroyed, and they will
all be deported to the Muslim country of their choice. A second terrorist in a
village results in the destruction of that village and the deportation of its
residents to a friendlier country. (If the homes in that village would be
useful to Jews, then they should be retained and given to Jews after the evil
residents are deported. Or, as they used to say in Israel, disengaged.)
*Anyone who riots or throws a stone at a Jew should
be shot – with real bullets. Rubber bullets and tear gas should be sold to the
Amish. Those who wish to be martyred and who celebrate death should be
accommodated as often as possible. The media should be barred from scenes of
violence, cell service canceled and cameras confiscated, like in most war
zones.
*Arab access to the Temple Mount will be denied for
at least six months, and Jewish prayer will be allowed thenceforth at
permissible locations, such as they might be. It is unconscionable crime to
deny Jews the right to move their lips on the Temple Mount! … Perhaps the day
will come in the near future when the mosque and the dome can be uplifted
intact and reset in Saudi Arabia, Syria or wherever it is wanted. (The Arab
countries can fight over it if they want.) That itself will preclude any Arab
claim to Jerusalem.
* Implement measures that encourage Arab emigration
– the payment of stipends, compensation for property, etc. Thy must be made to
feel that that they have no future in the land of Israel – no national future
and no individual future. Start with the Arabs of Judea and Samaria who are
stateless; they deserve to find a country in which they can be full citizens
and make their contribution to society.
Pruzansky closed his post by noting that “Rational
thinkers will argue that the “world” will never tolerate such Draconian
sanctions, that countries will sever diplomatic relations with Israel, cut off
trade ties and completely isolate the Jewish state. And, in the short term,
much of that is true. But is there an alternative short of national suicide and
self-immolation?” In keeping with the moral grandiosity that goes along with
the whole “Light Onto The Nations” idea, Pruzanky says the backlash won’t be
that bad because “Israel has much to offer the world, without which many people
in the world would suffer. Any “alienation” that such a hardline action plan
might engender “will be short-lived.”
*****
Rabbi Pruzansky is not exactly a political
wallflower. Back in 1995 he drew scorn in some quarters for calling Israeli
Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin a “Judenrat”
for his efforts to make peace with Palestinians, using a reference to the Jews
who did the Nazis’ bidding during the Holocaust. Rabin was assassinated shortly
thereafter In Israel many believe such rhetoric set the stage for Rabin’s
assassination, which followed shortly after the rabbi’s disparagement. Just
this year, Pruzansky picked a fight with the New York Jewish
Week, likening it to the Nazi publication Der Sturmer.
But the Rabbi’s racist, eliminationist rhetoric,
including the open espousal of collective punishment; desecration of corpses,
the destruction or dismantling of Muslim holy places (including the Dome of the
Rock), as well as forced deportations, population transfers and
other violations of international human rights seemed to cross a line.
Within two days, Pruzansky’s post had triggered
such a furor, including threats against him, his family and his shul
that he took the post down. He told the Times of Israel
however that he didn’t think he was saying anything all that “outlandish.”
The TOI also noted that the rabbi’s “extreme views”
did not “faze” the synagogue’s congregants. It quoted one of Bnai Yeshurun’s
board member, Stan Steinreich, a former attorney who owns a communications firm
that, among other things, does PR for Shmuley Boteach’s Value Network.
Steinrich said the congregation was “lucky to have a spiritual leader of Rabbi
Pruzansky’s intellect and depth.” Steinrich said that Pruzansky enjoyed broad
support in the synagogue, and that anyone who found him objectionable as a
spiritual leader had ample alternatives in a township that was filled with
Orthodox shuls. For his part, Shmuley Boteach chose not to return a
request for comment.
Meanwhile, Abe Foxman of the Anti Defamation
Leaugue denounced Pruzansky’s “screed” as “outright racism and bigotry,” adding
that “coming from a rabbinic authority, it’s just hideous.” The Orthodox Union,
an important institutional and moral voice in that community issued condemned
Pruzansky’s “incendiary rhetoric,” said it was “anathema to Jewish tradition”
and “had no place in civil society”--- but did so without specifically
mentioning the rabbi’s name.
This would not do for the Failed Messiah blog, a
popular website in the Orthodox community which often challenges the Orthodox
right wing. “At what point does the RCA remove
Pruzansky from its executive committee? When does it expel him entirely? How
many more lines must he cross? And why is Congregation Bnai Yeshurun still a
member of the OU even though its rabbi openly espouses racism and collective
punishment (among many other very objectionable things) and it has done nothing
to reprimand him?" Failed Messiah demanded to know.
Pruzansky also issued a “clarifiction” on his blog,
saying that when he was referring to “savages” he was referring to terrorsts
and terrorists only. "I certainly did not, nor did I intend to, call all
Arabs or Muslims 'savages,' nor do I, obviously, believe that to be so,"
he explained. But his clarification was less an apology than an exercise in
gaslighting, saying he had not said what it fact he actually had. A radio
interview he did with the Voice Of Israel showed his lack of repentance. He
called the media “lairs” and that “the Geneva Convention doesn’t apply anymore.”
Failed Messiah said that it was clear the rabbi still “believes he has done
nothing wrong.”
After a battering week, Bnai Yeshurun’s board
issued a
statement taking pains to distance itself from Pruzansky
declaring that it was “in no way affiliated with the rabbi’s blog postings and
has never had editorial control over them whatsoever.” The board announced that
it would establish a panel to ensure “editorial oversight.” Pruzansky
welcomed the measure, but again minimized his transgression. He said that the
oversight panel would not censor his ideas but would merely ensure that his
ideas would not be conveyed “in such colorful ways.”
*****
Every faith has its whack jobs and fire breathers.
Lord knows there are plenty of imams and mullahs in the Islamic world whose
anti Jewish utterances far outstrip Pruzansky’s ugly anti-Arab views. Yet
Islamic spiritual leaders here in the States generally do not indulge in
rhetoric like this rabbi’s, at least for public consumption. This seems
to underscore a troubling double standard in the American discourse about
Israel, which is encouraged by a sense of ethnic entitlement, by a sense of
ethnic exceptionalism and by a sense of historical victimization.
The accompanying irony is that a that a
community---or at least a significant and influential part of that
community---which never ceases to invoke the specter of the Holocaust and as
well as Holocaust guilt, would advocate collective punishment and ethnic
cleansing along lines that might not be as extreme as what was done to them but
is certainly in and of itself egregious. In some way it underscores what
anti-anti-Semitism has wrought, encouraging some Jewish hardliners to be so
focused on identifying and rooting out “monsters” ever ready to attack them
that they lose the capacity to recognize and restrain the monsters within.
Indeed, in making their case for America’s inherent anti Semitism, American
Jews often invoke the memory of Father Charles
Coughlin, the anti Semitic “radio priest” from the 1930’s. Coughlin
was in fact quite harsh, but Pruzansky is more explicitly violent---murderous,
really..
The Pruzansky affair is important to note too because
the Modern Orthodox congregation he leads, full of educated upscale
professionals, represents that part of the American Jewish community which is
gaining in numbers and political strength and which bring significant influence
and money to bear on coming Congressional battles over the Iranian nuclear
negotiations and in the money-fest that the 2016 presidential campaign will
surely be. This community is also the focus of considerable patronage from
pro-Israel billionaire Sheldon Adelson who is also devoting his considerable
resources to ensuring that the Republican party has a candidate who will mirror
or adopt his extremist Zionist views on Israel, including the stated desire for
the US to “nuke Iran” as a preemptive warning. Among the modern Orthodox,
Greater Israel is an object of religious veneration; sovereignty over the land,
which itself “holy” is seen in a sacramental light.
Pruzansky’s noxious words also echo the
increasingly strident, neo-fascist rhetoric employed by the Israeli right wing,
from political figures like Likud party leader Moishe Feiglin, Knesset member Ayelet Shaked,
Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and hardliner Naftali Bennett, who might
become Israel’s next Prime Minister and has extensive connections to the
American Jewish right and its GOP operatives. In fact, the rabbi’s “to do” list
reads as a spiteful embellishment of the steps that the government should
implement to foster “real deterrence” against Palestinian terrorism as outlined
in a Knesset bill
introduced by Likud party leader Yari who says he did at the behest of Bibi
Netanyahu.
Maybe the most unfortunate aspect of the Pruzansky
affair though is the reminder of the way that religious nationalism can profane
the very religious and ethical traditions it seeks, nominally speaking anyway,
to protect and exalt.
A Jewish novelist I know from a family of “survivors”
told me once that he considers Israel a bad advertisement for Judaism--- and a
bad influence on it as well. At the time I thought his comment overly harsh,
histrionic in fact. The more I see and hear however from rabbis like Steven
Pruzansky, the less I am able to dismiss it entirely. I. F. Stone seems
to have had it right back in "Holy
War," his enduring 1967 piece in the New York Review of Books: “A
certain moral imbecility marks all ethnocentric movements.”
Tuesday, November 25, 2014
News From The 51st State
Credit: Dish |
"The
Senator from Jerusalem" as some Israeli journalists have taken to calling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, hasn’t yet communicated his preference for Hagel's vacant post. But as the 2016
presidential campaign looms, backed by unprecedented pots of pro Israel money that would make even the most brazen Elders of Zion blush, it’s reasonable
to suspect he’ll get his way. If not on this appointment with this particular
president, then certainly on other cabinet positions in the future, when the 2016 winner takes the oath to protect the Constitution, which the last time I checked was still the US Constitution.
Friday, November 21, 2014
Loathsome Doves: Why The Israeli Left Is Losing
Haaretz columnist Chemi Shalev today offers the top reasons "why the right beats the left in the battle for Israel,” explaining
why the right wing has the upper hand on peace with Palestinians and sets the
agenda on relations with the US.
The first reason Shalev lists is the whole thing in a nutshell,
underscoring why the accusations of “incitement” leveled against Palestinian
President Mahmoud Abbas were so effective. Number 14 rings my bell too, a lack of empathy on the Israeli side of things growing more pronounced in the face of rising Palestinian violence---and the growing influence of right wing, fundamentalist Judaism that asserts the primacy of Jewish life over that of others. More on Israel's empathy issues, TK.
*****
*****
20 top reasons why the right beats the left in
the battle for Israel
By Chemi Shalev
1. Because the right has cornered the whole deal, cause
and effect, chicken and egg, lock stock and barrel. First it laments that
Israel has no partner, then it makes sure to undermine those that are; first it
builds settlements and creates irreversible facts on the ground, then it
proclaims the end of the two-state solution. It’s a perfect setup.
2. Because the right wing is a no-fault service provider
while the left lives by the opposite motto: it’s not you, it’s us. The further
right you go, the more anyone but you is responsible for the mess we’re in, but
the further left you travel, the more you have only yourself to blame. Given a
choice between those who point fingers from morning till night and those who
tell them how virtuous and noble they are, most people understandably prefer
the latter and opt for the flatter.
3. Because the right, no matter what it does, is always
the wronged victim while the left feels guilty even when Israel is on its best
behavior. Because the right has blinders on when it comes to Israel’s
transgressions, while the left usually looks at them through a 500x zoom
microscope.
4. Because right-wingers are on total-offence and in
perpetual attack mode against their enemies, real and imagined, mainly on the
left. Which leaves the left ducking the fire and scrambling for cover.
5. Because right-wingers never admit to a mistake, never
apologize for anything, never concede even a point to the other side. Remember
how many right wingers “proved” that the videos shot near Ramallah that showed
the shooting of two Palestinian teens were a “Pallywood” fake? Have you been
swamped with apologies and mea culpas ever since? Me neither.
6. Because the right has tunnel vision and is focused on
one issue only, while the left seems to believe for some reason there are other
worthwhile causes in the world besides the Jewish state and the procreation of
its people.
7. Because, like maids and windows, right-wingers don’t do
nuances. They have a one-stop, clear-cut, black-or-white, for-us-or-against-us
mentality, while left-wingers live in a complex world of 50 shades of grey at
least. The old hasbara joke about “Israel good, Arab bad” has become the right
wing’s dogma while lefties are still figuring out what their position is in the
first place.
8. Because right wing donors put their money where their
mouth is, while left wingers either spread their wealth among myriad causes or
prefer to stay out of the limelight altogether. Because even when you have
someone like Hami Saban serve as a supposedly leftist counterweight to Sheldon
Adelson, as he did at the recent Israeli American Council meeting in
Washington, it turns out he doesn’t like Obama too much on the Palestinians and
his policy on Iran is to “bomb the living daylights out of the sons of
bitches”.
9. Because the right wing has ingeniously found a way to
delegitimize measly contributions from “foreign governments” to left wing NGO’s
while building separate fast tracks for untold millions of dollars to flow
freely from end-of-days Evangelists, Third Temple enthusiasts and transfer-
supporting trillionaires. The former, which won’t make of a difference anyway,
is considered self-hating and treasonous, while the latter, which could
detonate entire continents, is the epitome of Jewish patriotic pride.
10. Because when the right wing runs out of convincing
arguments they can always go to their no-nonsense god and no-arguing Orthodoxy
trump cards. The left, even when it gets some rabbis on its side as backup,
they usually come from denominations in which everything is negotiable and up
for debate.
11. Because the right wing rewrites history, plays up its
role and trashes anything the left has ever done, and the left does exactly the
same, but not vice versa.
12. Because no matter how far right you may go, from
blowing up the temple to killing off a prime minister, you may be a “wild weed”
but you’re still in the “national camp”. But if you’re on the left you have to
tread carefully and watch out not to fall off the ledge, from liberal Zionism
to non-Zionism to post Zionism to anti-Zionism to enemy of the state. And even
if you keep completely still, the right will eventually move the goalposts so
that you turn willy nilly into what you didn’t want to be.
13. Because the left is often much more preoccupied with
its own internal divisions than with taking on the outside world (See “What
ever happened to the Popular Front? He’s over there”)
14. Because hatred is so much more effective as a
propellant and so much less tiring than making an effort to understand the
other side, never mind empathizing with it.
15. Because the other side, lets face it, has its own
right-wingers, or equivalents thereof, who will corroborate the right wing’s
most dire predictions, and vice versa. It’s a type of symbiosis known as
Synnecrosis, which, Wikipedia notes, is “detrimental to both organisms involved
and eventually causes death”
16. Because the left is always attracted to living in
other liberal democracies while the right wing feels that its back is to the
wall with nowhere to go.
17. Because the right always forward and outward and never
looks back while the left gazes at its navel, looks over its shoulder and
agonizes over where it went wrong.
18. Because while the left is in meditation, yoga, gym, Pilates
or Soulcycle, the right-wingers are out there, demonstrating, building or
creating a ruckus, actually doing something tangible for their cause.
19. Because the right has only one source for its news and
believes the worst of its enemies while the left usually suffers from sensory
overdose and too much information. (See: Political Polarization & Media
Habits)
20. Because, most right wingers, let’s face it, are
flesh-eating carnivores, while leftists have become vegan, vegetarian,
gluten-free, macrobiotic, peanut-allergic feinschmeckers. So it’s usually just
a matter of time before they get devoured.
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