Fratello Metallo: for serious You might not expect to see many *Men of God* at a heavy metal concert, but that doesn’t mean there are no monks rocking out -- on stage, no less. Take Fratello Metallo, or the Metal Friar, a 62-year-old Capuchin monk who’s based in Milan and fronts a metal group that just came out with their second album. This isn’t just Christian rock with a bit more grit. The Metal Friar sings about sex, drugs, and alcohol in his lyrics, and though he mentions faith and religion in some of his songs, he maintains that he’s not trying to convert anyone to Catholicism.

The Metal Friar, aka Brother Cesare Bonizzi, began his love affair with heavy metal at a Metallica concert fifteen years ago. 

He fell in love with metal energy, and has been making loud head-bashing music ever since, sharing stages with the like of Slayer, Iron Maiden, and (irony of ironies) Judas Priest.

There’s something so amazingly perverse about raging metalheads flashing the devil sign at a friar. See for yourself:

Chinese Santa Comes Bearing: the business secrets of the JewsI was chatting with a Chinese co-worker last December when she asked why I wasn't going back to America for Christmas like other foreigners she knew in Beijing. I offered what seemed like a simple explanation: "Jews don't celebrate Christmas because we don't believe in Jesus."

She looked puzzled, as though I had just uttered a non sequitur. Most Chinese don't really know what exactly makes someone Jewish; they know only that Jews are some kind of minority group in America who also have their own country, Israel. Some also seem to believe that the two distinct Chinese words for "Jewish" and "Israeli" are, if not exactly synonyms, then at least denotative of the same set of people. To my co-worker, my response was like saying I didn't celebrate Christmas because I was black or French (though she may also have been unaware, as some Chinese are, that Christmas is in fact a religious holiday, rather than a secular gift-giving festival like the lunar new year).

So how exactly do I explain to them who Jews are -- and aren't -- using concepts that are more or less directly translatable into Mandarin?

Calling Judaism a race is obviously wrong, in addition to smacking of Nazi pseudoscience. We're too similar to other races, and too racially diverse within ourselves, to be a distinct race. We're also not an ethnic group inasmuch as that requires a common language. So my first instinct is usually to say something like, "Judaism is a religion, like Christianity or Buddhism."

But this is incomplete at best, and probably misleading. And anyway it won't really end the conversation. After all, Christianity is rapidly spreading in China, so people have a relatively clear notion of what that entails (even if they may not realize that "Christianity" is related to "Christmas," since in Mandarin the two words lack a common root). If Judaism is like Christianity, my acquaintance invariably asks, why don't I go to church or temple or whatever, like the Christians s/he knows?
Again, the first instinct is to try something like, "Well, I'm not a very observant Jew," or "I'm a secular Jew." But "observant" and "secular" are complex notions with no precise Mandarin translations, and anyway these answers just kick the original question down the road. The question remains: What does it mean to be a non-observant Jew? What makes a secular Jew still a Jew?

Of course, the question of "Who is a Jew?" is age old, and it certainly isn't just a problem of translation. But outside Asia, it can seem unimportant, at least as a day-to-day matter. After all, even if most Americans and Europeans (or, for that matter, Arabs) can't offer a clear-cut answer to the question, they still know basically what it means to say that so-and-so is Jewish. In particular, they know that not all Jews go to shul, wear a kipa, or even keep kosher. Like many words in our language, they know what "Jewish" means in context, even if they can't offer a precise definition.

But how do I explain to someone who, though well educated in her own culture, totally lacks the relevant conceptual framework? At this point, the usual approach is to say something like, "Besides the religious aspect, Judiasm is also a cultural tradition. so you can be considered a Jew even if you don't go to temple, or even if you don’t believe in God."

This is better, but even this fails to satisfy the more inquiring of Chinese minds. One reason for this is that Asia is now awash with self-help books purporting to reveal "business secrets of the Jewish" and "how to raise your kids like the Jews." As a result, even though they most likely don't understand what actually defines Jewish identity, educated Chinese may already know that Jews are often skilled businessmen, bankers, and professionals. They may even know that Jews from were among the first wave of foreign businessmen who set up merchant empires in Shanghai following the First Opium War in 1842. What one hears over and over, at any rate, is that Jews are "smart and make a lot of money."

Highly cosmopolitan Chinese, who are aware that Jews have distinct communities with deep roots in countries all around the world, especially in large cities, are the ones who tend to be most unsatisfied with the explanation of Judaism as merely a cultural tradition. That's because the notion of a generations-old diaspora made up largely of merchants, businessmen, and professionals is readily comprehensible to the Chinese. These kinds of tight-knit, assimilation-resistant, financially successful communities would appear to Chinese just like the tight-knit, financially successful overseas Chinese communities that exist today in countries around Asia -- including Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, the Philippines -- and, of course, Chinatowns all over Europe and the Americas.

Indeed, the similarities between the Chinese and Jewish diasporas are striking. In both cases, the minority diaspora communities have remained, to varying degrees, distinct from majority society, even as they've influenced these societies significantly. Both diasporas have also periodically suffered oppression, partly as a result of resentment in majority society towards their business acumen (by some estimates, ethnic Chinese account for 70% of GDP in Indonesia despite making up less than 10% of the population).

The explanation of Judiasm as primarily a "cultural tradition" doesn't fly with my acquaintances here because Chinese instinctively understand that like their own diaspora communities abroad, Jewish communities don't merely share a distinct culture but also comprise a concrete social formation that explicitly includes some while excluding others. The Chinese are masters of networking and glad-handing, and the concept of guanxi -- which literally means "relationship", but implies the notion of connections, suction, knowing the right people -- is central to the way business and politics is done here. Guanxi is what everyone wants and what people with money and power have. It's also what people born into tight-knit, financially successful diaspora communities automatically have with each other, in part because they tend to suffer from a kind of negative guanxi, i.e., prejudice, at the hands of the majority society. So naturally, they stick together and help each other out.

Familiarity with the concept of guanxi is why Chinese people instinctively recognize that Judaism is not simply a culture, or even a religion in the sense that one may become Christian or Buddhist simply by accepting and practicing certain religious doctrines and rituals. Chinese people can become jazz musicians, rugged individualists, capitalists, or Mormons. Even though these are originally American cultural and ideological traditions, they are fundamentally open to everyone.
By contrast, even were the Chinese government suddenly to lift its current ban on Chinese citizens attending foreign religious services, average Chinese would still not be welcome at the Beijing branch of Chabad house, where I occasionally attended Shabbat services during my first year in Beijing, partly for the free dinner and plentiful vodka, and partly in the hopes of meeting someone who could help me find a job.

I haven't summoned the guts to try it yet, but I suspect Chinese would have no trouble understanding that being Jewish means having a particular sort of guanxi with other Jews. This guanxi manifests itself as social, cultural, and religious affinities, but it is ultimately based on ancestry, just like the 56 ethnic groups that all schoolchildren learn about (always 56, no more, no less), and just like the Indonesian Chinese. To the corpulent, bearded rabbi at Chabad House, I am a Jew, no matter how pathetic my Hebrew or how firmly rooted my atheism.

A Jewish hippie returns to his roots
People get more conservative as they age. With Jews, of course, they get more Jewish, too, and then we can see the conservative notions rooted deep in Jewish identity. In fact, for secular or "cultural" Jews, these notions are central to of what it means to be Jewish.

Recently I've been thinking that whiling away the rest of my 20s in China -- writing, teaching English, and spending long mornings with my local girlfriend -- might be a good decision. But on floating this idea past my father, the notion of such a course-setting on my part seemed to strike a chord.

In a phone conversation from Beijing, I was shocked to hear my dad urging me -- as we talked about how I might proceed with a career in China, having lived here for two years and dabbled in widely contrasting expatriate lifestyles -- to consider seriously that I was well-positioned, living and working in this kind of boomtown environment, to make "serious" money.

It was the exact opposite of the life my dad, now in his 60s, chose for himself when he was my age. In his mid-20s my dad was touring the country in a VW bus, exploring new ways of life (read: drugs, black girlfriend) and sending idealistic letters home to his own dad, a workaday small businessman who owned several shoe stores in metro Cleveland ¬but certainly never made "serious money." Later he straightened out a little and went to law school. But though intelligent, he was an un-ambitious student and lawyer who never made much money and eventually moved into the more idealistic but even less lucrative field of divorce mediation.

The conversation with dad might have ended there, with the grim realization that my father, like other older folks I’ve heard of, is getting more conservative as he ages. But then he added, almost as an after-thought, that he didn't want to see “the earning power gene in our family die out with you.” It was a supremely bizarre statement coming from a man who once quit a promising job covering the "youth movement" for Time, including the raucous Chicago 7 trial, to join a commune in Taos, and later worked for legal aid, rather than a corporate firm, after finishing law school
Challenged on this, dad freely admitted he hadn't taken his own advice. In fact, it became pretty clear that he was urging me to avoid some perceived failures of his for which he felt regret, coupled with a characteristically Jewish kind of guilt. He felt guilty for selling short his talent and potential through lack of ambition, aversion to competition, and a philosophically-justified laziness.

Celebrating Purim: in Shanghai, 1929Were these just my dad's late night ramblings, or does this concern about losing the "earning gene" seem to echo the concerns of our Jewish leaders about intermarriage and assimilation? My dad was 23 when he spent his first summer in San Francisco in 1967, ushering in the "Me" Generation. Forty years later, my own Me-inspired musings about a life of expatriate leisure, subsidized by the People's Bank of China's commitment to an undervalued renminbi, seemed to raise the awful possibility that the consequences of his life decisions might still be rippling down, beyond his own life, to influence my own un-ambitious, half-assed choices these decades later.

And wouldn't the cross-generational trajectory of our family -- assuming I follow through on these choices -- serve to illustrate to a disturbing extent the worst fears these same Jewish leaders have about our children intermarrying, assimilating and (though this is rarely stated explicitly) losing our competitive edge by diluting our culture of high expectations for our children's academic and professional achievement? Koreans, Indians -- these are the "new Jews" at elite universities, children pestered to financial success by relentless immigrant parents. Meanwhile, the great-grandchildren of those who fled the Holocaust fritter away the hard-bought fruits of their ancestors struggle. The trajectory goes something like this:

First generation: scientists, bankers, novelists, Hollywood studio execs, Communists

Second genearation: doctors, lawyers, journalists, liberal political/social activists

Third generation: still plenty of lawyers and i-bankers, but quite a few failed artists and expatriate degenerates,

And isn't this such a Jewish kind of notion -- feeling guilty for one's lack of professional success? Looking back on their lives, wouldn't most gentile men who never made big money say that it was because they were cheated, or because they faced insurmountable external obstacles (e.g., poor family background, racism, sexism), or they had really bad luck, or maybe even just admit that they weren't smart or strong or talented or whatever enough?

But not Jews. We feel guilty, as if we've somehow betrayed our birthright, squandered a place in society that was made available to us only through the struggle of our industrious, long-suffering ancestors. We're ashamed that we could just slap it away, like a toddler petulantly knocking over a glass of warm milk while children in China starve.

My dad's sudden conversion to materialism reminded me of nothing so much as Kevin MacDonald, the presumptively anti-semitic anthropologist and author Culture of Critique, a trilogy on Jewish history and culture. MacDonald argues that Judaism is best understood as a "group evolutionary strategy," a social formation defined by social practices evolved to produce material success in modern, complex, urban societies.

Through social and cultural norms and practices, MacDonald argues, Jewish societies have effectively bred successive generations of offspring to select for traits like intelligence and a certain kind of intellectual aggressiveness. In Jewish societies. intellectual brilliance, rather than athletic talent or physical attractiveness is what earns a male high social status and desirable females. And, of course, intelligence and material success are often closely related.

It's always risky mentioning MacDonald's name in polite Jewish company, but I doubt I'm the only one who's read his monograph "Understanding Jewish Influence" and felt that certain parts of it were weirdly on point. For all its flaws, perhaps even its bigotry, I've never read another writer who seems to put his finger so squarely on that specific kind of guanxi that defines Jewish identity, even -- or rather, especially -- among those who aren't religiously observant.

In a bizarre way, "Understanding Jewish Influence" is reminiscent of those email forwards I've received from certain far-right Zionist great uncles listing the 178 Jewish Nobel Prize winners in one column and the nine Arab winners in the other, followed by the observation that there are twelve million Jews in the world compared to more than 1.4 billion Arabs.

The analysis is the same in both, namely that Jews are superior to some particular group. In MacDonald's case, the group is unsuspecting white European-stock societies subtly undermined by intelligent, highly aggressive Jewish dynamos (think Ari Gold or Joseph Flom). In my uncle's case, the out-group is the Arabs who surround Israel. But the concerns motivating the analysis are quite different. MacDonald apparently wants to jolt gentile whites out of their complacent slumber and into a realization of the threat to their society. My right-wing Zionist great uncles want to justify Israel's treatment of the Palestinians.

The "tight-knit" quality of both Chinese and Jewish diaspora communities is what MacDonald calls "ethnocentrism," which suddenly makes it sound sinister. But it's not exactly news that traditional Jewish parents discourage their children from intermarrying.

And what other word could there be for my dad's sudden rediscovery of his long-dormant "earning gene"? It seems to rise directly from a sense of group identity that is perhaps strongest among secular, non-Israeli Jews. As such, my dad's comment seems to illustrate MacDonald's point that Jewish social norms -- such as the sense of material success as a birthrite -- exert a powerful and often unconscious influence even on those, like my dad, who have rejected religious observance and other obvious markers of Jewish identification.

It's not hard to see how materialism could become rooted in the Jewish experience. A history of struggle, persecution, and fighting for security blends seamlessly into materialism. Money and status weren't pursued for their own sakes but because they equate to protection and safety.

Weren't the Jews who got out of Europe the ones who had the money and connections to do so? Of course, many of them fled Europe with only what they could carry. Still, others, like my German-Jewish great-grandmother, shrewdly deployed what money and connections she had to spirit out her family's hard-earned wealth in a room-sized crate that eventually found its way to New York harbor. That crate contained the lovely set of hand-painted china that brightened my childhood Passovers and an arresting German expressionist canvas sold last year to the Neue Galerie, on the upper¬east side, for a tidy sum.

Apart from the impulse to financial success, Jewish identity as defined by MacDonald also explains other aspects of dad's twisty life path. In his twenties, my dad dated a black girl and later a Chinese girl before settling down with my Jewish mom in his early 30s. "I didn't set out to marry a nice Jewish girl from the Midwest," he has told me. "It just happened that way."

MacDonald cites genetic similarity theory, which states that "people are attracted to others who are genetically similar to themselves," as the scientific basis for his claims about Jewish character traits. The theory, he argues, "predicts that Jews would be more likely to make friends and alliances with other Jews, and that there would be high levels of rapport and psychological satisfaction within these relationships." To this theoretical foundation, MacDonald adds anecdotal accounts from Jewish authors remarking on "the incredible sense of oneness … with other Jews and [the] ability to recognize other Jews in public places, a talent some Jews call 'J-dar.'"

Again, calling him an anti-semitic seems beside the point because whatever motivates MacDonald's analysis, the analysis itself resonates. Though I've been with my own Chinese girlfriend for nearly a year now, I realized some time ago that I could never spend my life with her. We lack that "high level of rapport." We both speak each others' native languages, and yet there is too much about me she could never understand, too many of my jokes she could never get.

Self-hating Jews

Are Koreans and Indians: the new Jews?The Zionists who put together those Nobel prize lists will label me a self-hating Jew, and they won't be too far off. But I don't exactly feel guilty for my people's success. My feeling is that we earned it. Things weren't easy for us, to say the least, and no one handed us what we have.

Still, there are certain things I don't readily share with my Chinese acquaintances, when we talk about what it means to be Jewish. On one early trip to Beijing Chabad, I met a man with two kids who, on hearing that I was looking for a job and confirming that I was, in fact, Jewish, immediately offered to send my resume around to guys he knew around town. Isn't this -- like the Bar Mitzvah money that makes your gentile friends jealous -- a characteristically Jewish experience? And yet it's not an aspect we flaunt.

Any complete account of Jewish guanxi must include the fact that having it carries real risks -- anti-semitism is real. But on balance, in most parts of the world in 2008, including China, I have to conclude that it's enormously advantageous to have this sort of guanxi, just as it is advantageous to be born ethnically Chinese in the Philippines.

But unlike these ethnically Chinese communities, I don't share a common language with the Jews I meet at Chabad House in Beijing. So the question for Jews like me, who cannot fully embrace either the religiosity of the Chabad rabbi, nor the militant Zionism of my secular great uncles (or the many secular Jewish professionals who come to Beijing Chabad for Shabbat when they pass through the city on business, but whose Hebrew is evidently no better than mine) is what binds us together?

Of course, there is also a tradition of secular Jewish intellectual and artistic productivity, as well as social, and political involvement. When shopping this essay around, one editor, after expressing some interest, finally rejected the essay on the grounds that "Who is a Jew?" isn't a question that ignores or even undermines this secular tradition. He wrote:

What does it matter *what* the Jews are? Why is this a worthy subject for an essay? Or for a series of new magazines that have appeared in the US in the past five years (Heeb, Zeek, Jewcy.com, Guilty Pleasures, etc. etc. etc.)? As someone committed to the tradition of secular Jewish humanism and leftism, I find all this profoundly disturbing.

What this argument ignores is that "the tradition of secular Jewish humanism and leftism" is precisely what is at stake in the question of what the Jews are. To Jews under about 60, this tradition may feel ubiquitous, like the ground we walk on. But the fact is, it's a very short tradition -- maybe 100 years old -- and very fragile.
Jewish leaders see this clearly, which is why they're so concerned about the secular liberals in their ranks. They don't believe that kind of Judaism can sustain the community against assimilation, intermarriage, and creeping leftism, which calls for applying universal norms of human rights, rather than the appeal to Jewish particularism used, at various levels of explicitness, to justify Israel's treatment of the Palestinians. And neither do I.

Indeed, maybe all these Jewish magazines really are lame. But that's precisely the problem: it's pretty much all you've got left once you've stripped away religious practice and hardcore Zionism. The intangible guanxi, the traditions of "secular Jewish humanism and leftism" -- these currents are parasitic on the traditional religious and Zionist institutions, even as they reject them (define themselves in opposition to an "other," etc). Think of Phillip Roth's iconic short story "The Conversion of the Jews," which seemed to place heretical questioning of Jewish orthodoxy at the very center of Jewish experience.

"The tradition of Jewish secularism" feels secure now, but perhaps this is because it has already reached its zenith. It looks to me increasingly like a temporary, atavistic relic of the trans-generational process of Jewish assimilation. As this process reaches its latter stages, "Jewish liberal secularism" seems likely to fade into the broader tradition of liberal secularism generally.

"Who is a Jew?" matters -- now more than ever -- because after thousands of years of maintaining highly endogamous communities (under 10% intermarriage), rates are up to 50%. The point isn't whether or not we're Jews -- obviously we are -- it's whether our children will be.

While my generation happily partakes of this atavistic tradition of Jewish secular humanism, children of intermarried couples mostly don't self-identify as Jews. So by the time we're grandparents - well, that's all she wrote. It's lights out in the temple.

If Judaism is to survive, we need a modern Jewish identity that can stand up to the pressures of assimilation, while still fostering the values of liberal humanism that make secular Jews proud to identify as such. The "earning gene," the effortless rapport with nice Jewish girls, the online magazines -- these must be the starting points, not the sum total of who are.

The Windsor Hills Baptist Church of Oklahoma City gave away a gun at its annual youth conference, held last week. The youth conference included a shooting competition (Jesus loves a good target range, after all), and the winner received an AR-15 semiautomatic assault rifle donated to the church. I know it sounds bad, but don't worry: the church’s youth pastor, Bob Ross, explained that the main thrust of the conference wasn't about guns but rather "teens finding faith.”
Nothing Says Faith: Like an AR-15
He said, “I don’t want people thinking ‘My goodness, we’re putting a weapon in the hand of somebody that doesn’t respect it who are then going to go out and kill. That’s not at all what we’re trying to do.”

I’m thinking I might start a USY chapter that has an annual event where we play with knives, set fires, and practice punching crash test dummies in the gut. But in between the violence, we’ll give tzedakah, and sing David Melech Yisrael. Then it’s okay. 

Zeek's Editor-in-chief, Jo Ellen Green Kaiser, talks with Rabbi Rebecca Alpert about social justice, feminism and her book, Whose Torah?

Zeek: When people hear your name, Rabbi Rebecca Alpert, they tend to think, "Jewish feminist lesbian." Has that label been useful or helpful for you?

Rabbi Rebecca Alpert: All labels are problematic, but I don't mind taking on this label, and people do think of me that way - though they are often shocked that my current work is on Jews and baseball, or that my earlier work was on Reform rabbis developing an understanding of healing in the early part of the twentieth century. The label, though, was helpful back in the 1970s and 1980s when the idea of a lesbian rabbi was shocking. I was perfectly happy to stand up and confuse people.

Zeek: I was impressed to learn in your new book,Whose Torah, that you have deep experience in peace and poverty work.

RA: I do see feminism and gay rights work as part of a larger progressive agenda, both within the Jewish community and in the world at large. I have always understood feminism as being about more than just equal rights for women. Feminism opened my eyes so I realized that if you make life better for women, you make life better for everybody. Social justice is the grounding for the movement. Coming out of Reform Judaism, I believed social justice was the main way we Jews could make a contribution.

Zeek: How do you see social justice and spirituality connected within Judaism?

RA: I am very moved by Arthur Waskow's vision linking social justice to spirituality. That connection has not been the main impetus for me. The older I've gotten the more secular I've become, but I really see the importance of people seeing that there is a religious vision for social justice. There are so many people in the Jewish world today for whom spirituality is the center of their Jewishness: it's great when they make that connection to social justice.

Zeek: In your book, you frame Judaism as a kinship network as well as a spiritual source of faith. One element we lack in contemporary America is strong community, and you need strong community for justice work.

RA: I'm with you 100%. We see ourselves as Jews, fundamentally, as both a cultural network and a religious community. They are intertwined. That understanding that Jewishness is not only about spirituality throws people sometimes. People are surprised that religious people don't think you are any less a Jew because you are not spiritual. I am a post-Zionist, but I am always deeply moved by the Israeli world, the way they need to deal with the secular-religious connection. For instance being gay in secular Israel - as long as you are not in the chareidi camp - people say 'they are our brothers because they are Jews, they deserve rights.' Of course, it's a problem if our community is limited only to Jews.

Zeek: If the social justice impetus comes from Judaism as an ethnic tradition, why not just do social justice work from a purely secular position, or from another community that one is part of-for example, you talk about African-American Jews, Arab Jews. If you are a Jew with that kind of dual community, why not do social justice from an African-American position as opposed to a Jewish one?

RA: I guess it's the "as opposed to" that I don't agree with. People find a place from which they do their work. I don't think one place is better than another. I am a Reconstructionist Jew, which means I don't believe Jews are the chosen people. Every group has something to contribute. If doing the work from the Jewish perspective is meaningful, then great. If doing it from a different perspective is meaningful, then great. The connections are more important to me than the divisions.

Zeek: I can hear people saying, "Oy vey! This rabbi is saying we don't have to believe in God and we don't have to be Jewish just because Judaism is better, so why bother? Why bother learning Torah? It's too difficult! Why would anyone be Jewish! This will kill Judaism!" You must get this sometimes.

RA: I wish I was so powerful, that I singlehandedly could kill Judaism. I would have to be a bit careful about what I ever said to anybody.

Zeek: (laughs)

RA: Seriously, I don't do this because I believe in God or because it's the best way, but because it's my way. I see great wisdom and beauty and truth in Judaism. If I didn't find Judaism a tremendous source of wonderful ideas I wouldn't be a rabbi. I think Judaism holds up to rational scrutiny. It holds up to my questions. I feel I am in the tradition of Abraham arguing with God. You know, God in the Bible does not get along so well with the Jewish people, and the Jews didn't get along so well with God. There is always an argument, always questioning. That is the most wonderful part of the Judaism I grew up with.

A custody battle is brewing in Indiana, and it hinges on whether or not Satanism is a real religion. Jamie Meyer, a 30-year-old factory worker, is the divorced father of three young girls, and a member of the Church of Satan. Meyer’s ex-wife is suing to restrict his visitation time to allow his girls to attend Christian church. She also argues that the Church of Satan isn’t a real religion, that Meyer’s beliefs embarrass the children, and that Meyer’s may not really believe in Satanism.
Satanic pentagram: tres creepy
But the Satanism being practiced by Meyer isn’t what you might think. It’s nothing like what you saw in Rosemary’s Baby. Instead, Satanism is a “carnal religion.” Its members are atheists, anti-spiritualists, and proponents of pride, liberty, and individualism. That’s according to the current high Priest of the Church of Satan, Peter Gilmore. Doesn’t sound so bad, right?

A trip to the Church of Satan website (definitely not safe for work) proves otherwise. Here are the slightly creepy Nine Satanic Statements: 

1. Satan represents indulgence instead of abstinence!
2. Satan represents vital existence instead of spiritual pipe dreams!
3. Satan represents undefiled wisdom instead of hypocritical self-deceit!
4. Satan represents kindness to those who deserve it instead of love wasted on ingrates!
5. Satan represents vengeance instead of turning the other cheek!
6. Satan represents responsibility to the responsible instead of concern for psychic vampires!
7. Satan represents man as just another animal, sometimes better, more often worse than those that walk on all-fours, who, because of his “divine spiritual and intellectual development,” has become the most vicious animal of all!
8. Satan represents all of the so-called sins, as they all lead to physical, mental, or emotional gratification!
9. Satan has been the best friend the Church has ever had, as He has kept it in business all these years!

There are also Eleven Satanic Rules of the Earth, including, “Do not make sexual advances unless you are given the mating signal.” And my favorite: “Acknowledge the power of magic if you have employed it successfully to obtain your desires. If you deny the power of magic after having called upon it with success, you will lose all you have obtained.”

But what’s at stake in this case has little to do with mating rituals or magic. Meyer’s ex-wife is suing on grounds that raising the kids with two conflicting faiths in their lives could be emotionally damaging, in addition to her discomfort with the Church of Satan in general. In a time when more and more people are intermarrying, the core issue of whether two religions can cause emotional damage to a kid is fascinating and tricky. The Church of Satan is a particularly potent example of how things can conflict, but a kid with a Jewish father and Christian mother can be plenty confused, too (see: Half/Life). Or he can be totally well-adjusted. It may have more to do with the parents than the religion, right?

I never thought I’d feel a little defensive about the Church of Satan, but in this case, I don’t want an anti-interfaith precedent to be set. 

When Sarah Cohen of Monsey and her husband were arrested for welfare fraud last month they both had to have mug shots taken, and the police asked Sarah, a Chasidic Jew, to remove her sheitel (wig) for her mug shot. Traditionally, Chasidic Jewish women don’t uncover their heads in mixed company, and some don’t uncover their heads except to bathe, so the request and subsequent mug shot have caused quite the controversy. Wigging out: good disguise

The issue here is whether the police can force someone who’s accused of a crime to do something against their religious beliefs, and whether the government can allow someone to avoid a legal obligation because of his or her religion.

It’s worth noting that the police department in Monsey does provide kosher meals to those prisoners who request it. But allowing Cohen to keep her wig on is different. Wigs are a fairly typical disguise, and Chasidic women have access to many wig options within the community. While they’re not made in order to conceal a woman’s identity, they certainly can have that effect. Would the police allow someone to leave on a mask? What about a woman wearing a hijab or a jilbab? There have been similar cases with Muslim women, and though the ACLU has filed a few suits, all are still pending. No word yet on whether Cohen plans to sue, but the entire Ramapo PD is undergoing “sensitivity training” in an effort to avoid similar situations in the future, and the officer who ordered who to take off her wig is being “sharply criticized.” 

Tajikistan’s last synagogue was razed to the ground recently, to make way for the new presidential palace, despite outcry from the community. Reading this got me thinking about sacred spaces that have been converted into not-so-sacred spaces. In some cases, like Tajikistan, is seems horrible and insensitive. But in other places, it’s not quite so bad.

New York Magazine recently covered an old synagogue converted into an artist’s loft. Something about it seems reasonably respectful. And then there’s a design firm in Utrecht, Zecc, that transformed an old chapel into a spacious and fairly trendy home.

I know people who have lived in synagogue apartments, or houses owned by their churches, and that doesn’t seem particularly strange to me, but living a regular life in a space that was previously used for worship? Can you imagine having sex two feet from where a bima used to be? Or taking a bath on what used to be an altar?

Shortly before the beginning of seventh grade, when I entered the public school system for the first time after spending my earliest formative years at Nebraska’s only Jewish day school (student body: 37), my mother came to me with a warning. It wasn’t her intention to scare me, she explained, but she wanted to make sure I was prepared for some of the challenges that lay ahead.

“What challenges?” I asked. “What do you mean?” I wasn’t expecting the schoolwork to give me any trouble, and my grandmother had recently furnished me with several new back-to-school ensembles from the Limited that I was certain could at least partially smooth over my problem of not having any social skills.

My mother paused for a very long time before she spoke. “It’s possible that you may have to face some…anti-Semitism.”

Anti-Semitism. It wasn’t precisely clear to me what a Semite was, but I knew what it meant to be anti one. It meant you hated Jews and wanted them dead.

The existence of such a prejudice was hardly news; the bookshelves in my room groaned under the weight of solemn tales of the Holocaust and the pogroms, stories festooned with grim illustrations of terrified children laden with bundles, peering helplessly through pen and ink fence of barbed wire. My parents had their own stories: anti-Semitism was the reason my immigrant grandmother refused to let her children go swimming with the non-Jewish neighbors, why my father had been beaten up several times a week on his way home from junior high by roaming gangs of feral Gentile children.

But that was years ago.

“I’m not saying it will happen,” she continued, “but I want you to prepare for it if it does.”

As I had not yet learned that my mother’s general pessimism towards the human race was not always based in tangible reality, her warnings filled me with a consuming, atavistic sense of dread. When would the assault come, and in what form? Would I be shunned in the cafeteria or disinvited from birthday parties? Would I be physically attacked: trapped in lockers or forced to gather change from the floor as a gang of Esprit-clad Aryans mocked the parsimoniousness of my race? At the very least, I assumed I would be taunted verbally with cries of “kike” and “yid”; “heebie” and “hook-nose” and “Red Sea pedestrian” and other racial epithets I learned from Monty Python’s The Life of Brian.

“You forgot sheeny,” said my mother.

“I thought that was an Irish person.”

“Nope. You’re a sheeny.”

As time passed, I would hear all those words and more. What my mother didn’t tell me is that they would mostly come from other Jews.

Everywhere, young Jews are eagerly, even gleefully appropriating the traditional iconography and language of anti-Semites faster than you can say “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.” We howled with laughter at Borat, at the grotesque puppet in “The Running of the Jew” laying its “filthy Jew-egg” as Sacha Baron Cohen spewed der Sturmer-worthy invective in pidgin Hebrew. We read publications with names like Heeb and Jewcy, and cheerfully throw around terms and stereotypes that would have sent previous generations straight to the local ADL office. Recently, I was watching TV at home when I received a phone call from a co-religionist friend.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I’m at home, watching The Jewish Americans on PBS.”

“Yeah? What’s happening?”

“Oh, I guess this episode is on Leo Frank. But as far I as can see, the whole thing is mostly about how we’re ugly and everybody hates us.” We dissolved with laughter.

There are a number of possible reasons for this change in attitude. The age we are living in is a peculiar one, equal parts irony and genuine turmoil. Festering internecine and tribal hatreds have once again become a very real part of how the world operates; as a result, political correctness has died an unceremonious death, while multiculturalism is dying a somewhat more tortuous one. At the same time, overt intolerance has become nearly obsolete, to the point that one can perpetuate almost any form of prejudice with the implicit understanding that if the speaker is of a certain social class or education level, he or she cannot possibly be a bigot. On a strictly Jewish level, I think my generation has simply lost patience with our Hebrew school educations, with the constant focus on victimhood and hardship, and the sometimes reactionary politics of the Jewish establishment—with the powerful lobbies and their professional outrage, the shell-shocked parents and grandparents ever at the ready to pick up a phone or file a formal complaint the second a Jewish child is made to sing “Silent Night” or assigned a biology midterm on Yom Kippur (I speak from personal experience here.) There are better things to do with one’s time than to be constantly on guard against closet Nazis. Or maybe after 5000 years of the being on the wrong end of the world’s general shittiness, we’ve just stopped taking it so personally.

But to borrow a phrase from David Mamet in The Wicked Son, his provocative and occasionally infuriating book on the subject, “The world hates the Jews. The world has always and will continue to do so.”

Fine.

In this, my mother was right. All of our mothers were right. My generation, we American Jews in our 20’s and 30’s, may have missed having taunts and dirt clods thrown at our heads as we waited for the school bus, but you don’t have to look very far to find our people held in general contempt. In fact, don’t look hard at all—just look in the comments section of any major internet blog that so much as mentions the State of Israel, the Holocaust, Steven Spielberg, or boiled chicken.

So welcome to The Protocols, named of course for the famous (and forged) Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or as I like to think of it, the book that started the international craze, the Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone of twentieth century anti-Semitism. Here, I’ll strive to answer the important questions—not so much “Why do they hate us?” but “So what if they hate us?” I’ll look at how Jews have, for better and for worse, internalized the tenets of anti-Semitism and turned them inside out, how Jews judge other Jews, and what it means to be a self-hating Jew (as opposed to a Jewish self-hater.) I’ll examine anti-Semites through history, anti-Semites in the news, and once every few weeks or so, anti-Semites we love. (And yes, I’m taking recommendations.)

My qualifications for this mighty task, taken on by everyone from Moses Maimonides, Mark Twain, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Adolf Hitler? None whatsoever; except I’ma writer, I’m a Jew, and I’ve spent a disproportionate amount of my life worrying about who doesn’t like me.

So, my fellow filthy Christ-killers, if you can stop counting your golden ingots and draining your neighbor’s kids of their blood long enough to actually read something, I hope you’ll join me. We may not win any hearts and minds, but in the words of the immortal G.I. Joe, knowing is half the battle.

And after all, we’re supposed to be so smart.

11.05pm: Jaffa Gate, Old City, Jerusalem.
Far from the madding crowds flowing out of Jerusalem’s ancient stone walls, a white car was waiting at the bus stop down the hill, ready for the first leg of our journey to another holy city, one less trodden by tourists: Shechem (or Nablus, as it’s commonly known). Kever Yoseph, the Tomb of Joseph, son of Jacob, lies in the center of Nablus, which has a population of over 160,000 souls, making it the largest Palestinian city – and also one of the most hostile. In brighter days Jews could worship there freely but the Kever now falls under Palestinians Authority Area A and is thus forbidden for Israeli citizens to enter the city. The only way there is under cover of darkness – and with an army escort. So be it.

11.40pm: Ofra, West Bank.
Within seconds of getting out of the car, an American in his 20s ran towards us, gleefully waving a book in the air--On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society--whilst muttering clichés about wimpy ‘liberals’. Welcome to Ofra, one of the first West Bank settlements established by the messianic right-wing Gush Emunim movement in the 1970s. We were early for our bulletproof bus but, in true Israeli style, we had to wait an hour before boarding. On the pavement, the atmosphere was starting to get festive, with a mix of starry-eyed settler youth, mainly from the central and southern West Bank, whose knitted skullcaps and long peyos dangled alongside those of the Breslav Hassidim, some of whom sneaked into the Tomb in 2003 in defiance of the military, leaving seven with gunshot wounds. But not everyone had registered with the authorities, a necessary requirement for entering ‘enemy territory’, leaving dozens stranded. It was too much for one teenager, who threw himself under the bus, narrowly missing its wheels.

12.13pm: Tapuach Junction, West Bank.
Word had spread that there was going to be a knisah [entrance] to Joseph’s Tomb, and the Tapuach checkpoint was packed with over 100 people trying to get in. Some had given up hope and resorted to davening in the middle of the road, whilst some ingenious haredim attempted to hide in the luggage compartment of our bus. Things were getting serious. It had been several months since the last Knisah, and it seemed like Joseph had never been so popular; “There’s lots of pent up demand,” said the American rabbi sitting next to me, who had prayed at the Tomb twice before--once recently with an army escort, and another time more freely in the 1990s, before the days of checkpoints and intifadas (and with half as many Jewish settlers in the West Bank).

12.55pm, Huwara Village, south of Nablus.
After leaving Tapuach, we found ourselves in a convoy with three other buses flanked by army vehicles, all of which soon came to a halt at the next Palestinian village where Jewish pilgrims were trying to outsmart the bewildered border police. Aizeh balagan. We took a right past the notorious checkpoint to which the village lends its name, and that serves to keep would-be terrorists from Nablus at bay whilst maintaining a virtual siege on the rest of the city. We climbed the hill in the direction of the Elon Moreh settlement (not a place I thought I’d be returning to so soon after my last jaunt there).

01.24am: Army checkpoint, somewhere east of Nablus.
The 50 people on the bus burst into song and chants of “Od Yoseph Chai” and “Yoseph, Yoseph, Yoseph HaTzaddik” as soon as we burst through the checkpoint. “It’s nothing physical, they just want kesher [contact] with the Tzaddik,” said the Rabbi. “It’s ridiculous. This is our land and we have to sneak in at the middle of the night.” The irony escaped him that the Palestinians in Nablus/Shechem feel the same: This is their land, but are barred from traveling freely inside it whilst settlers zoom through the checkpoints and freshly-tarmaced roads and with ease.

01.39am: Joseph’s Tomb, downtown Nablus.
We officially arrived. The tomb itself is a shadow of its former glory, covered in ash and rubble after being partially destroyed by Palestinian riots in 2000, but that didn’t dampen the euphoria of the crowd, who filled the building’s central chamber with songs of exultation. Outside, the streets were deserted, save for our bus and two army vehicles straddling them. I get the feeling that if the locals wanted to take a potshot at us, it wouldn’t be too difficult.

For once, I found myself in agreement with the rabbi: The situation was ridiculous. As exhilarating as it is to visit the resting place of our forefathers, the price to pay is steep: soldiers putting their lives on the line, whilst Nablus and the rest of the West Bank are on lock-down. No one wins. It’s a similar story at the resting place of Joseph’s mother, Rachel, sliced out of Bethlehem by the ominous separation wall, and the Cave of the Patriarchs in the walking Kafka novel that is present-day Hebron. Jews should have access to our holy places, but it makes me wonder if the apparatus of checkpoints and settlements encircling them help ensure our rights to them or the opposite? The experience of the last 41 years is less than conclusive.

02.27am: Evacuation, Joseph’s Tomb. Soldiers with loudhailers round up the excited worshippers, no easy task when half of them are tucking into the steaming cholent that appeared from nowhere (via Bnei Brak). After a pause at Tapuach, a hitchhike arrives and we’re homeward bound.

04.19am: Jerusalem, Israel. The car pulls in near King George Street, passing Israeli teenagers wandering home after a night on the town. I glide up the four flights of stairs, take off my Nike Air trainers, painted black by the soot from the Tomb, and head to bed to ponder the night’s surreal events.

Sacha Baron Cohen is loose in Israel, and he's creating some confusion over the thin linguistic line between hummus and Hamas. Posing as his character Bruno, a gay Austrian rock star, Cohen has been interviewing unsuspecting Israeli and Palestinian political experts, leaving them flabbergasted by his "confusion" between chick pea paste and the militant political organization. This delicate differentiation has been dealt with before, most notably in West Bank Story, winner of the 2007 Live Action Short Film Oscar, and an official selection of Sundance Festival.

Hungry for more? Check out this video of Adam Sandler discussing the hummus factor in his recent flick, You Don’t Mess With the Zohan.

When Dubliner Dan Walsh removed Garfield from the classic Jim Davis cartoons, drawing attention to the peculiar life and mind of his owner Jon Arbuckle, he created an internet phenomenon which has drawn between 30,000 and 300,000 hits per day since February. Without the fat, waggish, sarcastic, star of the cartoon, all we are left with is Jon Arbuckle, Garfield's owner. Walsh would have us believe that this results in "an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and the empty desperation of modern life" of which Jim Davis, himself, is a fan.

In Walsh's distilled version, Arbuckle still says and does all he did in the original cartoon, when his life was made tougher (and often funnier) because of Garfield. He wishes for love, struggles with maintaining the house, waxes philosophical, makes dumb domestic mistakes, and tries to find joy in the everyday. Garfield no longer wryly responds to any of this because he is no longer there. And it's true, Arbuckle does seem off-kilter, lonely and unstable at times without the cat making any appearances.

But for those who can't shake the knowledge that Arbuckle is interacting with someone, his irrational behavior can actually appear profound and poetic. Another possible reading is not that he is mad and melodramatic (although I'll admit, sometimes he does seems a bit mad....), but that Arbuckle is seeking a relationship with God. Like Arbuckle sans Garfield, religious people attempt to have relationships and interact with something that cannot be seen or heard. (One can already anticipate the catcalls, "All this suggests is that religious people are also schizophrenic, bipolar, depressives!) Pleading with this intangible thing, fearing it at times, religious people occasionally find a companion, albeit one with fierce independence. Like Arbuckle in this new version, religious people incorporate this seemingly absent thing into their lives, for better or for worse.

Arbuckle's life takes on a chaotic and meandering tone. He talks to himself constantly, cannot grasp the reins of his life, and acts just plain oddly at times. If by removing Garfield from the strip, Walsh is suggesting that the cat never existed, and was just a figment of Arbuckle's imbalanced imagination, then this, too, parallels a modern notion that people manufactured God in order to have a pretext for social control (or a context for their madness). Why all the mumbling into books? Why the unscrewing of refrigerator light bulbs?

But for those who have had experiences of or deeply sense the divine, the kind of conduct that Arbuckle exhibits makes a whole lot of sense: Despite the discombobulation that Arbuckle might feel from having this "absent-Garfield" in his life, he also seems to feel a whole lot more. His paradoxical relationship with "that which isn't" expands the kinds of experiences he can have in the world and enlarges the map where he can take his extraordinary range of emotions.

In Walsh's revised strips, Arbuckle's relationship with that-which-is-absent presents a window into the complex, challenging, and beautiful relationships modern religious people build with God. It also shows us a bit how these relationships can appear loony to others. Who knew such a rich meditation on relations with the divine could be achieved with photoshop and in pastel?  Here are eight religious readings of Garfield Minus Garfield.


In this strip, Arbuckle is experiencing some kind of joy. It's rare for him to be so pleased—perhaps he just booked a ticket to go back to the farm or was successful in landing that elusive comic date. But when encountering the Other wanting to share his joy, he is clearly rebuffed. This portrays the independence of the intangible God who cannot be summoned at will or manipulated into giving comfort at all times.  Arbuckle would like to universalize his experience, or influence something larger with it—if I am feeling good, then all must be good. But try as he might, he realizes that his emotions do not determine the state of the world.

By attempting to hear the dreams of the Other, Arbuckle is attempting to make a more selfless connection with the world. It is unclear whether he actually hears any response to his question, but he understands that relationships require listening—or at the very least a place for the Other to assert itself. To try to listen to the dreams, specifically, of the Other—if that Other is indeed God or if that Other is another being—is to try to be commanded towards a vision of the world not yet established. Arbuckle is opening his own existence to include the will of another.

One of the things that religion focuses on is an understanding of death. Some, full of hubris, might believe that it can be controlled or intimidated, but that can only lead to futility, as is portrayed here. Since he appears the next day, one can surmise that his disappearance only served to remind him of his mortality, something that perhaps encourages him to live and feel more fully, as he seems capable of doing.

For a modern person, all religious expressions and moments of relationship with God do not lead to disappointment or absurdity. Here, Arbuckle seems to have found a space for his contentment.  His suggestion that he and the invisible Other “think nice thoughts” is accepted. One can imagine God appreciating the sentiment. Jewish texts portray God as responsive to the suggestions of others, even allowing people to sway God's emotions.

Truth be told, most people, even religious people, are not always satisfied by religious worship or ritual. And even though one might imagine that doing things in a special or different (read: religious) context would make things improve, it doesn't always. A boring Shabbas morning shiur is still boring with or without a flashy kippah on one's head. And sometimes one just needs to admit and accept that.

Sometimes religion entreats people to do seemingly irrational things—like walk to shul a mile in a snow storm, spend too much money on a citrus that one won't eat, cut off one's circulation with funny boxes on one's arm and head, or take off one's clothes in a marketplace if it turns out one's garment contains a mixture wool or linen. The experience, although not always pleasurable, usually leads to a good amount of deliberation about why a religious person does what one does, or why one is required to do what one does......

When humans fail, people often turn to God for comfort or understanding. Given the free will that God allows, these moments of communion do not entail asking God to change things. Jon is not asking God to cut a hole for him.  Rather, the experience of the Other is a way to have companionship in these moments when other people disappoint us.

Arbuckle's intense excitement about his three-weeks-from-now date would be cause for concern for his human friends. But here it comes across as reflective gratitude, especially given that no person is there to tell him otherwise. It almost feels like his next move is to say a bracha..... And I am sure I am mistaken, but doesn't that look like payos tucked behind his ear?

It may not seem like there’s much any of us can do to bring peace to even a relatively small corner of the world, but supporting world peace is as easy and concrete as drinking coffee or playing basketball. Here are four groups that not only work for peace, they also grow coffee, make yummy food, teach kids to play basketball, and bring young people together for a camp experience that includes conflict resolution exercises.

	Mirembe Kawomera A coffee cooperative in Uganda that grows organic, kosher, fair trade coffee. The best part: The co-op is made up of Jewish, Muslim and Christian coffee farmers all working together. In Luganda, Mirembe Kawomera means Delicious Peace.
	Peaceworks is a "not only for profit" company that makes healthy foods products produced by neighbors on opposing sides of political or armed conflicts. Plus, they donate 5% of all profits to groups working to empower the moderates in the Middle East who want a peaceful end to the war through a two-state solution.
	PeacePlayers International Founded on the premise that “children who play together can learn to live together” PPI brings kids together to play basketball, which unites and educates young people in divided communities. Currently operating in Northern Ireland, South Africa, New Orleans, Cyprus, and the Middle East, they foster positive relationships for thousands of children, helping form positive relationships, develop leadership skills, and improve their futures.
	Seeds of Peace Bringing kids together at a summer camp in Maine, and doing follow up programming in their home communities in the Middle East and South Asia, this program includes daily dialogue sessions, regular camp activities like arts, sports, and music, a ropes course, religious services for both Jews and Muslims, and a peer support program. When participants (called ‘Seeds’) go home, they attend more coexistence programs, and a conflict resolution and mediation training program.

Philip Schein: undercover in uruguayPhilip and Hannah Schein are the Rina Lazarus and Peter Decker of American vegans. This husband and wife team – Philip is forty-three; Hannah, ten years younger – are undercover investigators for the animal rights group PETA. Over the past six years, the duo has taken on almost twenty high profile investigations, including one that shook the Jewish community to its core: Agriprocessors, Inc. in Postville, Iowa, the world’s largest kosher slaughterhouse.

Agriprocessors (the producer of Aaron’s Best, Supreme, Shor HaBor, Rubashkin’s and David’s meats, and owned by Chabad hasidim) is currently in the news for the massive immigration raid that saw close to half of its workforce arrested, and for related allegations of child labor violations, extortion of illegal workers, company-organized identity theft, forced unpaid overtime, and a brutality toward workers reminiscent of the Jim Crow South.

In 2004 the Schein’s went undercover at the plant and found different horrors – including the plant’s practice of ripping out the trachea and esophagus of live cattle with a meat hook. (The Schein’s would uncover a similar practice at the company’s smaller Gordon, Nebraska slaughterhouse in 2007.)

The Schiens are former Jewish community professionals.

What Jewish involvement did you have as a child? Did your family attend synagogue regularly?

Hannah Schein: I was raised in a Conservative family, and my parents were very involved in the synagogue. My mother was the synagogue president at one time. I did not attend every Shabbat, but I wasn't a "High Holiday" Jew either.

Philip Schein: I grew up in a more assimilated household (we later became involved in a Reconstructionist synagogue). Early on, we only celebrated the major holidays: Pesach, etc. I just found documentation that my oldest recorded relatives in the 1700s were actually father-and-son shochtim. So I am sort of carrying on the tradition of being on slaughter floors.

Did you attend Hebrew school or a Jewish day school?

HS: I attended day school for three years, from pre-K through first grade, and then attended public school from second to 12th grade. While attending public school, I participated in my synagogue's Hebrew school. After my bat mitzvah, I attended the Bergen County High School of Jewish Studies (on Sundays).

PS: I didn't become seriously involved until I worked for a Jewish camp for people with disabilities for the Reena Foundation in Toronto. I also attended the Ivy League Torah Study Program, which is run, ironically, by the National Committee for Furtherance of Jewish Education (NCFJE). I say "ironically" because now this organization is the focus of a multi-year PETA investigation into abuses during kapporos. Rabbi Shea Hecht of NCFJE has been completely resistant to making humane changes.

Rubashkin's Glatt Kosher Products: also glatt illegalDid you grow up keeping kosher?

HS: Yes, in a Conservative way. I have never knowingly eaten pork, shellfish, etc., or mixed meat and dairy. Our home was kosher, but we did eat in non-kosher restaurants.

PS: No, but I went vegan as a teenager, which sort of made me kosher "by default" at the time.

What's your favorite childhood memory?

HS: I have so many—I had a very fulfilling and fun childhood! My parents are the kind of people who were truly prepared to have children and nurture them—they were both teachers and ran Jewish camps in the summers. Some of my best memories relate to when my mom would teach me to love and respect nature—for example, crossing paths with a box turtle while picking raspberries on the edge of a meadow.

PS: Unfortunately, as a child, I used to enjoy going to horse races before I knew about all the abuses in the industry. PETA's anti-horse racing campaign is particularly important to me because of my personal history.

Where did you go to college? What type of Jewish affiliations did you have as a college student?

HS: Princeton University. I was active in the Hillel and was very lucky in that the Center for Jewish Life (CJL) opened during my freshman year. I ate at the CJL's kosher dining hall every day for several years, participated in the Conservative minyan, and was a CJL board member (house manager) one year.

PS: Hannah always laughs when I say that I am an "Ivy League" graduate (Ivy League Torah Study Program) because she actually is one. I did my undergraduate work in Canada and became very involved in Holocaust studies. I traveled to Poland to make a film for the Toronto Holocaust archives about a man I was working with in Toronto who sustained a brain injury at the hands of the Nazis and then survived hidden by a Polish family for 22 months in an underground bunker. After college, I worked extensively with people with developmental and psychiatric disabilities in the frum community in Toronto. I later did graduate work in York University in Toronto and then at Syracuse University.

How did you two meet?

HS: I had been hired as the CJL/Princeton Hillel program director and traveled to Washington, D.C., for Hillel's orientation for new professionals in August 1998. At one point, a fellow attendee brought Philip over. He wanted to meet me because he heard I used to work for the Yankees. When the annual Hillel national conference rolled around in December, we got engaged.

PS: Shortly after we met, Hannah made me a wager about the 1994 World Cup (soccer), at which she had volunteered. She went to the nearest computer to look up the info and announced that she would have to "eat crow." I suggested she eat "crowfu" instead.

You both worked for Hillel. Where? In what capacities?

HS: Princeton University, program director.

PS: Syracuse University, program director (3 years)

What is your impression of Jewish campus life? How many Jews are Jewishly involved? Do you see mistakes made by Jewish campus organizations that limit or reduce this number?

HS: I haven't worked at Hillel since the 1998-99 school year, but I think we did a pretty good job of making options available to students seeking any type of Jewish activity. The CJL is centrally located on campus, and its opening made it exponentially easier to facilitate student involvement. At Princeton, the percentage of Jews was probably a little more than 10 percent of the student body (and the school is on the small side), so we didn't have the kinds of numbers you see at some campuses, but we had excellent rates of involvement. We had a very successful Jewish advisor program that reached out to incoming students and let them know what kinds of programs and resources the CJL offered.

PS: At Syracuse, we had to work with the student culture rather than impose some generic brand of Hillel community. So we organized events like multi-university Jewish basketball tournaments to get some of the more unlikely students involved with Hillel and the Jewish community; things like that and Birthright Israel built up a base of students across the spectrum. It was very successful in that sense. However, I found it to be somewhat of an immature Jewish community regarding social action. For example, students had a project to collect 6 million buttons for Holocaust commemoration—I think their energies could have been better used actually doing something concrete and useful that would address current injustices.

Why did you leave the Hillel system to work for PETA?

HS: I left Hillel to move to Syracuse and marry Philip. He stayed on as program director for SU for two more years, while I earned a masters degree in criminal justice. I wanted to work preventing crimes against animals, so I looked into jobs in the animal protection field. PETA is at the vanguard of the animal rights movement, so I was very gratified to get a job where I could make a real difference. On my first day, they had me review new footage from an undercover laboratory investigation, and I was hooked.

PS: Hillel functioned for me more like a graduate assistantship while I was in grad school, and it was never my intended career track. I had worked for more than 10 years with people with disabilities, and during my graduate work in disability studies at Syracuse, it became clearer that all the "-isms" (e.g., racism, speciesism, sexism) are profoundly connected. For example, women, people classified with mental disabilities, and certain races and classes were all historically presumed to not be able to think abstractly, not be individuals, not have complex emotions, etc., and were depicted as being synonymous with nature. The same misunderstandings are continually applied to other species. So I look at the work I'm doing now as the culmination of all the work I did working with marginalized, vulnerable "others"—those who are full beings but falsely characterized as being deficient.

I decided to apply to PETA a few months after watching a TV debate with a PETA vice president. Her arguments and explanations were so reasonable. I had preconceptions of PETA as having extremist views, but the more research I did, the more I found it to be the opposite—advocating for the prevention of unnecessary suffering should just be common sense. The counter-arguments are truly extremist and absurd, such as when the Chief Rabbinate of Israel said, in the words of The Jerusalem Post, that "gratuitous cruelty to animals during the slaughter process does not disqualify the meat." I soon became convinced that this was the most important and urgent work. Hannah started working at PETA first, in the Investigations Department, while I was working on my dissertation, and I saw how everything she was doing was making such a difference for the animals. I felt compelled to apply to PETA and devote all my energies to this cause.

What was the worst thing you saw at Agriprocessors? What shocked you the most?

PS: I was absolutely shocked that workers were ripping the tracheas out of animals while they were still completely conscious. It was such a cruel and brazen violation, and this was standard operating procedure. We knew immediately that AgriProcessors was in enormous trouble.

HS: I think seeing the steer actually struggle to his feet and walk out of the room was most shocking to me. It's shameful that these inhumane slaughter procedures were allowed by all the parties involved.

Hannah's Favorite Vegan: friend of jewcy, alicia silverstoneWhat about on your other investigations? What was the worst you saw? The most shocking?

HS: The worst thing I've seen in person was the "shackle and hoist" kosher slaughter of cattle in a slaughterhouse in Uruguay. Workers took minutes hooking and roping each steer's feet in order to trip him onto his side and chain his legs, then they stood with all their body weight on his legs and pinned his head to the floor with a sadistic trident-type tool so that the shochet could cut his throat. The workers then hoisted each steer quickly by one foot, while the steer struggled to breathe and his lifeblood poured on the floor. The worst investigative footage I've seen, period, is the video showing animals being killed for their fur in China: You actually see people peel the pelts off live animals, and you see them suffering horribly, writhing on the ground with no skin. We have footage of one animal who had her fur peeled off—all but her eyelashes—and she raises her head slowly and blinks. Animal behaviorists say that blinking is a sign of consciousness—she was, very likely, still feeling the pain of being skinned alive.

PS: Perhaps the most disturbing single incident I witnessed was during a bear-hunting investigation I conducted last September, when a hunter attempted to shoot a black bear at a bait stand and missed, seriously injuring the bear. They tried to track the trail of blood but were unsuccessful, so the bear most likely suffered for days and died from the injury. One of the most viscerally shocking things I experienced was the stench in the first poultry slaughterhouse Hannah and I investigated.

Has your view of Judaism changed since the Rubashkin scandal of 2004 and the various rabbinic reactions to it? (Especially rabbinic reaction to using a meat hook to excise the trachea and esophagus of a fully conscious animal.)

PS: I used to buy into the image that kosher meat was cleaner and more humanely produced because of the multiple levels of supervision and added scrutiny. However, the kosher meat industry is complicit in all the abuses of the conventional factory-farming and slaughter industries, and we have documented how some of the worst violations—the most inhumane practices—in recent industry history have been perpetrated in the kosher meat industry as standard operating procedure. In many ways, the additional oversight has served only as a buffer, concealing some of the most abusive practices.

HS: It's been very disappointing that the first reaction by the Jewish community to our kosher investigations has been to circle the wagons and scream, "Anti-Semitism!" It is heartening that the Conservative movement has started to take a stand against the cruel practices that we've uncovered, and I have great hopes for Hekhsher Tzedek.

Why do you think Jewish organizations and denominations are for the most part silent on issues of animal welfare? To me, it's as if Jewish soul food – chicken soup, chopped liver, brisket, etc. – has replaced Jewish values. You'd think any rabbi seeing PETA's Agriprocessors footage would say, "Not in my shul." But it rarely happens that way. Why do you think this rabbinic reaction happens so infrequently? What's missing from the equation?

HS: I think there is still shock and disbelief in the Jewish community that the kosher industry could be responsible for such cruelty. There is also confusion about how there could be such a disconnect between Jewish principles about treatment of animals and the reality as it is practiced in the kosher meat industry. But remember, it has been less than four years since the first AgriProcessors investigation was conducted, and there has been a tremendous amount of awareness and action generated since that time.

Also, I think some rabbis are reluctant to be too "preachy" when it comes to telling people what to consume and how to live—in many cases, it's a struggle just to get people in the door. However, I do think the rabbi's role should include guiding people toward deeper consideration of social justice issues, including animal welfare.

PS: Even some who may publicly defend the technical kosher status of the meat produced by AgriProcessors or defend the kosher status of the meat produced through the "shackle and hoist" method in South America may in more private situations condemn these immoral practices. For example, Menachem Genack of the OU—in a lecture at the "Ask OU" conference in August 2006—admitted that PETA was correct that animals were demonstrating prolonged consciousness at AgriProcressors:

"The initial claim from our community was that [the animals] were not conscious, but that's probably not true because that type of complex motor activity means that there is a certain level of consciousness." (Rabbi Genack in a lecture at the AskOU8 conference titled "The PETA Controversy," August 2006)

Rabbi Genack, in that lecture, also said explicitly that AgriProcessors never should have been doing trachea dismemberment on conscious animals:

"It's a procedure that shouldn't have been done, frankly; when the OU found out about it they stopped it right away."

And even before our South American investigation footage was released, Rabbi Genack stated that "shackle and hoist" was "extremely stressful and probably painful" (Rabbi Genack in a lecture at the AskOU8 conference titled "The PETA Controversy," August 2006). Why then can't the OU just suspend its hechsher from these companies in light of these horrible abuses? There is still a paranoid mentality that we should never speak out publicly against our own community. Damage control is the priority. Discrediting the messenger seems to be the tactic of choice. Fortunately, initiatives like Hekhsher Tzedek recognize that the only way to preserve the long-term credibility of the industry is to confront, admit, and resolve the most egregious issues in order to avoid the embarrassment of the magnitude that just occurred with AgriProcessors.

Philip's Favorite Vegan: jewcy friend, isa chandra moskowitzA bad but still necessary existential question: In front of you is a lake. In it, equidistant from you and from each other are a man and a dog. Both are drowning. The man is a total stranger. The dog belongs to your neighbor and is a kind, loving creature you really like. You're alone. You can only save one. You must act now. Which one do you save?

PS: This is not a useful exercise. In all real-life cases, doing something to reduce the suffering of animals is not at the expense of some human interest. For example, banning the cutting out of ear tags on conscious animals (this cruel procedure was done at the Rubashkins' Local Pride slaughterhouse in Nebraska) would not result in the ear mutilations of humans. Except in some fantasy/hypothetical situation, it is never the choice of one at the expense of the other. In real life, it is often the opposite. It is no coincidence that the Rubashkins, whose slaughterhouses are so abusive to animals, also extended this lack of compassion to exploit humans.

Carry the thought to medical research. Obviously, some medical research can be done using computer models and the like. But some cannot be done that way. The only way to do the research is to test on animals. In one hypothetical case, a particular drug that reverses Alzheimer's Disease needs to be tested before going into human trials. The only way to test this new drug is on animals – there really is no other way. If animal testing is not done, the drug will not be used to help humans, to alleviate human suffering and to save human lives. But if animal testing is done, the animals will suffer. Researchers will do everything possible to curtail that suffering. Still animals will suffer. What should be done?

HS: Experimenting on animals is not an effective way of advancing human health. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration reported in 2004 that 92 percent of drugs tested that were found to be safe and effective in animals were unsafe or ineffective in humans. Drug trials on animals are not predictive of efficacy in humans. Reactions to drugs vary enormously from species to species. Penicillin kills guinea pigs despite being inactive in rabbits; aspirin kills cats and causes birth defects in rats, mice, guinea pigs, dogs, and monkeys; and morphine, a depressant in humans, stimulates goats, cats, and horses. Sir Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin, remarked, "How fortunate we didn't have these animal tests in the 1940s, for penicillin would probably have never been granted a license, and probably the whole field of antibiotics might never have been realized."

If you could tell every Jew only one thing about why you spend your lives working to reduce animal suffering, what would it be?

PS & HS: Unthinkable things are happening to animals all over the world, right now, because people are paying for them to happen. Our work helps open a window so that people can view these uncomfortable scenes and hopefully reconsider the necessity of their turkey bacon or fur-trimmed coat.

Besides each other, who is your favorite Jewish vegan? Why?

HS: Alicia Silverstone. She walks the walk and has been a super-strong advocate for