OH! Never mind!

I've heard about the hookers in NYC and in Israel (elsewhere too, I would imagine), but an adult bookstore that caters to that clientele, to the extent of having a discrete door for them - love it!

This is what comes of enforced gender segregation.They grow up inadequately socialized and become obsessed with sex as a result. In the end you get porn emporia with back doors (how Freudian is that?) on the one hand, and, on the other, a rabbi screaming bloody murder about a wig store that displays pictures of (chos v'sholem!) women actually wearing the wigs!

Those wacky Hareidim!

FACT, they are the most loving, giving, helping, charitable people the world has ever known, & that's what irks so many of you.

Right. That's what irks us.

Well, it's a good thing Mother Theresa isn't alive to hear that she's been outclassed by a group of Yidden in Boro Park and B'nei Brak.

Nancy - I'm so sorry you've gone through everything you have, then to be subjected to all of this.

Every time this man opens his mouth, it's a national and cultural embarrassment. He belongs to a small cadre of Jews - the others being Klinghoffer, Lappin, Ben Stein and Berlinski - who either work for or hang out with evangelical Christians. One can only wonder about their motives (I think they enjoy being the evangelicals' "house Jews" - lots of perks and attention - but that's mere speculation). In any case, we should by no means be giving any of them the attention they seem to crave so desperately.

LOL!

(I didn't know Banner was a Jewish name.)

The post says Anonymous but the tone and words say Jeff...

That was not me. I log in before I post comments. Although I've been coming back from time to time to read new comments, I stopped participating because most of the opinions here are worthless. You really didn't understand my points, but, for the record (and regarding your comments about racism), I accept the definition of a Jew as someone who was born of a Jewish mother, or who has converted, formally - not merely joined a Messianic congregation and begun calling him/herself a "Jew". I don't agree with those who say that a Messianic Jew (if a Jew by birth) is no longer a Jew; however, he/she is not practicing Judaism, but a variant form of evangelical Christianity. If a Jew were to convert to mainstream Christianity, I would still have problems with granting him citizenship, but I'd be open to hearing arguments on either side. However, in the case of a Jew who becomes an evangelical or Messianic, and is blithely happy to abandon millions of other Jews to hell for all of eternity - I would certainly deny Israeli citizenship to such a person. As I said before, in adopting a belief in salvific exclusivism, that person has separated himself from the Jewish people.

On the imagined "Day of Judgment", they'll be cheerfully waving all the rest of us off to hell. But, in the meantime, when the American winters become too harsh, and they want to emigrate, all of a sudden, it's "Let me in; I'm one of you"? Screw them.

Halakhically a ger is obligated to accept every one of the treatises of the Halakha of the specific branch of Judaism they are converting into, even if they aren't (and certainly wouldn't be) familiar with all of them.

HalfSours, what are you talking about? As an Orthodox Jew, you don't even recognize that there are other "branches" of Judaism. And, if you're referring to the different flavors of Orthodoxy - surely, you can't be saying that if a Hareidi rabbi oversees her conversion, she's obligated to assume every chumra they can devise. What if he caught her listening to Mozart? Or going online? Or driving? Could he revoke her membership card for that?

Is this position even halakhic?

Anonymous, I disagree with virtually everything you've just said. I wouldn't even know where to begin.

An article by Arthur Caplan, Director of the Center for Bioethics at U Penn, in which he argues that Expelled's attempt to link evolution with the Holocuast is itself a form of Holocuast denial: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24239755/

To lay blame for the Holocaust upon Charles Darwin is to engage in a form of Holocaust denial that should forever make Ben Stein the subject of scorn not because of his nudnik concern that evolution somehow undermines morality but because in this contemptible movie he is willing to subvert the key reason why the Holocaust took place — racism — to serve his own ideological end. Expelled indeed.

 

Anonymous,

It's one thing to hold to a literal interpretation of the Torah (although that in itself was never considered to be intrinsic to traditional Judaism; the Rambam was quite contemptuous of it). It is another thing entirely to work for and with Christian organizations whose goal is to use the Jewish people to trigger their apocalyptic scenario. In any case, our fundamentalists are much easier to ignore - they're a minority within a minority, they keep largely to themselves and they don't, outside of Israel, involve themselves in the political process. They aren't trying to legislate away anyone's civil liberties for the simple reason that most people are irrelevant to them.

Jeffrey Weaver,

There is no lack of fossil records to support evolution. I assume you're referring to the creationist claim that there are no fossils representing transitional forms. Not only are there plenty of them, but a number were predicted before they were discovered.