Religion & Beliefs
Newsweek’s Rabbi Popularity Contest Takes Some Hits
By Tamar Fox / April 16, 2008
Newsweek came out with its second annual list of Top 50 Influential American rabbis, and this year started a list of the Top 25 Pulpit Rabbis. But alongside the lists, it printed an op-ed by Lisa Miller called "Is Your Rabbi Hot or Not?" that summarizes some of the criticism of the first list, and explains that the list of pulpit rabbis is a way of recognizing not just Madonna’s puppetmaster and the heads of various movements, but also rabbis who are particularly good at inspiring their congregants, nurturing growing communities, and are exceptional leaders. Miller was right when she speculated that the response to the list would cause storms to rival the ten plagues. Rabbi Jill Jacobs is already on record at Jspot complaining about how few women made it onto the lists (3/50 and 4/25).
Miller and the three guys who put together the list, (Gary Ginsberg, an executive at NewsCorp.; Michael Lynton, chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures, and Jay Sanderson, CEO of JTN Productions) claim their intent is to inspire the public, and help people find rabbis who are doing transformational work. It’s a nice thought, but ranking rabbis is different than ranking local sushi bars. For one thing, it’s telling that there are only 25 Top Pulpit Rabbis, but 50 Influential Rabbis. Pulpit rabbis seem to be inherently less important than rabbis who run major foundations or movements, even though the impact of a pulpit rabbi on your average Jew is much greater than the work of the guy who runs, say, Chabad.
And beyond that, what’s the point, really of ranking them? Maybe listing fifty rabbis with great influence in American society would be interesting, but keeping track of who drops from number 23 to 29 is perhaps not a productive way of dealing with a bunch of high maintenance power brokers. And what we certainly do not need in the American Jewish community is more animosity between movements and machers in the major communities.
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This morbid fascination with rankings and horse races connects directly to our limbic brains; an evergreen way to capture attention. Like watching an accident, we are almost incapable of ignoring a ranking list no matter what it is or who compiled it. Even though this rump rotisserie rabbi league, conceived and continued by a handful of Jewish Hollywood types, unsettles anyone raised religiously on the notion that rabbis are learned, modest and ranked on piety rather than publicity.
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Our need to turn rabbis into rock stars, facilitated by Newsweek’s need for content, and probably better Hollywood access, drives this pre-Passover gift to the chosen people. You can just image these smart-alecks sitting around and talking rabbi trash talk, the way millions of kids talk about their baseball cards, their favorite teams or players and their rotisserie league line-ups.
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In some ways it’s a sin. In other ways, it’s a guilty pleasure to dissect the list and the changes in rankings from year-to-year. I guess that’s what Newsweek is counting on.
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i was glad to see Eric Yoffie, Marc Gellman (my favorite Newsweek contributor), and Kerry Olitzky all returning for another year on the list. unfortunately, there was one who was left off the list that deserved to be on it: Orthodox Rabbi Jacob Rubenstein.
don't let the Orthodox title fool you: this is a guy who went zip-lining and scuba diving on vacations, quoted Bruce Springsteen and Lynard Skynard in his sermons, and saw the good in everyone whether they were Jewish or Gentile, gay or straight, so on and so on. he was also one of 15 Rabbis to be invited to the White House for the High Holidays in 2003. he was a close friend and confidant of mine for nearly 20 years. sadly, he and his wife were killed in a house fire last week (there's probably one article about this in at least every Jewish newspaper in the greater New York area). it has left a tremendous void in the Jewish community, but i have good memories of him. he had a great sense of humor, and i'm sure he would have gotten a kick out of this site.
Can we trade them all for UK Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks? His tranlsation of the prayerbook with commentary is wonderful.
I can't name fifty American rabbis *period*, much less the TOP fifty. Is there really anyone here who is impressed with rabbi Hier? I'd heard of him, but had no idea what he did. I googled him expecting some sort of actual Jewish theologian, but no, he's the director of the Weisenthal Center and of Moriah films, whatever the hell that is.
That's what I suppose I get for expecting that a more traditional rabbi might somehow take the top spot on this list, which is why I found the list of pulpit rabbis more interesting than Newsweek's article.
On a totally unrelated note I have to smirk a bit when say I personally know two people on each list. maybe I'm a total nerd for being proud of that fact but what can I say. Also if you are ever in Park Slope Brooklyn stop by Beth Elohim and meet Rabbi Bachman and and the CBE Rabbinic Intern Matt Soffer. They are both great men and very committed to Social Justice.
I think the list is bizarre and way too LA-centric, too, but I'm giving some credit to the guys who wrote it in the assumption that they know who's influential and who isn't. We may not have heard of Hier, but he may be able to get politicians and/or celebrities on the phone at a moment's notice in a way that others on the list may not. I don't know. I honestly think the concept of the list is ridiculous.
There seems to be a substantial LA-centric bias to the "influential" list. In what sense is R' Hier influential? Does anyone outside of LA know or care about the Skirball center, the base of R' Herscher, their #6? R' Wexler is #3 because he's head of the American Jewish University, but does he have any national presence at all? (By contrast, R' Artson, who's head of the rabbinical school within AJU, and does have a national reputation, is only #31.)
The list is quirky in other ways also. R' Wohlberg is supposedly #18 after not even appearing on last year's list; he's the incoming president of the RA, but so what?
Although I don't identify as Reform and thus can't be accused of bias toward it, I would've ranked Rabbi Eric Yoffie, not Marvin Hier, as #1. Rabbi Yoffie is, after all, the primary spokesperson for what is now the largest Jewish denomination in America. Not to devalue Rabbi Hier's important work, but it seems to me that R' Yoffie's name pops up much more frequently when media types want a "Jewish perspective" on something or another.
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