Joel Teitelbaum, the Rebbe of Satmar and the most coercive of all modern day ultra-Orthodox leaders, passed away 29 years ago this month.  A vociferous anti-Zionist, Teitelbaum is known for having exhorted his followers to stay in Europe.  Later, as the Nazis approached, he was one of many Hungarian ultra-Orthodox rabbis who told their flocks to remain calm.  There is nothing to worry about, these rabbis announced, God will protect us because of our anti-Zionism.

Unfortunately for Teitelbaum’s followers, God didn’t go along with his promises. While most of his followers perished in Auschwitz, Teitelbaum went into hiding and later escaped to freedom. He did not do this through his own ingenuity or through some divine intervention – Joel Teitelbaum, uber-anti-Zionist, was saved from certain death by a Zionist leader.

That Zionist, Rudolph Kasztner, organized the largest Holocaust rescue of Jews by another Jew.  He did it with smoke and mirrors, with bravado and slight of hand. Kasztner saved thousands of his people by negotiating with Adolph Eichmann – short of Hitler, the most feared Nazi in the world. Oskar Schindler of Schindler’s List fame said Kasztner was the bravest man he knew.

After the War, Teitelbaum lived for a brief time in Palestine, where he became a leader of the rabidly anti-Zionist, rabidly anti-modern, Edah HaCharedit. When you read about Jerusalem video stores being torched or Internet cafés trashed, chances are the thugs who did it are proudly affiliated with Edah HaCharedit.

Teitelbaum couldn’t stand what he saw as the ‘destruction’ of the Holy Land by the irreligious and imperfectly religious – in practice, pretty much everyone who wasn’t a Teitelbaum follower or acolyte. So, in 1946, Teitelbaum moved to Brooklyn and set up what was then his small hasidic court.  Teitelbaum found America’s Orthodox welcoming, and America’s Jewish welfare agencies helped to resettle many of his followers in Brooklyn.

You’ve probably heard the stories about these American Jews – the same ones who were so hospitable and supportive of Teitelbaum when he first arrived: Pious Jews fled pogroms in Eastern Europe.  The need to make a living in America forced them to give up strict Shabbat observance and other Orthodox practices. Their children, lacking the example of fully Orthodox parents, became even less observant. If those pious Jews had just kept Shabbat, the story goes, their descendants would still be Orthodox today.

The flip side to this story is another story you’ve also probably heard: Seemingly pious Eastern European Jews board a ship bound for America. As the ship leaves the harbor and gets beyond sight of the shore, they cut off their beards and pitch their tefillin into the sea.

Both stories probably happened, although the first was probably far more common than the second. But even though these are iconic stories, neither really tells the tale of Eastern European immigration to the United States. That is because both are based on a lie – the idea that these immigration ships were filled with characters out of Broadway’s Fiddler On The Roof: long-bearded shtetl-dwellers with untrimmed earlocks, whose only brush with secular culture had taken place moments before.

By the 1920s, the masses of Eastern European Jews were secular or only nominally religious. Emancipation, which spread throughout Europe during the 19th century,  made belonging to a religious community – and following that community’s laws – optional. Ultra-Orthodox Judaism, itself a reactionary movement to the Enlightenment that preceded Emancipation, lost its state-sponsored coercive powers as did all forms of Orthodoxy. And Jews, no longer forced to be Orthodox or ultra-Orthodox, left Orthodoxy by the tens of thousands as a result.

Most Jews who came to America during the great wave of immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were neither ultra-Orthodox or rabidly secular – they were somewhere in between. They were Jews with a respect for Jewish law and tradition, but they were also Jews who appreciated and enjoyed secular culture and the freedoms it gave them.

The Orthodoxy they found in America was more suited to this hybrid outlook than the Orthodoxy of Eastern Europe. Never subject to state enforcement of religious law, American Jews – even American Orthodox Jews – took any type of religious coercion badly.

These new immigrants developed their own versions of Orthodoxy, too, founding shuls grouped around country or city of origin. In part, they did this to preserve the unique customs they grew up with. But they also did it for coarser, more practical reasons. These new shuls also served as affinity associations, and the social networking they provided helped immigrants land jobs and acclimate to American life. These shuls were rarely coercive – you paid your dues and you helped out with a minyan when you were able, and you were in.

These old and new American Orthodox Jews founded yeshivas like Torah Vodaas in Brooklyn and what would later become Yeshiva University in Manhattan. They also founded or helped to found many of the leading national Jewish organizations of their day, including what we now know as the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and other welfare organizations meant to help suffering Jews in Eastern Europe and beyond.

Despite this, and despite the fact that these same American Orthodox Jews would be instrumental in rescuing and resettling Eastern European Jews during and after the Holocaust, Teitelbaum rejected American Orthodoxy as impure and watered down by compromise and modernity.  He sought to impose Edah HaCharedit standards on it, demanding stricter forms of kashrut and the rejection of all secular values, including basic secular education. He created a community virtually walled off from the rest of society. And, when that was not enough, he created another in Upstate New York that now carries his name.To this day, when Satmar hasidim choose to leave Brooklyn or Kiryas Joel and the hasidic life, they often leave it illiterate in English. An entire organization, Footsteps, exists primarily to help these former hasids adapt to American life.

Yet the pull of a closed life and the allure of rebuilding a fantasy version of pre-Holocaust Satmar Jewish life was strong. Teitelbaum’s group grew to be largest hasidic court in America, although that growth has far more to do with the fertility and fruitfulness of its members (not to mention the difficulties those members face when defecting) than it does with the attractiveness of its lifestyle to outsiders.

Like the Edah HaCharedit, Teitelbaum and the movement he founded are ultra-Orthodoxy unvarnished, presented without PR agencies or concern for anyone else’s opinion.

Although he had opportunities to do so, Joel Teitelbaum never thanked the man who saved his life. Teitelbaum even refused to acknowledge that a Zionist had saved him. His pat answer when pressed was that he was saved by God, not by man, and would discuss the issue no further. Perhaps most shockingly, despite the failure of his theology and the success of Israel, Teitelbaum continued his anti-Zionist agitation, becoming the leading anti-Zionist in the world.

He showed little if any respect for the American Orthodox community that initially welcomed him, and he eventually shunned its leaders just as he shunned their schools, shuls, and organizations.

Many of the men and women who immigrated to pre-Holocaust America did so to flee men like Teitelbaum and the extremism that so often surrounds them.  That did not mean they threw their Judaism into the sea.  It meant they wanted to live a life free from religious enforcers and from antisemitism – a life where they could rise or fall based on their merits, not on their religious observance. In short, they wanted an American life, not an ultra-Orthodox one.

In a fit of rabid theodicy unmatched in modern times, Teitelbaum ultimately blamed Zionism for the Holocaust itself.

From: Ben Karlin
To: Elizabeth Wurtzel

I’m not sure you are going to get your handbag this way. Go for it! Just put it out there that you want one. Why beat around the bush?

Everything I want is vague and ill-defined. That goes for life goals too. I have no ability whatsoever to look into the future and conjure a picture of what my life will be – or even what I want it to be. Please read this in as un-angsty voice as possible. It does not make me nervous. Just a bitch to shop for.

I am working on a bunch of crap for HBO. Though that is not how I pitched it to them. I presented it in a manner that would make them think it is going to be quite good. I am writing a pilot about the world’s 237th richest man. We have another show, written by someone else, about a UFO alien death cult set in northern Wisconsin, and a third, loosely based on my book, which is a comedy-variety show built around the theme of failed relationships. As much as I loved working on a daily show, there is something about the promise and possibility of developing multiple ideas that thrills me more. Like, even though I ground myself down to a nub running multiple shows, the idea of having multiple shows is still thrilling. This inability to learn from past experience could be labeled either “boundless enthusiasm” or “fatal flaw.”

I really don’t want to get into a New York neighborhood apologia. In the 9 years I have been here I have lived in the West Village, Hell’s Kitchen, Greenpoint, Greenwich Village proper, off the Bowery in Noho, Clinton Hill and Fort Greene. What does that say about me other than settle the fuck down? There were things I loved about each place, though I loved Hell’s Kitchen least. Right now, I do live in Brooklyn, ambivalently. Don’t hate me for it. Hate me for a number of other reasons, which I would be more than happy to elucidate herein.

I am not now, nor have I ever been a birkenstock wearer. Here, however, for the purposes of partial disclosure, are some things I have worn or done that embarrass me in retrospect, though I stop short of regret:

1. Wore an earring briefly in high school, and again in college
   
2. Goatee for about a week, also in college
   
3. Wore a bandana in that hippee-helmet kind of way, though at a summer camp, which makes it slightly less obnoxious.
   
4. Frequently wore white tube socks with sneakers and shorts while not engaging in athletic activity
   
5. Killed a man just to watch him die

One of those things actually does not embarrass me.

Next: What the memoirist and the comedy writer have in common

It’s Friday night in Brooklyn and I’m on a reconnaissance mission to finally check out a venue that has local brownstone residents buzzing. Tucked away on busy Atlantic Avenue between a string of antique showrooms and overpriced boutique stores, there's a new high-end cocktail lounge that's been four years in the making. Unlike many nightspots with arbitrary names, this bar's moniker references the life of the building whose birth date and previous name are still engraved on the original façade. Welcome to Talmud Torah Beth Jacob Joseph est. 1917, now known as Deity.

Entering Deity: it's a great place to renew your bat mitzvah!Deity is the vision of financial consultant Caio Dunson (pron: Kuy-yu) and his fashion-designer wife Kristine. They bought the dilapidated building, which had not seen shulgoers for over 30 years, in 2003. The space had been an antique warehouse in the interim. The couple, with the help of family, friends and talented Brooklyn artists, tirelessly transformed the interior while consciously preserving the integrity of the building. They turned the top two levels into their residence. The bar below, as they see it, is like an extension of their living room.

The exterior hasn't changed much since the early 1900’s when Yeshiva students entered the hallowed building to study Gemorah and daven in its synagogue. Hebrew letters are inscribed into the limestone while decorative Magen Davids encircle the entrance. Tonight, a guy in a fedora hat smokes outside the wrought iron gates and a stylish brunette hostess in a red trench coat invites partygoers into the new sanctuary.

Continue reading...

Kars 4 Kids: The ubiquitious posters don't say where the money's goingIn Brooklyn, 150 residents were evicted from an illegally converted loft building after the fire department discovered an "illegal matzo factory" in the basement. Apparently, the grain used in baking matzo is a threat because it's potentially combustible. The residents have no idea when they'll be allowed to return.

Meanwhile, Kars 4 Kids, a nonprofit that advertises heavily in the New York area, says it uses car donations to "provide food, clothing, education and guidance to children," but it doesn't mention that all the money is channeled into Oorah, Inc., which provides religious education to children of non-observant Jews. On Oorah's website, the Post reports, the charity brags that it has an "'80 percent success rate' teaching its clients 'to keep themselves apart from the gentiles.'"

Here's a heads up about what promises to be an amazing show from our friends at the ever-hip Wooster Collective. Curated by Michael DeFeo, tonight's opening at Ad Hoc Art in Brooklyn features 40 of the most recognized graffiti and street artists showcasing works they're not typically known for.

Breaking news from the Times:

Exxon Mobil Cleanup Effort Continues on Brooklyn Spill:

The Brooklyn spill, which resulted from an industrial explosion in 1950, released an estimated 17 million gallons of oil and oil products, polluted the soil, left traces of toxic chemicals in Newtown Creek, led to years of community and environmental outcry and became the basis of several continuing lawsuits.

Nearly eight million gallons remain beneath the Exxon Mobil property and nearby properties along Kingsland Avenue, though the contamination cannot be seen or smelled. How long it will take to get rid of the remaining material is unclear. “We’ll be here until the job is done and done right,” said Barry Wood, a spokesman for Exxon Mobil.

Having begun the cleanup effort almost twenty years ago, do-gooder, community-minded Exxon Mobil is still churning along in ridding Greenpoint, Brooklyn of its petrotoxins. Maybe by 2027 Newtown Creek will no longer resemble rainbowy puddles near gas stations.

Apparently, cleaning oil spills progresses with the same efficiency as lawsuits. Decades pass. Platform shoes come and go and come again. The Red Sox win the World Series. Multiple wars happen.

Despite its cleanup effort, Exxon Mobil remains under scrutiny. It was one of five companies cited in a lawsuit filed by the New York attorney general’s office on Tuesday seeking to compel a faster cleanup. The other four were BP, Chevron, KeySpan and Phelps Dodge. Two other lawsuits resulting from the spill, one filed by Riverkeeper, an environmental group, and another filed by local residents, are pending.

• Stephanie Nolen's 28 Stories of AIDS in Africa affirms the prevalence and urgency of the virus in light of corrupt, AIDS-denying governments. The Guardian writes, "This is a call to arms, to a battle that we should all have been fighting for a very long time." [Guardian Unlimited]
• Kaui Hart Hemmings's debut novel of a patriarch's privleged Hawaiian life--speedboats and beachclubs and alcoholism--torn apart by a terrible accident and gripping middle age. [The New Yorker]
• Brooklyn resident Susanna Moore's new novel The Big Girls takes place in a women's prison and describes sexual torture, but this author's sunny, bobo life is anything but dark. [The New York Times]
• In The Price of Fire, independent journalist Ben Dangl writes of Bolivia from the time of the indigenous uprisings against Spanish rule through the Evo Morales administration's first year in office. [Z Magazine]
• In Leonard Michaels's newly collected stories--"part of that astonishing flowering of American Jewish writing that includes Bellow, Malamud, Mailer and Roth"--sex and betrayal in traditional short-story form give way to an "urban pastoral prose poem" and a collage-like list story of the author's immigrant family and concentration camps. [The Nation]

Someone discovered that there is a street in Brooklyn's very Jewish Manhattan Beach area that is indirectly named after Hitler, well according to the Jewish Blogmeister anyways.

Old-School Dead Guys All Look The SameIt was recently discovered that Austin Corbin, a 19th century Brooklyn Land Developer and one time head of the Long Island Railroad was also an outspoken anti-Semite, and president of the American Society of the Suppression of Jews. There is now a movement to rectify this situation.

This movement is also known as paranoid people with too much time on their hands. Besides, Corbin's Sun sign was in Cancer. Of course the guy had issues.

Rav Shmuel is no Weird Al. There I said it.

I promise I’m not a prude, but I’ve always thought single sex gyms make a lot of sense. You’re sweaty and gross and trying to focus on various muscle groups—and if you’re not being ogled by some random guy in jogging shorts you’re ogling the shirtless guy lifting weights. The hormones are literally in the air, and there’s that weird competitive vibe, too. Gyms are, by definition, immodest, so it’s not hard to believe that the ultra-Orthodox community hasn’t been interested in them until recently. But now, things are changing.
The Kosher Gym in Brooklyn: Oh so heimishe
In Brooklyn, you can go to the Kosher Gym on Coney Island Ave for a “professional, though heimishe, environment” to work out. There are separate facilities for men and women (yay!), personal training, babysitting, and a Torah Tape library where you can borrow recorded lectures from a variety of rabbis. The Torah Tape library is especially important when you consider that the KosherGym doesn’t have any televisions lest you catch sight of the secular world or a soap opera while you run on the treadmill.

I’ll admit, when I’m at the gym I allow myself to read trashy magazines and watch E! so I’m not sure I’d be happy at KosherGym, but the next time I’m in Jerusalem I really want to check out their version, also called Kosher Gym, although I don’t think the companies are related. The Israeli Kosher Gym puts a more Jewish spin on their atmosphere, bragging that “Not only is the ‘Kosher Gym' a flash of color in the monochrome Givat Shaul neighborhood, but it has also brought an energy boost to the religious community at large.” They also remind us that, “At Kosher gym, we don't only cater to the fitness of your body - we worry about the well-being of your soul too.”

I can’t decide if that’s creepy or cool. The Israeli Kosher Gym was just written up in the Jerusalem Post, and the article is full of more things that straddle the awesome/awkward fence, like a personal trainer talking about how she works with women to help strengthen their lower back and pelvic floor “which tend to weaken after several births.” It quotes a member who has ten children, and ends with a different trainer talking about how at the Kosher Gym women aren’t working out to get rockin’ abs and a killer ass, “They really want to be healthier. When someone is working to get a perfect body, no matter what her motivation is, eventually she'll become competitive and angry at not reaching her goal. That doesn't happen here. Here you'll find a greater emotional completeness.”

I’m not sure if I believe that. Just because you’re living under a snood and a mountainous velvet dress doesn’t mean you can’t be vain. But it does sound like the Kosher Gym crowd is a lot less likely to judge based on size, certainly in the women’s section, where most of the clientele is pregnant or gave birth recently. I wonder how many pregnant women go to the “eastern dance” (read: bellydancing) class.

Mostly I just think it’s great that the frum community is encouraging fitness.

Itche Kadoozy: Better than BarneyBuried in Brooklyn, just a few streets over from Avenue Q, there are some other puppets you might want to check out. Itche Kadoozy and friends!

The Forward has a piece about the Jewish puppetry phenomenon this week, and since I’ve not seen the show, I’ll leave it to better journalists to give you the scoop. But I couldn’t resist this plug. It just sounds so hilarious!

In an interview with the Forward, Taub said he created Itche — the show’s rabbi and one of its main characters — by accident, during his time as a counselor at a Hasidic summer camp. Disappointed by the way his first hand-sewn puppet turned out, he purchased a book on puppet making and re-created “Itche” (who, though only 4 in puppet years, is presented as a 60-ish rabbi on the show and boasts a long gray beard, a black yarmulke and a raspy voice).

When Taub shared his invention with Jonathan Goorvich, his childhood friend, Goorvich was “blown away.” Taub then taught him puppet making, and Goorvich created a puppet that reflected himself: casual college student with open plaid shirt, baseball cap and dark glasses. After the two friends improvised and taped these two puppets together, Jono was born: the show’s second main character, a secular Jew who lives in the rabbi’s basement. The characters befriend each other, and together they experience wacky adventures and mishaps with esoteric and practical lessons to be learned.

Any wacky hypercolor puppets inspired equally by Jim Henson and the Lubavitcher Rebbe have GOT to be worth a journey to Brooklyn, right?

C’mon! One of you has to be willing to go and scout this out for me, report back. Any takers? I’ll (personally) buy your ticket!

You can check it out online too!

Bubbe MaryashaThe Brooklyn bubbe who survived Russian pogroms, Communism, and Nazis, died on Wednesday.

"Bubbe" Maryasha Garelik, who lived through the entire 20th century, surviving the pogroms of czarist Russia, Soviet anti-Semitism and Nazi terror and then dispensing her wisdom to thousands of Lubavitch Jews, has died. She was 106.

She died Wednesday night in Brooklyn's Crown Heights neighborhood and was buried Thursday at the Old Montefiore Cemetery near the grave of the ultra Orthodox sect's revered "rebbe," Rabbi Menachem Schneerson.

I'm waiting for the Jewish newspaper obituaries. The AP simply has this at the end of the article (emphasis added):

Some of Garelik's more than 500 descendants are Lubavitch emissaries in Australia, China, England, France, Panama, Poland and South Africa.

I'd really like to see that broken down by grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great grandchildren. But, wow. Just--wow. My grandmother's descendants haven't hit triple digits yet, and aren't likely to for a long, long time.

How do you know you work in Jewish media? Because a porn star and her mother engender fewer riffs than "No decent Mexican in New York." User emmanuelle bounces her own thoughts off this ever-expanding soft shell topic:

i'd hate to run into too many gringos out in red hook, but the cute mexican grannies might as well reap the benefits of rich "hipsters". if you haven't already read about on chowhounds or in the new york times, the red hook ball fields, near the pool, are amazing. women straight from mexico are cooking giant quesadillas, tacos with a giant slab of carne asada. don't think they have guacamole, but everything else is authentic and delicious. there are also venezuelans arepas and ceviche among so many other tasty things

Yet more evidence that Red Hook is the new Williamsburg/Astoria/Jackson Heights/Long Island City/Lower East Side you've already been priced out of...

Speaking of which, and in the interest of my own rapidly deteriorating liver/Lebenstrum, I want to take a Shvitz poll: WHAT'S THE BEST BAR IN BROOKLYN?