David Prashker: drops the F-bomb and gets firedTwo Jewish educators are out of jobs—and one is on the run—due to allegations of molestation and...dirty poems.

The first infraction seems fairly minor: David Prashker, director of the Toronto Leo Baeck Jewish Day School, was all but forced to quit his job in the wake of a scandal involving poetry he wrote decades ago and published on his personal website. Though the poetry has since been removed, the National Post summarizes it:

One poem explored a young man's heady sexual encounter and used the word "f---" several times, another included the verse "the first act of killing is the hardest" and "the second time is remarkably straightforward." It is not clear when the poetry was written--Mr. Prashker's Web site references material that dates back to 1973 -- and it has since been removed from his personal page.

Was Prashker foolish to publish such poetry on his personal website? Arguably, yes. If the poems in question were written years before he entered the school system though, it seems a tad unfair to penalize him. Writing some angsty poetry and dropping the f-bomb in 1973 isn't exactly the kind of thing that should get a man fired in 2008. If anything, it's the poor judgment demonstrated by putting his crude verse on the internet makes him seem like an idiot—not to mention a bad leader for a Jewish (or any) school.

On the opposite end of the spectrum we find Malka Leifer, former principal of an ultra-Orthodox school in inner Melbourne. The wife of a rabbi and mother of eight is being accused of all kinds of craziness, including the allegations that she "shared a bed" with her students, and that she molested girls at school and at camps. Parents also claim that one victim has attempted suicide.

Within 24 hours of being fired from the school, Leifer left Australia for Israel, and some parents seem to think the school paid for her flight.

There are also claims that Mrs. Leifer left Australia with up to $100,000 borrowed from a family within the community, two days before she flew to Israel. She is also alleged to have taken about $20,000 from a pool of money earned from some students' part-time jobs. The money, managed by Mrs. Leifer, was pooled in a community fund and then lent to people in need.

This is hardly the first case of teachers and principals being accused of molestation in Jewish schools. The Awareness Center has a frighteningly long list of similar cases from all around the world.

What’s striking about the gulf between these two stories is that in the case of Prashker it seems clear that a parent was out to get him, and would go to any lengths—including hacking into the school’s computer system—in order to defame the director’s name. In Leifer’s case, the molestation seems to have gone on for many years before girls spoke up, likely because of the stigma associated with sexual abuse in these communities.

The challenge facing the day school community is in creating an environment that's open enough that kids in day schools will come forward if something inappropriate is happening, but principals don’t have to be responsible for bad words (and bad poetry) they wrote decades ago.

On Friday I got a beat down from our friendly Annie Anonymous because I dared to use the words shit and pussy. Apparently, using bad words makes it difficult to distinguish between me and “illiterates collecting cardboard from dumpsters.”
Don't Be Mine: I prefer "Fuck Off" but I still think these are brilliant
I think Ms. (or Mr.) Anonymous needs to take a serious chill pill, but this gives me an opportunity to discuss something I’ve thought about a lot, actually. When is it okay to swear? Where can you drop the f-bomb, and when is a simple “damn” going to get you in trouble?*

First let’s take note of the word “swear” itself. There is, of course, a prohibition against swearing, that is, taking an oath, when doing so is unnecessary. The idea here is that you don’t want to take a vow in the name of God and then later forget about it or be unable to fulfill the vow, thus desecrating God’s name. Jews often get around this by saying “bli neder,” meaning, “but I’m not swearing to it,” when pledging to do something. This is also the reason we have Kol Nidre on Yom Kippur; it absolves us from any oaths we may have made and not fulfilled in relation to God.

That’s all well and good, but when I say shit I’m not invoking God, I’m just expressing something. Even when I say “Holy shit!” I’m generally using the holy part to add emphasis, not because I think there’s anything particularly holy about what just happened.

Maybe, like Annie (or Andrew) Anonymous, you’re thinking that someone who claims to be an observant Jew and a struggling writer should come up with a more artistic and oblique way of emphasizing my point. If that’s how you feel, then gosh darnit, you go girl! But me, I like “profanities” and I adore all kinds of colorful language. I’m not offended by the sex or poo they tend to refer to because sex and poo are a normal part of my life. Of course I wouldn’t bring “fuck” to a job interview, but Jewcy isn’t a job interview, it’s a forum for progressive Jewish thinking and debate.

If you’re looking for more discussion of when and where and why it’s okay to swear, check out the insightful post on badchristian.com. If, like me, you have a genuine interest in linguistics and how languages and linguists treat swear words, check out this list of posts on Language Log. If you’ve got a beef with hearing bad words on the radio, head to this brilliant (oh, hell, it’s fucking brilliant) article by Sarah Vowell, which points out, “You can't say "tits" on the radio, but you can say "Pamela Anderson Lee," and what's the difference? A film commentator can't say "shit," so she'll replace it with "Air Force One" instead. Rush Limbaugh can't say "cunt," so he uses "Hillary Rodham Clinton" as a substitute.”

It seems to me that’s the jist of the problem. We can substitute inoffensive words for the four-letter variety, but if I still mean poo when I say shit, what’s the point?

* In high school I once got in trouble for saying something was “screwed up,” a term that I chose simply because it seemed less offensive to me than “fucked up.” It never really occurred to me that screwing something and fucking something are essentially the same thing. My ultra-Orthodox teacher, however, made the connection very quickly, and actually had me wash my mouth out with soap. I can’t imagine what she would have thought if she’d heard me talking dirty to my boyfriend at the time…