Noah Feldman

No life partners allowed: Does that mean Romy would have to leave Michelle home?Last week both the Forward and the Jewish Week reported on a scandal at Yeshiva of Flatbush, a prestigious Modern Orthodox school. In December the school hosted a ten-year reunion for the class of 1997, but openly gay graduates were sent a letter explaining that they couldn’t bring their partners to the reunion. Specifically, the letter said:

The Director of our Alumni Association forwarded your request to bring your partner with you to the 10th anniversary reunion this coming Saturday night. As previously stated to you, we welcome your attendance and look forward to your participation. However, your partner cannot attend.

The policy of the school and that is enforced is that only graduates and their spouses (engagements are recognized) are invited. We cannot acknowledge or define your partner relationship as one that falls under this policy. We kindly ask you to respect and follow our Yeshivah’s policy and attend the reunion without your partner. 

Some gay graduates chose not to attend. Others created a Facebook group called "Open Flatbush Reunions - End Censorship and Alumni Profiling" which now has over 330 members, including, according to the Jewish Week “a Nobel Prize winner who attended the school over six decades ago and a former principal of the school, Rabbi Alan Stadtmauer, who resigned from his position in 2004 as he came to terms with being gay himself.”

The best response I’ve seen so far is on Jewschool, where a gay alum of the Yeshiva of Flatbush writes about why and how the school is being hypocritical. My favorite passage:

Until this particular issue came up however, everyone was welcome at the high school reunion. There was no “tsitsiss check” or religious litmus test, no approved favorite movie or banned political opinion. People showed up, they brought guests, they shmoozed and ate and re-connected with their classmates. It didn’t matter what you named your kids. And it didn’t matter what halacha you may have broken in your life. Nobody asked you to testify as to which hashgacha certified your existence as kosher.

So when Mr. Eisenberg, the administrator, claims that “there are standards of halacha that guide the Orthodox community. All of our graduates are welcome to attend our reunion but only those involved in recognized halachic relationships may register to attend as a couple,” I don’t buy it. The standards of halacha that guide the Orthodox community surely exist — but they cover a lot more than the gender of who you date and marry. Modesty rules. Ethical business rules. Rules for sabbath observance. Sexual practices of heterosexual couples.

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You can find countdown lists all over the place this time of year; this morning I watched numbers 25 through 19 of E!'s 25 Most Memorable Swimsuit Moments of 2007. Jewcy's list has a lot less Lindsay Lohan, but only here will you find our contributers plus other assorted machers listing their favorite Jewish moments of the past non-Jewish calendar year.

1.) Andy Bachman becoming the rabbi of Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn. I know this might not seem like a big deal, but it is—having a visionary taking up the reins at a very traditional institution in the heart of the Jewish world, and then turning that institution on its head. Big, big deal, at least when we think about which rabbis will be running the next generation of Jewish communities.—Jordie Gerson

2.) Encounter—the best thing to happen to the american jewish community in years.—Jordie Gerson

3.) Encounter, an "educational organization dedicated to providing Jewish diaspora leaders from across the religious and political spectrum with exposure to Palestinian life," brought close to 120 Jewish leaders to Bethlehem and Hebron this year, including many "unusual suspects" from Orthodox and centrist to right-wing backgrounds. Encounter groups remain the only significant Jewish presence in Palestinian areas of the West Bank since before the second intifada, other than military personnel.—Elisa Albert

4.) I'm Not There. Bobby Zimmerman is a Jew for the ages: as an artist he remains intensely committed, un-pin-down-able, and honest; as an inspiration to other artists he is a gift that keeps on giving.—Elisa Albert

5.) Shalom Auslander (sort of) thumbs his nose at God's wrath, and gives us all a peek into his religion-warped head in the process.—Elisa Albert

6) Peter Cole received a MacArthur Genius Grant in 2007. Cole's many great projects include arranging a reading tour that brought the Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali and the Israeli poet Aharon Shabtai, together, to a bunch of places in the US. Cole is a truly brilliant artist, a translator, publisher (Ibis Editions), poet, and all around incredible force for good. Or, in the words of the MacArthur folks: "In a region mired in conflict, Cole's dedication to the literature of the Levant offers a unique and inspiring vision of the cultural, religious, and linguistic interactions that were and are possible among the peoples of the Middle East."—Edward Schwarzchild

7.) Spending New Year's Eve in Jerusalem.—Maya Wainhaus

8.) Becoming Facebook friends with my 17-year-old Orthodox cousin.—Maya Wainhaus

9.) This season of Curb Your Enthusiasm.—Maya Wainhaus

10.) Traveling in Israel with Livnot U'Lehibanot.—Maya Wainhaus

11.) In 2007 we launched VeryHotJews and learned there were a lot of kindred spirits out there who shared our love of sexy Hebes, flowery prose, succulently un-Kosher bacon, singing classic rock as loudly as possible and sticking it to Hitler. To our awesome community of smokin’-hot M.O.T.s and Jew-loving gentiles: We love you and fully expect 2008 to be a massive kvell-a-thon.—Simon Glickman

12.) Taylor Mays, #2, University of Southern California free safety. This second team All-American has the concentration of a Talmudic scholar and takes people out like a Mossad hitman (not bad, eh?). He is an incredible football player who credits his maturity to when he was bar mitzvahed. I was at this game in the freezing rain.—Pat Sauer

13.) Philip Roth, for Exit Ghost and the metaphorical death of Nathan Zuckerman, but also for Roth's literal life. Give the man the Nobel Prize and let him die in peace.—Pat Sauer

14.) Norman Mailer, for dying with pugnacity, if not dignity, winning the Bad Sex in Fiction award for his final novel The Castle in the Forest, where Adolph is born of incest, gets his rocks off watching bodies burn and is fascinated by poop. In The New Republic, Ruth Franklin said, "The reader strong-stomached enough to make it to the end of Norman Mailer's new novel, which comprises nearly five hundred of the most revolting pages in recent American fiction, will discover a refreshing oasis of reason."—Pat Sauer

15.) The Coen brothers are awesome for returning to form after the stylized nonsense of Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers. Cormac McCarthy wouldn't have seemed like their milieu, but they took his stark hard-rain's-gonna'-fall ethos and made a grim poem on the whether violence will always win out in the end—it will, even if decent men like Tommy Lee Jones try and believe otherwise. No Country for Old Men has a bit of the Coens' black comedy, but it's deeper and angrier, and other than Javier Bardem's ridiculous Prince Valiant haircut, it's got few of their old prankster impulses.—Pat Sauer

16.) Benny Shassburger, the office everyman whom the audience was meant to identify with in Joshua Ferris' great debut novel Then We Came to the End. Ferris took a big literary chance by writing it in a royal "we" narrator that made everyone part of the downsizing. Thus, Benny with his "corkscrew curls" and "quick laugh" is our stand-in, the amiable fellow who deserves to be the keeper of the totem pole...plus he's got a MySpace page.—Pat Sauer

17.) A couple of entries who would make my Best and Worst list: Noah Feldman and Shalom Auslander, The Bad Boys whose public criticism of various aspects of Orthodox life was embarrassing, annoying, mean-spirited and worth pondering (at least privately).—Gary Rosenblatt

18.) Harvey Weinstein married Georgina Chapman. I'm not sure if that falls under awesome or disaster.—Amy Odell

SEE ALSO: The Biggest Disasters of Jewish 2007

This is, of course, a pretty subjective list, not to mention highly personal (I bet you haven't Facebook-friended Maya's Orthodox cousin.) Add your own best moments of 2007 in the comments section.

Vive la difference: The event flier Last Thursday night, NYU hosted a debate between Birthright Israel founder Michael Steinhardt, rabbi and TV personality Shmuley Boteach, and law professor Noah Feldman on the question “Are Jews different?” But as commenter agenious put it over in the Noah Feldman thread, what took place wasn’t really a debate. (I suspect agenius and I don’t agree on much, but we’re together on that.) It was more like a chance for three very different Jews to air their beliefs about Judaism, followed by a mini-drubbing of Noah Feldman by the NYU audience.

Rabbi Shmuley, who spoke first, testified to the virtues of Torah-based Jewish values. I can't top Jewlicious's hilarious description, so I'm just going to quote it: "Shmuley Boteach is, and I do not exaggerate, an evangelical Protestant minister with a beard and hand gestures." The girl sitting next to me, wearing a sensible skirt and loafers that I can only describe as tsniut, leaned over and whispered “Isn’t he great? I was at his house for dinner last Shabbat.”

Michael Steinhardt, up next, argued that Jewish values are indeed worthy, but not because of the Torah. He believes that Jews developed a series of core values over the centuries: education, tzedakah, belief in the here and now, a beneficial sense of outsiderness, a strong sense of group responsibility, and an ability to succeed any society based on individualism and meritocracy. These six values make Jews special, he explained, so we can really scrap the rest, including the Torah. At this most of the crowd gasped, and the NYU freshman in front of me put down her Sidekick and reapplied her lip gloss.

Noah Feldman: Dapper! Noah Feldman was up next. (“He’s so cute!” said my new Orthodox friend. She was right—if Tiger Beat made pin-up posters of Jewish intellectuals, he’d be their best seller.) He put forth a third opinion: There’s no point in preserving Jewish values if they’re not worth saving. Rather than argue about how best to sell them to the 12 million unaffiliated Jews of the world, we should be examining them critically, to see what good they do. “We are not in the business of preservation for its own sake,” he said, “at least we ought not to be.”

To me, this makes perfect sense. I should reveal my biases: I’m one of those 12 million unaffiliated Jews. My family belongs to a Reform synagogue which I attend twice a year on the high holidays because, like a lot of Jewish girls, I’m fairly close with my parents. I had a Bat Mitzvah the year My So-Called Life debuted; the latter had a much greater influence on my adolescence. I’ve tried Shabbat on occasion and I basically enjoy it, but I enjoy bacon-wrapped shrimp too. My mind is open: I’m curious about Judaism and I think about it constantly. But nothing has ever successfully convinced me that a life of Jewish observance would be better than my current secular existence.

Both Shmuley and Steinhardt, it seemed to me, were preaching to the converted—or the unconverted, I suppose, in Steinhardt’s case. Shmuley’s points seemed tautological: The Torah is great because it’s great. Steinhardt seemed to be participating in a different discussion altogether; he was essentially arguing for a re-definition of “unaffiliated,” since the Jewish values on his list don’t require any kind of behavior change for most of us prodigal types. Only Feldman took the conversation away from describing Judaism and towards engaging with it.

The Jewish community's best mustache: SteinhardtI may have been the only unaffiliated Jew in the audience, though, because everyone seemed less interested in discussing Judaism’s role in contemporary society than in Noah Feldman’s family life. The moderator started the pile-on by asking a spectacularly wimpy question about a legal case Feldman had handled between two different members of the Jewish community. At the time, Feldman had said it was a shame this intra-Jewish conflict couldn’t be resolved without bringing in the Federal government. “So,” asked the moderator, “when is it appropriate to bring inside Jewish issues to the outside world?”

“Nothing is ‘inside’ anymore,” Feldman replied. If you’re proud of your community, you should be public about what takes place there. Also, he added, it was pretty obvious that the real issue at stake wasn’t the intra-Jewish legal case he’d handled a few years ago; it was his infamous New York Times article.

An effusive 2004 NYU grad stood up to gush about Birthright. He said he’d been to the recent reunion, and the whole room burst into applause—I guess a lot of people had been there. On the bus on the way up to the Steinhardt estate, he’d been struck by what he described as a spiritual experience: a sudden, overwhelming certainty that someday he would have his own kids, and Birthright would send them to Israel too. “You’re doing a good job,” he concluded to Steinhardt, “and it’s working.”

Then he turned to Feldman. “My question is for you. How are you going to raise your children?”

“Ooooooooooh,” said everyone in the room. This was the Jewish equivalent of smacking your dueling partner with a silk-lined glove.

Feldman replied that of course he was raising his kids Jewish—it’s a part of who he is. But he’s also raising them in his wife’s tradition.

Preach on: Rev ShmuleyThe girl next to me chose this moment to whisper that she has a friend who thinks it’s evil to raise as Jewish the children of a non-Jewish mother, because when they turn 18 they’ll find out that they’re not real Jews. “Can’t they convert?” I asked her. Just like that, our friendship ended.

Agenius wonders why Feldman wants to be accepted by his community. He’s a success in every other aspect of his life—Shmuley compared him to Einstein, another intermarried Jew who did his people proud—so why does he want to be a star among Jews, too?

This question may have been intended rhetorically, but it’s a good one. Why would someone embrace both Judaism and a non-Jewish spouse? Perhaps because, for most of us, Judaism is only once facet of our fractured 21^st-century personalities. We’re not used to swearing total allegiance to any single identity, and we see no reason to join organizations that ask us to give up every other part of our selves. That’s why unaffiliated Jews don’t show up to debates about Jewish values—because they’ve come to believe that you can’t engage curiously with Judaism without becoming a Super-Jew. (I see this all the time as a Jewcy editor recruiting writers; I ask them if they want to participate in a professional relationship with the magazine, and they react as if I’m trying to get them join a cult.) Of course it’s risky to ask secular Jews to participate in honest discussions about Judaism; they might discover that they don’t like it. But to me it seems like a worthwhile pursuit – much more useful than fretting about Noah Feldman’s personal life.

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Past Jewcy coverage of Noah Feldman:

Q&A with the Author of "Orthodox Paradox"
JTA Misses the Point on Feldman
The Rules of Engagement
The Feldman Flare-Up

Controversy continues to swirl around the Arabic-language Khalil Gibran International Academy in New York and (as Michael previously noted) its bizarro cousin, the Hebrew-language Ben Gamla charter school in Hollywood, Florida. The criticism of both schools is driven by skepticism regarding the secular nature of the schools. It is easy to dismiss the critics as the usual suspects, from Daniel Pipes to the ACLU, but the schools have also drawn criticism from less ideological figures. Recently in the New York Times Magazine, Jewcy's favorite constitutional law scholar Noah Feldman took the view that the projects of isolating Islam from a Arab cultural curriculum and Judaism from Jewish cultural curriculum were ultimately futile tasks, and therefore both schools were of dubious constitutional legitimacy.

Although it cannot be known for certain before they have begun instruction, Khalil Gibran and Ben Gamla seem poised to teach religion as a set of beliefs to be embraced rather than as a set of ideas susceptible to secular, critical examination. What, after all, is the point of a Jewish cultural school if not to bring the students to appreciation and acceptance of Jewish values? And what are those values if not the outgrowth of Judaism's millenniums of religious faith and practice? Not that Judaism without God is impossible. Secular Zionism sought to redirect yearning for God's redemption toward a national homeland. Likewise, Arab nationalism was born from the effort to supplant Islamic religious membership with a secular, cultural identity. But in both cases, the surgery designed to excise God was only partly successful, and there is ample reason to anticipate a recurrence in the classroom as there has been in the rest of the world.

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At the 1998 reunion of Noah Feldman's Maimonides yeshiva class, no one could possibly have imagined that a few group photographs--all wide Jewy smiles and shapeless sorta-Orthodox outfits--would spark a seat-ripping public debate almost a decade later, and a messy media scandal a month after that. But here we are, with everyone all hot and bothered by the innocuous-looking pics that played so central a narrative role in Noah Feldman's "Orthodox Paradox." ...

The Jerusalem Post has published an excellent Jewlicious blog on the Noah Feldman debate. Jewlicious takes the angle that although Feldman was born into the Orthodoxy and had no choice regarding his religious practice -- thus he is somewhat justified in being pissed that his Orthodox day school airbrushed his non-Jewish wife out of the reunion photo -- the moral of the story is you get what you pay for:

Feldman’s complaint that the Orthodox establishment hasn’t welcomed his fiancée, petty matter of religion aside, is akin to someone choosing to attend a school with a core curriculum, then decrying the injustice of being forced to take certain classes.

Gary Rosenblatt of The New York Jewish Week chimes in from the JTA:

For all of Feldman’s candor in the essay, he has nothing to say about where he fits into the community, if at all; whether he wanted his wife to convert; whether they are raising their children as Jews or not; or his feelings about all this. He only owes us such information if he wants our understanding and empathy, which clearly he does.

He does owe Modern Orthodoxy an apology for pinning it with his anger over rejection, knowing full well the rules of engagement. But we in turn owe him a sense of gratitude for a wake-up call, however unpleasant, about the need to struggle more deeply and honestly with the moral and religious tensions and contradictions in Modern Orthodoxy that can never be reconciled, and about learning how to deal more sensitively with those on the outside who may be calling out -- in anger and loneliness -- for a way back in.

What does the Jewish Telegraph Agency think of Noah Feldman’s contentious “Orthodox Paradox” in the Times magazine from a couple Sundays ago? Unimpressed:

Feldman turned these anecdotes about his alma mater into a launching point for a much wider and longer rumination on Modern Orthodoxy’s perceived failure to live up to its noble goal of infusing religious devotion with a commitment to pursuing secular knowledge.

Feldman and his critics have obscured the larger point: The most important policy decisions regarding intermarriage -- the ones having an impact on the vast majority of interfaith couples and their families -- are taking place on the other side of the denominational divide, within the Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist movements.

In the end what all these groups face is not a paradox posed by the clash between tradition and change but a strategic dilemma over whether the community’s survival is best ensured by enforcing taboos or reaching out.

Someone as smart as Feldman should know the difference.

Harsh. Last week, Jewcy’s senior editor Joey Kurtzman interviewed Feldman. Joey’s last question was, “Many blog posts have already been written about your article. Are there any that you found particularly insightful? Any that led you to rethink something you'd written in the article?” Feldman's response:

I spent the weekend playing with my kids and haven't read blogs.

Smart choice, Mr. Feldman. Feldman wrote a level-headed and honest portrayal of how he has been gently yet painfully ostracized from his school-boy Orthodox community because of his intermarriage. That’s his story. Why didn’t he address the Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist movements approach to intermarriage? Because they’re not his story. You’d think the JTA would understand that.

 

Noah Feldman’s “Orthodox Paradox,” an article published in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, is a shanda fer da goyim, a skewed and distasteful takedown that invites non-Jews to gawk at the internal problems of a modern Orthodox Jewish community. Or maybe it’s a poignant and brave discussion of the challenges of bringing a traditional faith into modern life, written by a man who cherishes his people. Either way, it’s kicked up a storm of impassioned chatter throughout the interweb, where you can find both these judgments and many more.

“Orthodox Paradox” hits on themes close to Jewcy's editorial heart, what with Feldman trying to figure out what a cosmopolitan Jew’s to do with this bewildering, antiquated faith that we just can't seem to leave behind. So we had to pick his brain a bit. Feldman, a professor at Harvard Law School who was raised modern Orthodox, agreed to answer my questions via e-mail.

In the hot seat: Noah FeldmanWhy did you write this article?

These are issues I've been thinking about for a long time, and that have recurred again and again in my work on the U.S. and the Muslim world. My thinking on those topics is influenced by my education in the modern Orthodox world, and I came to think that others might be engaged with similar issues.

You were surprised when Maimonides—the yeshiva from which you graduated—removed* you and your (non-Jewish) wife from a photo published in the alumni newsletter. Your surprise struck many readers as rather strange, since the community makes no secret of its rejection of intermarriage. It’s a bit as if you’d pulled out a bag of pork rinds, devoured them with relish throughout the evening, and then expressed bewilderment when someone asked you if you'd set them aside until later. What are your critics missing here?

My classmates are great. As it happens, the reunion was lots of fun and we were all warm towards one another, as one would hope. What is troubling about the view you describe—which I never sensed from my classmates—is its implication that somehow modern Orthodox people should be protected from my living my life as I choose. As if choice of life partner were as trivial as a snack. Going to a reunion is a perfectly normal part of life, and choosing not to attend, in order to shield people from my life, would be absurd. People who are comfortable with their own life choices don't get "offended" when others choose differently.

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Ed. note: This request for questions is now closed. The interview with Noah Feldman has now been published, here.

 

Dearest Jewcers,

I'm in the middle of an e-mail interview with Noah Feldman, Harvard law professor and author of Orthodox Paradox, a first-person in today's NY Times Mag that is already ascending to the top of the Times's most e-mailed list and generating much online chatter, offended and otherwise.

I could ask Feldman questions endlessly, and am prepared to do so until his stamina gives out--however, if any of you have read the article and have a question you'd like him to answer, please post it in comments below and I'll try to get it in there.

Thanks!