If there's a Jewish, quasi-Jewish, or non-Jewish celebrity who needs spiritual guidance of the Old Testament variety, they can count on Rabbi Shmuley Boteach to be close at hand. And it just so happens that Shmuley is in the market for a new mentee: first, his friend Michael Jackson passed away (but Shmuley still managed to exploit Jackson in a book documenting some of their private conversations); then TV dad and Shmuley advisee Jon Gosselin was ordered to stay out of the public eye while being sued for breach of contract by the TLC network. So who's next? Maybe Tiger Woods is in need of more help in his image rehabilitation project. It looks like Shmuley's trying to position himself as Woods' potential new BFF, as evidenced in this clip below.

 

As I'm sure you're all aware, last week marked the launch of the sixth season of "The Girls Next Door," E!'s reality show about life at the Playboy mansion. Kendra, Holly and Bridget are out, and Crystal, Kristina and Karissa (the latter two are twins) are in. As I curled up with Hef and the ladies, sipping a cup of Bedtime tea and rocking my sympathy pajamas, all seemed right with the world.

But as the half hour progressed, I couldn't help but be struck by something peculiar. The prevailing aesthetic, I noticed, was one that screamed "Aryan Nation": mounds of bleached blond hair, svelte hips...mounds of bleached blond hair.

Where, I wondered, were all the Jewish Playmates?

Well, it turns out they’re not that easy to find because indeed, they are few and far between. Out of approximately 670 Playmates since the magazine's inception, only a handful are known Jews. Cindy Fuller kicked it off in 1959, then Susan Bernard followed in 1966. Sally Sheffield posed in 1969, and Hef's longtime girlfriend, Barbi Benton (nee Barbara Klein) was also a Jew. Lindsey Vuolo was next in 2001, and most recently, Anita Marks in 2002.

And so, when I first sat down to write this, I thought, "How unfair! Playboy gives preference to the goys, promoting a singular notion of beauty." I thought I would be speaking on behalf of all Jewish women when I expressed my outrage that Jewish beauty is being overlooked or underappreciated.

But the more I look around, the more I realize that may be a bit out of touch.

Let us look first at Vuolo. Of all the Jews that have relieved themselves of their garments on the pages of Playboy, she seems to be the most notorious. Following her spread (haha), she was vilified by the Jewish community for the most part, and a nice summary of said vilification can be found here, in an interview she did with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach.

It's a painful read, but if you feel like a humiliating smackdown, go ahead and click over. I'll just wait. Done? OK. If you skipped that part, I'll summarize for you: Vuolo felt she had done nothing wrong by posing in Playboy, and Boteach took her to task for it. By the end, Vuolo said that she had begun to feel "like a bad person."

And Boteach isn’t the only one who feels like Vuolo let the Jews down; the same sentiment was expressed here at Jewcy. At other websites she was called stupid, blog commenters openly wondered what “happened to her,” and the general message was one we’ve all heard before: this is simply something that nice Jewish girls don’t do.

I'm beginning to wonder: is the lack of Jewish representation in this mainstream magazine a result of narrow definitions of beauty, or have Jewish women opted out of the running? And if it's the latter, is it because they truly don't want to do something like Playboy, or because they’re afraid that if they do, they’ll risk rocking the Jewish community boat to such an extent that they’ll knock themselves right off?

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Jon Gosselin (basic explanation for those of you lucky enough not to know who he is: he and his now-estranged wife had twins and sextuplets, then they got a show on TLC called Jon and Kate Plus Eight, then they split up and Jon started dressing like an overgrown frat boy and dating Kate's plastic surgeon's daughter. You're welcome.) recently gave an interview to ParentDish.com. There was quite a bit of Jewish talk, since Jon's girlfriend, Hailey Glassman, is a member of the tribe. Most of the quotes were so hilarious/embarrassing that we've decided to let them speak for themselves:

This is the first year I will celebrate Chanukah. Hailey is Jewish. Everyone in my life is Jewish now, my attorney. I love it. I'm now half Jewish and half Korean. The family values are great.

I just went through Rosh HaShana and Yom Kippur and learned about the new year and every Friday is the Shabbat dinner. I love challah bread. I'm learning about Jewish food, going to Zabar's. I love that place. I'm learning about kosher and when not to order a bacon, egg and cheese and make an ass of myself. Hailey makes fun of me. My mom came to the city on Yom Kippur and asked where all the traffic was. I got from the West Side to Midtown in five minutes. She wants to come to the city every year on Yom Kippur.

I talked to Rabbi Shmuley [Boteach] a couple of times. He has nine kids. I was really nervous dating a Jewish girl. She's like the best girl ever. All my friends are like 'I'm so jealous' and I'm like, 'Stay away, she's mine.'

I have a therapist. But hanging around Jewish people you don't need to talk to anyone else. My parents and grandparents are divorced and I want to break the pattern. I have Hailey and Mark Heller, my attorney, my therapist. They're all Jewish. I watch them and I confide in them, especially Hailey. She is my best friend. She'll tell me if I do something wrong. God has put these people in my life for a reason. My inner circle is Jewish. I only care what they think.

 

I’m a sex educator with a very liberal view (and a day job editing a blog about porn), so it should come as no surprise to hear that, for me, reading Shmuley Boteach’s The Kosher Sutra was a bit like being an atheist in AA. The underlying message is solid, and he makes a great deal of good points—but whole thing is packaged in a way that just makes me want to bang my head against a wall. Repeatedly.

It’s all too easy to criticize Boteach (and believe me, I most certainly will); but to start out, I’d just like to hit on a few of the points that Shmuley wins on:

Go deeper. One of my favorite parts of the book is the way Boteach differentiates between “horizontal renewal” and “vertical renewal.” For many of us, the solution to boredom or problems is to make a superficial change: change jobs, change cities, change partners. Boteach argues that this method of “horizontal renewal” doesn’t really solve the fundamental problem; instead of simply jumping from lily pad to lily pad, he advocates for exploring the depths of your current situation, and bringing new value and meaning to where you already are (aka “vertical renewal.”).

Communication is key. Like all good advice manuals, Boteach strongly advises to communicate—and to communicate about everything. Sexual fantasies and desires should be freely discussed, and partners should be open and honest with one another about whatever it is they’re thinking. Nothing is off limits—well, except for a discussion of previous sex partners, apparently.

It’s not play without foreplay. Boteach borrows heavily from tantric sex practices (well, minus the pagan idolatry, of course), and recommends that couples engage in extensive foreplay. He also argues for moving the focus of sex away from the goal of orgasm, and towards the process of experiencing sensuality and intimacy. While his suggestion that couples engage in sex without orgasm for days at a time might seem a bit extreme, it’s nice to see some focus put on the journey rather than simply the destination.

Okay, now that that’s out of the way, here’s a bit of advice that I, personally, would like to give to dear old Shmuley:

Don’t put the pussy on a pedestal, man. Orthodox Judaism is well known for its celebration of female “superiority”—which, as far as I’m concerned, more or less amounts to a patronizing, and limiting, attitude towards the female sex. Boteach is no different: over and over he discusses the complexity of female sexuality, emphasizing the fact that women are vastly more complicated creatures than men, and that men must explore their partners, peeling back layer after layer of mystery and erotic intrigue. It’s not so much that I object to the recognition that women are complicated beings; it’s this idea that women are objects to be pursued and unraveled by men—and, furthermore, the idea that men are fundamentally simple creatures, nowhere near as complicated as women. Sexuality is complicated, period, no matter what parts you have in your pants.

Porn viewing does not mean porn addiction. I can’t really say that I’m surprised to learn that Boteach isn’t on board with the world of porn, but it does bother me to see that he seems to equate use of porn with porn “addiction.” There’s a very big difference between occasional, or even moderate, use of something and addiction—and using such a broad brush to describe an issue as intricate and complicated as porn use just doesn’t help anyone (and don’t even get me started on this idea that people get addicted to porn, either).

Chemistry does not necessitate mystery. Not surprisingly, Boteach is an advocate of modesty. But he wants you to know that covering up isn’t about discouraging lust; it’s about creating mystery and inciting lust. If you never see your partner naked, then it’ll just be that much more exciting when you’re in bed together. I’d be willing to go with that point (sort of) were it not for the fact that Boteach extends it to include a ban on things like peeing in front of your partner and—worst of all—showering together. If a healthy marriage means a ban on fun in the shower, well, I guess I just don’t want a healthy marriage that badly.

So is The Kosher Sutra a must-read or a pick you can pass on? Well, if you have an odd sense of humor, or the ability to take sex advice with a very, very large grain of salt, than The Kosher Sutra might just be right up your alley. But given that there are very, very many sex books that offer comparable (or better) sex advice minus the cringe inducing aspects—well, I’d say pass on The Kosher Sutra and pick up The Joy of Sex. True, it’s not written by a rabbi—but maybe that’s a good thing.

I was both amused and irritated by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach's recent article at the Shmuley Boteach's Vision Of FemininityHuffington Post about single-sex education and its relationship to sexual polarity and eroticism. His basic argument is that going to school with the opposite sex from an early age desensitizes the two genders towards one another, which disposes people not to marry, and if they do, dulls their erotic intimacy. It also has the effect of making boys seek out the more beautiful girls - and vise versa - which creates a hierarchy of beauty.

Noble sentiments: fairness for ugly people; more marriages; more sex for married people. Unfortunately, all of these sentiments then rest upon Biblical gender essentialism. Here it is:

This is why the Bible insists on certain incontrovertible differences that must forever remain between men and women. It says that men cannot wear a woman's clothing (Deuteronomy 22:5) and men are not to uproot the hair on their faces (Leviticus 19:27) (yes, that is the reason we Rabbis have such undeniably sexy beards). Even in external appearance, men and women are supposed to look different. In the Jewish religion, men and women sit separately in the synagogue, with a literal divider down the middle, all designed to heighten, while never overdoing, the sexual divide.

Now, if an Orthodox Jew (or an orthodox Muslim who believes the same kind of stuff) wants to think that increasing the gulf between men and women is the best way of advancing their sex lives, hey, by all means, feel free to do so. What they can't do, though, is to get past the simple fact that for great parts of history --- and in the Muslim word even today --- gender essentialism has been the essential backbone of oppression.

A while back I wrote a piece on Jewcy about honor(less) killings among Muslims. It's a subject that I've confronted frequently in my life (largely because it really messes me up). In my piece, I tried to suggest that not just patriarchy, but many varieties of oppression itself, are historically rooted in Manichean readings of gender:

At this point I started to wonder: how did the idea of "I am better than you" originate in the first place? More importantly, how is that idea perpetuated? The only thought that I kept coming back to, one that I am starting to believe very deeply, is that somewhere along the way every system of inequality and supremacism justifies itself by positing the existence of a purportedly "natural" inequality between man and woman, the original dualism. Man equals strong, woman equals weak, and thus lordship, supremacy, mastery, control, power, all become tied to this purportedly "natural" difference.

Now, people like the good Rabbi, Christian priests, and Muslim clerics, have had thousands of years of attempting to prove that gender essentialism doesn't engender gender supremacy (always the supremacy of males). They have utterly and thoroughly failed.

I am not sure why, then, they should get another chance, even if they are now able to repackage their gender essentialism with 'hip' terms like 'sexual polarity.' Give me a break.

What we should be really focusing on is trying to emphasize the shared humanity of men and women. Why should we believe that a man's desires or fetishes are any different from a woman's? Just because our parts look different? Again: we tried looking at the world like that, and all we did was alienate women --- and excise them from legal, literary, social, and cultural spheres of society.

There is something even more pernicious in the Rabbi's comments, though, and since he's focusing on the Jewish-American community he probably doesn't realize it, but the argument he's advancing is precisely the argument used to advance the burqa.

Just in case we don't know what a burqa is --- it covers a woman from head to foot in a cloth, often even covering her eyes. It's that thing everyone from the Huffington Post to ultra-right Evangelicals and Jews are always trying to "save" those "poor Muslims" from.

I was talking to a prominent Muslim cleric a few years ago and we were discussing Islamic modest dress, specifically the hijab and niqab. He is a very honest and learned man and is always willing to accept multiple readings of scripture. At the conclusion of our conversation, he conceded that there were multiple ways of reading the Quranic Arabic upon which veiling is premised.

Lacking any further scriptural support for his position, he proposed the Rabbi's argument: "If my woman is covered, it makes me more wont to have sex with her when we're alone."

At which point I proceeded to lose respect for him.

Nevermind how pathetic it is to rest one's religiosity --- or salvation --- upon one's groin; the fact is, if you accept the idea that men will find women more arousing when they are not always in front of their eyes, you will very soon have men who will say a) remove these women from places where us men hang out or b) if they must be around then cover them up in black so its like they are not here.

The world has seen enough of that.

The rabbi no doubt has good intentions, as do the many Muslim leaders who espouse similar sentiments. However, the way to create more warmth and empathy between men and women isn't to separate them, but to cultivate and raise and rejoice in them as if they were essentially --- here's where that word is useful --- the same creature.

God is one. So should be us humans.

Not kosher: Valentine the heart-spotted pigLast week, when I posted Alex the Videographer’s call for love, a user named Levitt8 replied “Tell me again why a Jew needs a date on St. Valentine's Day?” True, the holiday is named after an early Catholic martyr – but the “saint” part has really disappeared from the holiday. Beliefnet explains that Vatican II took the day back from St. Val because the Church was “embarrassed by the presence of saints on its calendar who might never have existed” (you know, because religious leaders around the world tend to come down hard on stuff that defies the historical record.) So even though it’s named after a Christian figure, literally no one celebrates it as a religious holiday any more.

Some Jews have another reason for staying away from the holiday: In 1349, it was the occasion of a massive pogrom in Strasbourg. So if you prefer holding 648-year-old grudges to eating candy and sharing warm feelings with your loved ones, then yes, a boycott might be in order.

Keep in mind, though, that no less a Jewish authority than Shmuley Boteach thinks you should celebrate Valentine’s Day. Boteach suggests showing up at your sweetie’s house wrapped in a bow. For the record, when I was in high school a boy actually did this to my best friend, and she was VERY impressed. It might not work on women over the age of 15, though.

 

Last night the 92nd Street Y hosted a debate between Mr. "Shalom in the Home" Rabbi Shmuley Boteach and the inimitable Christopher Hitchens on the existence of God, something so wholly unprovable that the only guaranteed outcomes were bruised egos and hangover scars from all the ecclesiastical elbowing and bad kosher wine. The buzz around the sold-out event was louder than a book-selling rabbi's shrill or a drunk Englishman's demand for another drink. (Just speaking stereotypically of course.)

The 92Y Blog has a video excerpt from the evening, and we asked bloggers in attendance for feedback. Looks like God took a beating of Biblical proportions:

Felix Salmon: "I can't recall ever seeing such a lopsided debate -- if 'debate' is the mot juste, which it really isn't. Boteach didn't even attempt to defend his side of the motion, preferring instead to bash Hitchens's book; he ignored substantially everything that Hitchens said. His logorrhea was an embarrassment, especially when it became obvious that he had no strategy at all: all of his points about evolution, for instance, even if they had hit their mark (which they didn't) did nothing to bolster his purported cause. In any case, he was disqualified on account of Godwin's Law so many times that Hitchens would have won by default even if he didn't win overwhelmingly on the merits."

Rex Sorgatz: "Rabbi Shmuley Boteach proved, once and for all, that god is not dead. He's just exceptionally boring."

Neal Ungerleider: "Here's the thing... despite both Hitchens and Boteach being annoying, self-righteous egomaniacs, there's a difference between the two. Last night's debate taught me that Hitchens is an intelligent, annoying, self-righteous egomaniac. I wish I could say the same for Boteach. However, he still didn't convince me on the non-existence of God. Sorry, Hitch."

Lilit Marcus: "Thanks, Shmuley Boteach, for caring more about selling copies of your latest book than about making people who believe in God not come off like complete morons."

Phoebe Maltz: "I found myself wishing the rabbi could make one coherent point, not just evoke the Holocaust every two seconds, only to call Hitchens 'not a Nazi, but.'"

Sara Ivry: "Boteach’s repeated use of the name 'Christoper Hitchens' really made me think of the Bill Murray segment of Coffee and Cigarettes where RZA and GZA keep calling Bill Murray 'BillMurray,' as if one word. It made the whole debate seem particularly absurd, but at least brought back the good days of Wu Tang."

Daniel Radosh: After the way Hitchens treated Boteach, it was a little hypocritical of him to chastise God for condoning bloodbaths. To see the rabbi reduced literally to incoherent sputtering was almost sad, but then again, he had no one to blame by himself. Declaring that Steven Jay Gould, author of the classic essay 'Evolution as Theory and Fact,' did not believe in evolution, was probably not the wisest strategic gambit. I think the exchange that best captured the evening came when Boteach accused Hitchens of 'character assassination,' and Hitchens retorted, 'you should be more concerned that your character is committing suicide right here in front of everyone.'"

David Kelsey: "In a strange twist demonstrating that this debate was not personal in the least, both men argued that the other’s moral decency proved his own point. Boteach argued that morality came from religion generally, and Judaism’s influence specifically. 'It’s our morality he is embracing,' insisted Boteach. But Hitchins countered that, 'Religion borrows its morality from us, not us from religion.'”

Jeff Bercovici: "Hitchens wiped the floor with Boteach to such an extent that it was actually Hitchens who lost, in a sense, just by showing up. Lost stature, that is. He should be debating his equals, not publicity-hungry TV rabbis."

Rachel Sklar: "In the cab on the way home, we coined a new phrase: 'To Shmuley,' denoting the making of pathetic, unsupported non-sequitur arguments and the taking of flailingly weak intellectual positions, with a dash of name-dropping bluster thrown in for good measure. Excruciating. Christopher Hitchens could Bo-teach him a few things about theology!"

Emily Gordon: "Is God a mystical force or a conscious mind (I liked the moderator's vision of 'a New Yorker cartoon kind of God'), a present parent or a deadbeat dad, the same idea in many forms (including nonreligious ones) or accessible only by secret red phone? How can people be born moral, or inherently moved by religion or the Golden Rule, given all the baddies that both Hitchens and Boteach included in their survey of humanity, and how do you account for their nasty behavior? There are countless questions that could have made for a spirited and genuinely intellectual debate instead of the ping-pong of statistics, political arcana, and smooth putdowns--all of which I enjoyed, of course--that stood in for it. I would have liked to have heard how humanism can transcend the question altogether, or account for both points of view in a civilized and meaningful way, but it was not to be. I admire the Y for holding the debate, though, and perhaps it can be reprised with different and more fruitful combinations."

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

There’s an article in today’s New York Sun about Taglit-Birthright Israel’s multi-million dollar initiative to build on its program of sending young Jews on free 10-day trips to Israel. The program as it stands is a pretty remarkable thing. Birthright Israel has sent almost 145,000 young adults to Israel since 2000. Here’s the new plan in a nutshell:

[T]he as-yet-unnamed initiative will build new, fully staffed Birthright Israel program offices in 17 American cities, where alumni would be able to choose from a menu of free subsidized programs including seminars, festivals, conferences, retreats, and trips back to Israel — or obtain seed grants to create programs of their own.

The idea is to extend the return traveler's excitement for Jewish life into their everyday world.

The post-trip rush of enthusiasm for Judaism has become legendary in Birthright Israel's seven short years. Studies by researchers at Brandeis University found that Birthright Israel participants are more likely to participate in Jewish events on their college campuses; more likely to want to learn Hebrew, and more likely to say they want to marry within the Jewish faith and raise Jewish children.

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Girls gone wild on Spring break.Rabbi Shmuley Boteach's Jerusalem Post article on America's coed colleges and the uneducated, culturally vapid, intellectual slackers it spawns is gathering its share of criticism. But despite the generic tone of "youth going to Hell in a handbasket" that Boteach's argument wallows in for a bit too long, I don't think that he's all that far gone with his conclusion that there are academic advantages to a single sex higher ed institution. Namely, that the sexual and/or romantic entanglements combined with the debaucherous joie de vivre of being away from home get in the way of academic affairs. My father who is a Professor could attest greatly to this. Whether Boteach is simply using his J Post platform to preach the didactic of abstinance and female modesty (Tzniut) is another topic altogether.

If there is one event that sums up all that is wrong with American university life, it is spring break, which was celebrated last week. I was lecturing in Miami Beach, where I grew up, and was walking on the city's famed boardwalk. Thousands of young college students - all in their late teens and early 20s - were lounging on the sand.

It was a sobering sight. The female students' beach attire was close to non-existent. Time was when the bikini was considered revealing. Today it is only for prudes and the modestly attired. These young women were already perfecting their role as eye candy for men. Is this what they were learning in college?

Western educational life revolves around getting into a good college. But the time has come for a fundamental reevaluation of whether our children progress or regress at university. The simple fact is that the American campus is not a very healthy place and belies its description as a place of "higher" education.

Before parents send their kids off to college they should travel to a nearby campus and witness its shenanigans for themselves. That's what the celebrated novelist Tom Wolfe did for his 2004 novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons.

READERS OF the book would scarcely believe the description of the American campus as a giant orgy filled with misogynistic men who harbor indescribable contempt for women and arrive on campus with the stated intention of bedding as many as possible. Less so would they believe the complicity with which women have joined in their own degradation.

Most of us believe that sending our daughters off to college will safeguard their future and increase their self-esteem as they walk away with a respected degree. In fact, for a great many young women the campus environment serves to foster permanent anxiety as to their looks and a concern that rejecting the prevailing sexual availability will label them as unpopular prudes.

Jewish Pop sensation/televangelist Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, formerly Michael Jackson's spiritual advisor before he went all Muslim, has some choice words and advice for Britney Spears' unorthodox behavior:

In an open letter to Britney, New York spiritual leader and author RABBI SHMULEY BOTEACH shares tips including: "Once you become a parent, Britney, life gets really serious... We can all pretend that life is one big party devoid of responsibility.

"And rarely being home, or coming home drunk, or letting your kids see you in a degraded state, will permanently scar your kids."

Shmuley continues, "Soon your boys will be surfing the Internet.

"They'll see a lot of photos of you in poses that no son should ever see their own mother... Try and be home with your kids... Cover up... Limit the visits to the nightclubs."

The spiritual leader ends his letter by saying, "I know you can get your life together, Britney."