The Feldman Fracas

In late July, the New York Times gave Harvard professor Noah Feldman the opportunity to kvetch about an incident that happened in connection with a reunion of his yeshiva day school. Apparently, subsequent to the reunion, a photograph was published in the school's alumni newsletter that left out not only Feldman, but the woman he was dating at the time--a Korean and a non-Jew. An uproar has erupted all around that has included calls by The Jewish Week and the Orthodox Union for the dismissal of Feldman and his editor on charges that he deliberately misled leaders.

Why the Times felt Feldman;s story was interesting enough to publish, I don't know. I actually happen to agree with a letter the Times published in reply a couple of weeks later whose author noted that, if Feldman did not occupy the high position in academia he now occupies, this story would never have seen the light of day. But more interesting to me, is the way the Orthodox Union, the Jewish Week, and Orthodox Judaism generally has managed to ignore the actual issue lodged by Feldman.

That issue is, of course, the way the Orthodox world chooses to treat the issue of intermarriage. Alone among the Jewish denominations, Orthodoxy slams a door in the face of its members who have intermarried. It is only in Orthodox synagogues that intermarried Jews--never mind their spouses--cannot become members. It is only in the Orthodox world that rabbis routinely will not convert children born to Jewish men married to non-Jewish women (unless these women convert according to stringent Orthodox standards). And it is only in the Orthodox world that a story like Feldman's even makes sense.

See, that's the whole thing in this story: whether it is literally true or not, it makes sense. A story like Feldman's is believable. And even more than Feldman's story is completely believable, the circle-the-wagons response of the Jewish Week (most particularly, its Orthodox editor, Gary Rosenblatt) and the Orthodox Union is completely predictable.

Is all of the above an instance of "Orthodox-bashing"? Maybe. But the very term "Orthodox-bashing" is suspect. One frequently hears charges in the Jewish press that some particular article or editorial critical of Orthodoxy is "Orthodox-bashing." But, despite the never-ending vitriol that seems to come out of the Orthodox world regarding the movements to its left, I never see the terms "Conservative-bashing," "Reform-bashing", or "Reconstructionist-bashing" in print.

I think this discrepancy says a lot not just about how effective the Orthodox PR machine has been, but about the biases in the Jewish press. The use of the term "bashing" is highly inflammatory; the word "bash" brings to mind images of jack-booted Gestapo agents knocking on someone's door. The term thereby implies that, merely by criticizing Orthodoxy on grounds of policy or theology, the rest of us are guilt of almost Hitler-like crimes.

If anything, exactly the opposite characterizes the relationships of Orthodoxy and the rest of the Jewish community. It is not the liberal movements that are attempted to suppress Orthodoxy in Israel. It is not the liberal movements that are attempting to delegitimate Orthodox conversions for purposes of the Law of Return. It is not the liberal movements that use terms like "Silent Holocaust" to describe intermarriage and the children that result from it.

Even if the claims made by Rosenblatt and the Orthodox Union are true--even if Feldman did intentionally misrepresent what happened with regard to why this particular photograph happened to be published in the alumni newsletter--the wider question he raised about Orthodoxy still deserves to be addressed. That question is almost childlike in its simplicity: why do Jews who marry out deserve to be uniquely singled out by Orthodox institutions for particular stigmatization? One really has to wonder whether, had Feldman been convicted of insider trading after the reunion, his likeness would have been similarly removed from the photograph of his alumni newsletter. There are many actions that can constitute a betrayal of the Orthodox community's values, but there is no logical reason for intermarriage to be treated with special stigma.

Shame on The Jewish Week and the Orthodox Union for tryng to deflect attention from the real point of Feldman's article.