Black Female Rabbis

My new story on black rabbis is up at Moment.

One of the first things that six-year-old Alysa Stanton noticed when her family moved into a predominantly Jewish neighborhood in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, was a rectangular ornament affixed to the doorpost of her new home. Her uncle Edward, a “devout Catholic who went to shul on occasion,” explained to her that it was a mezuzah. “He would wear a yarmulke sometimes,” she says, “and he knew a lot about a lot of things.” A few years later her uncle, who spoke eight languages, gave her a Hebrew grammar book, which she still has.

This fleeting introduction to Judaism set Stanton—the granddaughter of a Baptist minister and daughter of a Pentecostal Christian—on a journey that led her to convert to Judaism 18 years later. Stanton, now 45, recently passed another milestone on her spiritual journey. On June 6 in Cincinnati’s historic Plum Street Temple, she was ordained by Hebrew Union College, the Reform rabbinical school, making her the movement’s first African-American rabbi and the first African-American woman ordained by a mainstream Jewish denomination.

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Worlds away in Philadelphia’s middle class African-American West Oak Lane neighborhood is a black-Jewish congregation that has only been headed by women. Indeed, when Hebrew Union College announced that Stanton was to become the world’s first female African-American rabbi, Debra Bowen was bemused. The 63-year-old rabbi of Temple Beth’El has been behind the pulpit since 2001. She became rabbi when her predecessor—and mother—passed away. Louise Elizabeth Dailey, the synagogue’s founder, had served as its spiritual leader for 50 years.

Born into a Baptist family in Maryland—her father was a minister—Dailey was working as a housekeeper for a Jewish family in Philadelphia when she recognized that she had a deep spiritual—and, she believed, historical—connection to Judaism. She decided to observe the Sabbath on Saturdays and to keep kosher, and soon began holding weekly services in her living room. When the crowd grew too large, the group decided to build a synagogue. “My mother had the ability to break down Torah and simplify it,” says Bowen. “She could quote Torah chapter and verse—and she reached people.”

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Watch out for Wolpo

New post up at Moment:

The right wing group SOS Israel, led by Rabbi Sholom Dov Wolpo, leader of Chabad’s messianic wing in Israel, has published the first in a series of English-language newsletters that includes a vaguely threatening message to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and accuses him of selling out his nation and country to “High Commissioner Hussein Obama.”

The newsletter comes in advance of the 15th anniversary of Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson’s death.

The pamphlet includes an excerpt from an interview with 83-year-old Geulah Cohen, a former Knesset member who was an outspoken opponent of Ariel Sharon’s 2005 disengagement from Gaza:

The Lubavitcher Rebbe warned Mr. Moshe Katsav 17 years ago…that he, personally will be the first to fight with all his forcefulness and might against Shamir so that his government will fall. The fact remains that any Prime Minister who has tampered with our inheritance of Eretz Yisroel has received his just desserts in a humiliating and painful fashion.

Being truly concerned for your future, we turn to you, Mr. Prime Minister, and advise you: do not tread on the path of your predecessors which caused danger to the residents of Eretz Yisroel and themselves. Whoever harms Eretz Yisroel is declaring an open war on Hashem and his Torah, with all the resulting consequences

It’s often said that giving publicity to extremist groups only furthers their agendas. Any publicity, after all, is good publicity. But keeping quiet about these groups also encourages ignorance, and can leave the public ill-equipped to cope with them. Especially at a time when the far-right in America is growing increasingly mainstream and violent–take, for example, the murders of Dr. George Tiller and an African-American guard at the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC–it’s important to be wary of incitement.

Wolpo’s SOS Israel should be given special attention. Founded in 2003 “to oppose and fight the political accords with the Arabs that include land or security concessions,” SOS Israel is a U.S. and Israel-based non-profit that, as of recently, is also a political party in Israel: Eretz Yisrael Shelanu (Our Land of Israel). The party quickly teamed up with nationalist and Kahanist parties to form the National Union, an extreme right-wing alliance that won 4 seats in the recent Knesset elections (I haven’t seen official numbers, but according to one website, over 70 percent of Kfar Chabad residents voted for Eretz Yisrael Shelanu). In spite of SOS Israel’s transformation into a political party, the group continues to accept tax-deductible donations.

In the recent newsletter’s lead article, Wolpo calls Netanyahu “very, very, very bad for the Jews” and states that by “agreeing to a Palestinian state, the prime minister has “declared war against Hashem [God].” These comments might not qualify as incitement–though they certainly sound ominous to me–but it was this kind of invective that paved the way for Yigal Amir’s assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. As the late, great political scientist Ehud Sprinzak explained, Rabin was the victim of a widespread and vicious character assassination campaign in the aftermath of the Oslo Accords.At the very least, Wolpo’s remarks help create an environment where what most Jews see as crazy-talk is completely acceptable.

It was one thing when Wolpo and his organization preached to their ideological base in Israel, but it’s another issue entirely for him to bring SOS Israel’s message to America. It’s fine if he wants to do it, but American Jews should let him know where they stand.

Can Israel's Electoral System be Fixed?

There was a reason that Israel’s wild-haired, hardheaded founding father and first prime minister named himself Ben-Gurion, Hebrew for son of a young lion. Born David Grun, the charismatic Polish-born leader with a forceful personality and a streak of realpolitik was accustomed to confronting difficult problems—and having his way with them. One of the greatest challenges he faced was transforming the fledgling country’s political system.

The electoral process aroused in Ben-Gurion more anger and annoyance than any other institution he took part in creating. “In our electoral system,” he said in 1954, “the citizen has no right to choose his representatives. The candidates are selected not by the voter but by a central party committee. Our ballot system is a farce and worse, it is an abuse of democracy.” Four years later, in a speech to the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, he contended that the country employed a “bad democratic system” whose electoral procedures were “rotten and destructive.”

His words were prophetic. Israel has undergone immense change since its creation in 1948. Its population has grown ten-fold, its borders have shifted, its kibbutz movement and socialist orientation have faded and have been replaced by religious settlements and an ardor for high-tech, and it has made more enemies and fewer friends than it wished for. But almost 40 years after Ben-Gurion left politics, the Jewish state’s electoral system—perhaps the only thing that Israel’s first generation might have expected to change—remains largely untouched.

Alongside the electoral systems of Italy and Weimar Germany—the latter of which helped smooth the way for the Nazis’ ascendance—Israel’s purely proportionate system will likely go down in history as one of the world’s worst. Unlike the United States or European countries, which are divided into voting districts, all of Israel is treated as a single district with 120 representatives. In contrast to Germany or Turkey, where a political party can gain a seat in parliament if it garners five and 10 percent of the national vote, respectively, a party in Israel is guaranteed a place in the Knesset if it obtains a mere two percent. Since no single party ever wins a majority of Knesset seats, large parties depend on support from small ones to form coalitions, giving the small—sometimes fringe—parties? disproportionate influence. Israel has seen over 30 governments, each comprised of 10 to 15 parties, in its 61 years of existence.

“The root cause of Israel’s institutional weakness,” says Gidi Grinstein, director of the Reut Institute, an Israeli policy center, “is an electoral system that generates unstable and fragmented governments.” It also creates incentives for acting and thinking in the short term, he says, when Israel needs a leadership that can think broadly and plan for the future. “It’s a potentially tragic mismatch.”

The newest government, led by Likud veteran Benjamin Netanyahu and his sprawling, mainly right-wing coalition, is as good an example as any. Twelve parties were elected to the Knesset—Likud, Kadima, Yisrael Beiteinu, Labor, Shas, United Torah Judaism, United Arab List, National Union, Hadash, New Movement-Meretz, The Jewish Home and Balad. Six joined the ruling coalition, which boasts 30 ministers, making it the largest and messiest in Israeli history. “They used to talk about a kitchen cabinet,” says Harvard law professor and Israel advocate Alan Dershowitz. “This is a mega-mansion cabinet. It’s unwieldy and unworkable.”

The day after Netanyahu’s government was sworn in, the distinguished American scholar of the Middle East, 92-year-old Bernard Lewis, addressed the issue in the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal. “It is becoming increasingly clear,” he wrote, “that electoral reform of some kind is imperative if Israeli democracy is to survive.”

Read the rest at Moment