Is A ‘Conservative Synagogue’ An Oxymoron?
I agree with letter writer Barry Koppel. It is wrong not to “care about the massacre in Pittsburgh [just] because it took place in a non-Orthodox shul.” As he wrote, “the lunatic who committed this atrocious crime was targeting Jews.” He didn’t care how observant his victims were.
And yet, some non-observant agitators are now feigning outrage over someone allegedly preferring not to use the term “synagogue” for a non-Orthodox place of worship. It’s almost as if Rav Saadia Gaon didn’t write over a thousand years ago, “The Jewish nation is a nation only by virtue of the Torah.”
Non-Orthodox movements understand the Torah quite differently from classical Judaism, which means that a “Conservative synagogue” sounds like a contradiction in terms to many Orthodox Jews. Advocates of “religious pluralism” may not like this reaction, but it is a valid one.
These advocates are perfectly entitled to call their places of worship “synagogues” or their clergy “rabbis,” for that matter, but they have no right – indeed, it would be the height of intolerance – to force those who disagree to do so.
It’s true, as you pointed out, that “the Nazis didn’t differentiate between Reform and Orthodox Jews at the lineup in Auschwitz,” but that’s irrelevant. We should define ourselves by our own traditional norms, not by those who hate us.
Martin D. Stern
Salford, England
Malcolm X vs. Meir Kahane
Re “An Open Letter To the World” (November 2): It is outrageous that Rabbi Meir Kahane, Hy”d, was – and still is – reviled in much of Israel and the Diaspora.
I don’t want to compare Rabbi Kahane to Malcolm X, but Colbert King, in a remarkable column in the Washington Post (Nov. 25, 1990), does. He notes that while Malcolm X, the champion of black pride, joined the pantheon of black heroes after his assassination, Rabbi Kahane, who fought for Soviet Jewry and the safety of Israel, remains ostracized by many Jews.
In America, streets and schools are named after Malcolm X, sympathetic films have been made about him, and a stamp was issued in his honor by the U.S. government.
Liberal Jews meanwhile continue to condemn Rabbi Kahane for wanting all Arabs, including Israeli Arabs, out of Israel even though all he wanted was to keep the Jewish state safe from disloyal and often murderous Arabs.
The history of Zionism will be incomplete without a page devoted to Rabbi Kahane, a Jewish hero.
Jacob Mendlovic
Toronto, Canada
Social Justice Jews
Dennis Prager’s article last week was unfortunately very accurate, if painful. A sizable proportion of assimilated Jews have severed all ties with Judaism and repudiated all allegiances to Israel or their fellow Jews. They’ve sworn to uphold a new covenant – with the social warrior idol.
And they don’t leave Judaism quietly. They evince raw hostility to it due to inferiority complexes and guilty consciences based on their inability to surmount the challenges life presented to them as Jews.
Nothing has changed. In the Dark Ages, converts were often the catalysts behind forced theological debates between Christians and Jews. The debate in Barcelona between the convert Pablo Christiani and the Ramban is just one example.
Defectors to Torah Judaism harbor animosity to Judaism because all they have left is the vacuous, insentient, empty life of Reform Judaism, which offers nothing. Their leaders, meanwhile, have endeavored to inject social reform and leftism as a way to revive it.
Hope for a brighter future,
Samuel Deitel
Tech Companies Should Look in the Mirror
Some of the companies hoping to design artificial intelligence anti-bias tools (the subject of Bracha Halperin’s “Tech Talk” column last week) may be looking for bias in the wrong place.
According to the New York Times, in August 2018, Brian Amerige, a senior Facebook engineer, posted the following on Facebook’s internal message board: “We are a political mono-culture that’s intolerant of different views. We claim to welcome all perspectives, but are quick to attack – often in mobs – anyone who presents a view that appears to be in opposition to left-leaning ideology.”
In 2016, Shurat HaDin, an Israeli civil rights NGO Law Center, conducted an experiment on Facebook bias against Israel. Shurat HaDin posted two very similar pages on Facebook, one inciting violence against Palestinians and the other inciting violence against Israel. After
reporting both to Facebook, only the one inciting violence against Palestinians was removed.
A study released in September 2018 found that 90 percent of political donations by Google, YouTube, and other subsidiaries of Alphabet have gone to Democrats.
Developing software to look for bias in other software would make more sense if these companies eliminated the bias among their personnel and did not program bias into their software in the first place.
Josh Greenberger
Brooklyn, NY
Time to Buy Guns?
We live in dangerous times. Even the best and brightest – those on university campuses – now spew anti-Semitism. Apparently, all the education in the world has not eliminated the age-old urge to kill Jews. As uncomfortable and inconvenient as it may be, synagogues may need to start arming themselves.
Brian J. Goldenfeld
Woodland Hills, CA
When Will Cuomo Leave Us Alone?
With Election Day behind us, I am reminded of “The Outer Limits” 1960s television show, which would end with, “We now return control of your television set to you.” With November 6 behind us, the round-the-clock commercials by politicians, political parties, unions, and pay-for-play special interest groups are gone. The politicians have returned our TV sets to us.
If only Governor Andrew Cuomo would participate in this ritual. When will he direct the Empire State Development Corporation to stop running their wasteful “public service” advertisements?
Cuomo has had this quasi-independent state agency spend several hundred million dollars in taxpayer money on these “feel good commercials. They were clearly designed to assist him in greasing the wheels of another term in office and raise his profile in preparation for a presidential run in 2020. These commercials periodically run in heavy rotation on many stations several times per hour, day and night.
Diogenes is still waiting for State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli, Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, State Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart Cousins, State Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, or a brave member of the State Legislature to come forward and challenge Emperor Cuomo to end this waste, fraud, and abuse of public monies.
Larry Penner
Great Neck, NY
Israel, Be Wary Of The Democrats
If anyone still believes the Democratic Party is pro-Israel, the results of the current election should be a wake-up call. Two Democrat Muslim women were elected to Congress, and both argue that Israel has no right to exist and must be replaced by a Palestinian Arab state. Both have also made virulent anti-Israel remarks.
For those dedicated to the security of Israel the election results were a disaster. The Democratic Party is clearly no longer a friend of Israel.
Nelson Marans
New York, NY