Claire Danes' (Sobering) Chabad Memories
By Nathaniel Popper
Chabad Lubavitch is famous for their willingness to open their homes to Jews and non-Jews, including the goyische celebrities, such as Jon Voigt, who appear on Chabad’s West Coast telethon to cheerlead for the group. Sometimes, though, the encounters produce a more nuanced response — as is evident in actress Clare Danes’ memory of a Chabad Lubavitch wedding she attended in Brooklyn.
Danes’ tale is jammed into the last paragraph of an item in New York magazine about how little Danes knows about Brooklyn. The little she says about the wedding is remarkably evocative. She tells of how the event began on the sidewalk in front of someone’s apartment, presumably in Crown Heights, where Chabad is based.
“It was in February, and it was really cold and very, um, stripped down, the ceremony,” the star of the 1990s TV drama “My So Called Life” remembered.
From there, she says, the group moved to one of the nearby catering halls. The people “celebrated,” she said, “but the women and the men celebrated in separate rooms, and the women were not allowed to drink, and it was quite sad.”
September 25, 2009, 4:24pm
Bibi, Again With the Rebbe
By Gabrielle Birkner
Those in the handpicked crowd at the 92nd Street Y Thursday night weren’t the only ones who heard Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speak of being inspired by the late Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson. Earlier in the day, he told the Israeli press roughly the same story about the Rebbe’s message to him, which stressed the importance of standing up for truth when speaking before the United Nations.
Watch Netanyahu’s comments to the Israeli press, with English subtitles here:
August 4, 2009, 8:58pm
Boteach Unloads on Chabad
By Nathaniel Popper
Television host, sex columnist and Orthodox rabbi Shmuley Boteach is no stranger to controversy, but this week he added his voice to a growing chorus of Orthodox Jews who believe that their religious community has to take a look in the mirror in the wake of the New Jersey money-laundering scandal. In an article in the Jerusalem Post, he writes:
We Orthodox have no one but ourselves to blame. We are often “religious” without being spiritual, prayerful without being humble and ritually precise without displaying the same punctiliousness in business.
Perhaps the most unexpected part of the piece comes when Boteach takes the opportunity to wantonly unload on the Chabad-Lubavich religious community in which he was trained. Boteach says he still raises his children in the Chabad spirit, but he explains how they pushed him out:
In 1993 I was ordered by the leadership of Chabad UK to dismiss all non-Jewish members of our Oxford University student society. I refused because the Rebbe (who had just died) loved non-Jews and regularly reached out to them. Chabad fired me.
Boteach implies that Chabad representatives “preach hate” by calling for a distance from the non-Jewish world, and goes on to criticize Chabad’s representative in Washington, D.C., Levi Shemtov, who, he says:
wrote on a super-secret global Chabad Web site that I “desecrate” any Chabad House I visit and should not be invited to speak. I shudder to think that a man of such extreme opinions is Chabad’s representative to the US government.
Shemtov, who sounded surprised by the attack, told the Forward: “I did not write what he implies; he misconstrued words into a sentence of his own making to imply inaccurately that I condemned him personally.”
It’s not entirely clear how Boteach’s criticism of Chabad relates to his larger discussion of Orthodoxy. He does seem to say that if more non-Jews read his book “Kosher Sex,” they might see the inherent goodness of Orthodox Judaism.
Maybe, but then again, maybe not.
March 26, 2009, 12:16pm
Yid Vid: Frum Rappers Put Aside Differences, Provoke Dismay
By Dan Friedman
First Y-Love and Shneur Hasofer, a.k.a. DeScribe, collaborated on “Change” — a rockin’ track on the Modular Moods/Shemspeed label. Black, white, left, right, United States, Australia, all put aside to “uplift the mundane” in the name of Hashem.
Then Elad Nehorai from Chabad.org covered it for the news service ChabadOnLine Live, and suddenly the lashon hara flowed in. One commenter asked:“[W]hy do u have to print this. this is totaly not what lubavitch is about. where are the pictures of chassidishe lubavitchers that daven like a chosid etc.” The note was quickly followed by questions of the rappers’ eligibility: “[I]s shneur Devora’s son, and is he married? if yes to whom?”
A reader identified as “4 Questions” asked, “Why are all these seemingly talented young men going down this goyishe music path? Can’t they get a proper job? Is (G-d forbid) this the direction Chabad is really going?”
There were milder versions of that question, such as, “[A]s Chassidim do we have to take the Chitzoniyus?” (the external appearance of others) and more clichéd ones, such as, “Does this represent Chabad and do I want to give the children the impression that it does???”
In the end, the general opinion — helped by Y-Love and Erez of Shemspeed posting the lyrics and trying to explain their intention — was that “having Ahavas Yisroal is the main part of being JEWISH” and respecting Y-Love and DeScribe for their obvious talents and genuine dedication to Hashem was the way to go.
Finally, a crucial subsidiary part of the thread was concluded with a tease. It related that Shneur is Devorah’s son. There was no mention of his marital status.
Advertisements
Advertisements