The High Line's and Rabbi Shmuley's Unwelcome Neighbors
By Gabrielle Birkner
Stroller mommies taking in New York’s new High Line park aren’t the only ones vexed by the prospect of seeing more than they bargained for. Media-loving Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is threatening to sue the Libyan government, which owns the Englewood, N.J. property that abuts his home, for cutting down trees that kept his neighbors out of view.
The Libyan leader Col. Muammar al-Gaddafi, who last week warmly welcomed back to Libya a convicted mastermind of the deadly bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, is slated to visit the U.S. next month for the United Nations General Assembly. He is reportedly planning to pitch a Bedouin-style tent on the Libyan Mission-owned Englewood property.
Boteach, in a press release Monday, said that he and his family were deeply distressed by the thought of Gaddafi peering down their throats. He warned: “If they don’t restore my trees and fence to what they were, immediately, then I will sue them so that Libyan money goes to peaceful projects like planting trees rather than blowing up planes.”
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.
June 26, 2009, 2:08pm
Shmuley: I Foretold Jackson's Demise
By Gabrielle Birkner
In the wake of Michael Jackson’s death, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is, not surprisingly, all over the place — weighing in on the Gloved One’s decline and demise. In this opinion piece in today’s Jerusalem Post, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach writes that, back in 2004, he foretold Michael Jackson’s untimely death:
In the two years that I had attempted, ultimately unsuccessfully, to help Michael repair his life, what most frightened me was not that he would be arrested again for child molestation, although he later was. Rather it was that he would die. As I told CNN on April 22, 2004, “My great fear, and why I felt I had to be distanced from Michael … was that he would not live long. My fear was that Michael’s life would be cut short. When you have no ingredients of a healthy life, when you are totally detached from that which is normal, and when you are a super-celebrity you, God forbid, end up like Janis Joplin like Elvis… Michael is headed in that direction.”
June 25, 2009, 6:49pm
Rabbi Shmuley on the Gloved One, z''l
By Gabrielle Birkner
As you’ve probably heard, pop superstar Michael Jackson died today at age 50.
The music icon had a short-lived, but well documented, friendship with Rabbi (and author and television star) Shmuley Boteach. In 2003, the British Web site “Something Jewish” published a Q&A with Rabbi Shmuley about his relationship with the King of Pop. Read it here.
June 11, 2008, 11:18am
Chabad in Trouble?
By Daniel Treiman
Writing in The Jerusalem Post, former Chabad emissary turned media personality Rabbi Shmuley Boteach expresses concern for the current state of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement:
Chabad is by now the most effective Jewish educational organization in history, and no movement works harder for the Jewish people or caters to more unaffiliated Jews.
But success has brought the usual challenges. Chabad emissaries are becoming more ego-driven and territorial, too often bickering with one another. A seemingly incessant spate of court battles should serve as a wake-up call.
In Crown Heights, the official Chabad leadership seems engaged in permanent litigation with — mostly — Chabad messianic forces, for the soul of Lubavitch. Nearly all of it takes place in mainstream rather than Jewish courts, making them highly public affairs.
In London, an ugly public battle ousted one of the heads of Chabad UK of the past half-century. Sydney, Australia witnessed another ugly public battle for the control of Chabad institutions.
These are just a few examples. The press has reported on many more in places as far away as Russia, Ukraine and Israel.
November 19, 2007, 7:52pm
'The Single Most Effective Non-Jewish Exponent of Judaism in the Entire World'
By Daniel Treiman
Who is it? According to Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, it’s his longtime friend, Newark Mayor Cory Booker. Writing in The Jerusalem Post, Boteach tells the story (which, granted, he’s told many times before) of his friendship with Booker.
The prompt for this iteration is, apparently, that Booker called up Boteach last week, because he was headed to the grave of the late Lubavitcher rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson. Apparently, a Jewish friend was getting married, and the Newark mayor thought it would be a good idea to give his pal a spiritual Jewish experience.
The article’s worth reading for the small window it provides on the passionate philosemitism of an exciting young leader. Booker, it seems, is so enamored with Jews that Michael Steinhardt enlisted him to speak to a gathering of hundreds of Birthright Israel alumni. “A great many participants later said that Cory’s speech was life-transforming as he quoted from the Bible in the original Hebrew and from the Talmud in Aramaic,” Boteach writes.
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