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A Kosher Playmate?, Fast Friends, Aliyah and Anti-Americanism, Fit to Print?
A Kosher Playmate?
Playboy centerfold arouses rabbinical interest

Playboy magazine's Miss November, Lindsey Vuolo, is no shiksa goddess centerfold. For the first time in the publication's history, pictures of a Playmate in the buff are accompanied by a bat mitzvah photo and a glowing reminiscence of a teen tour to Israel.

Vuolo, a 20-year-old communications major at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, has said that she values her Jewish heritage and is proud to be an openly Jewish Playmate. "I feel it's not objectifying anyone because I choose to do it," she told Philadelphia's Jewish Exponent newspaper. "I look at it as a major accomplishment. All I ask is, if you don't accept what I'm doing, respect what I'm doing."

But for one rabbi, respecting a woman's choice to pose naked is just too much to ask. Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, the limelight-loving author of the book Kosher Sex, conducted an interview with Vuolo for the Web site Beliefnet. Boteach opened the interview by stating, "I am not against pornography but rather in favor of the erotic attraction of modesty." He then proceeded to relentlessly challenge Vuolo's decision to pose nude, concluding, "Playboy has used you." (Boteach didn't mention that he sold an excerpt from Kosher Sex to Playboy.)

In another Beliefnet interview, a second Orthodox rabbi, Bradley Hirschfield, vice president of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, took issue with Boteach. Hirschfield argued that whether Vuolo has her clothes on or off is irrelevant. For him, Vuolo, as a young woman who is proud of her Jewishness, a good example. Besides, Hirschfield said, "you have Jewish men who will go home and they'll masturbate to a Jewish girl for a change."

Fast Friends
Jewish students join Muslims in breaking the Ramadan fast

It's a difficult time for forging ties between Jewish and Muslim students on campus. But students of both faiths at Columbia University and the University of California at Los Angeles have found an unlikely avenue to dialogue: shared fasting traditions. Last fall, student groups at Columbia and UCLA hosted joint iftar dinners, the meal that breaks the dawn to dusk fast observed by Muslims during the holy month of Ramadan.

At UCLA, the iftar celebration was the outgrowth of a two-year dialogue project initiated by Hillel director Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller and UCLA senior Fadi Amir, a Muslim of Palestinian descent. At Columbia, plans for the campus Hillel and the Muslim Students Union to host an interfaith event took on added significance after the September 11 terror attacks. "It was important for us to have a program so Jews and Muslims could get to know each other on a personal basis and break down any stereotypes," Hillel President Elana Santo told the Columbia Spectator. "I wanted the Muslim population, some of whom are dealing with hate crimes, to know that they have the support of the Jewish students and Hillel."

Finding common ground in fasting was a theme of both iftar celebrations. At Columbia, Santo and Zehra Mamdani, a leader of the Muslim Students Union, spoke about the two religions' shared fasting rituals, and at UCLA, Seidler-Feller pointed out that the Prophet Muhammad encouraged Muslims to fast on Yom Kippur. "We need to see religion as a force to bring people together," Seidler-Feller told the Los Angeles Times. "When you open the door and say, 'Come celebrate with me,' you're opening up your heart."

Aliyah and Anti-Americanism
Promoting immigration to Israel by badmouthing the United States

It's not easy convincing young American Jews to immigrate to Israel--after all, most of us quite like it here. So Kumah, a new student group devoted to promoting aliyah, with a presence on several campuses in the United States and Canada, has its work cut out for it. But Kumah's founder, Yishai Fleisher, a student at Yeshiva University's Cardozo School of Law, has hit upon a novel strategy--supplementing his organization's appeals to Zionist idealism with anti-Americanism.

This November, at the General Assembly of the United Jewish Communities, Kumah activists distributed an essay written by Fleisher for the group's online journal (www.kumah.org). The essay, entitled "Neo-Zionism and 'The Event,'" argues that the events of September 11 will lead American Jews to become estranged from their country. For Fleisher, however, this "need not be viewed in a negative light" because it advances his goal of getting American Jews to move to Israel. He writes:

The horrors of September 11th inflicted fatal wounds to the America we knew before. Traditional anti-Semitism is on the rise, but more importantly, the American government has clerly put itself at odds with the State of Israel's best interest. America's Arab coalition, and the resulting sentiment promoting a Palestinian State, is pushing Israel in a direction that will necessarily cause a rift between the two nations. America's leadership has chosen the value of oil over the lives of people and is coercing Israel to kowtow to ruthless murderers who dance in the streets as we die. The impending division between the US and Israel has inevitably changed how America perceives the Jew, making him suspect. Moreover, American Jews themselves have begun to doubt their role in a country that places them over OPEC's barrels. The consequences of the "war on terrorism" and the struggling American economy are the factors that will push American Jews out of America and draw them into the bosom of Israel.

Jewish people vary in creed and in temperament, but their internal cohesion and their separate existence from the gentile world make them one entity, one society, one organism. While in exile this Jewish organism can be at times accepted by a host organism--like the Spanish, German, and most recently American society. But history has repeatedly shown that the host society in which the Jew finds himself will inevitably reject him. This is because the Jew is an artificial implant in the land of exile, a stranger amongst the gentile families of man. Those American Jews who wish to deny this irrevocable fact and believe that 'America is different' in its acceptance of Jews, are slaves to their wishes and are blinded by their materialistic wills.

Fleisher may not have realized that those who refer to Jews as an "organism" within "a host organism," usually describe the former more specifically as a "parasite." Of course, anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism do frequently go hand in hand.
--Daniel Treiman

Fit to Print?
Student paper runs article suggesting Israel perpetrated September 11 attacks

Being a newspaper editor means wrestling with the difficult question of what is "fit to print." But the editors of San Jose State University's student newspaper sidestepped this issue by deciding that anything goes--even articles containing patent falsehoods.

In October, the Spartan Daily printed a lengthy letter by SJSU junior Romeo Bonet suggesting that Israel's intelligence service was behind the September 11 terrorist attacks. "The Mossad and the Zionists are behind the attacks on the twin towers and the Pentagon, past and future," Bonet wrote. "They are capable because they have access to the United States, have money and have blue eyes." The error-filled letter also alleged that "five Zionist journalists were awake waiting for the attacks," made reference to "F-16 American tanks," and stated that US aid to Israel "exceeds $8 trillion a year," a figure that approaches the US gross domestic product.

The local Jewish community was outraged by the paper's decision to print the letter. But Michelle Jew, the Spartan Daily's executive editor, initially seemed unfazed by the criticism. She told the Jewish Bulletin of Northern California that she didn't regret printing the letter, and disclaimed responsibility for its many errors. "I didn't make the errors in the letter. I didn't write the letter," she said. "…We don't have time to sort through every letter and fact-check them." The paper did later run a correction, noting that F-16s are planes, not tanks, and that Israel receives only $3 billion in annual US aid.

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Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved.