Our post last week on Rabbi Manis Friedman’s statement to Moment magazine calling for the murder of Palestinian civilians seems to have generated a bunch of attention. The JTA and Failed Messiah linked to us on Monday, and tonight both the Forward and the JTA have features on Friedman’s comments, as does the Pioneer Press in St. Paul, which quotes us. (A side note: the Pioneer Press quotes a line I wrote that refers to BTs and makes a half-joke about Mayanot. Do people in St. Paul actually know what those things are?) Rabbi Friedman himself has stepped back from the original remark in a statement on his personal site, and Lubavitch HQ has distanced itself from Friedman in a separate statement.
The Forward’s Nathaniel Popper has a great lede:
Like the best Chabad-Lubavitch rabbis, Manis Friedman has won the hearts of many unaffiliated Jews with his charismatic talks about love and God; it was Friedman who helped lead Bob Dylan into a relationship with Chabad.
But Friedman, who today travels the country as a Chabad speaker, showed a less warm and cuddly side when he was asked how he thinks Jews should treat their Arab neighbors.
Popper follows with a breathtaking quote from ADL chief Abe Foxman, who told him, “I am not shocked that there would be a rabbi who would have these views…but I am shocked that Moment would give up all editorial discretion and good sense to publish this as representative of Chabad.”
Never mind Foxman’s unfounded assumption that these views are totally alien to the Chabad mainstream. I’m troubled by the proposition that we can only allow official spokespeople of Chabad to speak on its behalf. It would be one thing if Moment had lined up Manis Friedman with URJ president Eric Yoffie and JTS chancellor Arnie Eisen, the de-facto heads of the Reform and Conservative movements, and presented him as the second coming of the Rebbe. But the Moment feature, which appears in every issue, makes a point of selecting rank-and-file members to represent each movement. Given that the Rebbe is dead (sorry, guys), I don’t understand the terror of ascribing beliefs to the Lubavitch movement that don’t come out of the mouths of the Chabad PR apparatus.
Anyway, congratulations to Moment for getting this out there.
