Tens of thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jewish men attended a rally Sunday at the New York Mets’ stadium on the dangers of the Internet and how to use modern technology in a religiously responsible way.

Women were not permitted to attend the meeting at Citi Field in Queens. However, it was broadcast live to audiences of women in schools and event halls in ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods. The event garnered so much interest that organizers rented the nearby Arthur Ashe Stadium for the overflow crowd. [Read More]

When I learned about conservative Judaism was the downfall of my respect for the religion (and only the religion). The misogyny hit deeply. I considered myself a feminist long before I became a self-proclaimed atheist. The event of learning more about “my religion” was a merging of the two (yet I still didn’t use the term “atheist” for a bit of time).

In any case, the idea of internet rules is something many of us fight tooth and nail against. With the plethora of congressional bills that have either died or are slowly working their ways around, one thing has become clear: people on the internet hate rules for the internet.

We can moderate ourselves. We don’t need religious groups dictating what we can and cannot view.

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From The New York Times:

The first shock came when Mordechai Jungreis learned that his mentally disabled teenage son was being molested in a Jewish ritual bathhouse in Brooklyn. The second came after Mr. Jungreis complained, and the man accused of the abuse was arrested.

Old friends started walking stonily past him and his family on the streets of Williamsburg. Their landlord kicked them out of their apartment. Anonymous messages filled their answering machine, cursing Mr. Jungreis for turning in a fellow Jew. And, he said, the mother of a child in a wheelchair confronted Mr. Jungreis’s mother-in-law, saying the same man had molested her son, and she “did not report this crime, so why did your son-in-law have to?”

The moral fiber of a community strives for its people to feel safe from predators of all types. Mental and physical well being of children (but, really, all people) should be of the utmost importance. The safety of children needs to be considered. In some religious communities, it is not. We’ve all heard of priests molesting boys so much, it’s the butt of many jokes. This reminds me of this poorly executed Catholic group’s logo: 

All silliness aside, the Catholic molestation cases are prevalent in our minds but not so much the Jewish ones. Whether or not this is only happening in a handful of communities, the problem is that this is happening at all. Sometimes “keeping to themselves” becomes a hefty issue that the larger society must sort out.

Pearl Engelman, a 64-year-old great-grandmother, also noted that the community has failed her.

In 2008, her son, Joel, told rabbinical authorities that he had been repeatedly groped as a child by a school official at the United Talmudical Academy in Williamsburg. The school briefly removed the official but denied the accusation. And when Joel turned 23, too old to file charges under the state’s statute of limitations, they returned the man to teaching.

…

“There is no nice way of saying it,” Mrs. Engelman said. “Our community protects molesters. Other than that, we are wonderful.”

[Read More]

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“Standing Silent” is a new documentary by Phil Jacobs. It uncovers the ritual abuse in an Orthodox Jewish community in Baltimore, Maryland. Jacobs went on a quest to uncover the stories from the sexual abuse survivors.

The Washington Post has a piece on it. It’s very moving.

One by one the victims stood and described their alleged molesters: the Torah teacher, the rabbi, the ice cream truck driver, the man at the mikvah.

That meeting, held nearly six years ago in a small room in a synagogue in Pikes­ville, just outside Baltimore, went on for four hours. Seated in a circle with the other victims was Phil Jacobs, a Baltimore Jewish Times journalist. He was not there as a reporter. He was there because he, too, had experienced sexual abuse.

…

“Standing Silent” was filmed between 2007 and 2010, with a three-person crew that traveled with Jacobs through Baltimore’s suburbs and to Israel, eventually recording more than 125 hours of video, much of it interviews with victims and alleged perpetrators.

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There is a gallery of a few still from the movie. You can view the “Standing Silent” gallery here. I’m unsure where to actually watch the film. Or when it’s coming out.

In any case, there’s also Survivors for Justice.

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CNN:

A teacher was gunned down along with his two children at a Jewish school in southern France Monday, while the director of the school saw his daughter shot and killed in front of him, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said in a somber appearance at the school.

It is the third time in the past 10 days that a gunman on a motorcycle has fired on members of ethnic minorities in the southwest of France. Authorities believe the cases are linked, and a court in Paris has opened an investigation under anti-terrorism powers.

Monday’s killing of four people at Ozar Hatorah school in Toulouse was a “national tragedy,” Sarkozy said. He called for a minute’s silence in French schools on Tuesday.

The gunman pulled up in front of the Jewish school just before 8 a.m. and started shooting, authorities said.

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This historic case has inspired hundreds of other Israelis to get divorced from the Jewish religion. Israel is 15-37% atheist, so this comes as no surprise. The less religious people are in the middle east, the greater the chances are for an end the violence. If only more people of “Muslim” countries came out as atheists (or nonreligious), we could be closer that goal.

Kaniuk’s case has been celebrated as a victory for separation of state and religion in Israel. Actually, he may have fought the wrong battle. The court decision gives people more freedom to define themselves, but only according to predetermined categories. The division of Jewish ethnicity and religion is an embarrassingly simple bureaucratic distinction in place of the mixed up identities of real Jewish life—the kind of complications on which a novelist should thrive.

That said, the Kaniuk case has its benefits. It sheds light, for instance, on how Americans and Israelis misunderstand each other when they use the word Jew. And it helps show that the current Israeli government’s demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state is silly.

I’ve never liked the idea of a “Jewish state” because I don’t like the idea of any religion having it’s own state.

Israel doesn’t need a Palestinian stamp of approval to be a Jewish state. Nor does it need the registration system that Kaniuk used to voice his anger. It needs only a majority that considers itself Jewish in one not-quite-consistent way or another and that has the freedom to conduct a roiling, constant argument about Jewish culture. If Kaniuk’s suit reminds the rest of the tribe of how messy the issue of Jewish identity is, how unsuited it is for sharp delineations, he will have performed a service. [Read More.]

I wonder if this will, in fact, mix up any political happenings in regards to Judaism as an ethnicity rather than a religion.

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For an atheist, Maxim Schrogin talks about God a lot.

Over lunch at a Jewish deli, he ponders the impulse to believe — does it come from within or without? Why does God permit suffering? Finally, he pulls out a flowchart he made showing degrees of belief, which ranges from unquestioning faith to absolute atheism. He stabs the paper with his pen.

“This is where I fall,” he said. “Zero.”

This is religion without god. It still unnecessarily labels children.

Still, Schrogin, 64, is a dues-paying member of Congregation Beth El, a Reform synagogue here in Berkeley. He is among its most active members, attending Torah study, and, for a time, heading its social action committee. He organizes its community service projects and works with leaders of other congregations to help the poor.

His two children were bar and bat mitzvahed. On Friday nights, he and his wife light Shabbat candles and recite Hebrew prayers. There is one song, sung by the congregation in Hebrew, that can bring him to tears.

Schrogin isn’t alone. [Read More.]

It’s becoming more common for Jews not to believe the stories of the old testament but still choose to be involved in their local Jewish community. I get why someone would go to a holiday family/friends gathering but I don’t personally understand that much devotion to a single place of worship (synagogue).

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Harris sits down with Pinker for a discussion about the history of violence.

Sam Harris asks, “Need I remind you that the ‘atheist regimes’ of the 20th century killed tens of millions of people?”

Steven Pinker has a great response.

This is a popular argument among theoconservatives and critics of the new atheism, but for many reasons it is historically inaccurate.
First, the premise that Nazism and Communism were “atheist” ideologies makes sense only within a religiocentric worldview that divides political systems into those that are based on Judaeo-Christian ideology and those that are not. In fact, 20th-century totalitarian movements were no more defined by a rejection of Judaeo-Christianity than they were defined by a rejection of astrology, alchemy, Confucianism, Scientology, or any of hundreds of other belief systems. They were based on the ideas of Hitler and Marx, not David Hume and Bertrand Russell, and the horrors they inflicted are no more a vindication of Judeao-Christianity than they are of astrology or alchemy or Scientology.

Second, Nazism and Fascism were not atheistic in the first place. Hitler thought he was carrying out a divine plan. Nazism received extensive support from many German churches, and no opposition from the Vatican. Fascism happily coexisted with Catholicism in Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Croatia.

Third, according to the most recent compendium of history’s worst atrocities, Matthew White’s Great Big Book of Horrible Things (Norton, 2011), religions have been responsible for 13 of the 100 worst mass killings in history, resulting in 47 million deaths. Communism has been responsible for 6 mass killings and 67 million deaths. If defenders of religion want to crow, “We were only responsible for 47 million murders—Communism was worse!”, they are welcome to do so, but it is not an impressive argument.

Fourth, many religious massacres took place in centuries in which the world’s population was far smaller. Crusaders, for example, killed 1 million people in world of 400 million, for a genocide rate that exceeds that of the Nazi Holocaust. The death toll from the Thirty Years War was proportionally double that of World War I and in the range of World War II in Europe.

When it comes to the history of violence, the significant distinction is not one between theistic and atheistic regimes. It’s the one between regimes that were based on demonizing, utopian ideologies (including Marxism, Nazism, and militant religions) and secular liberal democracies that are based on the ideal of human rights. I present data from the political scientist Rudolph Rummel showing that democracies are vastly less murderous than alternatives forms of government. [Read More.]

While us atheists realize that Hitler’s world philosophy was shaped from Christianity and the bible, some people still like to say he was an atheist. He considered Jews to be atheists because they did not accept Jesus as the messiah. He hated Jews. He hated atheists. He hated a lot of people. As an atheist Jew, I take much offense to allegations that Hitler was an atheist. As far as the others go, I don’t have nearly as much personal angst. In any case, it wasn’t so-called atheist philosophies that shaped their policies.

The book: The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

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With regard to a young American Jew named Harald Fuller-Bennett, the Taglit-Birthright project to some extent achieved its goal. The project brings young Jews from around the world for a trip in Israel “in order to diminish the growing division between Israel and Jewish communities around the world; to strengthen the sense of solidarity among world Jewry; and to strengthen participants’ personal Jewish identity and connection to the Jewish people,” to quote its own words. And indeed, about two years after coming on a Taglit-Birthright tour, Fuller-Bennett intended to visit Israel again.

…

But this time, the people working to diminish the distance between him and Israel were two Tel Aviv lawyers, Omer Shatz and Iftach Cohen, and Jerusalem District Court Judge Yoram Noam. Together, they overturned a bizarre attempt by the Shin Bet security service to accuse him of having connections with terrorists and intending to convert to Islam – for which reasons it barred him from entering Israel for 10 years.

Read the entire story here.

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