Some of us have had a little trouble sleeping lately. Luckily, that wasn’t a problem last night, thanks to a Millionaire Matchmaker episode in which everyone was boring, and no one found love. Memo to Patti: if you promise a hootenanny, give us something we can sing along to!

Instead, we have Tricia and Trevor, a pair designed to create controversy. Tricia Cruz, who says she’s 38, is on the show because she recently walked in on her husband in flagrante on the desk at their office, and she would like to punish him by finding a woman to fall in love with. On national television, no less! But Tricia is no stranger to doing things on TV; as DJ Tina Turbo, she appeared last year on a reality show called Hellbent for Hollywood. Also, she has a standup show called Strip. Whatever! She’s bi-curious!

And she is going to be at a mixer with Trevor Shively, of Leesburg, Indiana, pop. 625, where the 2000 census recorded two black people, neither of whom, Trevor says, he’s ever had a whole conversation with. Trevor is also a fervent Christian, which freaks Patti out. “I am not really a fan of real religious Moral Majority types,” she starts, before getting to the point. “I don’t really get along with Midwest idiots.”

But in the event, Tricia and Trevor pretty much ignore each other. Trevor recently bought a 10,800 square foot house on Tippecanoe Lake, and he has decorated it with a ginormous television, and we can only assume that he knows from watching it that black people and bisexuals live on God’s green earth along with him. Or not! “I don’t know exactly what she was talking about,” Trevor admits after Patti breaks the news about Tricia. “I have never encountered a bi-curious woman before.” He is, apparently, not curious to learn anything further.

Instead, Tricia picks a butch woman named Tyler who has had experience “flipping” women before, but who, after an awkward date at a skating rink, reminds Tricia of what she liked about men in the first place. Which is that they ogle her. Once again, Patti’s been proven right. Which is great, because it means she can go retrieve the hot, hairless Latino dancer dude Tricia overlooked at the mixer.

As for Trevor. Unlike Mateo, last week’s excitable Christian bachelor, Trevor is just the man Chace Crawford would have become if he’d stayed down in Plano. He runs the grain farm his grandfather founded, teaches Sunday school to middle schoolers, and he doesn’t really see any reason to leave the United States of America. He also likes Pizza Hut a lot. Patti decides he’s just a product of his environment, and she will help him find love anyway. “That’s what life’s about and that’s what the United States is about!” she gushes. Yes, this is indeed a country where what Jesus would have done is go on television to ask a wise Jewess to help him find true love.

Trevor’s celebrity crush is Carrie Prejean, who spent a lot of last year lobbying against same-sex marriage legislation. Luckily, Carrie’s off the market, so instead this 26-year-old will settle for Heidi, a blond former 4H-er who wants to raise horses and ride them at her beach house. (Trevor almost chose Maile, a stunning black former pageant competitor from Hawaii who also really likes God, but foiled Patti’s coastal-liberal-elite plot at the last minute by going with his prejudices. Letdown!)

Trevor and Heidi meet at a flower farm, thanks to our friends at 1-800-FLOWERS, and it’s not clear whether what happens next is a date or a Zyrtec ad. They snip some Gerber daises for a while, and then they lunch in the middle of a field. Heidi, who despite the possibility that they may go mudding or truck racing or something, is wearing an extremely short, tight, and low-cut dress, chirps about how much money she will make by starting businesses. ‘Ah-choo!’ She does not want to date people who are judging her on her looks and her money, see. ‘Excuse me.’ Trevor is smitten. He wants to fly her to Indiana! Heidi’s mouth says “sure,” but her watery eyes say, “I am never going back to flyover country, buddy.”

Sure enough, she hasn’t. The Leesburg Times-Union talked to Trevor, who set up a Facebook page to celebrate this whole hoedown, and he says Heidi has not taken him up on his offer. Also, he reveals that he thought it would be good to use Bravo as “a platform to share my faith as a Christian.” Um, is he aware of Bravo’s target demographic?

Next week: a self-absorbed gay man and a stubborn older woman. Can. Not. Wait.

Remember after-school specials? Do they even have them anymore? Who knows! But this week, The Millionaire Matchmaker brought viewers two very important lessons: one, interfaith relationships are tricky! Two: Jews aren’t so much into Jesus!

But before we get to that, let’s review the story of Jimmy d’Ambrosio, a bachelor from Season Two who returned last night for a second go-round with la Matchmaker herself, Patti Stanger. When we last saw d’Ambrosio, he was referring to himself in the third person as Jimmy D and chasing tail at his Chicago nightclubs. Well, now he’s 32, still single, and wants to grow up. He’s even left Chitown for Las Vegas, which Stanger’s deputy, Chelsea, says is evidence that Jimmy is looking to settle down. Patti, not so easily convinced, takes Jimmy to Dr. Pat Allen. A truly remarkable specimen, Allen looks like she’s about eight million years old, and she’s got a mouth on her. too. “You’re a fox loose in the henhouse, but the trouble is, when the fox gorges on chicken, he loses his taste for chicken,” Allen explains. Except chicken is sex, which may or may not taste like chicken.

At the mixer, Jimmy passes over the lovely Whitney, another Season Two returnee—a brunette so hot a Jewish guy tried to date her, even though she’s not Jewish—and instead picks a blonde bimbo called Angel, who proceeds to get drunk, win $100,000 in a poker game, and disappear upstairs to vomit. (America’s Playground!)

Now, on to the main course. Mateo Stasior is a 42-year-old Harvard grad who worked at Microsoft before moving to L.A., where he is now an asset manager for a billion-dollar hedge fund. (“Just a billion dollars?” scoffed a friend of The Scroll.) Anyway, Mateo, who looks a lot like Herc from The Wire, says he thinks it’s time for him to find his mate, settle down, and get on with ‘that part’ of his life. We think maybe it’s time for him to ditch the terrible ties he keeps wearing. But maybe all of these things are related. Anyway, he seems like a nice enough guy, and it turns out his ex cheated on him, which is kind of sad. Patti reassures him that she’s not going to let him pick his next girlfriend with his penis, and says she will find someone who likes him for his personality.

The rub is that Mateo is a committed Christian, seeking same. “Religion is a deal-breaker, and I understand this completely,” Patti tells the camera in a bit of ecumenical sympathy. Luckily, she has just the girl for Mateo: Amber, a former Dallas Cowboys cheerleader who has the face of St. Mary and absolutely enormous breasts. What about God? She’s cool with that! Except, we learn on the date, she actually thinks that religion is the opiate of the masses, to paraphrase from one of the Jersey Shore kids.

Luckily, Mateo has spotted someone else at the mixer: Andrea, a flight attendant. Andrea—not one of Patti’s handpicked girls—comes with a little catch: her last name is Kaplan. That’s right, kids!

Patti takes her aside. “From one Jew to another—you’re Jewish, right?” Patti asks. Well, of course she is. “In God’s world, there is no religion, but in the real world, it doesn’t always work,” Patti warns. But Mateo decides to explore a little further, and invites Andrea for a little couch time. “So, you believe in God?” he asks. Yes, Andrea tells Mateo, Jews believe in God also. The very same God, in fact! Awesome! So Mateo picks the busty Jewess over the cheerleader. We like him more and more by the minute.

That is, until we see where this is going. Mateo seems to be under the impression that if he and Andrea are meant to be, she’ll see the light and find Jesus. “It’s in God’s hands!” he says, cheerfully. Patti, meanwhile, is freaking out. “He picked the wrong girl! Oy vey!” Andrea shows up for their date in a va-va-voom dress and with her hair gorgeously blown out. They get in a limo and go to the Los Alamitos racetrack to drink champagne and bet the ponies, which is what Christians do on dates, apparently? And they have so much fun Mateo doesn’t even notice Andrea’s Fran Drescher laugh.

A least, he doesn’t until they sit down to eat, which is when the trouble starts. Would she become a Christian, Mateo wants to know? “Both sides of my family are Jewish,” Andrea replies. “It’s important to me because it’s my heritage—I would never want to convert. I don’t think it’s an option for me.” Mateo looks stunned. Well, what about the kids? Can they be Christian? “I’m a woman,” she tells Mateo. “My children will be Jewish.”

Harvard grad Mateo is confused by the concept of halakhic matrilineal descent, and by the fact that Jesus is letting this happen to him. “Here she is, laying down the law about how she wants her children raised,” he sputters to the camera. Shocking, right? Patti reappears, more in sorrow than in anger at having been proven right. “It’s so sad religion is a deal-breaker for most people,” she reflects. “But it’s true.”

Next week: Bisexuals!!! It’ll be a hootenanny, promises Patti. We’ll see!

When the movie premiered, in the fall of 1940, 20 million Germans packed cinemas to see it. Audiences jeered lustily at scenes of bedraggled Jews—actual residents of the Prague ghetto compelled to serve as extras—carting their possessions away after they are banished in response to Oppenheimer’s perfidy. Goebbels, who wrote in his diaries that Jew Süss was “the anti-Semitic film,” ordered screenings for all SS units during the winter lull in fighting. But after the war, the victorious Allied forces proved less impressed. Harlan found himself charged with being an accessory to crimes against humanity. In court, Harlan claimed he had no choice but to do Goebbels’s bidding. He was acquitted, but, as he wrote in a draft of his autobiography, the “the shadow of Jew Süss will not vanish.” But the film did; it was removed from public circulation under postwar de-nazification laws. Harlan returned to filmmaking in the 1950s, but, as a New York Times correspondent wrote in 1951, “the reek of the gas ovens is inseparably associated with his name.”

Harlan died in Capri in 1964 without ever acknowledging the impact of his work—despite the fact that he was once married to a Jewish actress, Dora Gershon, who was killed at Auschwitz. The task of grappling with Veit Harlan’s legacy has now fallen to his childen, their children, and their close relatives, the subjects of Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Süss, a documentary by the German filmmaker Felix Moeller opening today at the Film Forum in New York.

Harlan’s heirs represent an astoundingly broad range of opinion: from borderline revisionism to a full embrace of Jews and Judaism. Not surprisingly, they disagree about whether their father was motivated by a commitment to Nazism or by simple opportunism. “War games and films are now sponsored by the American military,” argues Kristian Harlan, one of the director’s two sons with Söderbaum. “Not much has changed.” And while his brother Caspar describes Veit as a “despotic” husband to their mother, he nonetheless insists that his father was coerced to make Jew Süss and didn’t believe in Nazi principles. But for Moeller, what Veit Harlan actually believed doesn’t much matter: The point is, Harlan made a film, and its consequences have been real.

Only Harlan’s eldest son, Thomas, is old enough to carry any real personal guilt. Born in 1929 to Harlan and his first wife, Hilde Körber, Thomas joined the Hitler Youth as a teenager. As an adult, though, he publicly repudiated his father and worked for a time researching Nazi war crimes in Poland. But his inability to convince his father to recant continues to haunt him. “I was prepared to take responsibility,” he says. “It was self-evident to me that I was answerable along with him … but I don’t know how he saw it. I think he really took me as an enemy.”

Thomas’s two younger sisters, Maria and Susanne, were only old enough to know they needed to look smart when their father’s Nazi patrons came to visit. Yet both, for different reasons, chose to marry men with Jewish blood. Maria, who at one point in the film angrily recounts how her father and stepmother were asked to leave a theater after the war because the leading lady refused to perform for them, nonetheless says she felt impelled to get involved with a man whose Jewish father had been killed by the Nazis because she felt sorry for him. “I said, ‘He has suffered, and we have to help him,’ ” she explains. “I thought I was doing a good deed.”

Her sister Susanne, who committed suicide in 1989, had other motives. “My mother wanted away, away, away from this history, from her father, from everything it meant to her,” Susanne’s daughter, Jessica Jacoby, says in the film. Susanne threw herself headlong into Judaism after meeting Claude Jacoby, who managed to flee from Germany to New Orleans in 1938 but returned to his native country as a journalist with the American Army after the war. Claude Jacoby died in 1964, of a heart attack; in 1967, Susanne left for Israel but ultimately returned to Berlin, where Jessica Jacoby is now a writer for the city’s Jewish newspaper, the Jüdische Allgemeine.

“I belong to a family that the Nazi period divided into perpetrators and victims,” Jacoby says in the film. “You could say that insofar as Jew Süss was a call to persecute and annihilate not just the Jews of Germany but of Europe, it cost my other grandfather and grandmother their lives.”

Good news! Bravo reran the season premiere of Millionaire Matchmaker last night—presumably in an effort to get us all to watch the twirling Olympic sprites on parent network NBC—which gives us the chance to fill in a little blank in the recap archive. So, sit back and listen to the ballad of Nick and Omar.

Nick Friedman (yes, he’s Jewish) and Omar Soliman are definitely pretty-lookin’ people; so pretty-lookin’, in fact, that their multimillion-dollar business is called College Hunks Hauling Junk. They’re high-school buddies who, at 27, have blossomed into entrepreneurs, though it probably didn’t hurt that their high school was Sidwell Friends, one of the most prestigious prep schools in Washington, D.C., where their classmates included Chelsea Clinton and Al Gore III. But they’ve clearly worked hard to build the brand, and now deserve to enjoy the fruits of their labor.

Enter Patti Stanger, the titular Matchmaker, who knows from fruit: she’s getting nachas in heaven, and nachas in life. In this case, “nachas” means a sparkly new four-carat diamond ring her fiancé, Andy Friedman (no relation to Nick, we think), picked up for her in Israel. (“It’s a non-conflict stone,” Patti told People).

But the true do-gooder—as profiled by the Daily Beast—needs no rest; she’s got work to do, too. See, Omar is a freak about women wanting him for his money, and Nick is a little immature. Also, they live in Tampa. Ick!

Luckily, Omar’s uncle has a house in L.A., and the boys have flown in. First up, Omar: he’s half-Egyptian and half-Italian, he’s clean-cut, and he has a Maserati. W00t! But, not so fast. See, his idea of a dream date is “Take Your Girl to Work Day.” Like, he wants her to haul junk with him. Like, actual trash. “If you’re testing girls that way, this is the reason you’re single,” Patti tells him. She suggests he take his girl on a hot-air balloon ride, because of some crackpot theory about how thin air gets the love pheromones pumping.

Next, Nick. This boy, who grew up in leafy northwest D.C. and went to Pomona College in California, shows up in his audition video speaking fluent faux-thug. Patti is appalled. “You’re JEWISH,” she shouts. Nick didn’t want to be on the show—he’s just supporting his boy Omar, who needs serious help. Although, he says, some of his friends have gotten engaged recently. And, he admits, his mom does harass him about his dating “Barbie dolls” who aren’t smart enough for him. Patti decides to break him of his bimbo addiction. No sex before monogamy, she intones. Nick’s eyes bulge out of his head. See, he’s got franchises all over the country, and monogamy isn’t part of that business model.

Patti skitters off to find these two some girls. For Omar, she picks Rachel, a pretty brunette who “radiates exotic sensuality.” For Nick, there’s Dakota, a German-Puerto Rican choreographer who’s a few years older. On to the mixer! Everyone’s cleaned up nicely, but—oh, no. Nick didn’t get his hair cut! “This is my Greek-god, Julius Caesar hair,” he insists. “It’s a Jewfro, man!” Patti retorts. Thankfully, you can get lots of things delivered in L.A. these days, including haircuts; stylist Tiffany shows up and solves the problem.

Newly shorn, Nick flourishes, like a reverse Samson. There he is, rollin’ in a bright-red Bentley! Now he’s taking his girl to the Hollywood sign! Here they are at Kress! And, what? Dakota isn’t in a relationship because she’s always traveling for work? “Well, to be honest, that’s probably better for me, because that’s how my life is,” Nick says. And then he promptly sticks his tongue down her throat.

Meanwhile, Omar. Silly Omar ignored Patti and picked up exotic, sensual Rachel in a garbage truck. “You’re the hottest hunk I’ve ever seen,” Omar says. “Tha-anks,” replies Rachel, slipping a bright green suit on over her cocktail dress. And off they go to work. There’s something winning about Omar’s relentless naïveté. “It’s been a while since I’ve been out in the field,” he admits. “I kind of forgot how bad it can be.” How bad can it be? Well, he shatters a big-screen TV, and he admits that that was wrong of him. “This freakin’ sucks,” he observes. But Rachel proves she is a good sport, and she is rewarded with dinner at Il Cielo in Beverly Hills. Unfortunately, she does not return the favor: it is an early night for the two. “Going to dinner with Omar felt like a guy friend,” Rachel tells the camera. And Omar starts asking the right questions: “Am I just an idiot?” he wonders. Well, Omar, yes.

Balkany, who was released last night on $250,000 bond, told Tablet Magazine in a phone call this morning that he’s sure he’ll be exonerated:

I’m pretty high-profile, and the government has always been after me in one way or another. They threw a bucket of mud at me seven or eight years ago and in the end there wasn’t even a trial. It’s just lots of hoo-ha and sensationalism. There was absolutely nothing there and there is nothing here.

Balkany claimed that he approached the hedge fund—whose name he refused to disclose (though the chatter up in Connecticut is that it’s Steve Cohen’s SAC Capital Advisors)—after being contacted by the inmate, who was concerned about selling out fellow Jews in exchange for a reduced sentence. “He doesn’t want to hurt another Jew,” Balkany explained.

How did the subject of charitable contributions come up? Well, Balkany said, after the hedge fund’s lawyers started talking about how generous the firm had been, he mentioned his school and a related yeshiva that were in need of a loan. “I said, ‘This is not a holdup, this is not an armed robbery, this is a request for charity and it had nothing to do with our other issue,’” he said. “Then they went and knifed me by going to the government.”

The government’s criminal investigator alleged that Balkany approached him at the same time, offering the insider information in exchange not just for reducing the sentence of the informant, but also for leniency in the case of an unnamed relative. Balkany confirmed that the additional person for whom he sought leniency is his brother-in-law, Sholom Rubashkin, who is currently in an Iowa jail pending his sentencing on 86 counts of fraud at Agriprocessors, the kosher meat empire. “The whole purpose was to get this first man out of jail,” Balkany said. “Rubashkin was thrown in later.”

Balkany, a white-bearded 63-year-old who heads the Bais Yaakov girls’ school in Midwood, is known in political circles as “the Brooklyn Bundler”—a name bestowed on him over 20 years ago because of his prowess as a fundraiser for political candidates, particularly those who proved willing to contribute to his pet causes. His wife, Sarah, is the daughter of Aaron Rubashkin, the founder of Agriprocessors; though Balkany never worked for the company, at the height of the Agriprocessors scandal, which involved allegations of both financial fraud and immigrant labor violations, he interceded on his in-laws’ behalf against a planned boycott.

It’s been a rough few years for the rabbi. In 2003, not long after he was invited onto the floor of the House of Representatives as guest chaplain, Balkany was charged with misappropriating $700,000 in federal grants to his school. (The government ultimately withdrew the charges.) He now faces charges of extortion, blackmail, fraud, and making false statements, carrying a potential sentence of up to 20 years.

Brooklyn Rabbi Charged in $3M Extortion Plot [NY Post]

Earlier: Rubashkin Found Guilty of 86 Fraud Charges

Then Patti’s tireless aide-de-camp Destin presented us with the night’s two bachelors, a pair of classic L.A. specimens: Prince Valiant and the Douchebag.

The prince, we are expected to assume, is David Sheltraw, a 51-year-old fitness fanatic and former actor who splits his time between L.A. and South Beach. His Bravo tagline tells us he’s a financier; Google tells us he played Eros in the 1995 Ally Sheedy thriller One Night Stand and, apparently, spent some time working as a mortgage broker for Countrywide. Never mind! He looks like Michael Douglas. What could be the matter?

Actually, as Patti knows, a good-looking single man signals danger: “There’s something really wrong with him,” she announces. “Otherwise, he wouldn’t be here.” Well, what’s wrong with him is that he says he wants to find true love, but in actuality is looking for a young, uncomplicated chickadee to have his child. “He’s looking for the bells and whistles and the violins and the Red Sea parting,” Patti says. (Yes! More Moses references!) It’s possible he just wanted to be on TV again, but sadly David’s other problem is that he’s boring, even though he has a motorcycle, and in the end he winds up behaving like a douche to the perfectly normal-seeming ex-model and mother-of-three he takes to Neptune’s Net in Malibu for beer and fried fish.

So that leaves the aforementioned douchebag to play the part of the prince. And, my, what a douche! As Page Six informed us yesterday morning, the second “millionaire” was Jason Davis, the 25-year-old grandson of the late tycoon Marvin Davis, who at various points owned 20th Century Fox and the Beverly Hills Hotel. The current Davis is a Perez Hilton lookalike who is regularly ridiculed in the gossip blogs as “Gummy Bear,” because he is fat, while his brother Brandon—who was responsible for starting the whole Lindsay Lohan “firecrotch” thing (if you don’t know, maintain your blissful ignorance)—is known as “Greasy Bear.”

Well, we get a gauzy montage of Jason as a young pudgy boy, hugging his grandpa at his bar mitzvah (for which the elder Davises converted their estate into a faux-casino), and then we get the real thing: a lardy guy in a gold late-Elvis tracksuit and sunglasses. All the time with the sunglasses!

But the Davis heirs’ finances are a little murky, plus Jason may or may not have been evicted from his apartment for failing to pay his $3,600 monthly rent, so it’s a little sad to hear him reminiscing about his childhood escapades on private planes. (He also brags about painting Tori Spelling, another dispossessed child of Hollywood royalty, on a Malibu beach when they were kids.) And slowly, and against all odds, Jason turns out to be kind of winning! He calls out one bimbo at the mixer for being totally boring. He also has a mommy thing going for Patti, which is actually endearing (and classic: “Wow, I kind of want to sleep with her!” he announces right after she reams him out for having dirty fingernails).

Patti treats Jason to a manicure and spray-tan at the Four Seasons, and finds him a not-too-ditzy blonde named Stephanie whose sole task is to puncture Jason’s attitude and prove that he can be honest without getting hurt. He picks Stephanie up in a limo and takes her to his house, where there is a violinist and a pet monkey, and they talk companionably about farting. Then they make out wrapped in a blanket. So far, so good!

By the time Jason shows up at Patti’s office for his debrief, she’s replaced Gummy Bear with Huggy Bear. Is the frog secretly a prince? We’ll never know. Sadly, it seems that Stephanie actually just wanted to get on TV (maybe you sense a pattern?), because she tells Jason she can’t see him again due to an “it’s complicated” situation with some other guy. And just like that, Patti turns all Mama Bear. She calls Stephanie to interrogate her about the date. Stephanie denies the make-out session. “You did not suck face?” Patti yells into her BlackBerry. “Tongues did not touch?” She gives the phone to Jason so he can deliver the final blow; he hangs up on the girl.

“I’m really sad Jason opened up and Stephanie lied to him,” Patti says afterward. But it’s okay! Jason found at least one woman he can trust: his hectoring Jewish mama-figure. And he still has his monkey to play with.

Next week: some guy says he’s looking for a Christian woman, but hesitates when asked how committed he is, exactly, to abstinence.

Earlier: Fellas: Heed the Millionaire Matchmaker

For those of you who haven’t seen her Bravo show, Stanger’s an L.A. transplant who’s taken the trade-craft her mother and grandmother practiced as shadchans at their New Jersey shul and applied it to the very rich and, frequently, very shallow people who pass through her office every week. But she’s no platitudinous fairy godmother, offering up worthy Cinderellas to lovelorn Prince Charmings; she’s Sophie Portnoy for hire. “Patti’s mom is quieter—she was that Jewish mom on the street who wanted to see the nice little Jewish girl get together with the nice Jewish boy and be happy,” Stanger’s right-hand man, Destin Pfaff, told Tablet Magazine the other day. “But Patti takes that nice Jewish boy who wants to be set up and says, ‘There must be something wrong with you, because otherwise you wouldn’t be single.’”

This is, by the way, the show’s secret genius: it’s not about watching people find love, it’s about watching millionaires discover that money doesn’t make them any less insecure than the rest of us. (Exhibit A: Justin Shenkarow, whom Stanger dubbed her “angry Hobbit” and who threw a thoroughly recognizable tantrum when Stanger visited his home with a wardrobe consultant: “You come into my fucking room and you tell me you have to open my closets? Who are you?” he snapped.)

Stanger gets away with eviscerating these guys because she exudes ethnic authenticity—which is to say, she talks back—and because everyone knows that, deep down, she really just wants them to be capable of finding happiness. “There are people who come in with this challenge attitude, like, ‘I challenge you to find someone for me,’” Pfaff said. “But these people just need a mirror in front of them to help untie some of those knots.”

Starting next Wednesday, we’ll be distilling Stanger’s wisdom weekly on The Scroll. In the meantime, we’ll leave you with an example of how not to behave this weekend: do not be like last season’s favorite, Dave Levine, a sex-toy mogul who told Stanger he was looking for a bisexual swinger who also had her own career and would be a good mother to his children; you know, someone he could take home to his Conservative family in Boston. Stanger’s analysis: “Ugh, Charlie Sheen.”

Except she isn’t. Jeanne isn’t empowered by the heroism of Jewish survivors; she decides she wants to be a victim. She goes into her bathroom one morning, draws some swastikas on her taut belly, and cuts her pretty face with a knife. Then she goes to the police and files a report claiming that she’s been attacked on a train by a gang of Arab youths who mistook her for a Jew. Voila, sympathy! News anchors detail her plight and bemoan the latest example of anti-Semitism, and the president’s office calls to offer support. It’s just what she thought she wanted: to become a victim, deserving of sorrow.

Usually, when non-Jews talk about their desire to access some of what being Jewish has to offer, they talk about spirituality, or lox, or Bar Rafaeli. But Jeanne is after something else: a kind of public martyrdom. “At the heart of Jeanne’s lie is the desire to become Jewish in the mode of persecution,” the film’s director, André Téchiné, explained in press notes for the film, which opens today in New York. “It’s an identification.”

In other words, it’s anti-Semitism turned inside out. Instead of fearing Jews, Jeanne envies some imagined special quality; what’s strange is that she expresses her philo-Semitism by claiming to be the target of anti-Jewish hate.

Jeanne’s story, as it happens, is based on real events. In July 2004, a 23-year-old woman, Marie Leblanc, went to the police and reported that she and her 13-month-old baby were violently assaulted on a suburban light-rail train by six young Muslim men who thought she was Jewish. France was already on alert; the previous fall, the president, Jacques Chirac, had announced a crackdown on anti-Semitic incidents. “When a Jew is attacked in France,” he’d said, “it is an attack on the whole of France.” He also called on French citizens to be vigilant against anti-Jewish outbursts. Perhaps as a result, the Parisian paper Le Figaro was quick to compare Leblanc, who claimed 20 fellow passengers watched the attack in silence, to Kitty Genovese, the New York woman whose neighbors famously failed to respond to her cries for help as she was brutally stabbed to death in 1964.

Within days, Leblanc’s tale was revealed as a hoax. Chirac, who had publicly called for the alleged perpetrators to be hunted down and held to account, apologized and instead demanded that Leblanc be punished for her “manipulation” of the racial tensions roiling the nation. (Leblanc was quickly sentenced to probation and ordered by French courts to seek psychiatric care.)

Leblanc wasn’t the only one that summer to fabricate an anti-Semitic attack for attention. According to the New York Times, police took a “mentally unstable” Jewish man into custody on suspicion of setting a fire at a Jewish community center in Paris where he worked as a security guard, and another man in Lyon admitted scrawling swastikas on Jewish tombstones after the press failed to notice that he had assaulted a Muslim man with a hatchet. But Leblanc was the only one who seemed to actually want to tap into something about being Jewish, without any particular interest in stoking the inevitable public scapegoating of Muslim immigrants that followed.

And the film—which Téchiné adapted from Jean-Marie Besset’s 2005 play about the Leblanc case, RER, named for the Parisian regional train network on which the attack supposedly took place—adds another wrinkle to the story. Téchiné introduces a prominent Jewish civil-rights attorney who appears, early on, as a talking head on television condemning anti-Semitism. Though he is an avowed atheist, he is also in the midst of refereeing a family debate about whether or not his 12-year-old grandson should have a bar mitzvah. It sets up a neat parallel: Jeanne, so preoccupied with claiming her share of the noble victimhood she believes constitutes the Jewish legacy, is utterly shocked to discover that actual Jews have a relationship with their heritage that is far more complicated, and far more interesting.

While offers of Ayurvedic massages and luxury accommodation may seem at odds with the somber, discouraging face that ultra-Orthodoxy has traditionally turned to prospective converts, Tropper, by most accounts, did not seem particularly interested in relaxing halachic codes to accommodate the modern world. A biblical literalist, he played an active role in an effort by a group of ultra-Orthodox rabbis to ban the books of another rabbi, Nosson Slifkin, who believed that the world is older than the Jewish calendar—that is, 5,770 years. In 2006, among his other duties, he took it upon himself to retroactively invalidate the conversion of a woman who subsequently dared to violate ultra-Orthodox codes of modesty by wearing pants.

As a newcomer to the fraught business of conversions—and, according to people who dealt with him, someone who could at times be an abrasive individual—Tropper appears to have been willing to augment his personal power at the expense of his conversion candidates, a vulnerable group whose well-being is supposed to be protected from oppressive behavior by millennia of explicit rabbinical teaching and practice. To his students, he presented himself as a learned teacher who could help them reach the God they yearned for. In the billionaire Thomas Kaplan and his multimillionaire nephew Guma Aguiar, Tropper found a pair of patrons who, in exchange for access to the leading halachic authorities in New York and Jerusalem, would help the rabbi reinforce his newfound influence over the conversion process with lavish spectacles in American cities like Phoenix and Boston as well as at the luxurious David Citadel Hotel in Jerusalem. In addition to paying for food, drink, and hotel rooms at five-star hotels, Tropper also used Kaplan and Aguiar’s millions to curry favor with some of the most elevated rabbinic authorities in the world—including Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv, one of the ultra-Orthodox world’s pre-eminent scholars, and Israel’s Sephardic chief rabbi, Shlomo Amar.

The world of spa vacations at the Biltmore was a long way from Tropper’s home base in the ultra-Orthodox enclave of Monsey, New York, where the rabbi ran a small yeshiva, Kol Yaakov, that specialized in “returning” non-observant adult Jews to Judaism. For more than two decades, Tropper—who was born into a rabbinic family on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and educated in Jerusalem—instructed returnees to Judaism, called ba’alei teshuva, on the laws of Torah in a modest brick-and-stucco house outfitted with a basketball hoop in the narrow parking lot out back. He got his start at Ohr Somayach, one of Monsey’s largest adult yeshivas, but splintered off to start Kol Yaakov in 1981 with help from a late New York couple, Louis J. Septimus and his wife, Edythe, for whom the school’s building is named.

The backing provided by Kaplan and Aguiar, Kaplan’s now-estranged nephew, was on an entirely different scale. The largesse provided by the two men over the years—at least $8 million, according to financial documents filed with the IRS—gave the rabbi entree into the insular world of the Israeli rabbinate—a cloistered group of men who, with the approval of the Israeli government, determine who can and cannot be considered a Jew, whatever their level of religious observance. By the time Tropper got to Phoenix, he could offer their imprimatur to reassure nervous hopefuls that he was the one conduit to becoming “a real Jew.” “If we ever make aliyah, there isn’t going to be any question of my Jewishness,” one Tropper graduate, Lucia Schnitzer, told the Jewish News of Greater Phoenix before the 2007 Biltmore weekend. “If my daughter wants to marry a Kohen, there isn’t going to be any question.”

In the past month, Tropper has been undone by the emergence of audio and video recordings that seem to indicate he tried to use his position to coerce a student, Shannon Orand, into having sex with other men in exchange not just for her conversion to Judaism but for cash. According to a student who answered the door at Kol Yaakov on Sunday, he remains in charge of the yeshiva, but Dovid Jacobs, Tropper’s former right-hand man, told Tablet Magazine the rabbi has been removed from his positions at both Eternal Jewish Family and its parent organization, Horizons Bais Achiezer, which have separate offices a few miles away from the yeshiva, in the neighboring town of Suffern. Tropper did not respond to requests for comment.

In the weeks since Tropper’s downfall, none of the rabbis who facilitated his meteoric rise in the Jewish world—men whose lives are devoted to the pious observance of God’s word—have stepped forward to publicly condemn Tropper for his violations of ultra-Orthodox codes on modesty and extramarital sex, let alone for his apparent willingness to use his position of religious authority to exploit the single mother of two young children for sex. The deafening silence parallels the response from the Roman Catholic Church after allegations of widespread child abuse surfaced in 2002; in diocese after diocese, bishops chose to protect the abusers, and settle generously with the victims, rather than forthrightly condemn what any parishioner would rightly see as an abomination in the eyes of God. “A community is measured by how it responds to something like this,” said one ultra-Orthodox rabbi. “The right-wing yeshivishe world is in damage control.”

As recently as November, when Tropper’s son got married, the list of rabbis who either attended or sent blessings included Elyashiv, and Reuven Feinstein, the son of the Rav Moshe Feinstein, who died in 1986, the most respected ultra-Orthodox halachic authority of his time. In addition to his impressive lineage, Reuven Feinstein is a widely respected figure in his own right and the head of the Yeshiva of Staten Island—which received a $3 million gift from Kaplan and Aguiar’s family foundation in 2008. Tropper gushed on his blog after the celebration, “The chuppah looked like a who’s who of the Torah world!”

In the wake of Tropper’s resignation from EJF, in mid-December, Feinstein declined to condemn Tropper’s activities or distance himself from EJF. Indeed, Feinstein issued a statement indicating he would increase his work with Eternal Jewish Family, to ensure that the organization would “continue to be guided by the highest halachic standards.”

To some, Feinstein’s circumspect response to the Tropper scandal was reminiscent of his silence on two other recent scandals involving sex and the abuse of rabbinic authority, both of which involved members of Feinstein’s family, the sons of his sister, Shifra, and her husband, Rabbi Moshe Tendler. One, Mordecai Tendler, was dismissed in 2006 from his post at a synagogue in Spring Valley, near Monsey, after a congregant accused him of seducing her into an affair with threats the she’d never find a husband unless she slept with him. A few weeks later, Tendler’s brother, Aron, resigned as principal of an Orthodox day school in Los Angeles amid allegations that he had “inappropriate” relations with female students.

Feinstein, of course, wasn’t involved in either of those incidents. But Feinstein’s willingness to take strong public stands on abstract questions of morality—including some as minute as whether or not men can return handshakes proffered by women (they can, to avoid embarrassing the other person)—only underscored, to some, his unwillingness to say even a single word about much more obvious abuses of Jewish law and halachic authority by eminent rabbis within his professional and family circle. (Feinstein did not return a message from Tablet seeking comment.)

It remains unclear what the future of Eternal Jewish Family will be. Kaplan has served as the organization’s chairman; his attorneys told Tablet last week they don’t know whether he will remain in that role. The group currently has a caretaker leader, after the rabbi initially announced as Tropper’s replacement—Elya Wachtfogel, head of a yeshiva in the Catskills hamlet of South Fallsburg, New York—subsequently released a letter saying he had not, in fact, taken the position. “The rumors which were spread of late regarding the EJF organization, alleging it is under my direction, are in error and baseless,” Wachtfogel said, in a handwritten declaration. Nothing further about Tropper, or his transgressions, was said.

If the silence of the ultra-Orthodox rabbinate is meant to keep members of their community in the dark, and shield the authority of the rabbinate from shame, it has been countered by outraged discussion on ultra-Orthodox blogs, whose commenters have been following the money that passed through Tropper’s organization—and venting their anger at the ongoing silence from the halachic establishment. One anonymously written blog, The Unorthodox Jew, called on Feinstein to shut down “this house of prostitution.” A commenter on the blog called for a letter-writing campaign to “as many Orthodox-affiliated Jews as possible, alerting them to the unworthiness of our so-called ‘gedolim’”—a Hebrew term used by ultra-Orthodox Jews to refer to their leaders. “King Lear should be obligatory reading in the ultra-Orthodox world, along with All the King’s Men,” wrote another person. At another highly critical blog, Daas Torah, a commenter wrote: “The chillul hashem”—insult to God—“of Tropper’s scandals is only getting worse with time like a festering untreated cancer.”

One of the few religious authorities to speak out publicly on the Tropper case has been Aba Dunner, the executive director of the Conference of European Rabbis, a group that publicly opposed Tropper’s incursion onto its turf even before the scandal; last week, Dunner published an op-ed in the Five Towns Jewish Times, a New York-area paper catering to Orthodox readers, in which he accused Eternal Jewish Family of conducting a “bounty hunt” for new Jews, by allegedly paying local rabbis to funnel intermarried couples into its fledgling conversion courts. “Tropper is a fraud,” Dunner wrote. “The organization he created is in his image and is therefore a fraud too. The creators of that image are fraudsters and hucksters who are trying desperately to keep the line to Mr. Kaplan’s millions open.”

CORRECTION, April 19: An earlier version of this article inaccurately described Rabbi Moshe Tendler as the uncle of Rabbi. In fact, Tendler is Feinstein’s brother-in-law.

MORE: Allison Hoffman outlined the entire Tropper scandal here.
MORE: Allison Hoffman profiled Guma Aguiar here.
MORE: Tablet Magazine’s Marissa Brostoff profiled Shannon Orand here.
MORE: Read transcripts of the phone calls, plus hear some audio clips, here.

Aguiar’s interview is just the latest—albeit the most public—example of increasingly erratic outbursts from the native Floridian and former evangelical Christian, who made aliyah to Israel in November 2007 with his wife and three young children. Last April, Aguiar has acknowledged in television interviews, he physically confronted Tropper in a Jerusalem hotel room; the rabbi claimed in an Israeli court that Aguiar, an athletic 6-foot-2-inch man, threatened to throw him off a ninth-floor balcony. In June, Aguiar was arrested in Florida on drug possession charges, after a cop pulled him over and found marijuana in his Bentley. Aguiar pleaded no contest and paid a $536 fine, but only after accusing the sheriff’s deputies of anti-Semitism and brutality. According to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Aguiar tried to head-butt an officer and told a guard, “I could buy you, Mr. Deputy.”

Yesterday, Aguiar’s family, in the statement released to the press, blamed Aguiar’s mental breakdown on a single factor: the stress caused by the web of civil lawsuits between him and Kaplan, from whom he is now estranged, over the $2.55 billion payout from the 2007 sale of their joint natural-gas exploration venture, Leor Energy. “Mr. Aguiar fell victim to a campaign of invasive surveillance and false accusations that amounted to psychological terrorism,” Aguiar’s family said in the statement. Aguiar’s U.S. attorneys did not return a phone call from Tablet seeking comment. Kaplan’s attorneys declined to comment, citing the pending litigation.

Earlier this week, in a phone interview with Tablet before his commitment to the Abarbanel mental hospital in the Tel Aviv suburb of Bat Yam, Aguiar charged that his uncle—who is currently president of the board of the 92nd Street Y, one of New York’s pre-eminent Jewish cultural institutions—was, among other things, paying off the U.S. military and tracking Aguiar and his family with GPS devices. “I’ve been under surveillance for a long time,” Aguiar insisted. Aguiar also made repeated references to death, claiming that both Kaplan and Tropper are on suicide watch because of the recent sex-tape scandal. He also claimed he had filed for custody of Kaplan’s two young children in both the United States and Israel. Then he bragged about the powerful people he knows who would stop him from doing “anything stupid.” “You know who would call me?” Aguiar asked. “People like Bibi, people like Tzachi Hanegbi”—Israel’s former minister of justice, currently chairman of the Knesset’s foreign affairs and defense committee—“maybe Tzipi Livni, maybe Shimon Peres, maybe Alan Dershowitz.” The Harvard law professor recently signed on to Aguiar’s legal team; he declined to comment on his client’s circumstances to Tablet, citing the ongoing litigation.

Documents filed by Kaplan in U.S. federal court suggest that Aguiar has been regularly leaving threatening voicemails for Kaplan and others as the Tropper scandal has unfolded. Their content, which has not previously been reported, demonstrates the degree to which Tropper’s organization has become enmeshed in the increasingly vicious family feud between Kaplan, who remains Eternal Jewish Family’s chairman, and Aguiar—both wealthy, ambitious men who have come to play increasingly prominent roles in the secular Jewish world, even as they sought, via Tropper, to increase the ultra-Orthodox stranglehold over the process of conversion to Judaism backed by the legal authority of the State of Israel.

“I demand that you resign as Chairman of EJF,” Aguiar allegedly said in a December 15 voicemail message, threatening to sexually violate Kaplan if he didn’t comply, according to court documents. “You can call me when the fucking pain is bad enough,” he said in another message, filed in support of Kaplan’s motion to hold his nephew in contempt of court. (The presiding judge has not yet ruled on the request.) Additional filings contain more such messages: on December 20, the same day the New York Post published the seamy details of Tropper’s alleged sexcapades with Shannon Orand, the conversion candidate from Houston, Aguiar allegedly left the following message: “It’s the eighth night of Hanukkah and the flames are burning loud. I just sent over some candles for you guys and some pizza and some other items and gifts today so that you would have them as a token of our appreciation from our family to our family of just how much we love you ‘cause we love you so much that we decided to let you know that we’re praying for you in the event that you finally decide to commit suicide.” In court filings, Aguiar’s attorneys have not disputed their client left the voicemails, but argue that their content does not constitute harassment.

As president of the 92nd Steet Y, Kaplan, 47, regularly hobnobs with some of the most powerful Jewish philanthropists in New York. He and his wife, Daphna Recanati, a member of one of Israel’s wealthiest and best-known families, also support major scholarship programs for arts education at the Y and have given millions to other charitable causes in Israel and the United States. Separately, Kaplan—who wrote a 788-page Oxford dissertation on Malaysia’s geopolitical positioning during the Cold War before, in 1994, opening a firm that prospected silver mines with financial backing from George and Paul Soros—has established a nonprofit organization called Panthera, devoted to wildcat preservation and research, which has created vast reserves of land in Brazil for big cats to roam free. (A recent admiring profile of Kaplan in the New York Times revealed that he also harvests honey from his jaguar preserves.) A serial entrepreneur, Kaplan moved on from oil wells to gold mining, through a new company based in London, which has hired Tony Blair’s former chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, as an adviser, according to British press reports.

Aguiar, 15 years Kaplan’s junior, is the son of the billionaire’s older sister, Ellen Kaplan, who left Judaism to become an evangelical Christian. He was born in Brazil, but grew up in Fort Lauderdale, where he was a tennis star for his Christian prep school, Westminster Academy. Even after “returning” to Judaism, Aguiar continued to support the school, which is also his wife’s alma mater, giving it a $50,000 grant in 2007. After graduating from Westminster, he attended Clemson University, in South Carolina, but dropped out and moved to New York, where he became a clerk on the New York Mercantile Exchange. In 2001, Kaplan offered to bring Aguiar into his new business venture: oil and gas exploration. In court documents, Aguiar recounts getting into a car and driving to Texas, where he and a geologist, John Amoruso, made one of the largest onshore natural-gas finds in the past decade; as gas prices skyrocketed in the middle part of the decade, Aguiar and Kaplan’s company, Leor, attracted Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch as investors before selling to oil giant EnCana in 2007.

In addition to discovering large deposits of untapped natural gas, Aguiar was also rediscovering his ancestral heritage. In interviews, he likes to recount the tale of calling Tovia Singer, a Monsey-based rabbi who specializes in outreach to Jews who have become evangelical Christians, to demand the rabbi stop trying to take Jews away from Jesus. Instead, Aguiar continues, he fell in love with the Torah. In 2003, Kaplan introduced his peripatetic nephew to Tropper, who bestowed upon him the name Yehuda Dovid and took him on as a pupil in his yeshiva. Eventually, Aguiar convinced Jamie Black, his onetime high-school girlfriend, to convert to Judaism. “I thought about Jerusalem since I was a child,” Aguiar told a documentary film crew last year. “I had these amazing visions of Samson, this big strong guy, and David with the slingshot—these visions of heroes in my mind.”

Until their falling out two years ago, Kaplan and Aguiar shared both a thriving energy business—Leor was named after Kaplan’s children, Leonardo and Orianna—and a charitable organization, the Lillian Jean Kaplan Foundation, named for Kaplan’s mother and established after her death in 2002 to support Thomas Kaplan’s “philanthropic and religious goals.” From the outset, Kaplan was the principal donor to the foundation, contributing more than $1 million annually. Aguiar ran the foundation, which was registered to his home on a cul-de-sac in Fort Lauderdale, and which gave to an array of causes, including medical research and Jewish groups ranging from Hadassah, Magen David Adom, and the Jewish National Fund to ultra-Orthodox education and outreach groups, including Tropper’s yeshiva, Kol Yaakov, in Monsey.

It remains unclear why Kaplan and Aguiar, having cemented their very profitable relationship in the oil fields of Texas, decided to get so deeply involved with Tropper, a moonfaced ultra-Orthodox rabbi who first came to public prominence in his community in 2005, when he joined a group of halachic authorities who had ostracized a fellow ultra-Orthodox rabbi who had the temerity to claim that the universe might be more than 5,700 years old. No rabbi who believed that the universe predated the Jewish calendar, Tropper insisted, could be a valid judge for a conversion to Judaism—a claim that carried with it the implication that no one who believed otherwise should be allowed to become a Jew. (Tropper subsequently invalidated a woman’s conversion to Judaism on the grounds that she had later been seen wearing pants, a sartorial decision that in his binding opinion proved that she was never actually Jewish.)

Between 2003 and 2008, the last year for which documents are available, the Kaplan foundation paid out more than $8 million to Tropper’s various enterprises, helping the rabbi establish adherence to his personal brand of biblical literalism as the gold standard for Jewish belief and practice, and for conversion to Judaism. But it’s not clear how warm their relationship ever was; emails filed in one of the court cases indicate that, as early as 2004, Kaplan was losing patience with his rabbinic ally, who was demanding more money. “Your method of recognizing my generosity is to threaten withholding of your contacts, a form of spiritual scorched earth,” Kaplan wrote. “You’ve acted like a child and jeopardized the greatest project with which you could ever be associated. Quite frankly you should be ashamed of yourself.”

In 2007, after the sale of Leor closed, Kaplan and his wife, Daphne, contributed $36 million to the foundation; Aguiar, in his first contribution, added another $25 million. By the middle of 2008, as the relationship between Kaplan and Aguiar began to deteriorate, Kaplan attempted to remove his nephew—who had been drawing six-figure management fees—from the foundation. In a lawsuit pending in Florida state court, Kaplan accuses Aguiar of hijacking the foundation and distributing $7 million to certain rabbis “to further his claim he is the Jewish Messiah.”

By then, Aguiar had already moved to Israel, where he has used his $200 million from the Leor sale to become something less than the Messiah—instead, he’s a bona-fide Jerusalem celebrity, instantly recognizable to Israelis as the owner of Beitar Jerusalem, the country’s most famous soccer club, whose bright yellow jerseys and caps he frequently wears. He is also known for high-profile charitable donations to major organizations, including an $8 million gift a year ago to Nefesh b’Nefesh, a group that promotes aliyah among North American Jews. In October, he appeared onstage with Israel’s president, Shimon Peres, at the annual Presidential Conference in Jerusalem, which Aguiar and his wife co-chaired. Earlier in the year, he chaired a similar conference there, and he bestowed a “Defender of Jerusalem” award on Texas Gov. Rick Perry during the politician’s August visit to the Holy Land.

In September, Israel’s Channel 10 aired a documentary about the country’s newest hero, in which Aguiar offered a guided tour of an unoccupied apartment he owns in Jerusalem’s Old City, overlooking the Western Wall. “What did you think, I was going to be in Row 56 or something?” Aguiar asked. “This is like VIP seats here—in case something happens”—he seems to be referring to the arrival of the Messiah—“I wanted VIP seats. If it never happens in our lifetime, then we have something to look forward to.”

The show also captured Aguiar—who explained in his interview with Tablet that he is relieved to have moved his allegiance from Tropper’s strict form of ultra-Orthodoxy to the more relaxed, welcoming Judaism of Chabad—stopping to buy cigarettes at a corner shop. “Jerusalem like you, love you,” exclaims one of the shopkeepers. “You been to selichot”—Jewish prayers of atonement—“at the Kotel?” asks he other. Aguiar responds that he has not, and pauses before asking: “What is selichot?”

MORE: Tablet Magazine’s Allison Hoffman outlined the entire Tropper scandal here.
MORE: Tablet Magazine’s Marissa Brostoff profiled Shannon Orand here.
MORE: Read transcripts of the phone calls, plus hear some audio clips, here.

December was a very bad month for Rabbi Leib Tropper, a powerful ultra-Orthodox rabbi who has been seeking to determine the standards for conversion in Israel and throughout the world through his little-known yet influential organization, Eternal Jewish Family. First, black-and-white posters appeared on walls in Jerusalem and other Israeli cities threatening public disgrace if the rabbi refused to “cease his filth.” While the definition of “filth” was left up to readers’ imaginations, photos and video were prominently mentioned in the text, which demanded that Tropper suspend his involvement in performing religious conversions.

On December 14, Eternal Jewish Family—which is based in the ultra-Orthodox enclave of Monsey, New York, and backed by the billionaire board president of New York’s 92nd Street Y, and his nephew, who owns one of Israel’s most famous soccer clubs—suddenly announced that its founder was resigning his post to “pursue a variety of other interests,” the details of which were again left to readers’ imaginations.

Two days later, the filth appeared online: audio tapes, allegedly of the rabbi, trying to coerce a single mother from Houston into having sex with other men for money—and as the price of her conversion to Judaism.

“Would you have a problem with just talking about sex to a guy, or only actually doing it?” the man asks on one of the tapes. In another, he reassures her, “I could roleplay a rape with you, but I couldn’t actually rape you.” A third featured explicit phone sex between the two. Shortly after the tapes surfaced, the hopeful convert, a minister’s daughter named Shannon Orand, told the blogger Shmarya Rosenberg—who has covered the story on his blog, Failed Messiah—that the rabbi had said, “If you fulfill my needs, I’ll fulfill yours—and you need a conversion.” Through an attorney, Tropper released a statement that admitted no wrongdoing but expressed regret for “what has appeared to be conduct not within our significant laws of modesty.” (When Tablet Magazine reached Tropper by phone at his home in Monsey to request comment, he simply said, “No, no,” and hung up.)

The sex tapes appeared to support the allegations of misconduct against Tropper, and they briefly elevated what started out as internecine rumor-mongering among ultra-Orthodox factions into legitimate tabloid fodder. (“Tal-Mood for Love,” read the headline above a brief item in the New York Post.) To more sensitive listeners, the tapes exhibited not just the particular sexual perversions of a rabbi from Monsey, but also the moral horror of a religious figure exploiting the trust of a woman who was hoping to join the Jewish religion and who was dependent on his authority. (Orand completed her conversion in Jerusalem last week under the auspices of a different Orthodox rabbi.)

Other than the mention in the Post, mainstream American newspapers ignored what is surely one of the weirdest, most embarrassing, and most consequential scandals in recent Jewish history. Mainstream rabbinical and Jewish communal organizations in the United States also chose to be silent. Yet the rise and fall of Leib Tropper raises fundamental questions about the abuse of a closed process in which a small group of ultra-Orthodox authorities are allowed to set their own binding terms for conversion to Judaism using the authority of the State of Israel and without any meaningful oversight. It is also the story of how an almost unknown rabbi managed to become one of the most powerful authorities on the question of conversion, fueled not by a superior knowledge of the Talmud but by access to something that appears to be even dearer to the hearts of the modern rabbinical establishment: money.

Tropper is a rare figure in the Jewish world: a creature of the insular ultra-Orthodox community whose relationships tie him to Texas oil fields, professional sports teams in Israel, and mainstream secular Jewish organizations—specifically, the 92nd Street Y, one of New York’s best-known Jewish community institutions, and home to one of the city’s most exclusive preschools. After spending more than two decades toiling in relative obscurity in Monsey, Tropper catapulted four years ago into the milieu of Israel’s powerful ultra-Orthodox rabbinate, propelled by his two powerful and wealthy patrons: Thomas Kaplan, the billionaire oil and mining wildcatter, and his nephew, Guma Aguiar.

Now 32 years old, Aguiar was born to a Jewish mother but raised as an evangelical Christian. Kaplan—the younger brother of Aguiar’s mother, Ellen—introduced Aguiar to Tropper in 2003, after Aguiar had already begun exploring Judaism. Under the rabbi’s tutelage, Aguiar adopted a Hebrew name—Yehuda Dovid—and, in 2007, made aliyah to Israel, where he has become a celebrity, thanks to his recent investments in the Beitar Jerusalem soccer team and Hapoel Jerusalem, the city’s basketball franchise. Kaplan and Aguiar cemented a philanthropic relationship with Tropper by directing millions of dollars to his Eternal Jewish Family. That money, in turn, enabled Tropper to influence determinations of which rabbis would have the authority to perform conversions—that is, to determine who is and who is not a Jew.

“On a personal level, he was not particularly well respected,” said Rosenberg, who is a fierce critic of the ultra-Orthodox world on his blog. “But insert EJF and conversions into it, along with Tom Kaplan’s money and Guma’s money, and suddenly Tropper became one of the most powerful rabbis in the world.”

Tropper’s relationship with Kaplan and Aguiar, once the source of his power, ultimately played a role in his undoing. For the past year, the two men have been locked in an Oedipal court battle over the $2.55 billion fortune resulting from the 2007 sale of their natural-gas exploration company, Leor Energy, to the oil giant EnCana. Tropper agreed to appear as a witness for Kaplan, and, in response, Aguiar turned against his former mentor. According to Tropper’s wife, Laurel Blond, Aguiar made a phone call to the rabbi’s house in March in which he claimed he had “thousands of rabbis praying for Tom Kaplan’s death” and encouraged the rabbi to “switch sides.” In early April, Aguiar confronted Tropper in Jerusalem at the David Citadel Hotel and, according to court records, threatened to throw the rabbi off a ninth-floor balcony.

Then, in October, Aguiar sued Tropper in an Israeli court, claiming that the rabbi misappropriated donations. “He had gone to Rabbi Tropper for several years as his rabbi—he had confidential discussions with him, he was his spiritual advisor,” Aguiar’s lawyers told a federal judge in Florida last June. (Kaplan’s attorney, Harley Tropin, said in a statement that Kaplan would not comment on the Tropper scandal in light of ongoing litigation.)

When the sex-tape scandal broke last month, Aguiar was among those who forwarded the audio recordings of Tropper’s conversations with Orand to Failed Messiah’s Rosenberg, ensuring that the rabbi would be publicly humiliated. In a phone conversation with Tablet Magazine, Aguiar initially said he forwarded the audio “to some people because I thought they were funny,” but subsequently said he only sent the recordings in response to a request from Rosenberg. “There’s no such thing as revenge,” Aguiar said. “It’s just exposing the truth.”

Aguiar said Kaplan introduced him to Tropper in 2003, after he had already begun studying Judaism with another Monsey rabbi, Tovia Singer, who specializes in reaching out to evangelical Christians who, like Aguiar, were born Jewish, and getting them to “return” to Judaism. With his uncle, Aguiar was instrumental in prompting Tropper to expand beyond his work with baalei teshuva—returning Jews—into the world of conversions. (Aguiar’s wife, Jamie, whom he met in high school, is a blond former evangelical Christian who converted to Judaism.) By 2004, according to emails filed in one of the federal court cases, Tropper had started writing a manual designed to streamline conversions among the various religious courts in America. That year, Kaplan’s foundation gave Tropper’s organization $154,000; the next year, Kaplan and Aguiar directed more than $700,000 to the rabbi’s group.

In early 2006, Tropper told a reporter that EJF was going to offer “Cadillac conversions” to non-Jews who were concerned about making sure their conversions—and, particularly for those converting to marry, their children’s status as born Jews—would be recognized by religious authorities in Israel, where full citizenship depends on it. Tropper offered a clever soundbite: “Why settle for a broken Chevy, which may go down the highway but nobody wants it in their driveway?”

The timing for Tropper’s new product line couldn’t have been better. A feud that had been simmering for years between Israel’s insular, powerful rabbinate and American rabbis erupted into full-scale war in April 2006, when Shlomo Amar, Israel’s Sephardic chief rabbi, announced that he would not automatically recognize conversions approved by the Rabbinical Council of America, the main union of Modern Orthodox rabbis. (The Israeli chief rabbinate does not recognize any conversions, marriages, or other rabbinical functions performed by Reform or Conservative rabbis, on the grounds that the Reform and Conservative movements do not recognize halachic authority and hence are no longer branches of Judaism). Amar’s announcement created a groundswell of interest in Tropper’s Cadillacs, and the rabbi spent lavishly to promote his brand of specially certified conversions to the ultra-Orthodox rabbinate. According to financial records, in 2006 Tropper spent $1.6 million—more than double his previous year’s budget—hosting conferences and paying for rabbis to attend his educational programming, including a lavish Jerusalem summit in July 2006 at the five-star David Citadel devoted to “Improving Conversions and Preventing Intermarriage.” Amar turned up, along with Ashkenazic Chief Rabbi Yonah Metzger and Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv, a nonagenarian considered to be one of the ultra-Orthodox world’s leading halachic authorities.

Overnight, the rabbi from Monsey had become a major power broker in the ultra-Orthodox world in both America and Israel. In 2007, the last year for which federal tax records are available, Tropper distributed $2.3 million in scholarships and hundreds of thousands of dollars more in unspecified travel and conference accommodations from his Monsey redoubt.

Tropper has been removed from his post at Eternal Jewish Family—which is still chaired by Kaplan—and, according to the group’s executive director, Rabbi Dovid Jacobs, has also been replaced at Horizons, EJF’s parent organization. It isn’t clear whether he remains in control of his yeshiva, Kol Yaakov; a person who answered the phone there Tuesday refused to comment. But in the weeks since Tropper’s downfall, no one in the ultra-Orthodox world has been willing to officially criticize or reprimand the rabbi for what appear to be his profound and sickening sins. At a December meeting, the Council of Torah Sages, the halachic body of Agudath Israel, an ultra-Orthodox umbrella group, discussed the scandal but decided against issuing a comment. Only the Modern Orthodox Rabbinical Council of America has condemned Tropper’s behavior: “What we have heard, if true, violates the fundamental elements of all that Judaism holds sacred,” the council said in a statement, adding that the rabbis welcomed any of Tropper’s victims for counseling.

“It’s like Nixon,” said Tovia Singer, the rabbi who initially sparked Aguiar’s interest in Judaism. “The damage has obviously been done to the haredi community and the more that they’re in denial the more damage it’ll do.”

MORE: Tablet Magazine’s Marissa Brostoff profiled Shannon Orand here.
MORE: Read transcripts of the phone calls, plus hear some audio clips, here.
MORE: Allison Hoffman profiled Guma Aguiar here.

Tablet Magazine reached Rosenthal earlier today at home in Madison, Wisconsin, where she is busy packing up her furniture for the move to Washington, D.C., later this week. She declined to comment on the furor her comments provoked, except to say that she believes the original Haaretz headline—which said she “blasted” Oren—exaggerated what she actually said, which was that she thought it “most unfortunate” that Oren apparently thinks J Street’s dovish policy positions could put the lives of Israeli Jews at risk.

“The interview focused on what is and what isn’t anti-Semitism,” Rosenthal said. “I don’t think a reporter asking me about J Street is out of bounds, and I don’t think my answer was out of bounds.”

American Envoy Sparks Furor with Criticism of Oren [Haaretz]
U.S. Official Slammed for Criticizing Ambassador Oren [JPost]

Earlier: U.S. Anti-Semitism Envoy Attacks Ambassador Oren

Related: The Anti-Anti-Semite [Tablet Magazine]

Benedict, who is already booked for a visit to Rome’s synagogue in January, responded earlier today with a mollifying speech about, yes, the Holocaust: specifically, about his visit earlier this year to the Yad Vashem memorial in Israel. “The visit to the Yad Vashem has meant an upsetting encounter with the cruelty of human fault, with the hatred of a blind ideology that, with no justification, sent millions of people to their deaths,” he said. Human fault: another way of saying that not everyone’s a saint.

Pope Says Visit to Holocaust Memorial ‘Upsetting’ [AP]

Except … it doesn’t, really. Since the whole effort is merely an exercise in political saber-rattling anyway, everyone is both having and eating their respective cakes: hawks—Jewish or not—can say Congress is willing to move against Iran, with or without help from other countries; and Obama can still go to prospective allies and say he’d like their help, and actually, hey, could they please get on board sooner rather than later, because Congress is getting a little restive, you know? “The administration did not say, ‘Go ahead,’ and they did not tell me not to go ahead,” Berman told reporters yesterday. And what did Israel—whose security is a key part of why everyone’s so worried about Iran getting nuclear weapons—say? Ambassador Michael Oren “deeply appreciates” the U.S. effort to stop Iran from getting the bomb. Win-win-win.

House Votes to Expand Sanctions on Iran [AP]
Obama and Kerry Slowing Sanctions Legislation Push [JTA]
Berman: Iran Sanctions Bill Empowers Obama [Politico]

The Vogels’ apartment was arguably its own conceptual installation: a perfectly ordinary, cramped New York space filled with one of the best private collections of contemporary art in the city, or maybe anywhere. Herbert, 87, and Dorothy, 74, originally aspired to be artists themselves. As newlyweds, they rented a studio on Union Square, took classes in Abstract Expressionist painting, and started buying art from friends and acquaintances whose studios they visited. “We started to take our work down from the walls and started to put other artists’ works up,” Dorothy tells filmmaker Megumi Sasaki in the documentary Herb and Dorothy, which was released on DVD this week. “We thought they were better than we were, so we gave it up.”

The Vogels began collecting at a particularly auspicious time—at precisely the moment when New York became the capital of the art world and when the son of a Russian Jewish garment worker from Harlem and the daughter of an Orthodox shopkeeper from Elmira, New York, could easily befriend the people who were shaping culture in New York, many of whom were Jewish émigrés from Europe or upstarts from Brooklyn. These tastemakers grew up as part of a generation that was encouraged, thanks to New Deal programs that subsidized artists, to take art seriously, and they became adults in the wake of World War II, just as New York was replacing Paris and Berlin as the global hub for art and ideas. And, while not explicitly Jewish, the American avant garde was to a great extent shaped by Jewish collectors, dealers, artists, and critics—not least by curators at the Jewish Museum, who mounted a series of influential shows for New York School artists like Jasper Johns starting in the late 1950s. “If you were collecting, what you were valuing was, to a great extent, what Jewish critics told you to value—abstract art, color,” said Catherine Soussloff, a professor of art history at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

The Jewish identification with the avant garde wasn’t, of course, new; the Nazis had early on marginalized Jewish artists in Europe with the “degenerate” label. “Jews took a role in the American avant garde, and within that role they maintained their identity as Jews,” said Margaret Olin, an art historian at Yale University. “Part of the pride that they took in their place in society was that they didn’t have to just collect Jewish things—in the 1950s and 1960s, we became a part of the mainstream of American culture.” The Vogels met in 1960 and married in 1962. Herbert, known as Herby, worked at the post office; Dorothy was a librarian at the Brooklyn Public Library. Down in the Village, where Herby went to hang out with Abstract Expressionist painters at the Cedar Tavern on his way to the graveyard shift, no one cared about what anyone did for a living. Their first purchase together, after a Picasso vase Herby bought Dorothy as an engagement gift, was a metal sculpture by John Chamberlain. Quickly, they arrived at a simple arrangement: they would live on Dorothy’s income, and buy art with Herby’s salary. Their budget constrained their purchases; they could afford only the edgiest, most “difficult” pieces from artists who were already getting notice or work by unknown artists who welcomed the Vogels’ cash-and-carry policy. (Literally—they didn’t buy things they couldn’t cart home on the subway.) “The artists were really very appreciative of people looking at their work,” Dorothy told Tablet last week.

The Vogels weren’t the only people collecting on a shoestring in the postwar era. Dorothy recalled crossing paths in the early 1960s with Sam Hunter, the former New York Times art critic who, in his capacity as director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University—an institution financed by a mattress manufacturer—had a mandate to spend no more than $5,000 on any single piece he acquired for the fledgling museum. (The cheapest was a Claes Oldenburg he picked up for a couple hundred dollars, Hunter recalled to me earlier this year.) But they quickly gained notice among other dealers and collectors for the amount of time and energy they spent getting to know artists’ work—though some dealers objected to their practice of going straight for studio sales. “They weren’t collecting for status—they were collecting because of their commitment to the artists and their ideas,” said Norman Kleeblatt, chief curator at the Jewish Museum. “So the Vogels were able to get in on the ground level.” For years, Herby had regular phone calls and visits with Robert Barry, Dan Graham, and Sol LeWitt; European dealers would consult with the couple on trips to New York to get the lowdown. “Often we did not have time to go to the galleries,” Jeanne-Claude, the late wife of the environmental artist Christo, explains in the documentary. “In one dinner with Herby and Dorothy, the four of us, we would know everything that happened in the past six months in New York.”

Over time, the Vogels achieved every middle-class collector’s fantasy: a collection of art, assembled on the cheap, by artists who subsequently became very, very famous. And unlike other Jewish collectors who came up in the 1960s, some of whom famously sold their pieces for quick profits, the Vogels held on to everything they bought, and only agreed to part with the collection when the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, promised to make a home for it. Today, more than a thousand of their pieces are held in Washington, while another 2,500 have been distributed to museums in each of the 50 states to allow as much of their work as possible to be displayed. (There is also a newly launched website, Vogel 50×50, that catalogues the entire collection online.)

“The idea that they are ordinary people is so important,” said Ruth Fine, the National Gallery curator who handles the Vogel collection. “They made good choices before these artists were well-known, and they took on the aura of being prescient.”

Paul A. Samuelson, Economist, Dies at 94 [NYT]
Remembering Paul Samuelson [WSJ]

Related: Something Old, Something New

Now, according to JTA’s Eric Fingerhut, Oren appears willing to concede that his government and J Street share at least some common ground—namely, Iran. Oren, Fingerhut reported, said in a short telephone interview that he appreciated that J Street had “made a statement and supported these efforts” to push sanctions measures in Congress. Which is reassuring, because it shows that peace, at least between these two parties, is still possible.

Oren: U.S. and Israel Tight on Iran, Appreciates J Street Support of Sanctions [JTA]
In Shift, Oren Calls J Street ‘A Unique Problem’ [Forward]

Related: The Pragmatist

Lieberman Faces a Long, Chilly Walk to Saturday’s Healthcare Debate [The Hill]

The synagogue’s president, 87-year-old Sam Teitelman, remembers the congregation’s heyday—a time when the Oak Street neighborhood, just west of downtown, was essentially a Yiddish-speaking ghetto dotted with shtiebels, kosher lunch counters, and butcher shops like the one around the corner from Orchard Street that his father once ran after arriving in the United States in 1924. When Teitelman’s family—Ukrainian, by way of Cuba—moved farther west, to a nicer area, his father would trek back to the old neighborhood by foot each Shabbat to occupy seat No. 57. Today, the congregation no longer holds services, though prayer books sit out on the bimah in readiness for the occasional, and increasingly rare, weekday minyan. “Every one of our members is also a member somewhere else,” Teitelman said earlier this week. “We are never going to be a traditional Orthodox synagogue again.”

Orchard Street is one of only a handful of the immigrant-founded synagogues that once dotted cities across America to have remained in the hands of its congregation, rather than being demolished or sold and converted into, often, immigrant churches. Other survivors—the Eldridge Street Synagogue on New York’s Lower East Side or the Vilna Shul in Boston—have been reborn in recent years as cultural institutions. Teitelman’s hope is that the same might be possible for his shul. While the building’s fate remains in limbo, a group of artists from around the country has stepped in to create a “cultural heritage” exhibit of works inspired by the synagogue, or by its now-absent congregation, opening this weekend at the John Slade Ely House, an art space a few blocks from the shul. “It’s not up to us what becomes of this building—they have to figure out for themselves what they want,” said Cynthia Beth Rubin, a digital artist based in New Haven, who coordinated the project. “What we can do as artists is help them realize that the story of the shul touches people beyond their own community.”

The idea of using contemporary art to illuminate the relevance of deteriorating institutions isn’t new, but the New Haven project is about something else—using a deteriorating institution as a conduit for broader ideas about Jewishness, nostalgia, and the vast gulf separating contemporary American Jewish life from the quotidian realities our grandparents and great-grandparents knew. The charm of the Orchard Street shul lies in its ordinariness, but that also made it an almost perfect canvas for the two dozen or so participating artists—some Jewish, some not—to project their own notions of what it meant to be Jewish then or what we have lost with the disappearance of these congregations, places where restrooms were labeled with Yiddish signs reading “Menner” and “Froyen.”

The participating artists were required to visit the building, and to respect the values of the shul—no desecration of holy texts, for example, was allowed in their work—but were otherwise set free to make what they wanted: rich portraits of the synagogue’s interior and cemetery, audio interviews with congregants, a sukkah made from paper decorated with archival photographs. One team of Yale computer scientists contributed a digital recreation of the shul’s interior, made using the same techniques that have been used to model Michelangelo’s Florence Pieta, which could eventually be used as the basis for a virtual tour of the building. The results are, in many cases, beautiful, or heartbreaking—as in the case of a Shaimos box, intended for the disposal of religious texts, placed in front of the image of the shul’s disarrayed shelves of siddurim. The question left unanswered is: what should we save, and how?

What Israel Can Teach Us About Rebuilding An Economy [TNR]
Earlier: Israel’s ‘Tech Miracle’ Explained

Hadassah Says Mammograms Should Start at 40 [JTA]

The last thing most Americans will be thinking about on Friday morning is more food, but in households where a bountiful Shabbat dinner is a weekly ritual, cooks who also celebrate Thanksgiving will be busily devising ways to re-purpose the turkey leftovers, or at least move them around to make space in the refrigerator for the usual weekend menu of soup, chicken, or cholent. “We tend to eat a lot on Thanksgiving—it’s like a yontif,” said Ahava Leibtag, who expects nine people for dinner on Thursday and as many as 18 the next night. “So on Friday, I don’t feel like I need to make it so elaborate, but you still can’t take away from celebrating Shabbat.”

Leibtag, a 34-year-old mother of three who lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, said she didn’t like the idea of putting leftovers right back on the table—as much because it felt tacky as because she couldn’t imagine people wanting to eat the same meal two days in a row—but planned to use the remains of her 17-pound turkey as the base for her Friday night soup, instead of chicken stock, and serve it with meatballs and couscous. Like many cooks used to putting on large-scale weekly Shabbat meals—without being able to adjust their ovens or use burners, of course—she seemed unfazed at the idea of feeding so many people, so many times in a row.

“There’s just none of the same frenzy that non-observant people have about pulling off a big dinner,” said Susie Fishbein, author of the Kosher by Design cookbook series. She said she planned a dairy brunch—quiche, bagels, lox—for Friday, along with turkey sandwiches or a turkey salad for Friday night, along with pumpkin muffins made from the same base as the pumpkin bread she’ll serve on Thursday. “I wouldn’t put the carcass of the turkey on my shabbes table,” she said. “My family is not going to see leftovers, but they’ll see parts of recipes reincarnated.”

Others said they planned to make use of the fact that everyone would have leftovers they didn’t plan to eat on Friday. “I’ll make a fresh chicken on Friday night, because I think Shabbat dinner should be special,” said Rachel Herlands, a Modern Orthodox Jew who lives in Manhattan. “But I’m having 25 people for Shabbat lunch this week, so I’m encouraging people to bring their leftovers and make it a Thanksgiving leftover Shabbat lunch.”

Observant Jewish cooks, of course, frequently have to plan for multi-day festival holidays, like Sukkot or Passover, which revolve around the ritual consumption of traditional dishes. “When you have a three-dayer like this, it’s not the time to be using your Martha Stewart influence—you have to make what you know,” said Lisa Baratz, an attorney in Hollywood, Florida, who has four teenage boys and expects to have 18 people on Thursday and Friday. She plans to make her standard brisket and matzah-ball soup on Wednesday and keep it until Friday in one of her two refrigerators; Thanksgiving leftovers won’t reappear until after Shabbat is over. “Cranberry sauce will last, yam pie lasts,” she said. “Who wants to eat it Thursday and again on Friday?”

Of course, some families decide to square the circle and make do with a “Shabbat turkey.” Bronya Shaffer, a Canadian-born Lubavitch who now lives in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood, said she prepared a traditional Thanksgiving meal on Thursday for years, until her in-laws passed away. “I would just have salads and a light soup on Friday night, instead of something more substantial,” said Shaffer, now 61, who has 10 grown children. “But in the last few years, what we’ve done is defer it all to Friday night—it’s just simply more convenient.”

Jewish Group Protests Passover Election Date for Wexler Seat [Sun-Sentinel]
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Last year, Rosenthal—who sits on the advisory board of J Street, the left-leaning Israel lobby—published a controversial op-ed in New York’s Jewish Week, timed to coincide with Israel’s 60th anniversary, calling on progressives to make themselves heard on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: “Perhaps out of fear, perhaps out of timidity, we have failed to stand up to those who favor military solutions to political problems or oppose peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian and Arab-Israeli conflicts in the name of promoting Israel’s best interests.” The piece drew criticism from Anti-Defamation League chief Abraham Foxman, who responded with an open letter to Rosenthal disputing the claim that conservative voices dominate the Israel debate; this week, the right-leaning Brooklyn-based Jewish Press sharply criticized Rosenthal’s appointment in an editorial, while conservative blogs took it a step further, tarring Rosenthal as anti-Israel.

Rosenthal spoke to Tablet Magazine about her plans for her new job and about her critics.

Your predecessor, Gregg Rickman, was very involved in winning visas for Yemeni Jews and was also very critical of the United Nations for its approach to Israel. What are your top priorities?

I don’t know what the top agenda item is going to be, but when I look at newspapers and listen to people around the world who I know, I’m very troubled to see increases in anti-Semitic acts and attitudes in Europe. As the child of a Holocaust survivor, I thought Europe would be further along in the tolerance agenda than they are. I hate to hear about boycotts; I hate to hear about graves and cemeteries being defaced; I hate to hear about speeches tinged with stereotypes of Jews. These are things we thought would fade into distant memory.

So there will be a reactive part of my job, and a proactive part. The proactive part has me as an ambassador or an educator to various cultures on tolerance, on human rights, and on making sure that they recognize the importance of combating anti-Semitism on a human-rights agenda. There will also be a reactive piece of it, where we hear a speech being done by someone, or a cemetery being harmed, or even a public policy that may be introduced, where we will probably need to intervene to say, also in an educating way, that this is a fundamental human-rights issue. And I think the fact that President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton have put this appointment high on their list in the field of human rights shows that there’s a strong feeling that the public at large needs to be educated that combating anti-Semitism is a fundamental human-rights issue.

Does responding to criticism of Israel fall into your portfolio?

I don’t know the answer. It’s a very fuzzy line. I can’t answer your question because I don’t know yet how that will shake out, but it will certainly be involved. Middle East realities and politics and challenges will be part of this job but I really don’t know how much.

There is no question in my mind that some of the attacks in the media and in the public against Israel come from a place of anti-Semitism. That is the unfortunate reality of some of the bad statements and hurtful ones. But not all of them are. Criticizing a certain policy in Israel or a certain policy in the United States regarding Israel does not make someone an anti-Semite. It makes them, perhaps, a thoughtful analyst of what’s going on, recognizing we can’t keep doing things the way we’ve been doing them.

What about critics who accuse you, like they accuse J Street, of being anti-Israel because of your position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or on America’s relationship with Israel?

My entire adulthood has seen the same thing over and over and over. I love Israel. I have lived in Israel. I go back and visit every chance I can. I consider it part of my heart. And because I love it so much, I want to see it safe and secure and free and democratic and living safely, where children don’t have to learn where every bomb shelter is. That’s my vision of what the future is, and if we keep the current policies and the current strategies that will not happen.

I don’t think questioning any policy, foreign or domestic, makes somebody an anti-Semite or an anti-anything. It makes them someone who wants a thoughtful discussion. I think J Street needs to be at the table, and I think other organizations representing many strategies all need to be at the table, because the status quo in the Middle East is totally unacceptable. And the people who are doing name-calling, and apparently taking me on—I have made a point of not reading them. My sister said I would need a bodyguard. I said it’s just the blogosphere.

And Abe Foxman?

I understand that Abe Foxman wrote a public letter to me. The problem is that he did not send it to me. I just heard about it. But I have worked with Abe in the past and I consider Abe a friend of mine and I would be shocked if he thinks this is a bad appointment. He and I will have differences and he and I will agree on things. He and I will agree that the world needs to have more good people to stand up and fight injustice. He may look to certain groups of people to find good people to stand up next to him, and I may look in a different group, or a broader group, but mostly we agree.

Anti-Defamation League chief Abraham Foxman didn’t appreciate that, and he last night he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s Eric Fingerhut that Ben-Ami’s statement was “the height of chutzpah.” See, Palin’s statements might have been a “simplistic effort to be supportive of the Israeli government” but they were “clear and well-intentioned,” and, anyway, “all politics is pandering.” As for Ben-Ami, Foxman accused him of “attacking a celebrity for supporting Israel, but not in the way they want her to support Israel.” This morning, Ben-Ami responded with a long, sharply worded letter accusing Foxman of being “willing to go along with the defamation of a world-renowned (and Zionist) jurist”—Richard Goldstone—“who has asked tough questions about the Gaza War,” and also of trying to hijack the designation of “pro-Israel.” “You of course have every right to disagree with us. It’s a free country,” Ben-Ami wrote. “But you have no right to decide who is and who is not pro-Israel based on whether they agree with your views.” We’ll let you know if Foxman responds.

Foxman Blasts J Street on Palin, Questions Its ‘Pro-Israel’ Slogan [JTA]
Ben-Ami Responds to Foxman [JTA]

Rosenthal Is Anti-Semitism Envoy Choice, Announcement Imminent [JTA]

The AP Layoffs, from Bismarck to Beijing [Gawker]

How Did Christie Do Among Jews? Still Not Totally Sure [JTA]
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Oborne, writing a companion piece in the Guardian, was careful to say that he wasn’t alleging any kind of conspiracy, nor even anything resembling a conspiracy. But London’s Jewish Chronicle reports that Jewish groups are nonetheless arguing that charges in the program about the lobbying groups’ influence veers too close to the controversial assessment put forward a couple of years ago by academics Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, who argued that Congress has been duped into promoting Israeli policy goals at America’s expense. The head of the Conservative Friends of Israel called the show’s specific allegations about donations and influence “fictitious,” while the Community Security Trust, which is a little bit like the Anti-Defamation League, accused Oborne of “shutting the stable door after the horse had bolted,” arguing on its blog that the show would inevitably stoke anti-Semitism.

Inside Britain’s Israel Lobby [Channel 4]

Morgenthau, New York’s chief prosecutor, knows his criminals. But at 90, he plans to retire at the end of the year, having decided, apparently with some hesitation, not to seek reelection to a 10th term in the office he’s held since 1975—just as the museum he helped found, and still chairs, known as the Museum of Jewish Heritage, is mounting a retrospective of Morgenthau’s public career alongside that of his grandfather, who served as President Wilson’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, and his father, who was President Roosevelt’s Treasury secretary during the Depression and the Second World War. (Museum director David Marwell said the exhibit was planned to open after the November election, just in case Morgenthau had decided to run again, and the typically shy prosecutor said he didn’t see it until after it was installed.)

Titled ”A Legacy of Service,” the show explores the influence the Morgenthaus held over the fate of Jews in the 20th century—in Palestine, in Europe, in Israel, and as refugees in America—despite the family’s assimilationist ambivalence about religious observance and ethnic identity. “If someone asked what religion I was, my mother told me to say I was American,” recalled Morgenthau’s elder brother, Henry Morgenthau III, a former public television producer and the author of an autobiography, Mostly Morgenthaus, that traces his own return to faith through his marriage to Ruth Schachter, a Holocaust survivor and Orthodox Jew.

The first item in the exhibit is a ledger Henry Morgenthau Sr., kept as a young man to log various ethical infractions, from slander to vanity, inspired by William Penn’s Quaker handbook No Cross, No Crown; the effort dovetailed with visits he made to churches of various denominations, to hear firebrand preachers including Henry Ward Beecher. The second is a silver menorah Morgenthau Sr. acquired in Palestine in 1914—by which time he had made a fortune in real estate and served as the founding president of Rabbi Stephen S. Wise’s Free Synagogue, an egalitarian institution intended to be “pewless and dueless.” As Wilson’s envoy in Constantinople, Morgenthau Sr. famously pressured the Turks to halt the genocide of Armenians—arguing that it didn’t matter to him that their victims were Christian and not Jewish—but he also moved quickly to assist Jewish settlers in Palestine after war broke out in August 1914, sending a cable to the Jewish philanthropist Jacob Schiff in New York requesting $50,000 in loans to prevent “serious destruction” in “thriving colonies.” The telegram elicted a swift reply from Schiff assuring Morgenthau Sr. he would convene an emergency meeting of the American Jewish Committee, or put up the cash himself.

But after returning to America, Morgenthau Sr. publicly turned away from the Zionist cause. In 1921, he wrote a broadside in the monthly World’s Work, which was quoted extensively in the New York Times, asserting that Zionism was “the most stupendous fallacy in Jewish history.” America, he argued, was where Jews had found their true Zion. “If I were pressed to define myself by any single appelation I would unhesitatingly select the one word ‘American,’” he wrote. “We in America refuse to set ourselves apart in a voluntary ghetto for the sake of old traditional observances.” Yet less than 20 years later, even as his son was sitting at Roosevelt’s right hand at the Treasury, helping implement the New Deal that Jewish voters overwhelmingly backed, the elder Morgenthau found America’s doors closed to his increasingly desperate Jewish relatives who were trying to flee Germany. In 1939, the same year Morgenthau Jr. failed to help secure U.S. entry for nearly a thousand Jewish refugees aboard the ship S.S. St. Louis, who were were returned to Europe after being denied landing in Cuba, Morgenthau Sr. succeeded in helping dozens of cousins win visas by providing affidavits pledging financial support.

One of them, Sophie Kahn, is pictured in the exhibit, a smiling 10-year-old on the train platform in Stuttgart, standing with her older brother and father. (Her mother had passed away from a chronic kidney ailment two years before, freeing her father to aggressively seek emigration papers for the family.) Morgenthau Sr., then 82, invited the family to his Fifth Avenue apartment; Kahn (now Taub) recalled dressing in her Shabbat best and being anxious about how to refuse if he offered her non-kosher food. “We were flüchtlings,” she said, using the German word for refugee. “But he was wonderful—he only gave us fruit, so there was no problem.” Every fall, she said, her father would send Morgenthau Sr. greetings for the Jewish New Year; after Morgenthau Sr. died, in 1946, her brother, an Orthodox rabbi, recited Kaddish on his behalf, as he would for a parent.

Yet, Morgenthau Sr.—who told his grandson, Robert, he regretted not getting into public service until he was 55—kept the whole business quiet from the rest of the family. “He never talked about it—I don’t even know if my father knew at the time,” Robert Morgenthau told Tablet. “When he died he had a list of 32 relatives in his desk he gave money to on a regular basis, but he never told any of us about it—the last couple of years he was worried about money, which I thought was strange, but I didn’t realize he had all these obligations.”

Meanwhile, Henry Morgenthau Jr. was—perhaps belatedly—fighting on behalf of European refugees. In 1944, his staff, led by Josiah DuBois, had produced a document titled “A Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews” claiming the State Department had quashed details of the Nazis’ murder campaign; Morgenthau Jr. softened the headline to “Personal Report to the President” before forwarding it to Roosevelt, who agreed to the establishment of the War Refugee Board, which succeeded in saving as many as 200,000 Jews. “I don’t think it was guilt,” said Andrew Meier, a journalist who is writing a biography of the Morgenthau family. “But it was a moral obligation for him.”

After the war, devastated by the deaths of both his parents, his wife, as well as of Roosevelt, Morgenthau Jr. committed himself to reversing his father’s anti-Zionist stance and fundraising on behalf of the new Israeli state. The exhibit includes audio of Morgenthau Jr. fundraising for the United Jewish Appeal; he befriended David Ben-Gurion and, according to Meier, even considered becoming Israel’s first finance minister. At the same time, though, he remained committed to America, delivering a speech in 1948 at Yeshiva University in which he insisted “the Jew who is true to his faith and to his people will be true to America.”

The current generation of Morgenthaus espouses varying degrees of Jewish identity; some are practicing Christians, while other children identify as Jewish. “There was a time when the family had to suppress its Jewishness in order to open doors, and that’s not true any more,” said Ben Morgenthau, the older son of Henry Morgenthau III, a pediatrician in San Francisco who considers himself Jewish. Yet all of them consider themselves wholly Morgenthaus. “This is a family with unusual continuity in terms of their involvement in the public world as well as a certain inevitability, given the numbers of Jews in the United States and what was going on in the world at the time—the Jews were at the center of all of it,” said Moses Rischin, an emeritus professor of history at San Francisco State University. “But there was a tremendous generational break, in terms of Robert Morgenthau’s role—it really is a different world.” Today, Rischin argued, “there is no public role of being a Jew, unless you’re a rabbi—you’re identified by your profession.” Accordingly, the last section of the exhibit portrays Robert Morgenthau as a Navy veteran and public servant devoted to redressing pervasive social ills, like sexism and racism. (The show includes a letter of thanks from new Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor, who worked for Morgenthau in the early 1970s.)

Morgenthau, too, sees himself that way, though he also has a record of pushing for the return of art looted by the Nazis; during a visit to the museum, he said he plans to devote himself to lobbying for immigration reform after he leaves office at the end of the year. Yet, at the opening of the exhibit on Sunday, surrounded by multiple generations of Morgenthaus, he described his first, and only, visit to the family’s ancestral home in Mannheim, Germany, in 1991—a trip he made despite his father’s admonition decades earlier to avoid the country at all costs. “I figured by then it was safe,” he joked. With his youngest son and eldest grandson, he toured the old Jewish cemetery and other landmarks. “And, you know, I wasn’t wearing my Star of David, but when we got ready to leave, the porter said, ‘Well, I guess you’ll be flying El Al,’” Morgenthau recalled, sardonically. “So, you’ve got to know where you come from. That’s all it is.”

Costco to Sell Torah [JTA]

The question now is whether all this noise is just that, or a sign that the dream of achieving a single, encompassing peace settlement is turning into a nightmare full of dissatisfaction and mutual resentment. Indeed, a growing chorus seems to be suggesting that the whole existing framework of discussions—all pointed in the direction of achieving “final status negotiations” around a two-state deal—should just be dropped. New York Times columnist Tom Friedman wrote last week that “this dysfunctional ‘peace process’” was achieving nothing except weakening the Obama Administration. Now, in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books, Hussein Agha and Robert Malley—who helped arrange the failed Camp David summit in 2000—argue that since 16 years of negotiations have failed to produce a viable two-state agreement, Obama ought to look for some interim solution. Trouble is, no one really knows what a good short-term deal would look like, either. “How such an interim arrangement would work is hard to fathom,” the two men write. “But is an end-of-conflict settlement is out of reach, and the status quo out of the question, options that fall somewhere in between deserve at least serious exploration.”

Palestinians to Seek U.N. Endorsement of Statehood [AP]
Israel & Palestine: Can They Start Over? [NYRB]

Messinger, who now heads the American Jewish World Service—a kind of Jewish peace corps that runs humanitarian projects in developing countries—went on to argue that the ever-expanding array of volunteer programs designed to build Jewish identity through community service can only succeed if they provide concrete benefits to needy people. In other words, they have to be authentic service programs, and not make-work designed to foster a fuzzy tikkun olam experience. “I want, as Jewish service grows, to be sure that it pays respect to the Jewish notion that we have responsibility to others,” Messinger told the audience. “We have to focus on beneficiaries’ needs, not on the need of the volunteers to feel Jewish, or to get something on their college applications.”

Berman Jewish Policy Archive [BJPA]

U.S. Jews Turn to Israel to Escape Bleak Job Market [Reuters]

Abbas Repeats Demand for Jewish Settlements Freeze [Guardian]
PLO’s Man in Washington: No Talks Without Settlement Freeze [FP]
Earlier: Emanuel Addresses G.A., Pushes Peace Talks

He then gave a 20-minute address about the urgency of getting the Israeli-Palestinian peace process moving, quickly, before the latest “last, best chance” to reach a real settlement evaporates. Emanuel got warm rounds of applause for talking about America’s determination to ensure Israel’s security and guarantee its long-term future, and for calling on the Palestinians to recognize Israel’s right to exist and reject political violence. Ditto for his commendation of Israel’s efforts to promote economic development in the Palestinian territories, remove checkpoints, and support the establishment of Palestinian security forces—points that echoed yesterday’s speech by Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

But the applause dropped off once he started talking about Obama’s insistence that Israel halt settlement construction and fell to scattered, at best, as he warned Israel against taking any unilateral actions—prompting Emanuel, who made an early crack about name-checking Chicago every time he wanted to generate cheers, to interrupt himself. “I’m getting weaker here, guys,” he chided the crowd, drawing grudging laughs.

It’s impossible to know how much of the speech was lifted from Obama’s planned address, or whether Obama, had he spoken himself, would have made more pointed demands, or appeals for support from America’s Jews. Given the news blackout surrounding the president’s White House meeting last night with Netanyahu, it’s also impossible to know whether whatever was said there had any bearing on the talk—though Emanuel did say the meeting had been “very positive,” echoing comments Netanyahu made to Israeli reporters traveling with him today that the encounter was “very open and very warm.” We figure it’s safe to assume that the kicker, though, was certainly Emanuel’s alone: he wound up the address by saying he and his super-agent brother, Ari, plan to take their sons to Israel next year to be bar mitzvahed, and quipped that he would accept $18 checks in lieu of cheers. The 3,000 delegates laughed and clapped anyway.

Rahm Speaks to Jewish Federation [Politico]
Earlier: Obama, Netanyahu Meet, Stay Silent

In any case, the only account of what happened last night has come from the White House, which issued the following terse statement:

“The President and Prime Minister Netanyahu discussed a number of issues in the U.S.-Israel bilateral relationship. The President reaffirmed our strong commitment to Israel’s security, and discussed security cooperation on a range of issues. The President and Prime Minister also discussed Iran and how to move forward on Middle East peace.”

There you have it.

Readout of the President’s Meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu [whitehouse.gov]
Earlier: Bibi on Peace: ‘Let’s Get on With It’

Which wasn’t true, of course. At the United Nations last month, whole delegations left in a silent boycott of Netanyahu’s address, which included a show-and-tell of documents proving the Nazis’ plans to liquidate the Jews of Europe; in Washington, the audience sat rapt as he insisted that he was ready to get down to brass tacks with his Palestinian counterparts about creating an independent Palestinian state. As in his address at Bar-Ilan University last June, Netanyahu was clear about his parameters: no preconditions, no right of return for refugees, total demilitarization of Palestinian territory, and recognition of the Jewish state. But progress, he insisted, as he has for several months now, is entirely in the hands of the Palestinians, and specifically to Mahmoud Abbas, the embattled president of the Palestinian Authority. “My goal is to achieve a permanent peace treaty between Israel and the Palestinians, and soon,” Netanyahu said, to applause. “I cannot be more emphatic on this point—but to get to a peace agreement, we have to start negotiating a peace agreement. We have to stop negotiating about the negotiations. Let’s get on with it! Let’s move!” The assembled Jewish leaders cheered.

Related:
Man of the Past [Tablet]
Obliging Obama [Tablet]

Cantor drew a stark comparison between Iran’s nuclear ambitions and the Holocaust, warning the audience that “it may be too late” to halt Iran from developing nuclear weapons that could annihilate both Israel and the United States. “Have we not been down this road before?” he asked. He argued the Iranian question wasn’t a Jewish cause or an Israeli one but an American one, and asked the audience to “discard ideology,” as well as political correctness, and move toward—well, it wasn’t clear whether he wanted sanctions or something a little tougher. Oren, for his part, was explicit about what he wants, at least as a first step: “Ask for synagogues and your schools and community centers, alongside those banners proclaiming an end to the genocide in Darfur, an end to the AIDS epidemic in Africa, there must also hang banners declaring support international sanctions and stop the Iranian bomb.”

Cantor Wants Jews to Act Before It Is ‘Too Late’ [JTA]

Orthodox Voters – Change Again [OU.org]

Correction, November 10: This post originally credited the blog item posted by the Institute for Public Affairs to the organization’s director, Nathan Diament. It has been updated to reflect that the item was published unsigned.

Riyad Mansour, the Palestinians envoy to the United Nations congratulated the supporting nations for “fighting against impunity and seeking accountability,” while the Israelis, having initially rejected the result as “deeply flawed, one-sided, and prejudiced,” changed their minds overnight and are now calling the whole affair a victory of sorts. “We are neither surprised nor disappointed with the vote,” Israel’s foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, said today in Jerusalem. The nays, mainly from Western democracies—including the United States, following a Congressional resolution urging the Obama Administration to contest the report—actually constitute a “moral majority” for Israel that proves the country “is succeeding in getting across the message that the report is one-sided and not serious,” Lieberman argued. And now what will happen? Well, probably nothing: the United States is unlikely to let the matter go before the Security Council, and neither Israel nor Hamas are likely, at this point, to respond with any degree of seriousness to the report itself. So, in other words, everyone can say they won, and maybe now we can all talk about something else for a change.

U.N. Assembly Votes for Probes of Gaza War Charges [Reuters]
Earlier: U.S. House Condemns Goldstone Report

Comparing the Vote in the Governor’s Race [NYT]
Related: No New Deal [Tablet]

Meanwhile, Abraham Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League, called on Goldstone—who publicly expressed his irritation at the House resolution, which he claims distorts his report—to repudiate the whole investigation, not so much because the thing itself was flawed, but because its findings have had “an insidious effect on the safety and good name of the Jewish state.” Foxman went on to accuse Goldstone of naivete, for assuming that the world would give equal weight to his criticisms of Hamas, and not just pick up on his allegations about Israel’s wrongdoing; as far as we can tell, Goldstone has not responded.

This morning, the affair goes to the U.N. General Assembly, which is slated to debate a resolution urging the Security Council to consider referring both Israel and Hamas to the International Criminal Court if they do not conduct independent investigations into the claims lodged by Goldstone’s panel. Palestinian envoy Riyad Mansour told the Associated Press he doesn’t expect a vote until tomorrow; we’ll stay tuned.

US House Condemns Goldstone Report [JPost]
Resolution Seeks Gaza War Crimes Investigations [AP]
Earlier: J Street in the Middle?

“He was just doing his job—I don’t judge him,” said one 60-year-old woman, who declined to give her name. Dressed elegantly against the fall chill in a leopard-trimmed leather jacket, the woman—an Arabic speaker whose grandparents emigrated from Syria decades ago, and who splits her time between Deal and Brooklyn, where she grew up and where her children now live—said she wasn’t so much pro-Christie as against everyone else in the race, including the independent candidate, Chris Daggett. “To be honest, I don’t know if I like Christie,” she admitted. “But I hate Corzine, and you can’t waste a vote.”

Other voters emerging from Deal’s public elementary school—its sole polling place, only a short drive from the synagogues whose rabbis are currently facing criminal charges—didn’t make the link at all between Christie and the arrests, and few were willing to answer any questions about ongoing repercussions of the arrests. Instead, they offered a litany of explanations for supporting Christie: healthcare reform, the economy, the Obama administration’s apparent willingness to put pressure on Israel. Some said they considered themselves open-minded when it came to partisan issues—several recalled voting for John Kennedy—but tended to side with the Republicans when it came to state and national politics. Deal’s Syrian Jewish mayor, Harry Franco, who stopped by midmorning with his wife, offered a more straightforward explanation for Christie’s popularity in Deal. “Right now I think the main issue is property taxes,” Franco explained.

The Christie campaign—aided by the national Republican Jewish Coalition—has pushed the tax issue, targeting politically conservative Orthodox Jews, and Jewish swing voters, with pocketbook arguments, attacking Corzine for his decision to roll back property tax rebates in the face of a state budget deficit. “We’ve been getting e-mails for weeks in my crowd,” said one retired man, a McCain supporter who said he was an avid watcher of Fox News. Meanwhile, Democratic operatives spent the day focusing their efforts on turning out liberal Jewish voters in suburbs closer to New York and Philadelphia, leaving Corzine’s supporters in Deal mostly to their own devices.

One man sporting a large satin kippah described himself as a regular Democratic voter, and said he had voted for Corzine because Christie—a Bush appointee—represented “the same old business.” And over at M&A Kosher Meats, a few minutes from the school, one shopper said she planned to cast her ballot for Corzine on her way home, because she’d grown up in a Democratic household in Brooklyn and saw no reason to switch sides now. “I’ll tell you, none of them are any good,” she said, laughing. “But I always vote, because otherwise I couldn’t complain.”

Then something interesting happened: Americans for Peace Now, the long-established American arm of the Israeli peace movement and, so far, an active J Street booster, came out in clear, unequivocal, though regretful, opposition to the resolution, arguing that Congress wasn’t really the right venue to deal with the various thorny problems, political and otherwise, posed by the report. So, the question is, does that leave J Street in the center—where it says it aims to be—or kind of nowhere at all?

Congress to Weigh in on U.N.’s Gaza Report [WP]

Synagogue Shooting Unnerves Los Angeles [LAT]

But what’s good for the Jews isn’t necessarily good for the ADL, which exists primarily to combat anti-Semitism. Accordingly, the group’s website is currently advertising the results of the poll under the banner “Anti-Semitism Still a Factor in U.S.” In a statement on the site, executive director Abraham Foxman reminds everyone that positive news is no excuse for relaxing vigilance: “We can’t dismiss that 12 percent of the American people means that there are still over 30 million Americans that hold anti-Semitic views.”

Poll Finds U.S. Anti-Semitic Views at Historic Low [Reuters]
Poll on Anti-Semitic Attitudes [ADL]