John Fitzpatrick was about to be crowned King of the Jieuxs. He had put on a tuxedo for the occasion, and his silvery hair was impeccably gelled into position. Standing by the door at Donna’s Bar & Grill, on the edge of New Orleans’ French Quarter, he looked like an errant groomsman who had wandered ...

The Emails of Zion is a collection of messages from Jewish parents, uncles, aunts, grandparents, and others who are eager—often way too eager—to inform their children about issues of pressing concern to the Jewish community. Some of these emails may sound crazy, paranoid, ethnocentric, and/or racist, while others are disturbingly sane. These are the voices ...

Con Game: How a New York rabbi tried to remake the rules on converting to Judaism, until a sex tape—and a family feud between his wealthy backers—brought him down
Tale of the Tapes: Orand’s dirty phone calls with the man she says is Tropper
Converted: When Shannon Orand asked Rabbi Leib Tropper to help her study to ...

The Emails of Zion is a collection of messages from Jewish parents, uncles, aunts, grandparents, and others who are eager—often way too eager—to inform their children about issues of pressing concern to the Jewish community. Some of these emails may sound crazy, paranoid, ethnocentric, and/or racist, while others are disturbingly sane. These are the voices ...

In May 2007, Leib Tropper arrived in Phoenix, Arizona, to preside over a grand conclave of prospective converts to Judaism sponsored by his Eternal Jewish Family organization, which offered “Cadillac conversions” to non-Jews as part of an effort to seize control of the conversion process outside of Israel. Buoyed by a $4.8 million infusion of ...

Guma Aguiar, the 32-year-old multimillionaire who helped precipitate the downfall of the ultra-Orthodox rabbi Leib Tropper, was committed by court order to a mental hospital near Tel Aviv yesterday, according to Israeli news reports. Aguiar and his billionaire uncle, Thomas Kaplan, have bankrolled Tropper’s efforts to gain control of the stringently regulated process of conversion ...

A man believed to be Rabbi Leib Tropper—until recently chief of Eternal Jewish Family, a powerful group that has attempted to use millions of dollars in donations and the support of famous rabbis to control the process of conversion to Judaism throughout the world—is heard on several recorded telephone conversations doing a number of embarrassing ...