• Meanwhile, Syrian authorities have gone on something of an arresting spree. [NYT]

• After signing the unity agreement with Fatah—which is supposed to happen tomorrow—Hamas said it will abide by a ceasefire. [AP/Haaretz]

• Only a week or two after a religious Jew was shot without pre-clearing a trip to Joseph’s Tomb in the West Bank, a visit today ended in riots. [JTA]

• The American Reform movement is facing significant, public dissent from members who feel that the selection of Rabbi Richard Jacobs as new head signals the movement’s further retrenchment “into an affiliate of the Democratic party,” in the words of one. [JTA]

• In the Arab world, Osama Bin Laden was seen, after his death, primarily as a relic of an earlier era. [NYT]

The “cartel” in question is the Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly, which tightly governs the placement of rabbis with member synagogues across the country—a delicate matchmaking process whose result is often a major determinant of whether a congregation will thrive. The professor, Barak Richman, is a lay leader at his synagogue in Durham, N.C., and has spent the last eight months developing his claim that what started as a way to make sure that far-flung synagogues got their fair pick of rabbis graduating from the seminaries—and to prevent internecine poaching of successful clergy between competing synagogues—may today run afoul of the same federal antitrust statutes that brought down Rockefeller’s oil empire.

In Richman’s view, the Rabbinical Assembly and its analogues in the Reform and Reconstructionist movements use their oversight of the hiring process to threaten the autonomy and, at a fundamental level, the independent spirit of individual synagogues. (Richman excludes the rabbinic association of Modern Orthodoxy, known as the Rabbinical Council of America, from his analysis.) “Each placement system imposes severe restrictions on the labor market for pulpit rabbis without creating any identifiable pro-competitive benefit,” Richman wrote in his paper. “These rabbinic organizations are acting to advance their own commercial interests to the detriment of the welfare of consumers, namely the congregations and congregants who hire and ultimately benefit from a rabbi’s services.”

The argument lays bare a facet of Jewish life that remains obscured to the vast majority of American Jews today, who think of their congregations as independent religious communities and who are far less likely than their grandparents to know—or care—about the umbrella movements. But the rabbis’ and cantors’ professional associations do what secular professional associations do: maintain standards, facilitate hiring, and organize pensions. Under the current system, rabbis and cantors seeking jobs declare their candidacy through their movements’ placement offices, rather than operating as free agents. On the other side of the equation, synagogues agree to accept panels of candidates screened by the central placement authorities, rather than posting their jobs on public job boards or recruiting privately. Rabbis and cantors follow the rules in order to protect their access to future jobs at their movements’ synagogues; congregations, most of which go through the hiring process only infrequently, follow the rules because it’s easier and to preserve their good standing within their movements. Bucking the system requires an appeals process that can, in some cases, cost congregations, and rabbis, matches that both sides hope to make.

The idea that American synagogues are, at such a fundamental level, subject to a centralized leadership is a foreign one to most of their members—there is, after all, no Chief Rabbi in this country and no sense that a Jew in Pittsburgh is somehow answerable to an authority in New York, let alone in Jerusalem. The question of what the appropriate relationship between synagogue and movement should be is emerging at a moment when the Conservative movement, in particular, is painfully aware of the need to re-engage its constituents; indeed, its annual conference, last month, was devoted to the issue of rebranding. It underscores the degree to which mainstream synagogues feel the movements have hampered their efforts to attract younger Jews at a time when independent minyans and other groups are succeeding with a less institutional approach to Jewish practice. And it dovetails with a general decline in support for unions—which the rabbinic associations, in some sense, are—among a younger generation accustomed to union-busting. But Richman’s claim, first set out in a Forward op-ed last September, is that the movements’ constraints on rabbinic hiring aren’t just run-of-the-mill Jewish parochial concerns—it’s that they’re actually illegal.

***

Grumbling over the rules imposed by the rabbis’ and cantors’ professional associations is, by itself, nothing new. The issue was explored at length a decade ago by the journalist Stephen Fried in his book The New Rabbi, in which seniority rules restricting hiring by large synagogues became a major plot point, once the Conservative Philadelphia congregation at the heart of the story decided it wanted to promote its young assistant rabbi rather than hire a more experienced stranger from somewhere else to replace its retiring senior rabbi. (The Rabbinical Assembly eventually bent its rules to accommodate the synagogue, Har Zion, one of the largest and most powerful in the country.) And the idea that the movements might use their control over the hiring process to influence theological decisions by its member rabbis surfaced in 2005, when Ayelet Cohen, a Conservative rabbi, complained to the New York Times that she was being punished by the Rabbinical Assembly placement committee because she had officiated same-sex weddings. (The movement responded that Cohen was only being called out for violating the terms of a waiver allowing her to work at Congregation Beth Simchat Torah, a largely gay and lesbian Manhattan synagogue that is unaffiliated with any major movement; the Conservative movement voted the following year to allow its members to marry gay couples.)

The current system emerged in the 1960s to impose order on what was largely an ad hoc process, according to Marc Lee Raphael, professor of Judaic Studies at the College of William and Mary and author of a new history, The Synagogue in America. “In the old days, and this was true at the Orthodox seminary and the Conservative seminary and the Reform seminary, the chancellor of the seminary just told new rabbis what pulpits they were going to,” said Raphael, who also serves as rabbi of a Reform pulpit in Maryland. “The next step was the old boys’ network, where the president of the synagogue would call a guy and say, ‘We’re twice as large and pay twice as much and why don’t you come over.’ So, the placement process replaced two terrible ways of hiring rabbis.”

But the core of Richman’s argument, which has not been tested in any court, is that the rabbis’ professional associations organized their system in a way that violates the terms of the Sherman Act, which was passed in 1890 to combat the power of the railroad and oil monopolies, and later helped break up the Bell System. Rather than operating as a neutral clearinghouse, the hiring process run by the rabbinic associations is structured to limit both member rabbis and affiliated synagogues from using other avenues for making hires. And it turns out there is precedent for using the Sherman Act against secular professional associations for just this kind of behavior: In 1995, the Justice Department successfully sued the American Bar Association, the body governing the legal profession, on the grounds that it was using its cartel power to unfairly manipulate law schools into guaranteeing higher salaries for law faculties.

Richman’s crusade against the Rabbinical Assembly emerged from his personal frustration with a system that prevented his Conservative synagogue, Beth El, from interviewing Reconstructionist candidates to replace its retiring senior rabbi, who had been ordained in the Reconstructionist movement and obtained a waiver to preside over the congregation when it was still a Jewish backwater, decades before the universities in the area’s Research Triangle emerged as a hot destination for young academics, many of them Jewish. His initial salvo in the Forward elicited a statement from the Rabbinical Assembly asserting that its system “encourages talented individuals to enter and remain in the profession” and thereby “benefits not only rabbis and their families, but the Jewish community as a whole.” (Representatives of the Rabbinical Assembly did not respond immediately to phone and email messages left seeking comment; Richman declined to speak to Tablet Magazine on the record, citing potential legal action against the Rabbinical Assembly.)

But Richman is far from alone. Congregation Beth Elohim, a popular Reform synagogue in Brooklyn, ran into difficulty earlier this year over its efforts to hire a star cantorial student on the verge of graduation named Joshua Breitzer. Under the ranking system used by the American Conference of Cantors—Reform cantors’ equivalent of the Rabbinical Assembly—Beth Elohim was required to hire a cantor with more than three years of experience. In order to hire Breitzer, the synagogue had to appeal for a special waiver, which it eventually won. But the process took so long that they nearly lost their candidate to another congregation that could offer a job without waiting for secondary approvals. “In the end, we got who we wanted,” Beth Elohim’s rabbi, Andy Bachman, says now, “but it was an unnecessary wringer that we needed to go through.”

Part of the problem is that having a national office act in any substantive capacity is antithetical to the idea of local control. “I’m happy with how everything worked out, but down low, on a personal level, nothing was going to stop me from getting the best cantor, or the best rabbi, I could for our congregation, whether it was someone who was Reform or Conservative or Reconstructionist,” Bachman said. “We don’t need the national movement to tell us what Jews in Brooklyn need—we know what Jews in Brooklyn need.”

It’s an irony Richman notes in his paper: The approach taken by the movement may in fact be strangling the very community it purports to support. “It amounts to an effort to deprive local congregations of the very autonomy and self-determination that has fueled the blossoming of diverse Jewish experiences for two thousand years,” Richman writes. “Were the rabbinical organizations to adopt less restrictive rules that were consistent with the Sherman Act—rules that empower individual communities and defer to the preferences of both congregants and rabbis—it would kindle the passions and empower the dynamism that Jewish communities have shown over time.”

“I’m honored to follow the giants before me,” Jacobs told reporters today, just prior to an introduction with the URJ’s board of trustees, at the Upper West Side’s Stephen Wise Free Synagogue. “But we need a new path. I’m going to build on our movement, which is a strong movement.” The URJ, an umbrella organization that claims 1.5 million members and 920 congregations, has been threatened by financial difficulties and criticisms from congregation leaders like Jacobs.

Today, however, Jacobs praised the URJ for being responsive to critics, and while he insisted, “I am not defined by the Rabbinic Vision Initiative”—the group of prominent, critical rabbis of which he is a member—he did assert that his “RVI colleagues are with” him. He also bristled at questions concerning the financial challenges facing the URJ, insisting that with a truly transformative vision, he would attract partners and funds. To some extent, he admitted he’d be “renovating the house while the owners are still living there.” As to critics, he argued, “They might not love everything that happens, but they’re part of everything that happens.”

Jacobs will most likely follow in Yoffie’s tradition of political liberalism. He spoke expansively of enduring the “scars of Hebrew school” only to come into his Jewish consciousness at Camp Swig, a Jewish camp in Saratoga, where, “among the redwoods,” he met progressive leaders like César Chávez and Joan Baez. In recent years, he’s traveled to Haiti and spent Sukkot in Darfur; in August, he attended a rally in support of the Cordoba Initiative, the group sponsoring the Islamic cultural center a few blocks from Ground Zero.

He spoke proudly of his home in Israel, which he and his wife built during the Second Intifada. He smiled while describing coaching a basketball team of high-school seniors, none over 5’2’’, against much taller players from French Hill—all of whom fought in Lebanon.

He’s also a leader of the New Israel Fund, a board member at American Jewish World Services, and a former dancer and choreographer who is pursuing a doctorate in ritual dance at New York University.

Rabbi Israel Dresner, 81, recalls being arrested in June 1961 for participating in the first Freedom Ride. “I was a Reform rabbi,” he says, “but I always wore a yarmulke. I wanted people to know I was Jewish.” He remembers being with King in Georgia in 1962 while being threatened by the local White Citizens Council. Recounting a Seder he had attended, King reportedly told Dresner, “I was enormously impressed that 3,000 years later, these people remember their ancestors were slaves, and they’re not ashamed. We Negroes have to learn that, not to be ashamed of our slave heritage.”

A Half-Century Later, Rabbis Recall Marching with Martin Luther King [JTA]

• Left-wing Israeli bloggers have had some success in pushing the line that the IDF is covering up alleged culpability in a Palestinian protester’s tear gas-caused death. [The Lede]

• Chicago-area Rabbi Evan Moffic calls for the Reform Movement to adopt a “Judaism of relevance.” It’s more than a slogan. [Forward]

• RELEASE THE VULTURE! [Australia Broadcasting Corporation/Vos Iz Neias?]

• A “suspicious package” on a flight turned out to be a bagel with cream cheese. Current whereabouts unknown, though it is believed either to be at a black site in Poland or in some lucky person’s stomach. [NBC Miami]

• Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys beat his cancer. Damn right. [HuffPo via Jewcy]

Give it up for MCA.

There’s only one catch: Each institution must use $1 million of its grant money on joint teacher-training endeavors with the other two schools.

If that sounds like an obvious request, you probably don’t remember the interdenominational Jewish politics of the recent past. During the 1980s and 1990s, the three major synagogue movements were widely perceived as being at loggerheads. Movement leaders and observers seem to agree that, in the past decade or so, tensions between the denominations have eased—led in part by a warming of the relationships between the heads of HUC, JTS, and YU, all central institutions within their movements.

But the relative ease with which this arrangement was made may less reflect a burst of newfound harmony among disparate monoliths as much as a loss of power experienced by each. During the period in which relations have improved, major Jewish community donors have eschewed giving to the denominations at all, often contributing instead to robust nondenominational organizations like Birthright and Hillel that target often-unaffiliated youth—and where such “megadonors” also have more control. What the Jim Joseph Foundation may have done is found a creative way to harness the decreased power of the denominations—by combining it.

“They’ve all been hit, but one of the ways to recover your health is to cooperate, save a few bucks, and ideally augment your quality,” said Charles Edelsberg, the Jim Joseph Foundation’s executive director. Edelsberg maintained that his organization is basically neutral on the issue of interdenominational collaboration: The point of the mandate, he said, was to reduce “unnecessary duplication of effort” that would waste the foundation’s dollars; more cooperation between the universities “would be great if it happened, but it’s not something we’re going to measure” when evaluating the success of the grant program, he added.

But the mere existence of the grant-sharing stipulations suggests that the foundation may have an agenda vis-à-vis the movements. “The Jim Joseph grant reflects a general belief among major donors that the denominational differences need to be overcome,” said Steven M. Cohen, a professor of sociology at HUC.

But for those with a strong commitment to the denominations remaining distinct—either for ideological or, for those employed by one of the synagogue movements, professional reasons—harmony between the movements is not necessarily a good thing. That’s especially true for the right-wing of the modern Orthodox movement—which is probably why, of the three university leaders, YU president Richard Joel has been the most direct about having to hold his nose while accepting an offer he couldn’t refuse. Far from celebrating the spirit of the new partnership, Joel took pains to minimize its significance in an interview with Tablet Magazine. “There’s no joint programming involved in any of this,” he said. “There are profound philosophic and doctrinal differences between Orthodoxy and liberal Judaism and this doesn’t represent any change in those differences.” Moreover, he added, “I don’t believe that people from different orientations in Judaism speaking together makes any kind of statement legitimizing or delegitimizing each other.”

Joel himself came out of one of the most successful nondenominational Jewish organizations, the campus movement Hillel, which he presided over for 14 years. But even if he personally understands the wisdom of that model, much of his YU constituency would likely recoil at the idea of working in significant ways with other denominations. “It’s very important that Richard Joel not appear to be moving toward a liberal position that’s untenable for them,” said Adam Ferziger, a historian at Bar-Ilan University in Israel who studies Jewish denominationalism. “It’s a very tough tightrope.”

Ellenson and Eisen, with their more liberal—and, maybe more to the point, more apathetic—memberships, are at greater ease talking up the collaboration. Ellenson went so far as to disavow what he called the “financial carrot” completely in an interview with Tablet Magazine, instead describing the collaboration as “a genuine reflection of a strong religious and ideological commitment to the value of k’lal Yisrael.” Eisen, fittingly occupying a tenuous middle ground, sounded resigned to if not wildly enthusiastic about the new facts on the ground. “I think we’re in a moment where keeping Jews, especially young Jews, involved, is more important than keeping us involved in particular denominations,” he said. “So, all of us recognize this and see why cooperation is necessary because of this mood.”

But, some observers note, these leaders also have a stake in not letting collaboration go too far: As they become more and more ideologically indistinguishable from each other, they run the greater risk of losing their separate identities. The Conservative movement in particular, poised shakily between the other two movements, has been accused from within its own ranks of melding with its Reform counterparts—a fear that has sometimes been stoked by collaborative efforts between JTS and HUC. Earlier this year, for instance, the downsizing of JTS’s cantorial school led some students and faculty to wonder whether their program and HUC’s—which already share some courses—were going to merge. But it seems unlikely that either school—especially JTS, which is reportedly millions of dollars in debt—could have afforded to refuse $11 million even if it had wanted to.

It’s no coincidence that the collaboration between the universities will be directed at the level of their education Masters programs—first because the Jim Joseph Foundation’s focus on young adults is typical of megadonor-sponsored Jewish initiatives, but also because of what the education programs lack: the kind of inextricable relationship to theology and halacha that the universities’ rabbinic and cantorial programs do have.

According to Edelsberg, the schools have talked about using some of their shared grant money to create joint training in experiential education, but even that prospect has not gotten past the discussion stage. And optimists hoping for a slide from pedagogical collaboration on educational matters to collaboration on rabbinical ones should keep their hopes in check. While JTS and HUC offer some joint seminars for rabbinical students, Joel put the kibosh on such prospects involving YU.

“It’s counterintuitive to a contemporary liberal aesthetic,” he said. “But I’m trained as a lawyer. Some things are simply not negotiable.”

Yoffie talked to Tablet Magazine today about his diagnosis, and how he hopes the left will respond.

What prompted you to write this now?
As I said in the essay, the conservative response was the motivating factor. The common sense notion is that you need American support for dealing with Iran, and the anti-government rhetoric seems so counterintuitive and counter-productive. I have heard it, and having that experience in several instances had me shaking my head, and saying I need to write about it. On the one hand it indicates concern for Iran, but on the other hand it seems to be so counterproductive and not focused on Iran at all, but focused on all kinds of other agendas. Do we care about Iran, or is it a pro-settlement agenda, or an anti-Obama agenda? And is Iran getting lost in the fog?

You wrote that you were puzzled about the relative silence from left and center of the Jewish community on Iran. Why do you think that’s been the case?
On the liberal, centrist side of the equation, I don’t think people feel as passionately about it as they should. So much of the rhetoric on the right strongly suggests, implies, or directly acknowledges that what we’re really pushing for is military action, and that really makes the left and center uncomfortable. My view is that, as the Obama administration has said, we’re not taking anything off the table, but that while it’s getting late, crippling sanctions can still make a difference. I think that’s the way to go. Liberals and centrists are scared off by the implication of military action and that’s a factor in their thinking. But that can’t be a reason for staying silent.

You invoke 1967 to indicate how urgent the threat is.
This is the critical time. It’s not something we can wait six months to talk about. We have to talk about it right now. I think we’re running out of time on the ability of economic sanctions to be effective. So there is real urgency now. And the Obama people have ratcheted up the rhetoric. But if it’s between that and delivering results, results have not been delivered yet.

If you believe the Obama administration is engaging with the Iran issue, and endorse the approach they’re taking, why is there a need for people who support that to mobilize now?
It’s a question of getting everybody on board. We need to push the administration. They’re moving in the right direction, they’ve said some of the right things, but at this time are we confident that Iran is going to be blocked from getting nuclear weapons? No.

Do you think you should have written this essay six months ago? Were you waiting for your constituents to mobilize themselves on this?
I would have liked to see more grassroots activity than I’ve seen. And it’s not like I’m not happy with what we have said—we have resolutions, and if I wanted to build a paper trail, I could. But the community is very split right now on a lot of the Israel questions, and Iran shouldn’t be an issue on which we are split. So I think it’s very important for the Administration to hear from everybody on this, across the spectrum. We don’t want the government to perceive this as a right-wing issue alone. The overriding issue is that this is a terrible threat that we all have to be concerned about, and the government is less likely to move if it’s perceived as an issue of the right.

You were booed at J Street last fall over your defense of Israel’s conduct in the Gaza war, in 2009. Have you had pushback from the left since the essay was published?
Well, if you think about what the response is going to be, you’d never write anything. I don’t rule anything out but I worry more about indifference or silence that amounts to indifference than a negative reaction. Someone did share with me some blog on the right where the author was laudatory, especially since in those circles I’m the crazy leftist. But all the talkbacks were attacks, people who were saying this is simply an apology for the Obama administration. That’s the narrow partisan perspective I’m trying to avoid here. What will the response be on the left? I just don’t know. But in a certain sense I don’t care. This is an overriding issue.

What kind of action do you want to see from your rabbis and congregants?
I’m going to sit with some of our folks and talk about what the best strategy is for pursuing this. Again, it’s not that we haven’t done things, and there are a lot of people out there who feel very strongly about this in the centrist or liberal camp. So the issue is working with those folks to give this greater urgency and higher priority, and to have more organization on the local level. Do I have a whole plan worked out? I do not. But I do have ideas and we will begin to move on them very soon.

Do you want to see them engage with AIPAC, for example?
My view is that we should work with everyone in the community. But we should be prepared to speak up on our own.

Getting Serious About Iran [Forward]
Earlier: Reining in Iran

“There’s nothing in the Torah about palliative care, or dialysis…. When you start getting down to the details of the bills, how do you turn that into a moral argument as opposed to a political argument?” a host of the show asked Saperstein.

The rabbi gave the standard reply that we can apply the moral norms given in the Torah to contemporary situations; then, more intriguingly, he argued that “by the time of the Talmud 2,000 years ago, [these norms] had developed into health care systems and rules and requirements to provide adequate health care for all people. Any community that wanted to be considered a moral community had to provide health care, had to provide health care providers. These are not new ideas.”

So does that imply that people opposed to Obama’s health care plan are immoral?

“Good moral people can differ on the best way to go about achieving universal health care,” Saperstein said. “That isn’t what this debate has been about, unfortunately. This has been a very disturbing debate in terms of the civility of discourse in America. When people make these extraordinary accusations and allusions about fascism and Nazism and the Holocaust, what they’re doing is trying to take these ideas outside the free marketplace of ideas.”

The Moral of the Story: Religious Leaders on Health Care Reform [The Takeaway]
Previously: An Orthodox-Reform Divide on Health Care?

Have you ever walked into a synagogue and heard an organ, and wondered what it’s doing there? Organs moved into temples in Germany in the 19th century as part of the Reform movement. And there were huge fights over the organ: Some German Jews thought it was a sign of being modern and enlightened. Others thought it was too close to Christianity and a betrayal of Judaism. The organ followed Reform Jews from Germany to the United States.

Tina Frühauf is a professional organist and the author of The Organ and Organ Music in German-Jewish Culture, which is now out in German and is due out in an English translation in 2006. A Catholic from Germany, Frühauf went on a scholarly odyssey into a world of music that was silenced by the rise of Nazism and largely forgotten. Hear her explain what attracted her to Jewish organ music, and the work of composers Louis Lewandowski and Yohanan Samuel.