Well, that was then. Last week, just before Yom Kippur, the organization quietly removed one of the top ten vote-getters, Cecilie Surasky, the deputy director of the provocative Bay Area group Jewish Voice for Peace, from the ranks of eligible competitors. Federation spokesman Joe Berkofsky told JTA that Surasky was deemed ineligible because of her group’s support for the Israel boycott, sanctions and divestment movement (BDS), which Federation has invested heavily in countering. JVP countered that Federation changed its eligibility rules specifically to disqualify Surasky—and pointed out that the leader board currently includes Manis Friedman at number four, and that Friedman, a Chabad rabbi from Minnesota, made news in 2009 when, in response to a question about how Jews should treat Arabs, he told Moment:

I don’t believe in Western morality, i.e., don’t kill civilians or children, don’t destroy holy sites, don’t fight during holiday seasons, don’t bomb cemeteries, don’t shoot until they shoot first because it is immoral. The only way to fight a moral war is the Jewish way: Destroy their holy sites. Kill men, women and children (and cattle). The first Israeli prime minister who declares that he will follow the Old Testament will finally bring peace to the Middle East.

At the time, Friedman walked his comments back, saying they were “irresponsible.” His nomination statement doesn’t mention the brouhaha, focusing instead on a blurb Bob Dylan gave Friedman’s 1990 book on kosher sex, Doesn’t Anyone Blush Anymore?

Meanwhile, JVP is getting its own kind of award: a concrete example of the Jewish Establishment’s willingness to upset the apple cart when it comes to left-wing groups but not right-wing ones.

Here’s the thing: we all know that Americans generally, and Jews specifically, are splintering into ever-smaller interest and affinity groups. Instead of finding a way to make the case to younger, unaffiliated Jews for sustaining a single umbrella group that can claim to represent the broad interests of American Jewry, whatever they may be, Federation has instead, and with the best of intentions, succeeded in building a terrific soapbox ready for exploitation by the best-mobilized voices out there, however marginal or objectionable they may be to the vast majority of their fellow Jews.

Just look at the current top vote-getter in the volunteer category: Leah Rubashkin, who happens to be the wife of Sholom Rubashkin, who is currently serving a 27-year federal prison term for financial fraud in the Agriprocessors kosher meatpacking scandal. Rubashkin has become a cause célèbre among Orthodox Lubavitchers, who believe he was unfairly sentenced, and it seems his wife’s nomination is entirely about getting some mainstream publicity: her brief nomination statement says she is a hero for staying positive through her husband’s incarceration, and adds that “we pray with Leah for the day when she will truly rejoice alongside her husband Reb Sholom Mordechai.”

This is not a way to increase Federation’s relevance to mainstream, maybe-observant Jews under 50—the people who the Facebook contest were presumably supposed to attract in the first place. Worse, it demeans the very real and very important accomplishments of other nominees, like Randy Gold, an Atlanta father who began advocating for more thorough genetic screening of Jewish couples after his daughter was born with a preventable genetic disorder. But, never mind, Federation has an app for that, too: the final winners won’t be picked by open online voting, but by a panel of judges that includes Tablet Magazine contributor Mayim Bialik and sister-of-Facebook Randi Zuckerberg.

JFNA Bumps BDS Backer from Heroes Contest [JTA]
Jewish Community Heroes
Related: Tribal Allegiance [Tablet Magazine]

Rubashkin stood accused of hiring 26 teenagers from Guatemala and Mexico at the plant. Not only were the underage laborers knowingly on the payroll, prosecutors argued, but they were forced to work excessive hours around dangerous machinery and chemicals. While earlier trials against Rubashkin were held in neighboring South Dakota, the child labor hearings unfolded in Waterloo, Iowa—a short hour and a half drive from Postville.

The trial, which dragged on for nearly a month, revealed a company beset by divisive management and a vigilant anti-union streak. But the defense successfully cast Rubashkin as an unfortunate victim, uninvolved in day-to-day hiring practices that included workers’ falsifying documents.

One former plant employee testified that she began her job, defeathering chickens for 12-hour days, when she was 15. Another took to the witness stand to claim the company directed its workers to lie about their age to state labor investigators. An Agriprocessors Human Resources rep, he said, “Told us not to tell them I was 17 because the plant would have problems.”

Two former supervisors brought more apparently damning evidence against the plant. Mark Andrew Spangler, a night shift supervisor, said the slaughterhouse “most definitely” hired minors. While a second supervisor, Matthew Derrick, recalled approaching Rubashkin about the presence of underage workers, his warnings, he claimed, were shrugged off.

But the defense pushed back hard, calling upon a plant manager to refute the supervisors’ claims. Spangler, the manager said, was a drunk, and Derrick was “lazy.”

An agent from the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation told jurors that Derrick never reported his tale of warning Rubashkin before. Plus, according to Rabbi Zvi Bass, Derrick got a little too close to one underage female employee—though that testimony was thrown out.

Rubashkin’s lawyers culled mugshots of Latinos from Mexico and Guatemala and asked the lead investigator to guess the age of each. He missed more than a couple times. (Agriprocessors is accused of hiring workers as young as 13.) The tactic was pivotal to the defense’s main point: That the Rubashkins were fooled into hiring minors and, therefore, not culpable.

One witness for the defense was Rabbi Moses Weissmandel, who oversaw the plant’s Kosher certification. He testified that, on his frequent trips through the plant, he didn’t notice any underage workers. A former plant controller also testified that the Rubashkins were always staunchly against hiring minors.

Yesterday’s acquittal marks a rare victory for the former Agriprocessors’ management. A federal judge recently sentenced a company accountant to three years in prison.

The trial also points to the continual reverberations the industry and raid have in the rural community and beyond. Both a PBS documentary, “In the Shadow of the Raid,” and a lengthy Des Moines Register report explore the transnational impact of the plant’s saga.

Last week, the prosecution rested its case, pinning Rubashkin directly for ignoring repeated warnings about labor violations. In response, the defense framed Rubashkin — in odd, allegorical language — as a scapegoat, targeted maliciously and unfairly. Defense attorney F. Montgomery Brown described his client: “The stranger in a strange land. He became the white whale. You can feel from the absence of evidence and the evidence itself that they rushed to the conclusion that he was responsible, this white whale. Moby Jew.”

Rubashkin’s lawyers pushed the midwestern jurors to identify with their client. “He takes his kids to Disney World,” Brown said. “He’s just like us, he just looks different and believes in God a little different way.”

Former Manager of Iowa Slaughterhouse Is Acquitted of Labor Charges [NYT[
Earlier: Rubashkin Found Guilty of 86 Fraud Charges

Prior to his current incarnation as bike advocate, Herzfeld spent a year shuttling back and forth between the Dominican Republic, where he ran operations for a telecom company called SkyMax Dominicana, and Brooklyn, where SkyMax’s parent company is based. On paper, it was an absurdly good fit: Herzfeld reported to the company’s owner, a Williamsburg Satmar gentleman named Moses Greenfield, but he also got to indulge his penchant for Dominican culture, and particularly merengue. Naturally, he was bitten by the merengue bug while he was a bad student at Yeshiva University, which is conveniently located in the heavily Dominican Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights.

In the spring of 2007, after Herzfeld clashed with his colleagues one too many times, Greenfield fired him. An ugly dispute followed over how much money Herzfeld was owed. As per their contract, the parties took their conflict to the beth din, or rabbinical court.

The Beth Din of America is an odd institution: The judges are Orthodox rabbis (and their decisions are binding only because the claimants have agreed to use them as arbitrators), but the lawyers are … lawyers. In fact, Greenfield’s attorney in this case was Nat Lewin, an Orthodox lawyer who regularly argues before the Supreme Court. (Says Herzfeld of his foe, “He’s the guy who if they don’t let you wear a yarmulke and you’re an astronaut, he’ll sue NASA.”) According to Herzfeld, Lewin’s approach to the beth din case was to besmirch Herzfeld’s character and to highlight his least Orthodox habits. And so Exhibit A, in Herzfeld’s telling—Lewin says it was only a minor detail of the case—was a photograph of Herzfeld dancing the merengue with a Dominican woman dressed a tad short of modestly.

“In the Orthodox community, there’s no worse crime than mixed dancing,” Herzfeld explains. (By “mixed,” he means gender, although his dance partner’s skin color probably didn’t help.) “They wanted to show that they were at a higher level of religiosity than me.” The incriminating photo appears on Herzfeld’s Facebook page, followed by a seriously impressive number of punning captions submitted by Herzfeld and his friends, from “the behind the rabbis maligned” to “the dark tail that made the Hasidim turn pale.”

According to Herzfeld, the photo was used in court to back up the even weightier charge that he had sexually harassed two Dominican SkyMax employees. Lewin presented affidavits signed by the young women making these claims; Herzfeld asserts that their supervisors paid them to sign the statements, and indeed—at Herzfeld’s behest—one woman later said as much on video. (Lewin in turn counters that the harassment charges were just a small part of the evidence that Herzfeld’s conduct as a SkyMax employee was inappropriate.)

The beth din ruled that Herzfeld was entitled to some of the profits he demanded. However, in Herzfeld’s view, it did not go far enough in enforcing the verdict—to the point that, almost three years after the case first reached the beth din, he is suing Greenfield in civil court, where a hearing will take place later this month. Lewin has moved on from the case, but Herzfeld remains on a mission against him. Among the attorney’s highest-profile clients of the past few years are the Rubashkins, the ultra-Orthodox family that owned the Agriprocessors kosher slaughterhouse in Iowa that was shut down after a huge immigration raid. The day of the raid, Herzfeld said, Lewin was in the beth din with him. “I think the way it happened,” he said, “was that God punished the Rubashkins because Nat Lewin did what he did.”

Herzfeld, meanwhile, reports being happily married to an Orthodox woman. So, how does she feel about his merengue dancing?

“Eh,” Herzfeld replies. “She prefers to salsa.”

Clash of the Bearded Ones [NYMag]
Earlier: Bike Lane Battle Takes A Turn for the Civil

Except: Sholom Rubashkin, the former CEO of the beleaguered Agriprocessors slaughterhouse, is currently under court order to stay in Iowa’s Allamakee County until his trial. (He stands accused of 142 counts of fraud, money laundering, and immigration-related violations there.) He has, however, gotten special permission—on “religious” grounds—to travel to New York today. What holiday is he observing? The 15th anniversary of the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s death. The commemoration, Rubashkin’s lawyer said, is of “exceptional religious significance for those of the Lubavitcher faith.” It’s a faith, we imagine, much like Judaism.

Rubashkin Allowed To Leave Iowa For ‘Jewish’ Holiday [FailedMessiah.com]