1:08 PM
Gil Student
An article in the Jewish Week disproves Noah Feldman's claim that his reunion picture was cropped to remove him and his wife, and quotes my old buddy Josh Wolff (link):
Noah Feldman, who ignited a firestorm of criticism last week with his pointed attack on Modern Orthodoxy in The New York Times Magazine, admitted this week that he learned before publication of his article that he in fact was not intentionally cropped out of his reunion photograph...
The photographer, Lenny Eisenberg, told The Jewish Week Monday that he had difficulty capturing as many as 60 reunion participants within a single frame. Eisenberg ended up taking several shots from one side, then the other, and several people on the far side — not just Feldman and his fiancée — happened to be out of the picture when it finally appeared in the newsletter.
Josh Wolff, executive director of Maimonides, told The Jewish Week, “What we were accused of doing is false.” What happened was “nobody’s intent. It’s very obvious that not everybody fit into the picture. Why some people were standing on the inside [of the picture] versus the outside was not orchestrated by us.”
R. Norman Lamm in the Forward (link):
Frankly, your resentment at the removal of your name and photo from the alumni list of your high school and other such petty discourtesies does not elicit much sympathy from me. Tantrums do not move me. I am moved by your resolve to continue your relationship to Judaism. And I value your suggestion that we reexamine our attitude to the social ostracism we have practiced heretofore. We certainly will not accept the violation of the law with equanimity, but we ought to rethink how we can express our displeasure in a manner that will not close the doors to teshuva — if indeed the couple wishes to take advantage of it.
Apparently, you take the matter of intermarriage lightly — something on the line of eating non-glatt-kosher meat. If so, you are sorely mistaken. True, one can make a case that out-marriage is, technically, not a more serious violation than work on Shabbat or eating on Yom Kippur. But you well know that in our times the ultimate sign of pending assimilation is intermarriage. You resent the small discourtesies you experienced, yet you ignore the massive insult to your alma mater, and to the Modern Orthodox community that nourished you all these years, by violating a fundamental law — and then punish them in public.
