Kiera Feldman

Grace in Broken Arrow

Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivereth him out of them all. – Psalm 34

No more sleepovers. No more babysitting, or car rides home. No more being alone with children or “lingering hugs given to students (especially using your hands to stroke or fondle).” Aaron Thompson—Coach Thompson to his PE students—sat in the principal’s office at Grace Fellowship Christian School as his bosses went through the four-page Corrective Action Plan point by point. It was October of 2001, the same month Aaron added “Teacher of the Week” to his resume.

Grace’s leader, Bob Yandian—“Pastor Bob” as everyone calls him—wasn’t there: no need, he had people for this kind of thing. Pastor Bob’s time was better spent sequestered in his study, writing books and radio broadcasts. His lieutenant, Associate Pastor Chip Olin, was a hardnosed guy, “ornery as heck,” people said. Olin brought a USA Todayarticle on the characteristics of child molesters to the meeting. At age 24, Olin explained, Aaron was acting immature and unprofessional, and someone might get the wrong idea.

…Continue reading at This Land.

To the Abortuary

North Dakota’s one and only abortion clinic, located in Fargo, is something of a hub for religious life in the state’s largest city. On the one hand, volunteer escorts come to the Red River Women’s Clinic (RRWC) from the nearby Lutheran college wearing buttons that say “Jesus Never Shamed Women.” On the other, a state-funded Christian crisis pregnancy center (one of the city’s nine state-funded CPCs) is a half block away, while across the parking lot anti-abortion Catholics pray downward upon the clinic from a third-floor chapel. The chapel is an outpost of St. Mary’s Cathedral, just five blocks away, whose bulletin announces that the church “goes to the abortuary every Wednesday.”

…Continue reading at Religion Dispatches.

In Which the Young Will Eat the Old

Tuesday night, Brooklyn’s Park Slope Food Coop held a long-anticipated vote on voting: members decided whether to have a Coop-wide referendum on joining the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement. About 2,000 of the Coop’s 16,300 members packed the specially rented facilities, a GOTV triumph. In the end, the audience voted against having a BDS referendum: 1,005 against and 653 in favor.

…Continue reading at The Nation.

Starr v. Ellis

Former Special Prosecutor Ken Starr would rather be known as “Uncle Ken.” That’s how he refers to himself around Baylor University students in Waco, Texas, where he has been president since 2010. But for Starr, who very nearly took down Bill Clinton and helped uncover the president’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, history seems to have a way of repeating itself. Once again, he is trying to oust a liberal icon for alleged sexual misconduct with a subordinate. This time around his target is noted leftist Baylor professor Marc Ellis.

…Continue reading at New York Magazine.

Ken Starr’s Second Life in Academia

The rabbi began, “I have a special blessing-slash-prayer for Judge Starr.”

Early September 2010: fresh from a five-year stint as Dean of Pepperdine Law School, Baylor University’s newly anointed president Ken Starr celebrated the High Holidays with his Jewish colleagues. A former federal judge, though best known as independent counsel overseeing the Whitewater investigation and the Monica Lewinsky affair, Starr’s name is often accompanied by “Clinton nemesis,” or “yes, that Ken Starr.”

…Continue reading at Religion Dispatches.

Birthright Mic Check

I did my best to smell and look expensive, like someone who would normally come out on a Monday night to hear “venture capitalist and turn-around CEO Steven Pease,” author of a 622-page book called The Golden Age of Jewish Achievement. The program began with a complimentary light dinner, then the talk: “Why Jews are Disproportionately High Achievers.” This was the first in a series of Wall Street-oriented events hosted at Birthright Israel’s alumni headquarters, a loft on West 13th Street with exposed brick walls and tasteful track lighting.

…Continue reading at Waging Nonviolence or Occupy Writers.

The Boycott Wars

Once, in the bulk goods aisle of the Park Slope Food Coop, a wild-haired woman stood next to me and scrutinized the coffee-grinder settings. “I’m using it for an enema,” she explained. “It needs to be very fine.” I suggested the espresso grind.

This is exactly the kind of shopping experience I hoped for when I joined the Park Slope Food Coop in the fall of 2009: a realization of the eternal promise of New York, home of the strange. (That and crazycheap organic food.) Founded in 1973, the Coop is a Brooklyn institution with enough character to have spawned its own genre of trend piece. Some examples: the Coop has Byzantine rules and work requirements (debatable); the Coop has nannies covering their employers’ shifts (dubious); and, most recently, the Coop is becoming a hotbed of anti-Semitism (downright wrong).

…Continue reading at Waging Nonviolence (reprinted in the Observer, AlterNet, & Mondoweiss).

…Plus Part II of my Coop series: “Filling the Israeli Boycart” (with West Bank settlement-made SodaStream)

The Romance of Birthright Israel

The seekers are young, just beginning to face the disappointments of adulthood. Their journey is often marked by tears. They may weep while praying at the Western Wall, their heads pressed against the weathered stone, or at the Holocaust Museum, as they pass the piles of shoes of the dead. Others tear up in Jerusalem’s Mount Herzl military cemetery, while embracing a handsome IDF soldier in the late afternoon light. But at some point during their all-expenses-paid ten-day trip to a land where, as they are constantly reminded, every mountain and valley is inscribed with 5,000 years of their people’s history, the moment almost always comes.

…Continue reading at The Nation

Flash Dance

Not long before Christmas, in a Best Buy in a St. Louis mall, 86-year-old Holocaust survivor Hedy Epstein performed a synchronized song-and-dance number to the tune of “Telephone,” rocking black pants and a turtleneck in lieu of Lady Gaga’s metal-studded bra and crotch cover. Epstein, along with a cohort of mostly young women, urged the bewildered holiday shoppers to “hang up on Motorola,” a company that sells Israel surveillance equipment used in the Occupation. “Aiding in apartheid and being sneaky/tell us what you’re doing with your technology,” they sang.

…Continue reading about the activist flash mob revival at AlterNet

Frequent Fliers

Over the past decade, the Family, a fundamentalist Christian movement, has spent over $120,000 sending members of Congress all over the world.

Some members of Congress make a point of working visits to Family friends into their official travel—Sens. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), James Inhofe (R-Okla.), and others have conducted Family business on taxpayer-funded trips. Others have relied on the Family’s generosity in underwriting their travel. 

…Continue reading at Mother Jones.

In the fall of 2007, New York’s first Arabic-language public school was slated to open in Brooklyn. For a namesake, organizers chose the Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran, a pacifist, an immigrant to New York, and a Christian so obsessed with Jesus he often said the Son of God visited him in his dreams. With a name like Khalil Gibran International Academy, they thought, surely no one would mistake it for a Muslim school.

…Continue reading at Killing the Buddha.

Jews for Jesus

Another New York summer has passed: gone are the warm nights of stoop sitting; gone are the free concerts and outdoor movies and endless scrambles to claim picnic blanket space; and gone, too, are the Jews for Jesus.

For the 36th straight year, Jews for Jesus traveled here for their “Summer Witnessing Campaign.” They prepared in June with a two-week training at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, a boot camp for “the Lord’s army,” as their website puts it, that equips evangelical soldiers with the strength needed to withstand “the winds of rejection and opposition that are a regular part of the Summer Witnessing Campaign.” Each day began with calisthenics and marching. They studied the Bible and learned to identify with Jesus; His suffering on the cross was just as theirs would be on the streets of New York.

…continue reading at n+1

Israeli expo in NYC

At the Jewish Agency’s 2010 Aliyah Expo in New York last week, people asked one another, “When is your flight?”—no if’s about it. Many planned to move to a country that seems increasingly intent on ostracizing itself from the international community. And yet, during the four hours I spent at the Aliyah Expo, I heard just a single concern. “My husband would love to have a goat,” one woman with a thick New York accent told a Jewish Agency aliyah specialist, lamenting, “but you have to live on a moshav for a goat!”

…Continue reading at the Nation Institute’s Mondoweiss.