Kiera Feldman

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.

Notes from Bil’in

Upon the one-year anniversary of the killing of Bassem Abu Rahmeh, this is the news in Haaretz: “IDF won’t investigate death of Bil’in activist from tear gas grenade.” 

The kind of tear gas canister that killed Bassem is heavy, shaped like a bullet and the size of a can of beans. Haitham Al-Khatib—a video journalist who hardly sleeps, always on-call to film the the IDF raids in which demonstration organizers are arrested in the night—has a collection of them sitting on his desk. One day, Haitham showed me the Hebrew writing on the back of the canister. “The Special,” he translated ruefully. 

…Continue reading at the Nation Institute’s Mondoweiss.

The Body of Christ, Now Germ-Free

Wired reports on the brewing intellectual property war over hygienic churchware:

“A Minnesota marketer of communion-wafer dispensers is accusing its former president of patent infringement and misappropriation of trade secrets. (.pdf) … The handheld devices allow the dispensing of wafers without being touched by anybody but those receiving them. What’s more, the portable devices, according to the lawsuit, ‘easily deliver communion to military personnel in combat situations and to people who are hospitalized, infirm or otherwise immobile.’”

Fit for “combat situations”? Battlefield-ready—I’ll take two. But alas, Nu-Life Products of Minnesota, while offering the latest in communion wafer dispenser “quad-rotator technology,” doesn’t have a website. However, their competitor, Purity Solutions, offers lovely models in gold and silver (see front page for a product demonstration video with white-haired church ladies). The cost? (If you have to ask…) The “buy now” button leads to a screen saying to contact the sales department. Haven’t heard back yet on my pricing query email (subject line: “Purity costs”).

…Continue reading at Killing the Buddha

Deep Feeling, Remembered

Speaking at the New School, former believers Malcolm Gladwell, James Wood, and Christine Smallwood recounted growing up evangelical. Topics included: God, The Word, the Jewish intellectual monopoly, lamentations, and joy.

What remains in the absence of faith is the very question of secular life: how are we to feel deeply without access to the divine in everyday experience, warming our hearts with a love that is not of this world? And how are we to think?

To read the rest of my review, head over to Killing the Buddha.