Guilt by Association (for Jewish Studies)

A local professor gets #MeTooed by proxy.

But first, a visit to the mailroom.

Response to last week’s Ian Eisenberg interview ranged from “really good” to “really heavy” to “really wrong.” Starting with “wrong,” a Cholent reader and industry insider took me to task for not doing enough research on Ian’s evil ways. I make clear (with links) that he’s a controversial dude. You could even say he’s the Roger Stone of the local cannabis scene. Does this mean he has no right to tell his story?

A detailed response from Friend of The Cholent Greg:

Well that was heavy. You are the first person to paint Ike sympathetically, I must say. Some slight corrections or addendums to the record:

1) My understanding is that the church next door does have youth programs or a sunday school that brings minors to the building on a weekly basis. Yes, they sued and lost, so Ike is compliant with the letter of the law... but the spirit of the law, I mean, if you’re a socially conservative Black pastor trying to raise kids in a somewhat religiously moral environment, yeah, a neon-clad pot shop next door kinda undercuts your message. I went to Hebrew school weekly, and twice weekly for the year or two ahead of my bar mitzvah, so I’m not buying his claim that kids don’t hang out at churches.

2) Ponder is discreet. I buy pot at Ponder. It’s a storefront that blends in with the neighboring storefronts - coffee shop, gift boutique, bakery. Uncle Ike blares its marketing from blocks away. “Hey Stoner, Over Here” -- that kinda stuff. Ike doesn’t deserve the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories by any means, but he could choose to tone down the brash marketing. Especially before the newest buildings went up at 23rd and Union, Uncle Ike’s was a really loud presence in the built environment. I get the impression he’s not the back down/eat crow/humble pie type, however. 

He rode in on the wave of pot as novelty where ostentatious signage made some sense, the giddiness that something illicit no longer was. Ponder and its ilk are part of the normalizing wave, which I think is much healthier for us as a society. Like, coffee shops don't need signs posted two blocks away “Hey Caffeine Junkie, Over Here.”

3) Blacks and Jews. There are whole books written on this complicated relationship and it sure as hell ain’t all Heschel and MLK walking arm in arm. I attended a funeral in 2019 for a family friend in the Baltimore suburbs. One of the sons waxed nostalgic about their Jewish-American upbringing in Baltimore in the 1950s and 60s where the deceased’s family ran a corner grocer, then conveniently skipped a few decades before bringing us up to date with the deceased’s golden years in said Baltimore suburb. What happened in between? The 1968 riots. Were Jewish businesses a deserving target? Absolutely not. Did that engender a generation of racism from white Jews who had moved out of the city limits toward African-Americans still living in so-called “inner-city Baltimore” that I observed in my youth? 1000%. My high school girlfriend’s grandparents had nary a kind word to say about the “schv—s” who destroyed their neighborhood some 40 years prior. And of course, every Black Baltimorean was implicated in this historical event in their minds.

Truth be told, I almost took out the discussion about race. But several readers said they had encountered similar issues. It is really hard to talk about this.

On to something…heavy. But before that, please consider becoming a Friend of The Cholent by signing up for an annual subscription or joining the founder’s circle. Each of these articles takes 10-20 hours to research and write. Supporting this effort means you care about the future of Jewish journalism in Seattle.

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Man Walks into a Zoom Room…

Last week, the president of the Association for Jewish Studies resigned after participating in a discussion over Zoom with Steven M. Cohen, an academic who has been accused by multiple women of sexual misconduct. AJS might seem like an obscure organization to anyone not involved with Jewish academia, but this hits close to home, because the now former president of AJS is Noam Pianko, the chair of the University of Washington’s Stroum Jewish Studies Department.

In a resignation letter posted to the AJS website April 13, Pianko writes:

As I shared with the board last week, I met on March 11th with Steven M. Cohen, Jack Wertheimer, Steven Bayme, and Sylvia Barack Fishman in a hour-long Zoom conversation to discuss a short paper they shared with me in my area of academic research. As a scholar and an individual member of AJS, I believe strongly in upholding our mission-centric value of academic and intellectual freedom including our commitment not to regulate the intellectual association of its members.

However, I have now come to understand that although I violated no AJS policy, my role as President of AJS necessitated a different set of obligations and standards than other members of the organization. Accepting this meeting invitation was a mistake.

Neither Pianko nor AJS executive director Warren Hoffman would comment.

So what exactly is the crime? And what effect, if any, will this have on the UW Jewish Studies Department?

To get a sense, we have to look at the controversy around Steven Cohen.

Cohen was a professor of Jewish social policy at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion and director of the Berman Jewish Policy Archive at Stanford and considered one of the leading scholars of American Judaism. Much of his work revolved around Jewish continuity and the impact of intermarriage. In 2018, during the #MeToo reckoning, Cohen was accused by Keren R. McGinity, now a professor of American studies at Brandeis and an interfaith specialist at the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, of unwanted advances and forceful kissing at a Jewish conference several years prior. In an op-ed in the New York Jewish Week, she wrote:

There needs to be a Jewish response to the #MeToo movement. There are plenty of whispers and grumblings about abusive colleagues among Jewish academics. But people are afraid of personal or professional consequences if they dare to reveal the truth about these wrongdoers.

Her initial account did not name Cohen, but within a month the New York Jewish Week had received five accounts of sexual impropriety regarding Cohen, and the cat was out of the bag. It also tipped the first domino onto what did become a Jewish #MeToo moment.

Cohen did not deny the charges and resigned from his positions. He told the New York Jewish Week:

I have undertaken a critical and painful examination of my behavior. In consultation with clergy, therapists and professional experts, I am engaged in a process of education, recognition, remorse and repair. I don’t know how long this teshuva process will take. But I am committed to making the changes that are necessary to avoid recurrences in the future and, when the time is right, seek to apologize directly to, and ask forgiveness from, those I have unintentionally hurt.

Hebrew Union College launched a Title IX investigation into Cohen. (He has not been charged with any crime. A request for information about results of the investigation went unanswered by HUC.)

Despite his initial apology and doing-the-work promise, there seems to be a consensus that he has not done sufficient teshuva. Cohen was banished to a city of intellectual refuge that he may never be able to leave. His friends visit sometimes, including Brandeis professor Sylvia Barack Fishman, who is also the head of the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance. Fishman did not return requests for comment, but in past quotes she has seemingly separated Cohen’s actions from his scholarly contributions.

Here’s where one problem becomes two: Cohen’s predatory past has been fused with his scholarship, which has come under scrutiny for its valorization of Jewish in-marriage and reproduction.

After the accusations against Cohen emerged in July 2018, a new line of thinking came out that tied Cohen’s creepiness to his work. In an article in The Forward, three female Jewish professors point out that the Jewish continuity narrative — that is, the philosophy that informs basically every Jewish institution that encourages Jews to get married and have kids and perpetuate the tradition — is sexist, marginalizing, and in the hands of male scholars, namely Cohen. According to Kate Rosenblatt, Lila Corwin Berman, and Ronit Stahl:

Sexually predatory behavior must be confronted squarely and in multiple frames. We cannot hold an entire culture responsible for the misdeeds of an individual. Nor can we allow that individual’s unacceptable behavior to blind us to the shortcomings of a patriarchal power structure that enabled his work and worldview to set the American Jewish communal agenda.

It’s time to acknowledge that a communal obsession with sex and statistics has created pernicious and damaging norms.

These norms make it okay to tell women how to use their bodies, whom to marry, when to have babies, and how to allocate their time. They have also told people who fall outside of the parameters set primarily by men that their ways of being Jewish are not valued or valuable.

(For more on this ongoing discussion at an intellectual level, see these two articles.)

“There are lots of ways that his scholarship and his personal behavior seemed to diminish women as contributors to the Jewish community and as scholars,” says Karla Goldman, a professor of social work and Judaic studies at the University of Michigan and the chair of the AJS diversity and inclusion task force. Furthermore, Cohen was a gatekeeper, one who could apparently make or break a career and intimidate rising scholars.

While Goldman shared the observation that Cohen has not done sufficient teshuva for his victims, it’s unclear if any amount repentance would let him back in. His person and his scholarship are on the outs. Even if Cohen sufficiently repented, his ideas are being pushed outside the tent. Some believe his work should not even be part of the Jewish studies canon. (It seems worth asking how much his scholarship is being repudiated because of his actions and how much because it’s not in vogue with trends in Jewish studies that embrace intermarriage, as Cohen, Fishman, and Jack Werthaimer point out in this excoriating opinion piece.)

And this may be why Cohen seems to be sneaking into the party through the backdoor.

“There seemed to be an agreement that he should be out of bounds, yet there are ways he keeps popping up,” Goldman says. “He kind of can’t stand not to be in the conversation…. ‘If I’m not in the conversation, then, you know, the Jewish community is going to begin to say that intermarriage is fine. And that people who criticize Israel are just as legit as any.’ That’s the fear.”

The revelation that Cohen was participating in small group meetings, with the help of Fishman and Wertheimer, was met with outrage and seen as an attempt to rehabilitate Cohen’s reputation and sneak him back into the mainstream Jewish studies community. A letter condemning the meetings circulated and was signed by some 500 clergy, including several Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist rabbis from the Seattle area. (Of the local rabbis I reached out to, one declined to comment but did not regret signing the letter; the others did not respond.) The AJS Women’s Caucus put out a statement noting that while everyone has the right to talk to whoever they want, “This attempt to re-center and rehabilitate a disgraced and ostracized scholar has real consequences. The Women’s Caucus views these efforts as unacceptable and deeply troubling, because they jeopardize the position of junior and contingent scholars as well as re-victimizing women targeted by Cohen.”

On March 24, AJS leadership put out a statement backing the Women’s Caucus statement. One problem: Pianko’s name wasn’t on it. How could it be? He had met with Cohen a week prior. Pianko attempts to address this in his resignation letter:

Some AJS members have asked why my name did not appear on the statement. The answer is that I had already discussed my involvement with the Executive Committee, and we mutually agreed on a voluntary recusal so that the statement could be drafted with as much integrity as possible.

Perhaps if Pianko had owned up to attending the March 11 meeting sooner and/or disavowed his relationship with Cohen, it wouldn’t have come to this. But maybe he didn’t want to. And now it’s unclear if he’ll be able to shake it off.

“Resignation sends a message,” says Goldman. Still, it feels a little extreme. “I think this crosses into our cancel culture too much. Like, take a wrong step, and you’re out. We’re all going to take wrong steps in certain things, but what does it mean to be accountable?”

This is the question. How can we hold our institutions accountable without engaging in cancel culture roulette? What happens to the work of illustrious scholars whose misdeeds eject them from their careers and intellectual communities? What happens to the people who, unwittingly or with no malintent, continue to engage with such pariahs?

“[T]he questions we have been dealing with over the last few weeks — not about the sexual misconduct itself, but about the grey areas and the boundary questions created in its wake — are far more difficult to define and adjudicate,” Pianko writes in this resignation letter. “Here, we are still very much at the beginning of our work, of figuring out the real-world applications and implications of our own policies.”

Goldman doesn’t have an answer, either. “What would true accountability look like? In a way, I was hoping this would be a place where we might see this,” she says. “It takes imagination. It takes really entering into that space to measure out the extent of the damage.”

Editor’s note: Right around the time of publishing, a letter by a number of AJS past presidents came out “expressing pain and sorrow” over Pianko’s resignation. They note: “We value inclusiveness and diversity; we oppose boycotts and blacklists.”

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Community Announcements

Check out the Seattle Jewish community calendar.

This week’s parasha is Acharei Mot-Kedoshim. Yom Kippur is established, the “holiness code” is laid out with guidelines for proper relationships between relatives, neighbors, strangers, even animals and nature.

Candlelighting is at 7:53 p.m.

Hosts wanted!

We’re looking for host families for two Israeli shlichim ( emissaries) who are joining us as J Camp counselors this summer. Our shlichim help us infuse J Camp with Israeli culture by sharing music, dance, food, activities, and more with campers. We’re looking for families to host the counselors for at least three weeks at a time (or the full summer!). Host families are responsible for transportation and meals. The shlichim are excited to explore the Puget Sound area and to get to know their new “home away from home” with you and your family.  If you’re ready to become a host family, or if you have any questions, please contact J Camp and Youth Programs Manager Joel Jacobs at JoelJ@Sjcc.org.  

Dates needed for hosting: June 3rd-August 27th.

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Shoutouts!

Shout-out to/on/about Rabbi Darío Feiguin of Kol Shalom on Bainbridge Island. We began our pandemic mania about three months after his arrival from Argentina, and he quickly adapted, in his third language (Spanish, Hebrew, English) to conducting services on Zoom. Once a month and for special occasions he includes musicians from Argentina and Israel. —Kathleen Alcala

Happy birthday to Ariel Lapson. —Connie Kanter

Profound appreciation to Seattle Hebrew Academy’s Rivy Kletenik, teachers and staff for your amazing dedication to our community’s children during a challenging historical year. —Naomi Newman, President, SHA Board of Trustees

In memory of beloved mother & grandmother Roberta Corets z”l. —Marilyn Corets, Adam Mihlstin & Brooke

In honor of my father, Martin Schiller, who was liberated from Buchenwald on April 11, 1945. Even though his birthday is actually in March, he always celebrates April 11 as his re-birth day. Mazal tov for his 76 years of freedom! —Carol Schiller

Paid monthly/annual subscribers and founding members can submit shoutouts and announcements. The editrix has the right to moderate all content. Send shoutouts and announcements to thecholentseattle@gmail.com.