Fanatical self-publicist Boteach


August 13, 2014
Sarah Benton

This posting has these items:
1) Slate: Who Is Shmuley Boteach?, early account (2001)of Boteach’s grasp for the limelight;
2) +972: The bigoted rants of Shmuley Boteach, ‘America’s rabbi’;
3) Mondoweiss: About 60,000 Americans were murdered’ by Palestinians in Israel, says Shmuley Boteach, Philip Weiss on Boteach and Presbyterians, June 2014;
4) Failed Messiah: Rabbi Shmuley Boteach’s Charity Under Fire – Again, Giving and taking in Shmuley’s This World charity;
5) AV Club: The Michael Jackson Tapes by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, extract from withering review by Nathan Rubin, 2009;

Michael Jackson with his spiritual adviser, Shmuley Boteach


Who Is Shmuley Boteach?

He’s the Jewish missionary in the A-list position.

Slate, March 29, 2001

To understand why Shmuley Boteach is one of the world’s most prominent rabbis, you do not have to pore over learned Talmudic disputations (he isn’t known for his erudition) or attend a Sabbath service (he hasn’t led a congregation of his own for several years). You simply have to scan the dedication to one of his latest books, Dating Secrets of the Ten Commandments. “To Michael,” it reads, “who taught me of humility.” Michael, of course, is none other than Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, and Boteach manages to slip references to their relationship into most of his interviews and writings. The rabbi is currently co-authoring a parenting book with the blanched superstar and sponsoring a Jackson-led charity dedicated, unbelievably enough, to ensuring that children receive appropriate amounts of affection. And just a few weeks ago, Boteach orchestrated one of the most bizarre coups in the annals of American pop-cultural imperialism, arranging for Jackson to speak at the Oxford Union, that university’s august debating society.

Shmuley—he is known universally by his first name—is the best-selling author of Kosher Sex and has marketed himself as a rabbi to the stars and an expert on Jewish attitudes toward relationships and marriage. (“Dr. Ruth with a yarmulke,” the Washington Post called him.) Despite Jackson’s lesson in humility, he approaches self-promotion with religious fervor. As he told one reporter, his own Eleventh Commandment is “Thou shalt do anything for publicity and recognition.”

Shmuley learned his talent for outreach from the experts. Though he had been brought up in a modern Orthodox home in Miami and Los Angeles, as a teen-ager he became increasingly involved in the ultra-Orthodox Lubavitch, or Chabad, movement. Founded in 18th-century Russia as an offshoot of Hasidic Judaism, the Lubavitch are dedicated to making Jewish ritual accessible to even unlearned Jews. When Chabad moved its base to Crown Heights, Brooklyn, after World War II, its emphasis on outreach to secular Jews intensified; the group founded schools throughout the country and outposts around the world, all in the belief that when all Jews embraced their religion, the Messiah would arrive. (The guys with the beards and dark suits who stop you on the street and ask, “Are you Jewish?” and then hand you a pair of phylacteries are Lubavitchers.)

When Shmuley was 13, he met the movement’s charismatic leader, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, whom some considered then to be the Messiah and still do today, even after his death seven years ago. The Rebbe, as Schneerson was called, bestowed upon Shmuley a generous blessing—friends joked that perhaps Shmuley was the Messiah—and later dispatched him, at age 22, to Oxford to serve as a religious emissary. There Shmuley founded the L’Chaim Society, which he quickly turned into the university’s second largest club by recruiting high-profile speakers to address topics often only tangentially related to Judaism. Boy George spoke about redemption after drug addiction, and Argentinian soccer star Diego Maradona told of praying at the Western Wall in preparation for the World Cup.

As Shmuley’s stature on campus grew, his relations with the Lubavitch leadership began to fray. The L’Chaim Society attracted as many non-Jews as Jews—its president one year was an African-American Baptist—and his peers felt Shmuley was spending too much time courting gentiles, thereby diluting outreach efforts and possibly even encouraging intermarriage. Shmuley replied with what would become his signature defense: that broadening the visibility of Judaism to the general public would inevitably, if circuitously, attract Jews. “To get Jews interested in the Jewish world,” he later said, “you have to get the non-Jews interested. The Jews will follow what the non-Jews are doing.”

Few in the Orthodox Jewish establishment agree. In 1994 Shmuley was officially rejected by Crown Heights after inviting Yitzhak Rabin to speak at L’Chaim against the orders of the Rebbe, who strongly opposed Rabin’s land-for-peace position. The penalty was largely symbolic, since Shmuley had become a master fund-raiser (using British parsonage laws to purchase a second home in North London) and was financially independent. In 1998, Shmuley entered the Preacher of the Year Contest, sponsored by the London Times, becoming the first Jew to reach the final rounds. (He took second place; the next year he won.) And he churned out a stream of articles and books on relationships, an authorial fecundity climaxing in 1999 with Kosher Sex. With its gleeful discussions of intercourse, the book shocked the British Orthodox community, which forced him out of his North London synagogue. Shmuley moved to New York, where he published excerpts of Kosher Sex in Playboy and debated the merits of pornography with Larry Flynt. He became a fixture of celebrity culture, ushering Michael Jackson to an Upper West Side synagogue, setting Roseanne’s daughter up with a nice Jewish boy, and trading spiritual recipes with Deepak Chopra.

For all of Shmuley’s iconoclastic reputation, Kosher Sex is a deeply traditional book, extolling monogamy, female modesty, and premarital sexual naiveté. Its basic thesis is that the contemporary fascination with sexual compatibility has led to what Shmuley terms a “crisis of intimacy,” with too many people entering into matrimony as sexual experts scarred by previous relationships. Don’t obsess over finding the perfect mate, he counsels, because that partner will in fact become perfect through the raising of a family, the establishment of a home, and yes, the transformative act of sex. Shmuley is no prude: He makes much of Judaism’s rejection of Christian asceticism and sees nothing wrong with kinkiness within the bounds of marriage, as long as it furthers the couple’s sense of intimacy and unity. So oral sex and erotica are kosher; porn and masturbation, which lessen one’s dependence on one’s spouse, are not.

Despite a generous sprinkling of Talmudic anecdotes and wisdom from the sages, there are large chunks of Kosher Sex that do not seem especially Jewish. That’s because, fundamentally, Judaism is not about a set of attitudes toward life but about adherence to a certain body of laws, rituals, and customs, and Shmuley seems uncomfortable actually prescribing them. When he encounters a ruling that seems to contravene his counsel—such as the one in the code of Jewish law explicitly prohibiting oral sex—he dismisses it as simply “an individual commentator’s personal taste and advice.” In fact, Kosher Sex fits more squarely within the genre of the romantic self-help industry. It’s full of bland advice (look into your lover’s eyes during sex), gender stereotypes (most men act romantic just to get laid), and banal, pop-psych blather (“life is an uphill struggle”).

Perhaps this is because, like the L’Chaim Society, this book was conceived for an audience of Jews and gentiles alike. (Jay Leno gave a copy to Dennis Rodman.) Shmuley says he wants to turn Judaism into “the next Buddhism,” “mainstreaming” the religion in order to strengthen it. To this end, he has given up many of his day-to-day duties with the L’Chaim Society, devoting himself to establishing an online relationship advice Web site, scheduling more speaking engagements (at one event in April, he’s discussing black-Jewish relations with the Rev. Al Sharpton), and composing more books (Confessions of a Rabbi and a Psychic, co-authored with the spoon-bending Uri Geller, came out earlier this month).
Shmuley claims that all the attention bestowed upon him is really attention bestowed upon Judaism. But his ambition is clearly outpacing his spiritual mission; attracting secular Jews to the faith is only an ancillary preoccupation. After all, consorting with Michael Jackson might get Shmuley’s name in the papers, but it’s doubtful it will really encourage Jews to go to synagogue on Friday night. And even if these Jews did attend services, they might go expecting Kosher Sex-style Judaism, grounded in utilitarian justifications and stripped of inconvenient legalisms. Or they might go thinking they’d get to hang out with celebrities, too. Either way, they’d be terribly disappointed.



The bigoted rants of Shmuley Boteach, ‘America’s rabbi’

By Larry Derfner, +972
June 27, 2014

If any gentile in America wrote about Jews the way he just wrote about Presbyterians – for any reason – he or she would be ostracized from public life for good.

So many pro-Israel Jews are coming down on the Presbyterians as anti-Semites because of their divestment vote, which is a slander. But why aren’t any of them calling out Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, “America’s rabbi,” for the bigotry he has been spewing? From his Jerusalem Post column a few days ago:

The rotting corpse of the Presbyterian Church got another nail in its coffin with the vote on Friday … Now the Church demonstrates that it has no moral compass … The Presbyterians supposedly believe in the Bible. I say supposedly because I’m confused by their general approach to morality, which seems to follow a show of hands every year at their general conference. I’m not surprised that the Presbyterians – once the Church of choice for American presidents – is on a steep downward decline and seeing its membership being slowly decimated. The first responsibility of a religion is to serve as a moral voice and teach people right from wrong.

If any gentile in America said that about any stream of Judaism for any reason, he or she would be ostracized from public life for good. But “America’s rabbi” gets away with it.

News flash: Jews aren’t weak anymore, they aren’t oppressed, not in Israel nor in America, and in Israel they are the oppressors, so Jews who defend that oppression with hate speech, like “America’s rabbi,” are entitled to no immunity whatsoever.

Shmuley Boteach is not my idea of a rabbi. He’s my idea of a right-wing religious hustler.



About 60,000 Americans were murdered’ by Palestinians in Israel, says Shmuley Boteach

By Philip Weiss, Mondoweiss
June 25, 2014

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, “America’s Rabbi,” has written a piece in the New York Observer, titled, “By Condemning Israel, Presbyterians Condemn Themselves” that includes this factoid/howler:

When I was a student in Israel in the mid 1980s there were almost no checkpoints. That’s because suicide bombings had yet to come into vogue. Young Muslims were not being encouraged by the PLO and Hamas to detonate themselves to strike a blow for their religion.

Things have changed. In the wake of the Oslo Accords, in which Israel granted the PLO political autonomy in the West Bank, about 60,000 Americans were murdered in Israel.

I love the modifier “about.” Seems he is slightly off:

Tweet: daniel sieradski @selfagency
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@MaxBlumenthal @NewYorkObserver @RabbiShmuley 53 dead americans in israel since oslo. you’re off by 59,947. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Terrorism/usvictims.html

Update: [Boteach’s] piece has been updated to read:

Things have changed. In the wake of the Oslo Accords, in which Israel granted the PLO political autonomy in the West Bank, the equivalent of about 60,000 Americans were murdered in Israel.

Boteach begins that piece by running down the Presbyterian Church vote on divestment:

The rotting corpse of the Presbyterian Church suffered another nail in the coffin with its general convention vote on Friday to divest from companies doing business with Israel.

Scott McConnell comments, at The American Conservative:

One suspects that if a prominent Presbyterian cleric used comparable language about a branch of Judaism, it would attract some negative attention.

McConnell’s piece about the nobility of the Presbyterians is excellent. Two quick excerpts.

Protestantism, or to be more precise, liberal establishment Protestantism, used to be something of a state religion in America. Protestant clerics were widely quoted, featured on the covers of news magazines. Time magazine (itself widely read) ran a weekly “religion” feature, which more often than not circulated Protestant ideas and covered the comings and goings of mainline church luminaries. Presidents sought their advice, or at least claimed to.

That day is past: since then America has elected a Catholic president, and a substantial part of its financial and cultural establishment is Jewish. Multiculturalism has triumphed.

And this:

Presbyterian leaders in America have a richly textured history of political cooperation with Jews; they made common cause in opposition to Vietnam, over civil rights, over issues of church-state relations. They are fewer than 2,000,000 now, but they are generally well educated, and have both activist skills and a strong penchant to combat injustice. They are a smaller group than two generations ago, but the Israel lobby obviously cared enough about them to make a major effort to defeat the divestment vote. The Israel lobby failed, suffering a significant public defeat. Presbyterians made themselves more visible and relevant than they’ve been in decades.



Rabbi Shmuley Boteach’s Charity Under Fire – Again

By Failed Messiah
October 09, 2011

The 2009 Form 990 filing indicates the charity took in more than $651K in contributions and other revenue and racked up $638K in operating and administrative expenses–but only $70 K of that figure amounted to charitable disbursements.

Michael Jackson’s former spiritual guru rakes in more cash than he dishes out from own nonprofit
Gatecrasher • New York Daily News

Charity really does begin at home for Rabbi Jacob (Shmuley) Boteach.

According to Guidestar, a website that specializes in reporting on U.S. nonprofit companies, 2009 tax filings by This World–The Jewish Values Network reveals the the onetime spiritual adviser to Michael Jackson was paid $229K for his services as director of the charity.

There doesn’t seem to be much of a commute involved either. This World lists Boteach’s Englewood, NJ home as its address.

The 2009 Form 990 filing indicates the charity took in more than $651K in contributions and other revenue and racked up $638K in operating and administrative expenses–but only $70 K of that figure amounted to charitable disbursements.

Boteach’s 2009 pay was a big improvement over the previous year. The charity’s 2008 tax filing indicate Shmuley– who was named one of the 50 most influential rabbis by Newsweek magazine in 2007, ’08 and ’09–was paid approximately $59 K.

Guidestar lists This World as a society “dedicated to promoting Judaism and to the continuing development of the state of Israel.”

Investor Michael Steinhardt’s foundation donated a total of $200K to the charity in 2008 and ’09. A foundation bearing the name of real-estate developer Charles Kushner, whose company owns 666 Fifth Avenue, is also among the contributors listed.

Dr. Mehmet Oz and his wife donated $5K in 2008.

Interestingly, the tax documents indicate that This World was formerly known as “Oxford “L’Chaim Society.”

In 1999, London’s Observer newspaper reported that Britain’s Charity Commission froze the bank account of Boteach’s “Oxford University L’Chaim Society and its associated charitable trust.”

Showbiz 411.com writer Roger Friedman reported in May 2001 that the commission’s investigation into L’Chaim determined that “a number of apparent inappropriate payments” were being made by Boteach and his wife, and that “administrative expenses were high in relation to relatively low charitable expenditure.”

As a result of the inquiry, Friedman noted, the trustees decided to “wind up” the charity and its London and Oxford offices were closed.

This World president Arash Farin initially informed us that the charity was “preparing a statement in response” to our questions about its operations. He eventually stopped responding to our emails, however, and we have yet to receive the statement.



The Michael Jackson Tapes by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach

By Nathan Rabin, A.V. Club
December 15, 2009

EXTRACTS
In the aftermath of his death, everyone had their own private Michael Jackson. Orthodox Rabbi Shmuley Boteach was no exception. For a brief idyll, Boteach served in an unofficial capacity as Michael Jackson’s spiritual advisor and his partner in an initiative to encourage parents to prioritize their children. The rabbi and the pop star were going to save the kiddies, preserve families, and make the world a better place.

Both men were driven by formative early traumas. Jackson spent his adult life trying to experience the childhood that had been sacrificed on the altar of prepubescent superstardom. Boteach was traumatized by his parents’ divorce and has spent his career trying to save marriages and shamelessly promote the Rabbi Shmuley Boteach brand.

This odd couple made sense for a little while. The rabbi and the pop star fed into each other’s fantasies. Jackson needed good press: He wanted to be seen as a selfless advocate for children rather than the world’s biggest freak. Boteach, who fancies himself “America’s Rabbi,” got a contact high from Jackson’s fame. He aspires to be the Semitic Billy Graham, the public face of Judaism. Being bestest buddies with the man behind the biggest-selling album of all time could only raise his national profile.

So Boteach and Jackson sat down to record a series of marathon conversations about faith, family, fame, and parenthood that form the basis of The Michael Jackson Tapes. Boteach insists that he published The Michael Jackson Tapes because Jackson wanted the self-promoting rabbi to record their conversations for posterity, then turn them into a book. But when Jackson made that request—if he made that request—he and Boteach were partners, friends, and allies.

Jackson and Boteach had a bitter falling-out at the start of the decade, so it’s safe to assume that any agreements they may have had about the publication of these interviews became null and void once their friendship ended in acrimony. If your college girlfriend offers to do anything for you sexually shortly before you break up, that doesn’t mean that 15 years later, you can storm into her house, race past her husband and children, and angrily demand a blowjob on a merry-go-round.

Yet that somehow did not dissuade Boteach from publishing the book, though he at least had the decency to wait until Jackson was dead and could not sue him. Early in Tapes, Boteach writes, “I completed a working draft of the book in the year or two after our conversations ended. People who read it said they never knew Michael could be such a deep and inspiring personality. Many of my most well-read friends told me they cried through the manuscript. Like many others, they had earlier dismissed Michael as a mindless and shallow celebrity materialist who was hopelessly weird. The sensitive personality revealed in the conversations, however, was introspective, knowledgeable, forgiving and deeply spiritual.”

Boteach promises to reveal a new, deeper, more profound Michael Jackson. Yet the Michael we meet in Tapes is very much the myopic man-child of the public imagination, a giggly space cadet who fetishizes the innocence of children, lives in a womb-like bubble, and stopped maturing mentally and emotionally well before the onset of puberty. He’s a man who insists that Shirley Temple posters be festooned over the walls of every hotel he stays in, and devotes more time and thought to staging elaborate water-balloon fights than to his increasingly irrelevant music. It’s not as if Tapes finds Jackson suddenly discoursing about Foucault or the sub-prime mortgage crisis, either; Boteach sticks doggedly to a handful of topics he’s certain will keep the pill-addled pop icon’s attention.

Boteach asserts throughout that Jackson was straight and was constantly remarking on the attractiveness of women. Grown women. With whom he wished to fornicate. On account of him being heterosexual and sexually attracted to adults and all. I sincerely hoped that somewhere deep in the transcripts lie exchanges that could back up Boteach’s dubious assertion of Jackson’s raging heterosexuality, banter like:

Michael Jackson: That Angelina Jolie’s got quite a pair of dick-sucking lips. I bet she could suck the chrome off a tailpipe. Oh man, the things I would do with those funbags! She’d need a wheelchair after I was done fucking her!

Rabbi Shmuley: Michael, Michael! Always with the sincere, genuine expressions of heterosexual lust! You’re incorrigible! But we need to find you a nice wife, not some trollop who runs around with her tuchas out, kissing a lot of guys!

Instead, the best Boteach can muster is an anecdote about Jackson asking him to set him up on a date with Katie Couric. Boteach sees this as conclusive proof of Jackson’s heterosexuality; surely only a raging heterosexual would want to go on a coffee date with a sunny, unavailable mom-type. Jackson tells Boteach his dream woman is a cross between Mother Theresa, Princess Di, and Katie Couric. Is that too much to ask? Jackson looked everywhere for the ideal woman—his living room, his kitchen, even the Tilt-A-Whirl at Neverland Ranch—yet he just couldn’t find her, though nothing would please Rabbi Shmuley more than his spiritual protégé getting hitched.

Reading The Michael Jackson Tapes, it’s important to remember that Boteach had a sideline ghostwriting articles and speeches for Jackson. His job was literally to put words in Jackson’s mouth. Those words, not surprisingly, looked an awful lot like the ideas and philosophies of one Rabbi Shmuley Boteach. …

Those aren’t even words, they’re noises! Boteach isn’t interested in Michael Jackson as an interview subject or thinker: He’s interested in him as a powerful conduit for Boteach’s own ideas. He wants to put his thoughts inside Jackson so he can posit them as the moral philosophy of one of the richest, most famous celebrities in the world. So instead of asking Jackson an open-ended question like “What do you think about Britney Spears?” he tells Jackson what to think, then dares him to disagree.

On an objective level, Spears really does need the sleaze. She isn’t particularly pretty or talented. If she were to rely on talent alone, she’d still be playing open-mic nights. Boteach’s “question” says more about the interviewer than the interviewee. I love how he accuses Madonna of “taking advantage of the male sex drive” as if the blameless men of the world were all innocently studying the Talmud when Madonna suddenly appeared in a push-up bustier to get them all hunkering after her.

pride yourself on not being arrogant. How did you retain your sensitivity? Why didn’t it go to your head? Why did you visit orphanages? Why didn’t it happen to you? How did you remain large, how did you remain grand and nonjudgmental when you should have become more self-absorbed? It happened to everyone else. You’ve seen it happen to your friends, I’m sure, who’ve had success.

For those keeping track at home, that’s 14 questions, several of which Boteach answers himself. Is this practice of asking questions solely for the sake of answering them yourself a ubiquitous fixture of Jewish thought and rhetoric? Of course it is, don’t be meshuggeneh, but it gets a little ridiculous after a while. Boteach obviously kept asking Jackson questions until his interview subject found one that was worth answering. This wouldn’t be so maddening if the questions weren’t so insane. In what universe did success not go to Michael Jackson’s head? The man built his own theme park, palled around with a chimpanzee, and transformed himself into a hideous ghoul through cosmetic surgery. How are those the acts of a humble, grounded man?


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About

This World: The Values Network’s mission is to disseminate universal Jewish values in politics, culture, and media, making the Jewish people a light unto the nations.

This World: The Values Network is based on the teachings of Rabbi Shmuley Boteach and his passion for bringing universal Jewish values to mainstream American culture and beyond. Rabbi Shmuley’s teachings provide a means for healing and strengthening families, diverting society’s focus from material greed and inspiring children to practice caring and compassionate relationships. Our renowned lectures, debates, radio and TV broadcasts, religious services, websites, social media, and published essays cater to a broad international audience. Our goal is to inspire people to apply Jewish values into their everyday lives, ultimately conveying Jewish values in print and on the airwaves to both help America heal some of its greatest ills and to inspire Jewish youth with the power of its ideas.

We are committed to advancing a vision of Judaism as a light to the nations and ensuring that America benefits from the core values of the Jewish people.

See also BDS is working and hurting (Sheldon Adelson donates to Boteach)

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