Thursday, August 21, 2014

Boy Butter melts all over Lesbian Rabbi in Tablet Magazine expose

Check out my off the wall but sincere quote in the Boy Butter section of Tablet's hard hitting expose of the rifts within NYC's Gay Jewish Synagogue over the wacky political stance of it's leader Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum. Guess which one I am in the title of this article btw?

A Zionist Porn Star, a Lube Merchant, and a Lesbian Rabbi Walk Into a Gay Synagogue…

Several present and former congregants who have raised concerns about Kleinbaum’s activism with her describe the typical response: polite acknowledgement of a difference of opinions, followed by no change in either the tenor or frequency of her public activity. Eyal Feldman, an Israeli-American and founder of Boy Butter lubricant, began attending High Holy Day and the occasional Friday night services at CBST soon after he moved to New York in 2000 primarily as a social activity. He “always felt a little bit uncomfortable with her politics,” but was willing to stick it out because he had made so many friends. Feldman—whose blog “shares his global adventures in fighting friction with a mix of social and personal lubrication”—however, “stopped going three years ago because of the very same reasons Bryan left the board. I found her to be political and not at all balanced. … I couldn’t sit there and listen to that because if my eyes rolled anymore they would have popped out of my head.”
***  To read whole Tablet article by James Kirchick Click HERE

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

All this so Sharon Kleinbaum can take the fast track to her shameless self promotion. Its obvious she doesn't care about the Palestinians. The Palestinians are merely a shill, a tool up upon which Mrs Kleinbaum lifts herself priggishly to garner headlines and get her name mentioned. For more than 20 years Kleinbaum has served as head of the most recognizable gay Jewish institution in the world and has failed to leverage that position to accomplish anything meaningful to either gays or Jews. No books, no legislation, no ties with political or social causes, no meaningful discussion in either the gay or Jewish communities, absolutely nothing of note- only a flash- in- the- pan muckraking comment here or a lousy BDS parade there, guaranteed to get her name in the next day's press for all the wrong reasons. Im calling you out Kleinbaum. You're not interested in Palestinians, you're not concerned in the slightest about the Israeli/ Palestinian conflict, you don't care about gay or Jewish causes - you're interested only in Sharon Kleinbaum and leveraging anything and everything on your limited horizon to promote yourself in time for CBST's next round of rabbinical contractual negotiations as a sorry substitute for real and meaningful work.

Anonymous said...

As the cowboy would say. Right on right on right on

Steve Yuhas said...

The rabbi is not anti-Israel because there is an Israeli flag on the bimah. Isn't that the same as the old adage about not being racist because "I have black friends"? I love that people take stands that matter and a better title for the piece - even if the title of this one is fine with me - should have been "Resignations that truly matter" or something to that effect. The fact that you felt forced to leave this synagogue is sad - synagogue is family and friends and to leave is to leave some of those family and friends behind. It takes courage to point out when a teacher is wrong or when a place lost its way. I'm happy that you saw it and left. It will take more than that for this synagogue to get back on the right path - a path that teaches and doesn't preach and one that leads and doesn't follow (fads) with things they say are not anti-Israel because they require converts to Judaism to go to Israel - if they go to Israel to protest against Israel, that's hardly a good reason to convert is it? What a sad mess this rabbi has made.

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