Tikun Olam-תקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place

One of my informants provides the welcome news that Masada2000 is down once again. And it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving hate site. Unfortunately, I can’t tell whether his web host or his domain registrar took him down.

Two rabbis in a tub: M2K’s homophobic attack on Michael Lerner and Zalman Schachter, who ordained him

Doing some research the other day, I discovered that the site owner actually threatened and harassed Michael Lerner according to In These Times:

In May [2001]…Masada2000 listed Lerner as one of “the five most dangerous Jewish enemies of the Jewish people,” and posted detailed driving directions to his home address. Draped in guillotines, nooses and racist language, the site repeatedly stated: “If you’re ever in the San Francisco area, drop in on him at his home.”

Predictably, the death threats and hate e-mails started pouring in–more than 60 to date. Late-night calls also drastically increased. “Both my wife and I were extremely scared,” Lerner says.

So when the same bully threatened in a comment to this blog “We are going to have fun sewing your foreskin back on, Dickie” I felt I was in good company. Like Lerner, I reported the threat to the local authorities in order to have a police record of his brutishness.

With his fake blog intended to harass me taken down by Blogger after multiple DMCA violations and now Masada2000 down, the air’s smelling a whole lot nicer.

Returning to Lerner, it’s interesting to see that no less a Jewish “eminence” than Cynthia Ozick has adopted Masada2000’s views of Lerner (though with a tad more literary elegance). At the recent CAMERA conference, whose purpose was to ferret out Jewish “defamers” of Israel, Ozick called Lerner to task (Ben Harris called it a “tour de force” denunciation though that phrase says more about Harris’ sympathetic views of Ozick than it does about the actual quality of her argument) for being defamer number 1 on the Jewish far-right’s list. In fact, her speech could’ve been titled “Michael Lerner: How Do I Hate Thee, Let Me Count the Ways:”

Ozick reserved particular vitriol for Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of the left-wing journal Tikkun and a frequent critic of Israel.

After ridiculing him as a “garrulous mime,” questioning the validity of his rabbinical ordination, and slapping him with a flurry of unflattering adjectives — chaotic, disorganized, self-contradictory, puerile, and unbearably long-winded, to name but a few — Ozick accused the yarmulke-wearing rabbi of providing Jewish sanction to some of Israel’s most implacable foes.

“Only imagine Karl Marx davening and you will comprehend the dazzlement of Rabbi Lerner’s current achievement,” Ozick said.

Lerner is “one of a growing band of ambitious, self-touting Jews whose hostility to the State of Israel more and more takes on the character of the spite that kills,” she said. “The noise they make they call a silencing. The debate they attract they call a censoring.”

I rather like “garrulous mime” as I too find qualities of Lerner which are annoying or self-defeating (”defaming Israel” is certainly NOT one of them) including his propensity for pomposity, self-regard and volubility. But to mention Michael Lerner in the same breath with Karl Marx only shows how pathetically deluded Ozick is and how hysterical her political world view is. The fact that she and Masada2000 share the same view of Lerner tells us reams about Ozick and CAMERA and almost nothing about Lerner.