Monday, July 30, 2007

Noah, Why Now?

Everyone else has something to say about Dr. Noah Feldman's article Orthodox Paradox, if only to show how we have all taken his trolling bait. I haven't seen this one yet, though:

Something that has been bubbling in the back of my head - if Dr. Feldman was losing his faith while attending Yale Law in the mid-1990s, if he was already dating his wife in 1998*, when the 10th-Reunion incident happened...

Why now? Why, another 9 years after the incident that in theory inspired his anger at Orthodoxy, or 12-15 years after he started losing his faith, did he feel sufficiently angry at the Modern Orthodox community to write this article full of half-truths** and manipulation, which seems designed to make Modern Orthodoxy look bad to the outside world? What made him lash out, after nine years of not responding to the apparent slight?

____
* if he graduated Harvard in 1992, he must have graduated Maimo in 1988.
** talking about Goldstein and Amir, but eliding the paroxysms of self-doubt and self-examination that the Modern Orthodox community went through in the wake of these two terrible incidents, leaving the impression that Modern Orthodoxy somehow approves and/or leads to such behavior.

3 comments:

Reb Yudel said...

Doesn't he have a monthly column in the magazine? And hasn't he had it for about a year?

That would explain why now.

Anonymous said...

exactly, he has run out of material and is accessing his juvenalia/jewvenalia file now.

next article: what i did on my summer vacation.

Shlomo Greenwald said...

He doesn't have any such column. He writes occasionally--following no pattern.