At his Via Media blog, Walter Russell Mead takes notice of a spate of anti-Semitic attacks in France in the wake of the Toulouse massacre. He says that the media, including the NYT, appears to be more worried that the Toulouse massacre could inspire anti-Muslim sentiment than the actual terror French Jews are living with today:

It is certainly true that Muslims face serious discrimination in France and Via Meadia agrees completely that guilt by association is both immoral and unfair. Yet the Jews are clearly the victims here, and with this recent spate of attacks it looks as though they will continue to be at risk. VM is all for attacking religious and ethnic discrimination wherever they are found, but does this really require us to put aside all thought for a small minority now facing a terrible fear? What steps are Jews taking to defend themselves in France? How worried do they feel? Has police protection of Jewish institutions been increased? How are parents explaining this to their kids? Are more French Jews thinking about emigration? What do religious leaders and police authorities say about just how prevalent this climate of hatred is? What makes it so acute in France? These are stories that people would actually read. VM can’t be alone in its curiosity about the impact of these killings on the community most at risk.

More:

Rather than reportage about the obvious (and important) truth that most French Muslims don’t want to kill Jews or anybody else, shouldn’t the press be spending some time on these stories and on investigating the organizations, ideas, publications and financial flows that help nourish a disfiguring hate? … The progressive press has a Lord Voldemort approach to unpleasant realities: talk about them as little as possible and never, ever speak their names. This needs to change.

As we are all told, it is wrong, wrong, wrong to stereotype gay men as sexually insatiable and indiscriminate. If you have a negative or even somewhat critical view of gay male culture, you are not entitled to notice things like this Salon article. Excerpt:

If you’ve ever pulled over to a rest area, you’ve been near men having sex. I’m one of those men, I’ve done it a hundred times; we go into the woods or a truck with tinted windows, in a stall under cold light. It never stops, not for season or time. In the winter, men trudge through snow to be with each other, in the summer, men leave the woods with ticks clinging to their legs. Have you ever stopped at a rest area and found it completely empty? There’s always one man there, in his car, waiting to meet someone new.

This has been going on for a long, long time. The new ways that men meet — endlessly staring into phones, searching on hookup apps like Grindr or sites like Manhunt — haven’t changed the fact that we’re still having sex at rest areas, because they offer something different. For the man who is unsure of his sexuality, or unsure of how to tell others about it, for the man who has a family but feels new desires (or old, hidden ones) unfolding inside of him, the website and the phone apps are just too certain of themselves. They’re for gay men who want to have gay sex. Sex at the rest area, instead, abolishes identity; there’s a sort of freedom there to not be anything – instead, men just meet other men there; men who want the same sort of freedom.

The writer celebrates having sex in the bushes and public bathrooms as an existential act:

After awhile I began to develop a strange feeling at rest areas, like I was giving myself to someone. Not that I gave my full self, but that the part of myself I did give was complete. There was no pretense, no awkward conversation or dancing around whether or not I should be attracted to somebody. There was no wondering if someone was straight or gay; there was no sexual orientation at all. We were just there, together, as ourselves.

Years ago, a gay friend showed me a copy of a popular gay travel guide. It included listings for gay bars, gay-friendly hotels, gay-friendly restaurants and attractions. The usual. But it also included information about the best places for men to go to have anonymous sex in public. I thought that was so bizarre. But this was presented in the guidebook as if it were a normal thing for the gay male traveler (but not, of course, lesbians) to want to know about a city.

What I don’t get is why it is only permissible within our media culture to observe things like this guy’s celebration of the rest-stop liberty if you find it something worth celebrating, or at least morally neutral. If you read this and make a negative judgment on this guy and the culture that celebrates his kink, then you are some sort of bigot. In the past, gay friends who want nothing to do with this kind of thing have told me there’s intense pressure within the gay male community not to criticize it, at the expense of being labeled “self-hating,” or some sort of Uncle Tom.

The same dynamic happens when it comes to thug culture and young black males. It is fine to observe thug culture and celebrate its transgressive qualities (valorizing “bitches,” “hos,” pimps, murder, materialism, and so forth), but you can’t look at it and say, “That’s a degenerate way of looking at the world and other people, and anybody who embraces it is messed up.” That would be bigoted.

It all reminds me of my 16 year old self dressing up in New Wave gear, and going to the grocery store in my hometown. If anybody stared at me strangely — which would have been natural, given that most teenagers here didn’t wear get-ups like mine — I seethed inside over how prejudiced, how judgmental they were. But if they didn’t seem to notice me, that bothered me too. For teenaged me, the only acceptable response from others was some form of, “Wow, you’re so cool, you’re such a rebel. I admire you for attracting the scorn of others. They only show how bad they are by judging you negatively.”

Well, I grew up. Most of us do. And growing up means coming to understand that there are consequences for the choices we make. Of course people may judge us unfairly, but we can’t expect to defy social convention and avoid all consequences for our freely-made choices. It may strike you as unfair that the corporation you’ve applied to work for makes you put on a suit and take the ring out of your lip in the workplace, but honestly? Nobody really cares. Because we are social creatures, and have evolved to be social creatures, conformity to a certain degree is inevitable. If you don’t wish to conform, if you wish to despise and reject society and its morals and conventions, you have that right. But own it. You can’t tell ordinary people to go to hell, so to speak, and then expect them to not pass judgment on you. You can get away with that when your 16, if you have parents who love you and are willing to tolerate your nonsense, knowing that it’s just a phase, but the act wears real thin. If you dress like a thug, for example, you should not be surprised when people judge you a thug. If you seek out anonymous sex in rest stops and a significant part of your culture considers that normal and even positive, you should not be surprised when people outside your culture form a negative opinion. That’s how the real world works.

And yes, if you wear a Confederate flag on your shirt and walk into a black neighborhood, or even just into a public place where people may not appreciate the semiotical nuances of your garb, you should not be surprised when people think, however mistakenly, that you’re a racist redneck. That judgment, though, is acceptable in mainstream media culture, in a way that scorning Rest Stop Guy or Thug Teen  wouldn’t be. Some rebels are more rebellious than others.

UPDATE: No, I’m not saying that Trayvon Martin brought his killing onto himself by the way he was dressed, if that’s what you’re thinking. I actually have no idea how he was dressed, other than the hoodie. I have a hoodie myself. My white, small-town, middle class  13 year old niece wears hoodies. That means nothing.

Until this morning, I had never heard of Norman Cohn’s’s book, “The Pursuit of the Millenium.”  It’s a study of utopian end-times cults in Europe from the 11th through the 15th centuries. The novelist Ian McEwan refers to it in his discussion of Frank Kermode’s work as having influenced his worldview. Excerpt from McEwan’s Browser Five Books interview:

Frank Kermode, in his famous book The Sense of an Ending, elaborated on Cohn’s masterwork by suggesting that actually it’s very common for all of us – especially artists – to feel that we live at the end of times, and that our own demise means all the more to us because we’re not simply dying in the middle of the plot, in medias res. Our lives take on significance because as we decline we notice our society is declining all around us. It’s part of a yearning for narrative significance. As Kermode said, no one can hear a clock saying, as it does, tick tick. What we hear is tick tock. A beginning and an end. We impose this order.

That’s well said. My late sister Ruthie never gave a thought in the world, as far as I know, to apocalypticism, but she strongly believed that her death from cancer at 42 was part of a larger narrative being written by God, the author of her life, and of history — this, even though she accepted that she could never fully understand her role in the Story, at least not this side of heaven. I agree with this, strongly, and would point out that the apparent fact that humans “yearn for narrative significance” doesn’t make the existence of narrative significane untrue. That is, just because we want to believe something doesn’t make the thing believed in a lie. Whatever you think of God’s existence and his role in human affairs, Kermode’s insight is really helpful, I find. Consider it in light of the political philosopher John Gray’s choice of Kermode’s book in his Five Books interview. Excerpt:

Kermode touches on the psychology of this kind of faith, which reminded me of a quote I enjoy from your own book Heresies: “People need to believe that order can be glimpsed in the chaos of events.” It that the human impulse behind utopianism?

I think it is a very human impulse. It is hard for us to accept the degree of randomness there is in the world and in our lives, especially when that randomness operates destructively on us. I forget who said that paranoia is a protest against unimportance. It may have been me. A paranoid delusion can be of defensive benefit to the person who has it, because it gives them the sense of being at the centre of the world, whereas the reality is practically always that nobody cares about them at all and they are of no significance. The delusion of there being order in the chaos of experience can also lead to great human achievements, in science for instance, or in literature where the chaos of history and experience is shaped and moulded into meaningful and significant forms. So it is a benign impulse to that extent. But it can also be tremendously dangerous, because it leads to the phenomena of scapegoating and targeting which emerge in periods of toxic politics.

This makes me reflect on a short but intense period of my own life — I was 12 — when the monster-selling 1970s Christian apocalyptic book  “The Late, Great Planet Earth” fell into my hands. I was a kid who read the newspaper constantly, and brooded over what I saw there. The year was 1979. Iranian militants held American hostages. Inflation ripped through the US economy. The Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Always, talk of nuclear war with the USSR. I well remember on Saturday morning driving back across a field with my dad, coming home from the hunting camp, looking up at the sky and thinking, “A Soviet ICBM could explode right up there 19 minutes from now, and we would all be dead.” It shook me up.

There was no more fertile ground for that noxious little book to have fallen on than my curious, fearful, anxiety-ridden 12-year-old mind. The idea of apocalypse now was by no means irrational. An entire generation has come along not knowing the kind of fears the rest of us lived with during the Cold War, when the world appeared to be hurtling towards some kind of fiery conflagration. In my case, I was also entering puberty. You have unfamiliar emotions, and strong ones, as the hormones surge and remake the body you thought you knew. And, crucially, you have no control over what is happening to you.

So, when a book comes along that claims the authority of the Bible, and provides you what sounds like a plausible explanation for all these terrible things that are happening, or that look like they’re about to happen, and furthermore tells you that it only seems like things are out of control, but really, all this was scripted by God since the beginning of time — well, you can imagine why that sort of idea could seize one’s mind, especially in that historical, cultural, and subjective (puberty!) context. It was a perverse sort of consolation to be told that I lived in history’s last generation — and, thank you Jesus, I had the opportunity to get a rapture ticket on the last train out of here before the deluge, if I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal savior. Which, of course, I did as soon as I finished the book, in a single fevered reading.

I burned brightly with that stuff for about a year and a half, then burned out, and was done with religion for what turned out to have been years. The prophecies “Late, Great” made turned out to be false, mostly, but over the years, I’ve come to judge myself less harshly for falling under its sway. I think that’s because I have more sympathy for human weakness in emotional crisis, and the desperate need to discover (or to impose) meaning on chaos. But at the same time, reflecting on that experience has made me more aware, and skeptical, of my own susceptibility to apocalyptic themes in public discourse. The thing is, there really are apocalypses! Not big-A Apocalypses — though as a Christian, I believe that history will culminate one day in an End, though it may be thousands of years from now; nobody knows the date — but small ones. The Apocalypse is the end of the world; small-a apocalypses are the end of a world. The end of the Roman Empire in the West was an apocalypse. The Fall of Constantinople was another. Bolshevism and Nazism were both apocalyptic political cults that brought about real apocalypses for their victims and their victims’ cultures.  If I were a pious Arab Muslim living in the Middle East at this time in history, I could well imagine that I would look to apocalyptic prophecies and figures (e.g., the Dajjal) from my own tradition to explain the losses and traumas wracking my culture and civilization, and to give consolation that All Will Be Well in God’s Good Time.

As Kermode, Gray, and others point out, apocalypticism (and utopianism, it’s sister) is by no means only a religious phenomenon. As I said, Bolshevism and Nazism were secular political forms. Today, you will find few more apocalyptic secularists than those whose minds are seized by the prospect of a global warming apocalypse. (But, remember: just because they’re terrified of it in ways many of us don’t understand doesn’t mean it’s not real; perhaps they see something the rest of us don’t).

Some critics of apocalypse enthusiasts accuse them of taking pleasure in the prospect of the damnation of unbelievers. Many no doubt do, but I think this idea is misleading. When I was part of that Late, Great mindset and culture, I didn’t know anybody who relished the thought of sinners falling into the hands of the Antichrist, and suffering horribly. Surely some did, but not as many as you may think. To reiterate, the consolation offered by the Late, Great vision was rather this: 1) it offered an explanation for hard-to-understand, scary events in the world; 2) it assured you that none of this was random, that as chaotic as things seemed, God was actually in control, and things were unfolding according to His plan; and 3) as awful as things were getting, God was going to rapture His people off the planet before the worst happened.

If this sounds like the most ridiculous stuff you’ve ever heard, I would suggest that you ask yourself if you have ever felt terrified, vulnerable, and close to being overwhelmed by chaos.

Something Ross Douthat wrote once — can’t remember where; I’ll link to it if I can find it — revealed to me why even though I roll my eyes at my teenage infatuation with Late, Great, I am still too eager to see the prospect of small-a apocalypses in current events. As I recall, Ross said to a certain kind of conservative, the only prospect drearier than apocalypse is the thought that there won’t be a culmination, a conclusion, but rather that we will just muddle on through.

UPDATE: I got titles mixed up in the first graf. It’s been fixed now, thanks to the graceless correction of reader Leo Ladenson, to whom I am grudgingly thankful.

Step away from the Trayvon case for a moment and take a look at what’s going on at Notre Dame. Lizzy Seeberg, a freshman, reported to campus police that a Notre Dame football player sexually assaulted her in her dorm room. She first told her therapist shortly after it allegedly happened, then filed a written statement to the ND police the next day. They never charged the football player. From the National Catholic Reporter:

All their lives, women Lizzy’s age have been taught to report unwanted touching. But after she did, the same friend of the player who’d left her alone with him sent her a series of text messages that scared her as much as the player himself had. “Don’t do anything you would regret,” he wrote. “Messing with Notre Dame football is a bad idea.” Over the next 10 days, Lizzy became convinced he was right about that. The player wasn’t hard to find on the practice field each afternoon, so what were investigators waiting for? It crushed Lizzy, said her therapist in Chicago, Dr. Heather Hale, that reporting a crime somehow made her a traitor to the school she’d grown up revering. But she also couldn’t get past the idea that failing to follow through legally would make her party to any harm that came to other women on campus, either from the same man or others emboldened by her silence.”

More:

Lizzy wanted it to be better for the next woman. But one subsequent case, never reported until now, involved another young woman who decided that you really don’t mess with Notre Dame football. A year ago February, a female Notre Dame student who said another football player had raped her at an off-campus party told the friend who drove her to the hospital afterward that it was with Lizzy in mind that she decided against filing a complaint, that friend said.

Still more:

 But Notre Dame officials have painted and passed around a different picture of the dead 19-year-old. Sotto voce, they portray the player as wrongly accused by an aggressive young woman who lied to get back at him for sexually rejecting her the first moment they were ever alone together.

The player’s lawyer, Notre Dame alumnus Joe Power, isn’t whispering. He shouted in my ear about the “complete phony lie” designed to slander an exemplary young gentleman. His client, who has never been named or made to miss a football practice, had a reputation as a young man with a temper among some parents at his high school, and was suspended from high school over allegations of misbehavior.

Lizzy, whose parents signed waivers to make extensive information available, with no preconditions and nothing off-limits, has no such record. An anxiety disorder made Lizzy shun rather than seek attention, and she had no history of making up anything.

Nobody can ask Lizzy Seeberg anything. She killed herself 10 days after the alleged sexual assault. The reporter of this story, Melinda Henneberger, published it in  the nation’s leading liberal Catholic newspaper, was told this by the football player’s lawyer:

“You should be writing for the John Birch Society, or the Ku Klux Klan,” the lawyer continued, presumably because the player is black. “If you were in To Kill a Mockingbird, you’d be on the side of the Klan,” out to destroy a black man falsely accused by a white woman. “And if you slander this innocent young man,” he thundered, “you will pay!”

Read the whole thing.

What would justice for Lizzy Seeberg look like? I don’t really know; I’m asking. To what extent does your opinion depend on the templates you have in your head that help you explain the world to yourself? Templates about race, sex, religion, loyalty, sports, and tribalism, I mean.

I think about how completely outraged I was last year over the Jerry Sandusky case at Penn State. How volcanically disgusted I was at how Penn State students rioted in anger over the way the university treated Joe Paterno. How frustrated I was over the culture of denial at Penn State that appears to have allowed Sandusky to sexually prey on boys for years. With some distance from that time, I think about all the emotions that case brought forth from within me — emotions that had to do with what I regard as the worst trauma I’ve ever gone through — and how it became virtually impossible for me to consider that any of the major figures from that case might not be guilty. That red-headed coach in particular, Mike McQueary. I was ready to be judge, jury, and executioner on that guy, and I couldn’t see how anybody could see this matter differently. Wasn’t the truth obvious? If you doubted it, I was emotionally certain that you were blinded by your loyalty to Penn State.

That was wrong of me. McQueary may eventually be proven in court to be guilty of some criminal charge, or may be at least shown to have been a man of no moral integrity. But I didn’t know that at the time, and I still do not know that. The truth was, I judged McQueary guilty because the facts, as presented in the grand jury report, did not reflect at all well on him, and — more importantly — the facts fit a template that I carried in my head about how institutions allow children to be sexually abused to protect their public image and the powerful, well-connected people within the leadership of those institutions. Obviously, this was a big lesson I took from my experience of the Catholic abuse scandal, and it was a lesson I took from the two adult chaperones who walked out of a hotel room when I was 14, and a group of boys were trying to take my pants off to humiliate me in front of their girlfriends. Me begging the adults for help. Them stepping over me and leaving the room rather than confront the cool kids. That was my template. It’s why I reacted so strongly to the Catholic scandal that I could no longer say I believed in my Catholic faith. It cut too deep. It’s also why I would not be able to serve on a jury in a child sexual abuse case. I am, I think, incapable of being impartial in these matters, despite my best efforts. I feel so strongly about this stuff that even when I think I’m being impartial, I’m not. I didn’t see clearly how much emotion affected my judgment about Mike McQueary until after enough time had passed to let the emotions die down. I am absolutely certain that the same dynamic is at work in the Trayvon Martin case.

So, again: what would justice look like for Lizzy Seeberg? What makes you think that?

The latest thing:

Patricia Anne Murphy is a philosopher with a real-world mission.

Murphy may have a PhD and an intimate knowledge of Aristotle and Descartes, but in her snug Takoma Park bungalow, she’s helping a broken-hearted patient struggle through a divorce.

Instead of offering the wounded wife a prescription for Effexor — which she’s not licensed to do anyway — she instructs her to read Epictetus, the original cognitive therapist, who argued that humans often mistake their feelings for facts and suffer as a result.

Murphy is one of an increasing number of philosophical counselors, practitioners who are putting their esoteric learning to practical use helping people with some of life’s persistent afflictions. Though they help clients cope with many of the same issues that conventional therapists do — divorce, job stress, the economic downturn, parenting woes, chronic illness and matters of the heart — their methods are very different.

They’re like intellectual life coaches. Very intellectual. They have in-depth knowledge of Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist theories on the nature of life and can recite passages from Martin Heidegger’s phenomenological explorations of the question of being. And they use them to help clients overcome their mother issues.

What a good idea. When I was in college, the best thing that I read to get me out of my head was Kierkegaard, that profoundly psychological philosopher. His three stages of existence — the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious — gave me a framework for understanding my own state of mind, my confusion, my impulsiveness, and why various attempts I made to overcome the anxiety emerging from all this were doomed. This little book explaining Kierkegaard’s philosophy absolutely changed my life, and very much for the better. No therapist could possibly have helped me more than the Dane did.

ABC News has obtained a police security camera video showing a handcuffed George Zimmerman being brought in for questioning after shooting Trayvon Martin. Remember how Zimmerman’s lawyer said his client had a broken nose and a skull laceration from having his face and head pounded by Martin? Look at this video. Zimmerman’s face is a bit blurry, but I see no blood on his face, and not a scratch on his head. This video is not conclusive, but it does not build one’s confidence in George Zimmerman’s case, or, to be more precise, the credibility of his lawyer.

UPDATE: Leo Ladenson points to the police report saying that when officers found Zimmerman, he was “bleeding out of the nose and the back of the head.” And that he received first aid on the scene. It would make sense that he would have been cleaned up during that first aid treatment before being transported to the station. I had not realized these things.

Leo, if, as you say, I’m “blowing hot and cold,” it’s because I don’t feel comfortable yet saying, “Yes, this is what happened, I’m sure of it.” Because I’m not. I’d rather blow hot and cold than take a side based on incomplete information. What seems true emotionally may not at all be what’s actually true.

UPDATE.2: Or, the police who filed the report might have been lying to protect Zimmerman. Possibly.

UPDATE.3: Enhanced photo from the police surveillance tape shows a significant gash on the back of Zimmerman’s head.

I’m shocked, shocked by this development:

MIAMI (AP) — Websites are hawking key chains bearing Trayvon Martin’s likeness. Vendors are selling T-shirts and hoodies at rallies. The case of the slain Florida teenager is quickly turning into an Internet-fueled brand.

Buttons, posters, T-shirts and hoodies are up for grabs on Ebay since Martin’s shooting last month. Vendors are also selling them at rallies supporting Martin.

Martin’s parents have trademarked two phrases — “Justice for Trayvon” and “I Am Trayvon.” An attorney says the family wants to prevent others from exploiting the 17-year-old’s image.

We’ll see about that. His mother and father have reportedly quit their jobs “to help see that the fight for justice continues.” Really? How does fighting for justice pay the rent?

Meanwhile, the fight for justice continues among the youth in Miami:

About 100 students who walked out of class at North Miami Beach Senior High School in honor of Trayvon Martin, the Miami Gardens teenager who was shot to death last month in Sanford, ended up ransacking a Walgreens drugstore, breaking displays and merchandise, North Miami Beach police said.

The students walked out of school about 11 a.m. Friday in an otherwise peaceful demonstration, according to a statement emailed by police.

Tom Wolfe couldn’t make this up. Is this a great country, or what? Look:

In the wake of Saudi Arabia’s top religious leader calling for the destruction of all churches in the Arabian peninsula, Walter Russell Mead draws on his experience talking with both Christian and Muslim religious figures to explain why it is so difficult to have meaningful Muslim-Christian interreligious dialogue. It’s a pretty interesting read. For example:

Christians, especially in countries like the United States where the ideal of religious liberty has been an important element of Christian teaching for centuries, believe that the rise of religious tolerance in the Christian world is one of the signs that Christianity is true: believers are becoming more like Christ in his infinite compassion and profound respect and love of every human soul despite error and sin. Moreover they see the spread of tolerance and the repudiation of false ideals like “holy wars” (such as the Crusades, fought not only against Muslims but against heretics inside the Christian world) as signs that God is working in human history to bring us to a greater light and deeper understanding.

For many Muslims, however, the rise of tolerance in Christianity looks less like maturity and self confidence than like the senescence of a religion in decline. Christianity, these critics say, is losing its hold on the western mind. The rise in religious tolerance is the result of necessity — the churches are weak, the believers indifferent, and so Christians no longer have the inner conviction to stand up for their faith. Just as Christian countries tolerate a range of vices and practices that in the past, when their faith was stronger, they opposed (homosexuality, abortion, sexual immorality of all kinds, blasphemy and obscenity), so now they also don’t care very much about what religion people profess because their own faith doesn’t mean all that much to the shrinking minority that still has one.

Islam, these Muslims say, is a stronger faith, less subject to erosion by the forces of modernity and the neo-paganism of consumer culture. Islamic intolerance of religious error reflects a faith that feels itself to be true and is not ashamed or embarrassed to insist on its core values and its historic ideas.

Don’t hold up your flabby faith and your immoral, secular societies to us as examples to imitate, these Muslim critics say. You are tolerant because you are decadent, open because you have lost the will and the strength to defend yourselves and your ideas.

Did you hear about the new memoir by Deborah Feldman, “Unorthodox,” which is the sad and shocking tale of a lesbian who escaped her miserable, oppressive life in a New York Hasidic Jewish community? The book has received significant national attention — a gushy appearance on “The View,” for example — and made the NYT Bestseller List.

Whaddaya know, it looks like Feldman might have made a lot of it up. From the New York Daily News:

The problem is that much of her memoir may not be true, according to ardent critics. These include family members, neighbors and even New York State authorities.

In the book, Feldman charges her mother – who was apparently burdened by the pressures of Satmar life – with a “mysterious disappearance” when Feldman was a toddler.

In fact, it takes about 30 seconds to find Shoshana Berkovic on both Twitter and Facebook. She is a science teacher at New Utrecht High School and does not appear to have ever left Brooklyn. She did divorce her husband, as court records indicate. But that was in 2010, more than a decade after Feldman accuses her mother with leaving her behind. (Shoshana Berkovic / Facebook)

Feldman leaves out another relevant fact about her family – that she has a sister, now 17 and living with her mother. For reasons I cannot quite fathom, she entirely deletes her sister’s existence from what is supposed to be a truthful account of her life.

And while Feldman waxes poetic about how she had to sneak  secular literature (“Reading an English book is…a welcome mat put out for the devil”), neighbor Pearl Engleman distinctly remembers Berkovic taking both of her daughters to the public library on Fridays. “Flat-out lies” is what Engleman calls Feldman’s description of her family life.

Feldman writes in great detail about her strict religious education in Williamsburg. But she fails to mention that she only attended the supposedly restrictive UTA for four years – and that only after being kicked out of a much more lax yeshiva in Manhattan, Bas Yaakov of the lower East Side. A cousin says that Feldman was expelled for making comments about sex.

More:

But this is the worst of it: Feldman alleges that when she and her husband were living in Airmont, Eli learned from his brother Cheskel that a 13 year old boy had been murdered in nearby Kiryas Joel by his father for masturbating. The father, according to Feldman’s account, cut off the boy’s penis and let him bleed to death. The Jewish ambulance service, known as Hatzalah, supposedly helped cover up the crime.

Fascinating, but at the very least dubious. As Hella Winston of The Jewish Week first reported and the Daily News confirmed, the young man in question was seven years older than Feldman reported, and evidence from the coroner, the New York State police, ambulance workers who reported the crime and family members of the dead man all overwhelmingly suggest that the young man (an allegedly troubled individual) died from slitting his own throat.

An uncle of the dead man calls Feldman a “psychopath.”

Read the whole thing.  On her Tumblr feed, Feldman addresses the allegation that she made up the story about the boy who had his pizzle sliced off:

Regarding the story I relayed about the boy who died, I regret that information I did not include in my book has found its way into a discussion of the veracity of my memoir. In the book I do not offer any identifying information about this boy or his family. I do not state his age, and I do not state that his father murdered him. I relay a conversation that I had with my husband, showing that my mind went to a certain conclusion and stating that my husband urged me not to jump to conclusions. I felt this was a significant moment in my life, relating to my decision to leave Satmar with my son. I stand by what I wrote in Unorthodox regarding my feelings about the event as I experienced it then.

So, it may not have been true, and Feldman didn’t bother to check out whether or not such a terrifying thing had actually occurred before slandering the Satmar community by accusing it of covering up a father’s gruesome sex-related murder of his son. Now that it has been demonstrated that she lied about this, she’s claiming that well, she felt at the time that it might be true, which is what really counts.

The Daily News reports that Simon & Schuster, Feldman’s publisher, won’t make her available for interviews. Go figure. Actually, the person I’d like to see interviewed is an executive of Simon & Schuster, asking them to what extent they verified the lurid and even defamatory stories Feldman tells. Or is it this a case of confirmation bias? Did it ring true to editors at the publishing house because they figured that Hasidic Jews must be the sort of people who would do these kinds of things?