The NYPD’s Third Jihad controversy presents many questions for those who track the politics of and about Islam in the contemporary United States.  For instance, one wonders what the airing of such a film in a “training”—presumably a context for teaching tactics and strategies in preventing crime—says about the institutional cultures of American police forces more generally.  As scandals surrounding racial profiling on the part of police officers have consistently underscored, the inculcation of and reliance on prejudicial caricatures of criminals by the police constitutes a threat to citizenship in general.  My concern here, however, is a broader theme related to The Third Jihad scandal:  the Islamophobic conceit that American Muslims pose an imminent threat to American secularism.

A still from The Third Jihad

Unlike its predecessor, Obsession, The Third Jihad is not explicitly about terrorism or violence.  Rather, the film’s central contention is that “much of the Muslim leadership here in America”—to use the film’s own narration—is plotting to undermine American secularism and its cardinal principle of the separation of state and religion.  Within the first several minutes of the film, its narrator, Zuhdi Jasser, a Muslim doctor from Phoenix, reveals his post-9/11 discovery in ominous tones:  “It wasn’t until I saw this document, written in America, by American Muslims, that I understood what was really going on:  a strategy to infiltrate and dominate America.”   The weight of this statement rests clearly on the final phrase:  What do ‘infiltration’ and ‘domination’ mean in this context?

If ‘infiltration’ and ‘domination’ indicate an armed threat to the state on the part of American citizens—a thoroughly unlikely scenario, given the historically unprecedented military might of the U.S., both domestically and globally —then this is surely a matter of public concern.  But this is not what Jasser and the producers of Third Jihad have in mind.  Rather, the “strategy to infiltrate and dominate America” that elicits such patriotic paranoia on the part of the film’s producers amounts to a rejection of secularism:  certain American Muslim organizations and individuals reject the privatized model of religion that most (though certainly not all) Americans of other faiths accept and even valorize.

In his comments on the “Brian Lehrer Show” last week Jasser made this point explicitly.  He first asserts that Muslim American leaders in general are not “Jeffersonian democrats,” which begs the question:  Are the leaders of other American faith communities uniformly secularists who preach the rigid separation of state and religion?  Arguably, one of the chief virtues of American secularism has been its flexibility in accommodating communities, beliefs, and practices that do not valorize the Jeffersonian principle of separation.  But Jasser would nonetheless hold American Muslims to a higher standard:

…not every Muslim has sort of bought into the establishment clause…yes they may believe in it as a minority, but when they’re at home in their mosques, are they teaching the separation of mosque and state, or are they saying, ‘you know what, we follow the laws of the land as a minority but Islam is a way of life as far as laws, as far as society, and we want as a majority to have an Islamic state?’  That creates radicalization….evangelical Muslim movements in the West are not about violence, it’s (sic) about spreading the concept of political Islam within our communities.  (My emphasis; full audio available here.)

By Jasser’s own admission, then, the very organizations that The Third Jihad targets are not dedicated to violence.  The question then becomes:  Should we identify the refusal on the part of a minority religious community to accept the establishment clause and the separation of mosque (or church, synagogue, mandir, etc.) and state as a “strategy to infiltrate and dominate America”? I strongly think not.   Such an identification only makes sense if one assumes that any skepticism regarding the separation of religion and politics entails a political project to upend this separation entirely.

The question of how we should interpret the marginal American Muslim voices that do inveigh against the secular separation of mosque and state is unavoidable here.  For Jasser and the producers of The Third Jihad, such voices—and it is always worth noting that they are a distinct minority—demonstrate the fundamental incompatibility of Islam and American secularism.  However, if we look beyond the content of calls for an Islamic state, the relationship between even the most radical American Muslims and American secularism appears far from uniform or simple.

Although some few American Muslims may voice anti-secular positions that defy the Jeffersonian separation of religion and state, their very existence as non-governmental civil society organizations suggests that they also participate in and benefit from the institutional structure of American secularism itself.  In other words, even the most seemingly anti-secular voices within American Islam are affected by American secularism.   Secularism is not merely a political discourse, it is also a system for organizing and transforming religion.  But we can only perceive this transformative power if we refuse to reduce secularism (and its antithesis) to an explicit political position about the role of religion in public life.  Of course, from the Islamophobic vantage of The Third Jihad, such a nuanced rendering of both secularism and religion is neither politically expedient nor conceptually viable.

The producers of The Third Jihad envision a Manichean, either/or world in which one is either a good, secularist Jeffersonian democrat or a fanatical threat to the secular order.  However, given the massive asymmetry of power between the American federal government and American Muslim communities and organizations, such a threat to the secular order is practically inconceivable.  More pertinent, I think, is the following question:  Why is the rejection of the separation of religion and politics on the part of (some, certainly not all) American Muslims necessarily constituted as a threat to American secularism (even if, in fact, it is not)?  The anthropologist Talal Asad provides a clue to the answer of this question in one of his early, seminal articles on secularism*:  “Far from having to prove to existing authority that it is no threat to dominant national values, a religion that enters political debate on its own terms may on the contrary inevitably threaten the authority of existing assumptions.”

The point that Asad intends here, I believe, rests on a distinction between power and authority—although minority religions such as Islam lack the power to rearrange or transform the secular order, the divergent vision of the relationship between political power and religion that certain Muslims forward interrogates the very authority and naturalness of secularism, an interrogation that is easily transmogrified into a paranoid fear of the power of religion.  The notion that Islam or Muslims might infiltrate and dominate America is absurd and based on a misunderstanding of both Islam and American power.  This paranoia does register a real anxiety, however:  Through their refusal to accept the naturalness and desirability of the secular quarantine between state and religion, some American Muslims have destabilized the authority of American secularism.

In conclusion, a few speculative thoughts on the relationship between Islamophobia and the interrogated authority of secularism.  One of the principal complaints that Zuhdi Jasser raised in his conversation with Brian Lehrer concerned the monolithic image of Islam in America—in Jasser’s estimation, the equation of American Islam with its most conservative representatives obscures liberal efforts at ‘reforming’ the faith, such as his own.  It is deeply ironic, then, that The Third Jihad trucks in just such a monolithic image of Islam.

This monolith rests squarely on the tacit association of Islam with political violence.  The pernicious, syllogistic logic of this prejudice is simple:  for the Islamophobe, a) Islam is constitutionally prone to violence, and b) Islam does not mesh with American secularism, therefore c) Islam must constitute a violent political threat to the United States, “a strategy to infiltrate and dominate.”  For all that the producers of The Third Jihad deny that they are criticizing Islam as a whole, the iconography and language of the film strongly suggest otherwise.  It is no surprise that the broad strokes with which they paint American Islam have provoked indignation and anger on the part of countless American Muslims, including many who are otherwise perfectly happy with the secular separation of state and religion.

Jeremy F. Walton is an assistant professor/ faculty fellow in New York University’s Religious Studies Program.

*Talal Asad, “Relgion, Nation State, and Secularism,” in Nation and Religion: Perspectives on Europe and Asia, edited by Peter van der Veer and Hartmut Lehmann (Princeton, 1999), pp. 181.

Congratulations to the makers of “Love Free or Die” for their Sundance successes.  The movie profiles openly gay Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson.

The Village Voice reports on the death of Ann Tidman, someone not on the general media’s list but a very important member of the Church of Scientology.

From the Tablet review of “Red Tails,” a new movie by George Lucas:

The main idea Lucas borrowed from Campbell was that of the monomyth, or the universal structure Campbell argued explained every hero humanity has ever adored, from Jesus Christ to Luke Skywalker. They all followed the same pattern: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”

It sucks to be an Ethiopian Jew in Israel.

“RasTa:  A Soul’s Journey” is a new documentary  that follows Bob Marley’s daughter around the world as she discovers the reachers of this unique 20th century faith.

Charles Moore on Alain de Botton’s new book, A Non-Believer’s guide to the Uses of Religion:

So he offers a series of acute observations of various aspects of religion, often encapsulated in almost aphoristic sentences. Here are some: “Religion seems to know a great deal about loneliness”; “it is a sign of immaturity to object too strenuously [as atheists often do] to being treated like a child”; “The greatest Christian preachers have been vulgar in the very best sense”; “To sustain goodness, it helps to have an audience”; “Christianity has been guided by a simple yet essential observation that has nevertheless never made any impression upon those in charge of secular education: how very easily we forget things”; “It is telling that the secular world is not well versed in the art of gratitude.”

And The New Statesman’s Nelson Jones:

He is struck by the hollowness of much modern culture, the unwillingness of today’s education system, for example, to impart wisdom along with information. Secularism, he has said, “is full of holes. We have secularised badly.” Among his projects is a “Temple of Perspective“, a hollow a 46-metre high monolith in which pious non-believers will be able to contemplate the universe and the insignificant place they occupy within it. He wants to build it in the City of London, which to be fair probably could do with acquiring a sense of perspective.

Evil Little Thing:  A Rhode Island 16 year old sued to have a Christian prayer removed from her high school auditorium.  And she won.  Now she’s being made into a outcast in her small town.

E. Daniel Martin at Mennonite Weekly Review responds to Brian Larkin’s recent post on sexuality by–I’m not kidding–comparing homosexuality to blindness (a new twist on the old masturbation wive’s tale!), which suggests that whatever Mr. Martin doesn’t personally approve of must be a pathology. But it’s not just queer sex he’s chastising us for:

It is the devil’s deception that if you cannot have sexual intercourse you cannot have a fulfilling life. Sex is elevated as a god that must be served at all costs.

What?  Says who? Thankfully he doesn’t speak for the entire Mennonite body.

A jury of your peers!  Von Lester Taylor, a Utahan on death row for having killed two women, a mother and daughter, in 1990, has appealed his sentence and conviction because he says there were too many Mormons on the jury.  The case is now before the state Supreme Court.  run Riley, Utah’s Attorney General, has “argued the only purpose for the ongoing legal process was to delay Taylor’s execution.”  Can you blame him?

Our favorite read this week?  “The Dispossessed” by Tablet’s Matthew Fishbane.  He writes, “nearly half of Venezuela’s Jewish community has fled from the social and economic chaos that the president has unleashed and from the uncomfortable feeling that they were being specifically targeted by the [Chávez] regime.”

The Russian Jewish Congress will have none of the government’s attempt to alter a memorial plaque in Zmiyevskaya Balka where 27,000 Jews were killed in 1942.  The contested new plaque would state “mass killing” instead of “Holocaust.”

Hold your evil tongue.  At the Zondervan blog:

What exactly is an “evil tongue”? [When the apostle Peter speaks of an "evil tongue" in 1 Peter 3:8-10, he's quoting Psalm 34:12–13.]

In Hebrew, lashon hara (lah-SHON ha-RAH) is the name that Judaism gives to all types of gossip, slander, and malicious speech…

Peter Manseau reminds us that the death of innocence belongs to everyone:

Whatever else it has become, Anne Frank’s diary is a book written by an adolescent and largely read by adolescents. It is a book children encounter when they are just beginning to realize that they soon will be adults. For many would-be writers and artists, it is the book that first suggests that their voices, like Anne’s, can be used to struggle to make sense of the world.

Dolphin Tale is the “amazing true story” of the friendship between a boy and a bottlenose dolphin named Winter, who he helps rescue when Winter is caught in a crab trap off the cost of Florida. Winter is taken in by the Clearwater Marine Aquarium, where a group of “compassionate strangers” (played by the handsome Harry Connick, Jr., wholesome Ashley Judd, righteous Morgan Freeman, and older-and-wiser Kris Kristofferson) work together to find a way for Winter to survive given her severely damaged tail which they’re forced to amputate.  According to Winter’s own website, “Without a tail, Winter’s prognosis is dire. It will take the expertise of a dedicated marine biologist, the ingenuity of a brilliant prosthetics doctor, and the unwavering devotion of a young boy to bring about a groundbreaking miracle – a miracle that might not only save Winter but could also help scores of people around the world.” Who are these scores of people? Apparently, those who are disabled and can benefit from prosthetic limbs, like Winter, with the help of a miracle of course.

Dolphin Tale has everything you’d want in a warm-and-fuzzy, heart-gripping family film: cute animals, earnest young children, optimistic adult role models, wise elders who know from experience that one should never give up hope, and even a mother in heaven who is ready to listen when Winter needs help. Yes, when hope runs out after a severe hurricane threatens the aquarium’s already dire financial situation (the writers took some poetic license here), one of the young helpers prays to her mother.  The kids then come up with the idea to throw a “Save Winter Day” fundraiser, and we all know what happens in the end; it goes the way all miraculous stories do. We’ll never know if it’s the charitable individuals who find it in their hearts to help Winter, or someone in heaven who pulled through a miracle, but these Christian values may have boosted the financial success of the movie (grossing $89,664,846) just as much as they did poor Winter’s tail.

You might argue that a little light prayer in family movies is nothing new, but I figured something was fishy when I discovered that Dolphin Tale was produced by Alcon Entertainment, the same producers of The Blind Side. If you don’t remember this blockbuster favorite, picture Sandra Bullock as a blond, evangelical virtuous mom who takes in a poor, uneducated African American kid(“Big Mike”) who ends up playing for the NFL. It’s another uplifting “extraordinary true story” about saintly people saving the helpless.

Want more big miracles? Let me introduce Big Miracle, a film coming out in 2012 inspired by another true story, this time about restless, compassionate individuals in a fight to save a family of grey whales trapped in an ice formation in the Atlantic. Don’t worry about confusing this movie with the others. Ashley Judd is not Drew Barrymore. Case closed.

One could argue that these feel-good movies are just as American as they are Christian – indeed, the two may be synonymous, particularly when it comes to “family movies.” However, browse to a review of Dolphin Tale on a family Movie Guide and you’ll find that “DOLPHIN TALE is a movie that respects life and extols intelligent design.” Catholic News Service felt it sent a “pro-life message,” and calls it a “rare family-friendly film that is wholesome and fun, while offering lessons in faith, perseverance, and respect for those who are physically challenged.” Like the plethora of family movies that espouse charitable, “pro-life” (that is, pro-living?) messages, secular viewers will see these miracles as an outcome of the characters’ doing while religious viewers may see it as God’s.  Perhaps it doesn’t matter.

However, (and I may be over-reading, oh graduate school), but during this ever-so-entertaining GOP race for a presidential candidate, I worry when I can’t distinguish between watching debates about “pro-life” issues and charitable giving and chill time with my refusing-to-eat-fish-after-watching-Dolphin-Tale-7-year-old nephew. It’s almost like when I found out that Amy Grant’s God wasn’t the Hebrew one. . .

So it is with great respect and admiration that I celebrate the life of Robert Anton Wilson during this memorial week by remembering that he was the great believing skeptic, someone for whom the collection and curating of all that is weird was his life’s work, who reminded us always to question everything, while recognizing that we should never stop exploring. I sure wish RAW was alive today, especially at a time when there is something like a real Occult Revival going on, from the psychedelic explorers who see 2012 as a great trans formative event, to the huge increase in the membership of organization like the O.T.O. and Freemasonry, and by extension a whole load of conspiracy theories. RAW warned against any idea, group, or person that claims knowledge of the “Real” Universe, echoing Umberto Eco who wrote in Foucault’s Pendulum we should be mindful of turning metaphysics in mechanics.

For me, and many others of my generation who were doing the born-again thing, separation of church and Jesus goes back to 1977 when Scott Wesley Brown sang, “I’m not religious, I just love the Lord.”

You can go to church every Sunday and think it’s kind of neat

But the good Lord wants your love full time, seven days a week

You can give away everything you own, even give it to the poor

But listen my friends, in the end, you gotta love the Lord

**

You can look real pious, even spiritual, dressed up in your pride

But religion’s just a mask you wear and God sees who you hide

Acting like a pharisee, pretending you’re a saint, fooling everybody you know

God don’t need your stained-glass faith, He just wants your soul

Don’t go to church before  you go to Jesus

Wesley Brown, a Philadelphia native, was a Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) sensation who sang alongside other stars of the era like Sandi Patty and Petra (and my favorite, Mylon LeFevre, after Larry Normal, the CCM godfather) at popular Christian music events like The Creation Festival.  It’s no wonder that the overthrow of denominations for a personal relationship with Jesus resonated in my home county of Lancaster, PA, where the Creation Festival was founded in 1979 (about a mile from my childhood home), and where Anabaptists–those who believed in adult baptism, a consensual relationship with Christ–had been living since the early 1700s.

Wariness of organized religion has long, deep roots among the Amish, Brethren and Mennonite sects of the state.  Oddly, the “Jesus music” popular in the mid-to-late 1970s jived with the Mennonites I was kicking around with.  Writes Greenfield of “Why I Hate Religion” fans:

By repudiating religion, they establish themselves as subversive, as anti-establishment, as empathetic and educated and culturally savvy. Religion is full of rules and prohibitions; Jesus accepts you as you are. Religion represents the uncool collective mainstream; Jesus represents the hip individualized counterculture.

Much like the Anabaptists two hundred years before, Wesley Brown and his fellow musicians were making faith in Jesus cool.  A mission Jefferson Bethke might share.

Check out the hot new line debuting over at the Community of Compassion, a new Anglican Catholic order in Forth Worth, Texas. When Mother Mary Magdalene, founder of the order, needed help designing new habits – because foundresses are required to design unique new habits for their new orders – she turned to artist Julia Sherman for help, and the result was something new and, in a slightly discomfiting way, a little sexy.

Fisher Dress ($388). Photo by Julia Sherman.

If you’re going to be married to Jesus, you want to look good AND be comfortable, amIright? Mother Mary had just three requests: modest, natural and snazzy. But what’s really special about the line is that the sisters won’t be the only ones wearing them: Sherman has partnered up with JF & Son in New York to sell the outfits to secular customers. Habits – they’re not just for nuns anymore!

Of course, the store hasn’t taken a vow of poverty, so the un-anointed have a to pay a hefty price. First, for the pieces, which cost anywhere from about $200-$500. And secondly, Mother Mary had a word of caution about wearing the habit in public:

Bear in mind we consider wearing the habit to be a privilege. It says to others when in public, I am open for business. May I pray for you, comfort you, and serve you? It’s a caring symbol in a difficult world.

Buyer beware! But my concerns aren’t limited to mistaking a shift-wearing New York fashion blogger for a nun. I have questions about where the proceeds from sales would go, but according to this New York Times magazine article (which appears to be the first story on the topic, before the previously-cited blogs), a portion will go to the order; the actual habits for the nuns were donated by the store. So that’s nice. But I still wonder why they think there will be enough popular interest to support a line for lay people. Is there something forbidden about it, or about paying so much for it? Will wearers somehow feel closer to God by emulating the order in this way?

Harmony Hood ($208), Alban Cloak ($489), and Agnes Dress ($412). Photo by Julia Sherman.

And is anybody else weirded out by this pseudo-sexualization of nuns? Not that there aren’t plenty of B-movies out there on just such a topic, I’m sure. And of course the sisters of the Community of Compassion won’t be posing with stalks of wheat in their pouty mouths. But still. There’s some kind of boundary-crossing, line-blurring strangeness to this all that I can’t quite put my finger on.

I totally want that cloak though.

(h/t Jo Piazza)

photo by Oded Balilty, AP

According to Ethan Bronner and Isabel Kershner’s insightful piece in the New York Times, increasing media coverage of “hadarat nashim,” or the “exclusion of women,” began three months ago when a female pediatrics professor was prevented from publicly accepting an award for her book because the acting health minister was ultra-orthodox. Other events, according to Bronner and Kershner, include:

the chief rabbi of the air force resigned his post because the army declined to excuse ultra-Orthodox soldiers from attending events where female singers perform; protesters depicted the Jerusalem police commander as Hitler on posters because he instructed public bus lines with mixed-sex seating to drive through ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods; vandals blacked out women’s faces on Jerusalem billboards.

So far, a number of activist groups have taken the lead in pursuing action and awareness regarding what they see as a threat to basic human rights and religious freedom, including organizations like Sister for Women in Israel, Association of Crisis Centers of Sexual Assault Victims, People — The Movement to Promote Social Equality in Israel, and Women’s Parliament.  This month they have all signed a statement, released by the National Israel Fund (NIF) on the prohibition on female speakers at an OB/GYN conference.  Women were censored due to the sponsor organization’s religious beliefs. Additionally, according to Bronner and Kershner, the NIF organized concerts and singalongs for Jerusalem women and postered women’s faces under the slogan, “Women should be seen and heard.”

Political figures are speaking up as well. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu assured the public that  “Israel is a democratic, Western, liberal state” and pledged that “the public sphere in Israel will be open and safe for all.” Secretary of State Hilary Clinton condemned discrimination against Israeli women, saying that these acts “reminded her of Iran.” Sounds like there may be some anxiety about democracy in the Middle East. . .that’s new.

Naama Margolese and her mother

Said war on feminism has fueled a type of media coverage that positions secular Israelis against the religious, though at times offers slightly more specificity. Bronner and Kershner identify this pious sector as the “black clad,” ultra-orthodox, known as the Haredim, or “those who tremble before God.” You know that picture you get in your head of the Jewish bearded man with a black hat, side curls, and fringes hanging from his long black coat when you hear the words Orthodox Jew? You’re on the right track. While this sector is of course more diverse than we typically hear, what’s even more varied is the so-called “secular” opposition. In another New York Times article by Kershner, specifically covering outrage over the mistreatment of the 8-year old girl, she writes that “the extremists have provoked an outpouring of opposition from all those who are more flexible, be they ultra-Orthodox, modern Orthodox, mainstream or secular.” Surprise! “Religion” is more diverse than we thought.

Careful to take these issues seriously, and with healthy scrutiny, I see a few main problems with this recent coverage (not to mention cocktail party talk).  One of those problems has to do with math. If secularism ≠ religion, and feminism = secularism, then feminism ≠ religion. This formula propagates the unrealistic (and discriminatory) notion that if we want to promote/preserve feminism (and democracy for that matter), we need to subtract religion from the mix. When we do this, we not only irresponsibly represent lived religion in all its social and political messiness, but we contribute to a long European history of cultural Othering, in which we gloss over the fact that these same mechanisms work tirelessly in our very own backyards.

A second issue has to do with two words that tend to both articulate and confuse: the “Public Sphere.” While it makes my warm blood flow in this cold(ish) winter when I see coverage on this topic, I wish we could linger in the heat a bit longer. When Netanyahu claimed that “the public sphere in Israel will be open and safe for all,” what exactly was he imagining? Should it be “secular,” “plural,” or perhaps “post-secular-religious”? While some scholars of religion and politics have recently contributed some important work on religion in the pubic sphere, I’m partial to pragmatic approaches, such as Yossi Klein Halevi’s suggestions that Israel “face up” to religious extremism. Perhaps if we + communication + cohabitation + regulation and – absolute notions of religion + secularism, we’ll finally = equality.

Last June, a federal judge in Washington ordered the Russian government to return to the Lubavitch-Chabad Hasidic movement a sizable library of religious texts and documents which had been seized by Bolshevik authorities in the 1920s. The library was later obtained by the Nazis, before finally ending up—in 1945—in the hands of the Red Army. By that point, Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, had fled to the United States, where he set about rebuilding his court on American soil.

The books have remained contested property ever since. In his ruling, the federal judge, Royce C. Lamberth, called the seizure by the Red Army discriminatory and pointed out that the Lubavitch leadership had received no compensation from Russia. The Russian government, for its part, has refused to participate in the legal proceedings, arguing that the library is “part of the Russian State Library’s collection, which… is indivisible.”

In a tersely worded statement this month, Russian Culture Minister Alexander Avdeyev called the claims of the plaintiff—Agudas Chasidei Chabad, the Crown Heights–based organization that oversees the entire Lubavitch movement—“provocative,” and hinted that further action could have real diplomatic consequences. The request by the plaintiff “aims to spoil the bilateral relations between our countries and to undermine the political reset,” Avdeyev said, according to Interfax.

Interestingly, this is not the first major court action involving a Lubavitch-Chabad library. In the mid-1980s, the Lubavitch community in Brooklyn was consumed by a different fight over a very different collection of texts—and unlike the case adjudicated last year by Judge Lamberth, this one pitted one descendent of Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn against another.

The story begins in the 1920s, after the original Lubavitch library was seized by the Bolsheviks. According to at least one account, the Bolsheviks later agreed to sell the library back to the Lubavitchers, but Schneersohn, never a wealthy man, was unable to meet the steep terms of the ransom.

Instead, in 1925, Schneersohn opted—with the help of several wealthy backers in the United States—to purchase the private library of a man named Shmuel Wiener, who had at one time served as the head of the Asiatic museum in Leningrad. When the Nazis began their march across Europe, Schneersohn fretted that the new library would suffer the same fate as the old. In 1939, in a last-minute bid to stave off disaster, he wrote a letter relinquishing control of the library to Agudas Chassidei Chabad, the Crown Heights–based organization that ran the Lubavitch empire.

“I have no apartment, and I find myself living with friends with my entire family in one room; consequently, I have no space for the books which Agudas Chabad loaned me for study,” Schneersohn wrote. “I would be pleased if Agudas Chabad were to take these books back.”

In 1946, with the help of American diplomats, Schneersohn managed to arrange the return of the library—the anthropologist Jerome Mintz, who has written a definitive study of Hasidic movements in the US, says the books were shipped across the ocean in a whopping 120 crates. Schneersohn himself oversaw their installation in the offices at 770 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, the headquarters—then and now—of Lubavitch Hasidism.

In 1950, Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn passed away without naming his heir. Many community leaders wondered aloud if the mantle of rebbe would be passed to Barry Gourary, Schneersohn’s grandson and trusted aid.

Schneersohn was rumored to have hinted as much. Years earlier, the sixth Lubavitcher rebbe had reportedly blessed Gourary with the hope “that this child grow to be the greatest of his brothers, and stand firmly on the same basis on which his grandfather is standing.” Schneersohn asked that God “grant that he tread the same path that was boldly trodden by my holy forebears, for in his veins flows holy blood that is bequeathed from a father to his son, to his grandson, and to his great-grandson.”

Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, standing with his future father-in-law, the sixth Lubavitcher rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn. ((TheRebbe.org)

The lineage, in other words, would be writ in blood: from father to son, or from grandfather to grandson. But by 1951, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, Schneersohn’s son-in-law, and Gourary’s uncle, had showed himself to be a more charismatic leader than Gourary and, following a year of mourning, took his place at the head of the Chabad-Lubavitch court.

Gourary, a graduate of Brooklyn College, eventually moved to Montclair, New Jersey, and found a job as a management consultant. For several decades, Gourary had little contact with his uncle. But he often visited his mother and father, who had remained in Crown Heights in a third-floor apartment above the shul at 770 Eastern Parkway.

In 1984—driven perhaps by revenge or simply by fiscal necessity—Gourary began removing hundreds of volumes from the main Chabad library at 770 Eastern Parkway. He took old books and new ones—essays on Lubavitch theology; the testimony of past Rebbes; histories of Hasidism; biblical exegeses. He brought the books back to his home in New Jersey, compiled a computerized catalogue of the rarer volumes, and sold a stack of texts to various dealers; in the end, he made $186,000 from the transaction.

Several years later, in an interview with Jerome Mintz, Gourary claimed that Chaya Schneerson, his aunt—and the wife of the seventh Lubavitcher rebbe—had given him permission to take the books:

In 1984, my mother and my aunt had reached an accommodation on   the library. They were the two heirs. My aunt had been depressed by grandfather’s death. She said: “I’m not going to read those books. Why don’t you take what you want?”. . . I took the things that had no emotional value for the movement to sell them.

But the volumes did have great value to the Lubavitch movement, as Gourary soon discovered. Over the centuries, Hasidic courts have traditionally compiled great libraries of their central texts and treatises, which are passed from one rebbe to the next. The books are keystones to the movement, and beacons back to a shared religious history.

In 1986, Agudas Chassidei Chabad filed a suit in civil court seeking to block the sales of future volumes from the Lubavitch library. “These books were not taken for sentimental reasons, but because [Gourary] wanted money. Some people rob banks, and some steal books,” Lubavitch spokesman Yehuda Krinsky said. “He’s a thief, an outright thief.”

The Lubavitchers were chastised by other Hasidim who argued that the squabble over the books should be settled—as was custom—by a rabbinical court. To bring suit in a civil court, in front of the media and the goyim, was to embarrass all in the Hasidic world.

Among Righteous Men: A Tale of vigilantes and Vindication in Hasdic Crown Heights, by Matthew Shaer

The Lubavitchers, for their part, maintained that in the case of the library, a civil suit was a necessary evil. The Shulhan Arukh, or the code of Jewish law, forbids a Jew from taking a case before “heathen judges” unless the other litigant is unlikely to abide by the ruling of the Beis din, or rabbinical court. The Lubavitch leadership worried that Gourary, who had long ago abandoned the Hasidic lifestyle, would be unlikely to hand over the volumes on the basis of a Beis Din ruling alone. Furthermore, Gourary was in 1985 in the active process of selling off the library. If he was permitted to continue—if Agudas Chassidei Chabad waited around for a ruling that was duly ignored—the books would be scattered into the hands of dozens of different collectors. They would be impossible to retrieve.

In the spring of 1985, the rebbe went public with allegations that Gourary was looting the sacred library of Lubavitch, going so far as to call the missing books “bombs” which would detonate unless they were immediately returned to their rightful owners.

Gourary certainly didn’t do himself any favors. He continued to maintain that about a third of the books he had taken were actually secular texts. “Grandfather was a collector and he enjoyed collecting,” he explained. “Some [books] were sacred and some were not. Books that I had taken were far from sacred in the Jewish sense—the Old Testament printed by missionaries, with notes by priests in beautiful handwriting.”

Although he told Mintz that he had never been interested in the job of rebbe, the library case “reopened”—in Mintz’s phraseology—“old wounds that had existed since the death of the old rebbe in 1950.” Gourary lashed out at his uncle, noting that at “one time, Chabad was concerned with joyful worship of God.” No longer:

Nowadays the group is primarily interested in proselytizing. My uncle   organized the outreach movements, and some of this is good and some is bad. He became power hungry. He began to measure his achievements. After a while he began to encourage anyone who    would treat him as the Messiah.

These were incendiary charges, and Gourary quickly found himself the target of threats and intimidation. A strange car attempted to run his daughter off the road, and a group of thugs broke into his parents’ residence at 770 Eastern Parkway, leaving his mother with a fractured hand, nose, and palate. (Community leaders blamed the attack on Hanna Gourary on a deranged man, who they claimed had since escaped to Israel.) “My uncle never said anything about it, and they took this as a sign of approval,” Gourary said later. “Three weeks later, they started the case against us.”

• • •

In the fall of 1985, District Court judge Charles Sifton ruled that the library ownership issue would be resolved by bench trial. Agudas Chassidei Chabad, which alleged that the books were the legal property of the Chabad Hasidic movement, was the plaintiff; Barry Gourary and his mother, Hanna Gourary, were the defendants. The Gourarys issued a counterclaim, arguing that the books removed from the library—along with some of the volumes that remained at 770—were the legal property first of Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn and now of Barry and his mother.

News of the trial consumed the Jewish community in Crown Heights. Every day, the courtroom swelled with Lubavitch spectators, the men assembled in neat rows in the front of the gallery and the women in the back. Because so many Lubavitchers wished to watch the proceedings, a lottery system was devised by the leadership on Eastern Parkway—the winners would be ferried to and from Crown Heights in a school bus.

As Mintz noted in his study Hasidic People, there was much more at stake than the fate of the library, “a precious (if little used) archive.” There was also the issue of the rebbe’s authority, which might be seen as greatly diminished if the defendants were awarded the decision. Schneersohn had lectured regularly and loudly about the missing books; his Hasidim believed that God himself wished the whole of the library restored to the rightful hands of Agudas Chassidei Chabad.

“Gourary’s contention of familial rights was a poisonous thorn threatening the Rebbe and the well-being the community,” Mintz wrote. “Gourary’s actions could undermine Chabad and retard the spread of Yiddishkeit,” or the Jewish way of life. In this way, Judge Sifton was seen by Lubavitchers as presiding over not a secular problem but a divine struggle: the pretender versus the rightful king. A win for the plaintiffs would be proof that God was on the side of the Chabadniks.

The Agudas Chassidei Chabad case was relatively simple: a rebbe’s library traditionally belonged to his Hasidim and to the movement at large. Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn himself accepted this truth, the organization’s lawyers said. As evidence, the plaintiffs cited three letters: the 1939 note that signed over the collection to Agudas Chassidei Chabad; a missive to Rabbi Israel Jacobsen in Brooklyn, reiterating that the library belonged to the Chabad movement; and a request mailed in 1946 to the scholar Alexander Marx, requesting help in getting the Lubavitch library to Crown Heights.

“In order that the State Department should work energetically to locate these manuscripts and books in order to return them to their owners, the State Department needs to understand that these manuscripts and books are great religious treasures, a possession of the nation, which have historical and scientific value,” Schneersohn wrote. He continued:

Therefore, I turn to you with a great request, that as a renowned authority on the subject, you should please write a letter to the State Department to testify on the great value of these manuscripts and books for the Jewish people in general and particularly for the Jewish community of the United States to whom this great possession belongs.

The Gourarys acknowledged the veracity of the letter to Marx, but they claimed that the letter itself was a necessary lie on the part of the rebbe, who knew that his request would not be honored unless the retrieval of the library was seen as important to the whole of the Hasidic world. Sifton duly refuted this claim. “It does not make much sense that a man of the character of the sixth rebbe would, in the circumstances, mean something different than what he says, that library was to be delivered to the plaintiff for the benefit of the community.”

On January 6, 1987, Sifton rendered his verdict:

The conclusion is inescapable that the library was not held by the Sixth Rebbe at his death as his personal property, but had been delivered to plaintiff to be held in trust for the benefit of the religious community of Chabad Chasidism.

The defendants, Sifton wrote in his ruling, had no rights to the library. Gourary filed a cursory appeal, but the appeal was denied, and in 1987, Chabad headquarters dispatched an armored car to pick up the missing books from Gourary’s New Jersey home.

In Crown Heights, news of the ruling was greeted with a day-long celebration. The NYPD helped cordon off the cement in front of 770 Eastern Parkway, and jugs of vodka and soda were quaffed. Later in the day, the rebbe himself marched into the basement shul and joyously linked Sifton’s ruling to the 1798 release of Rabbi Schneur Zalman, the first rebbe of Chabad, who had been confined to a tsarist prison for allegedly supporting the Turks in their war against the Russians. On being freed from prison, Schneerson pointed out, Zalman had redoubled his outreach efforts—and now Schneerson, on the day of the emancipation of the Chabad library, would widen the reach of the Lubavitch movement.

Adapted from Among Righteous Men: A Tale of Vigilantes and Vindication in Hasidic Crown Heights by Matthew Shaer. Copyright © 2011 by Matthew Shaer. Used with permission of the publisher, John Wiley & Sons.

Matthew Shaer is the author of Among Righteous Men. His writing has appeared in Harper’s, Foreign Policy, and The Washington Post, among other publications. He is a regular contributor to New York magazine.

Today, in a huge victory for women’s health, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced that most employers will be required to cover contraception in their health plans, along with other preventive services, with no cost-sharing such as co-pays or deductibles.

Twenty-eight states already require employers to provide some coverage; but now, full coverage will be required in all.

Wowza! You know what that means – yup, Viagra no longer corners the coverage market. (Cuz, you know, Viagra has been fully covered for years. Good for men. Sucked for women who thought they should have equal rights or fair treatment or whatever.)

Besides that, it means that even most religiously-affiliated organizations have to comply. Obama decided to “maintain the narrow religious exemption that it initially proposed. Only houses of worship and other religious nonprofits that primarily employ and serve people of the same faith will be exempt.”

THIS IS A GOOD THING. Family planning is good for women, good for children. Good for their health, their finances, their families. It’s also a huge part, as Arons points out, of reducing unwanted pregnancies and the need for abortion.

Of course, just because the President approved it doesn’t mean it’s totally decided or certain or effective or anything. First of all, there’s a layover plan: “Religiously-affiliated employers who do not qualify for the exemption and are not currently offering contraceptive coverage may apply for transitional relief for a one-year period to give them time to determine how to comply with the rule.”

And secondly, don’t expect the religious right, Catholic Church or other anti-birth-control people to go down without a fight. When Catholic adoption agencies were told they had to let gay couples adopt, they opted to shut down instead. This is just one example of the ways in which the Catholic Church and other religious conservatives are trying to make claims of religious freedom in the service of discrimination. Just before the end of the year, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops stated that they were prepared to accuse the administration of religious discrimination if they didn’t drop this required-coverage regulation.

So the grand war for women’s equality is far from over, and this is just one more front in the battle of reproductive rights. But right now, I think I’ll take a minute to sit back and enjoy a moment to feel appreciated and, for even just this instance, equally represented.