Harvard's unorthdox liar
This fall the distinguished law professor Noah Feldman will be encsconsed on the banks of the Charles in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but he shares an unflattering personal attribute with New Republic Baghdad Diarist Scott Thomas Beauchamp. Professor Feldman led off his July 22 Times Magazine article "Orthodox paradox" with the following anecdote:
I went to my 10th high-school reunion, in the backyard of the one classmate whose parents had a pool. Lots of my classmates were there. Almost all were married, and many already had kids. This was not as unusual as it might seem, since I went to a yeshiva day school, and nearly everyone remained Orthodox. I brought my girlfriend. At the end, we all crowded into a big group photo, shot by the school photographer, who had taken our pictures from first grade through graduation. When the alumni newsletter came around a few months later, I happened to notice the photo. I looked, then looked again. My girlfriend and I were nowhere to be found.In short, according to Professor Feldman's clear implication, the yeshiva day school cropped Professor Feldman and his girlfriend out of the reunion photo because she is non-Jewish. Now we learn, courtesy of this Jewish Week article following up on Professor Feldman's Times account:I didn't want to seem paranoid, especially in front of my girlfriend, to whom I was by that time engaged. So I called my oldest school friend, who appeared in the photo, and asked for her explanation. ''You're kidding, right?'' she said. My fiancée was Korean-American. Her presence implied the prospect of something that from the standpoint of Orthodox Jewish law could not be recognized: marriage to someone who was not Jewish. That hint was reason enough to keep us out.
Noah Feldman, who ignited a firestorm of criticism last week with his pointed attack on Modern Orthodoxy in The New York Times Magazine, admitted this week that he learned before publication of his article that he in fact was not intentionally cropped out of his reunion photograph.The Jewish Week article elaborates on Professor Feldman's knowledge of the problem with his anecdote as of the time that his article was published:In the article, “Orthodox Paradox,” Feldman, a Harvard Law School professor, asserts that he was erased from a newsletter’s photograph by his former yeshiva, the Maimonides School in Brookline, Mass., because he was standing alongside his non-Jewish girlfriend. The reunion anecdote led off the story in a dramatic way and the image of Feldman and his wife allegedly being stricken from the photo appeared central to his feelings of being left out.
The photographer, Lenny Eisenberg, told The Jewish Week Monday that he had difficulty capturing as many as 60 reunion participants within a single frame. Eisenberg ended up taking several shots from one side, then the other, and several people on the far side — not just Feldman and his fiancée — happened to be out of the picture when it finally appeared in the newsletter.
Feldman now says of the photo, “In life you can never be sure, and the truth is I never knew any of this until I saw the contact sheets, about two weeks ago. All I knew when I had the experience described in the article is that [Eisenberg] took a bunch of group shots and then, sure enough, I wasn’t in” the newsletter photo.The Jewish Week article suggests that the Times is complicit in Professor Feldman's misrepresentation. Jewish Week contacted reunion photographer Lenny Eisenberg:“I felt that sense of being reminded of something I already knew,” that his future with a non-Jewish wife would meet limited acceptance.
Asked why he didn’t rewrite the story to reflect the newly discovered photo, Feldman responded: “When I first wrote it I was doing it from memory. When [the photographer] turned up the contact sheet there was no contradiction at all, as far as I could tell. They had several photos to choose from and they chose one that I wasn’t in. There’s no question that one could offer other explanations for what happened,” other than that it was intentional. “It’s not as if [the photo] was an outlying event. It fit right in with the other things [refusing to print his lifecycle notices]. This was a memoir of my experience.”
Eisenberg, who is now based in New York, said the Times “paid my way to go back to [his Boston studio] and find the negative. They wanted to run the [reunion] picture to illustrate” Feldman’s claim of being discriminated against because of his relationship with a non-Jew. Eisenberg returned with the photo but the Times opted not to publish it, he said, when it became obvious that there was no cropping but simply an overflowing of reunion participants beyond the camera’s range.Those into pattern recognition may conclude that the New Republic and the New York Times also share the attribute that Professor Feldman and Scott Thomas Beauchamp have in common.“It’s not like they could show that the only two people not in the picture were Noah and his girlfriend,” said Eisenberg.
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