Rabbi Art Green, prominent scholar of Hasidic Judaism, is barred from Hebrew College following sexual misconduct allegation
Rabbi Art Green, has been accused of
making unwanted sexual advances toward at least two people
(JTA) — The founding dean of
Hebrew College’s rabbinical school has been barred from its campus over
the fallout from an allegation of sexual misconduct about a faculty
member who was previously his student.
Rabbi Arthur Green, a prominent scholar of Jewish mysticism, retired
in May 2022 after two decades at the non-denominational Boston-area
seminary. In separate email announcements on the same day, both Green
and the college said a private matter concerning another member of the
college’s community contributed to the timing.
Last week, however, Hebrew College’s leadership informed the
community that the matter cited in 2022 involved “a report by a
community member of an unwanted and distressing sexual advance” by
Green, and that Green is no longer allowed to set foot on campus at all.
In an email to Green informing him of the ban last week, Hebrew
College’s leadership mentioned “conduct by you in a recent interaction
with an individual in Israel” that it called “concerningly similar” to
the previous report of sexual misconduct. It also accuses Green of
breaking a confidentiality agreement he made with the college.
In an interview with JTA, Green said he inappropriately kissed the
faculty member but rejected the school’s claims that a second
inappropriate incident had occurred or that he had violated his
agreement with the school. Green also said that following the initial
incident, he carried out several steps required by the school, but
stopped short of taking part in a public “ceremony” that he said had
been requested.
The ban, which was announced last week in an email to the Hebrew
College community hours after Green was informed about it, marks an
ignominious coda to a storied career for a rabbi who is widely
considered a leader in neo-Hasidism or Renewal Judaism. The author of
more than a dozen books, Green served as president of the
Reconstructionist Rabbinical College before founding Hebrew College’s
pioneering rabbinical seminary near Boston in 2003. As a teacher and
administrator there, Green oversaw the seminary as it grew and
contributed to a widespread disruption of the denominational rabbinical
school model.
“Rabbi Art Green is no longer employed at Hebrew College nor welcome
in the Hebrew College community because he engaged in sexual misconduct
that caused significant emotional harm to a member of our community and
was a serious violation of our institutional policies and our communal
values,” the college’s president, Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld, told the
Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
She added, “Rabbi Green’s conduct and communication since the
reported incident have not reflected a genuine understanding of the harm
he has caused, nor has he undertaken a good faith process of teshuva,”
Hebrew for repentance.
Green insists that he has not crossed a line since striking a
retirement agreement with Hebrew College. Anisfeld did not describe the
incident in Israel, or when it occurred. A source affiliated with Hebrew
College said the college did not take steps to verify the incident.
Green does acknowledge acting inappropriately with a male faculty
member who was previously his student, and expressed regret about it.
“I did something wrong,” he told JTA. “So I’m aware of that. I take responsibility for that.”
He also said he believed the incidents did not merit his ouster and
questioned whether the allegations were used as a pretense to eject him
from the school he shaped.
Green detailed the allegations against him and the events leading to
his being barred from campus in a draft email he shared with JTA on
Friday and said he intended to send to his contacts. He sent an
abbreviated version of the same email on Sunday afternoon.
In the email he sent, he wrote, “I am, and have always been, a
bisexual man” and had “made the difficult decision to keep this private
while still a rabbinical student nearly sixty years ago” in order to
build a career in the Jewish world.
In the draft email, he had written that he had been looking for companionship after the 2017 death of his wife of 49 years.
“My admittedly inappropriate loss of control was an expression of
affection by a lonely old guy, not an assertion of power to demand or
force sex,” Green wrote in the draft.
He also said that he believed he had been wronged by Hebrew College’s handling of the incident.
“I consider myself a victim of the extreme ‘Me-tooism’ that has come
to plague our society,” he wrote in the draft, referring to the movement
to hold perpetrators accountable for sexual misconduct. He added that
the faculty member “reported to Sharon he had ‘felt some sexual tension’
between us on prior occasions. I would just call it closeness.”
In the sent email, he acknowledged “another unwanted kiss by me” more
than 30 years ago with a different person who he said was not a
student.
“I take full responsibility for these encounters, my misjudgment of
the situations, and the unintentional harm I caused to people for whom I
cared,” he wrote. “I have communicated with them and sought to repair
the harm. I am committed to ongoing awareness about this matter and
exercising extreme caution in the future.”
Through representatives, the junior faculty member declined to speak
about his experience. (JTA has spoken to two people with whom he shared
his account.) He has retained attorneys, including Debra S. Katz, who is
known for representing alleged victims of sexual assault such as
Christine Blasey Ford, who accused now-Supreme Court Justice Brett
Kavanaugh of sexual assault.
The attorneys said in a statement that the faculty member had
“participated in a restorative justice process with Rabbi Art Green. As
part of that process, our client and Rabbi Green agreed they would alert
the other party before making any public statements. We are
disappointed that Rabbi Green has failed to adhere to that commitment,
forcing our client to hear through the grapevine of the narrative Rabbi
Green is advancing.”
The first public sign of allegations against Green came in May 2022,
when he and Anisfeld sent separate messages to the Hebrew College
community announcing his retirement.
In Green’s email, sent first, he mentioned “a private matter
concerning an incident that occurred some time ago, which involved an
act on my part that deeply impacted a colleague in our community.” He
added, “I feel badly about that situation, and that too has contributed
to my decision to retire this year.”
Anisfeld’s email, arriving a little less than an hour afterwards,
also referenced “a private personnel matter that deeply impacted another
valued member of our Hebrew College community” as part of a
“combination of factors” influencing the timing of Green’s retirement.
But the email also lauded Green and his contributions to Hebrew College.
“I know we will continue to be blessed by Art’s lasting influence as a
teacher, mentor, scholar, and friend,” she wrote.
Neither email provided any details about the “personnel matter”; both
emails said Green and another party were involved in a “restorative
process” with the community member and had requested privacy.
The emails were referring to the faculty member who had previously
been Green’s student. Green wrote in his email draft that he and the
faculty member were “quite close” from the faculty member’s student
days. He said he chose the student to be a research assistant on a large
project and characterized his relationship with the then-student as a
“growing friendship.”
In the fall of 2019, after the student had been ordained as a rabbi
and joined Hebrew College’s faculty, Green allegedly made the first
unwanted sexual advance, according to the two people with whom the
faculty member shared his account. Green and the faculty member were
among a group that had traveled to Uman, a city in Ukraine that is the
burial place of the turn-of-the-19th century Hasidic Rabbi Nachman of
Breslov, and is a major pilgrimage site for his followers. Green’s
“Tormented Master,” published in 1979, is considered a definitive
biography of Rabbi Nachman.
According to the friends with whom he shared his account, the faculty
member — once the group had arrived at their hotel — found himself in a
room alone with Green, who proceeded to make an unwanted sexual advance
on him. One of the friends, a former classmate, told JTA, “They were
there, and Art made a sexual advance toward my friend physically.”
The classmate added, “My friend stopped him and then has spent the
next many years of his life trying to put it back together again.”
Green denies that he crossed any boundaries in Uman and said any
accusation that he committed sexual misconduct on that trip is “absolute
nonsense.” He said people in the group were pairing off to share hotel
rooms, and that he had offered to split a room with the faculty member.
Once it became clear that there was no need for the two to share a room,
he claimed, they slept in separate places. He did not reference the
Uman incident in either version of his Sunday email.
“Since this person … is an out gay man, I thought other people might
be uncomfortable sharing a room with him,” Green told JTA. “So I said
that I would. It then turned out there was an extra room and we did not
share a room. That’s the end of the story. Nothing happened.”
The second incident occurred that December and, according to Green’s
email draft, is the allegation that prompted Hebrew College to initiate
disciplinary action against him.
Green acknowledged, in his email draft and to JTA, that he kissed the
faculty member “in a way I shouldn’t have” while the two were in
Green’s Boston-area home.
Green attributed his behavior to having smoked marijuana with the
faculty member. He said the faculty member had given him the drug, which
felt particularly strong.
He wrote in his email, “What began as an expression of genuine
affection was completely inappropriate and out-of-bounds to our
relationship. I accept responsibility for my behavior and regret it
deeply.”
But he added in the draft that had the faculty member felt any
discomfort, Green expected him to resolve the situation privately. “I
figured that if he was upset, he would let me know, but he didn’t,”
Green wrote in the email draft.
Subsequently, Hebrew College administrators informed Green that he had been accused of misconduct.
According to Green, the college and the faculty member’s attorneys,
the college attempted to resolve the issue through a private mediation
and reconciliation process between Green and the faculty member. In the
email she sent to the Hebrew College community this month, Anisfeld
described the allegation as an “unwanted and distressing sexual advance,
which was viewed as a breach of personal and professional boundaries.”
After learning of the alleged misconduct, Green said Anisfeld imposed
several penalties, including suspending him from faculty meetings,
asking him to engage in a guided conversation with the faculty member,
and requiring that he sign a statement saying he would not be alone in a
room with a student with the door closed. Green said he acceded to all
of the penalties.
Then, at the end of 2021, Green says Anisfeld called him into her
office and informed him that he was to retire in the coming year.
“I was, of course, close to retirement anyway, but I did not like
this feeling of being pushed out of a program that I had created,” Green
wrote in the draft. “Eventually, however, I agreed, frankly because
dealing with this matter had become so painful and distressing.”
To JTA, Green said he had questions about the motivations behind his
ouster. He said he had been distressed when a demand that he not attend
faculty meetings in December 2021 was extended to the winter term in
January 2022, when the Hebrew College community convened for a series of
conversations about whether to change a policy that barred students
with non-Jewish partners from attending the rabbinical school.
“I said to myself, ‘How far does this ‘He’s uncomfortable with my
presence’ go?’” Green told JTA. “But then I thought, well, Sharon and I
have different views on this intermarriage issue. She was very much for
the change in policy, and she knew I was quite strongly against it. So,
she might have found this was a convenient way to exclude me from that
conversation.”
He added, “I can’t prove that. But she told me no, I could not
participate in that Zoom conversation because [the faculty member] would
be unhappy with my presence. And I think that was bullshit, shall we
say.”
Anisfeld flatly rejected the allegation. “The intermarriage policy
process is completely irrelevant and unrelated to this matter,” she told
JTA by email. The school removed the ban on interfaith relationships in January 2023.
Green said Anisfeld and Hebrew College officials had escalated
penalties against him over time. He said he had been barred from the two
most recent Hebrew College graduations and had been kicked off a school
listserv.
He also said Anisfeld had asked him to participate in a “public ceremony of confession,” but he declined.
“My generation doesn’t play that game and doesn’t do that kind of thing,” he told JTA. “I just found it distasteful.”
In recent years, a reckoning over sexual misconduct allegations has
changed the norms and expectations for how institutions should respond
to them, with a broad move toward greater transparency and increased
understanding that misconduct can harm people beyond the direct victims.
In a 2018 eJewishPhilanthropy
essay, two advocates for “restorative justice” — a process for
institutions to address sexual harassment allegations — described a
“conference or circle with survivors, offenders, and their support
people” as one possible avenue.
“Ideally, the person who has been harmed asks for restorative justice
but, at times, offenders or people from the community inquire about
convening a process,” Alissa Ackerman and Guila Benchimol wrote in the
essay. “Inclusivity and collaboration are central because restorative
justice recognizes that people belong to communities and that the harm
they have caused or endured impacts wide networks.”
Anisfeld did not respond to a question about a public ceremony. In
their email announcing Green’s campus ban, Anisfeld and the current and
former chairs of Hebrew College’s Board of Trustees blamed his
unwillingness to complete all that was asked of him.
“As an institution committed to the value — and the possibility — of
teshuva, we have repeatedly asked Rabbi Green to engage in a communal
process regarding this matter,” they wrote. “Rabbi Green has declined,
and he therefore has been prohibited from visiting campus, or attending
Hebrew College programs and communal activities.”
Last week’s email from the college leadership raised questions among
some of those who received it. “One of the things that was curious to me
is: Why do we need to know this?” said Shaul Magid, a Jewish studies
professor at Dartmouth College who counts Green as a friend and teacher
and also said he holds Anisfeld in high regard. “All the letter can do
is really tarnish Art’s reputation at this point. He’s already retired.”
Green said in his email that relations between him and Hebrew College
had become strained in the years since the initial allegation against
him. “Although I agreed to all conditions as stipulated by Hebrew
College I was surprised to find additional demands and restrictions that
felt, and continue to feel, vindictive and unnecessary,” he wrote in
the Sunday email.
In the email, he also said Anisfeld sent the letter announcing his
ban following “an alleged additional incident that occurred recently in
Israel, thus supposedly justifying publicity on Hebrew College’s part.”
In the letter from the Hebrew College leadership to Green last week,
they wrote, “The College has also become aware of a report of conduct by
you in a recent interaction with an individual in Israel that, as
described to us, is concerningly similar to your admitted conduct during
the Incident.”
Anisfeld did not offer details about that incident. Green and the two
other men involved in what Green believes is the incident say it took
place on Purim last year and involved an encounter at Green’s home
following a party celebrating the holiday. Green said he was “very
drunk” when he and another man began “touching each other, holding each
other, not sexually, not genitally.” Both he and that man told JTA that
their encounter was consensual.
A third man in the room, who was then an acolyte of Green’s, became
alarmed. Through a representative, he told JTA that he felt violated
when Green “revealed his physical desire for me and my friend’s bodies.”
Previously, he had seen earlier requests for him to stay at Green’s
home “as service to a holy rabbi, a kabbalist and theologian.” He said
he soon left but experienced the night as “a soul-shattering crisis”
because of the nature of his relationship to Green.
“I served him as one would serve Rabbi Nachman or the Baal Shem Tov,”
two 18th-century Hasidic sages, the man said. He added, “Not once did
warning bells ring in my head.”
Green has written about rabbis who have been accused of abuse. In
2004, when Marc Gafni, a prominent rabbi in the Jewish Renewal movement,
was accused of a wide range of sexual offenses,
including having sex with underage girls, Green vociferously defended
him in a letter to the editor of the New York Jewish Week.
Praising Gafni as “a creative teacher of Torah,” he said that Gafni’s
misdeeds were long in the past and that Gafni had been “been
relentlessly persecuted for those deeds by a small band of fanatically
committed rodfim,” a term that in traditional Jewish texts refers to a
would-be murderer who himself must be murdered.
Two years later, multiple women in Israel said Gafni had lured them
into sexual relationships using his power as a spiritual leader. Green,
like other U.S. rabbis who had initially stood by Gafni, dropped his
defense.
“The stories were from long ago, and he had rejected and outgrown that side of himself,” Green told the Forward at the time. “These are now new cases and new investigations.”
Green had also warned about the dangers inherent in relationships between spiritual teachers and students. In a 2010 book outlining neo-Hasidic theology
by reinterpreting traditional Jewish edicts, including the Seventh
Commandment prohibiting adultery, Green wrote that spiritual teachers
“always need to be aware of human weakness, their own before that of all
others.”
The book included a reminder for teachers: “Sexual energies are
always there when we flesh-and-blood humans interact with one another,
anywhere this side of Eden,” he wrote. “Check yourself always. Be
aware; know your boundaries. Precisely because good teaching is an act
of love, the teacher is always in danger.”
He concluded, “Make sure that all your giving is for the sake of
those who seek to receive it, not just fulfilling your own unspoken
needs, sexual and other.”
