Pope - Year 2015 (l'misparam) "GOD WEEPS" - UOJ (original post) Year 2006 - "The Heavens finally broke down and cried with the victims! But not the gedolim...they were at dinners!"

PHILADELPHIA — Pope Francis apologized to victims of clergy sexual abuse in a private meeting on Sunday, and called himself “overwhelmed by the shame,” pledging that “every one responsible will be held accountable.”

“I regret this profoundly,” he said, speaking to bishops and seminarians on the last day of his trip to the United States. “God weeps!”

The pope said survivors of abuse by priests “have become true heralds of hope and ministers of mercy. Humbly, we owe each of them and their families our gratitude for their immense courage for making the light of Christ shine over the evil” of child sex abuse by priests, according to an early translation.

The pope also told them, “I am profoundly sorry that your innocence was violated by those who you trusted,” according to a transcript of his remarks released by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. “The betrayal was a terrible violation of human dignity.” He said he regretted that some bishops failed to protect children, and found it “disturbing” that some bishops themselves were abusers.

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"The Heavens finally broke down and cried with the victims! But not the gedolim...they were at dinners!"

 READ IT ALL:

 http://theunorthodoxjew.blogspot.com/2007/12/lets-change-subject.html 

All Ashkenazi Jewish women should be tested, because we have it at least 10 times the rate of the rest of the population: Up to one in 400 women is BRCA-positive, as opposed to one in 40 Ashkenazi Jews...

The Breast Cancer Gene and Me

I DID not know I have the BRCA mutation. I did not know I would likely get breast cancer when I was still young, when the disease is a wild animal. I caught it fast and I acted fast, but I must have looked away: By the time of my double mastectomy, the cancer had spread to five lymph nodes.

I had eight rounds of the strongest chemotherapy there is for breast cancer. Two months later, my body still tingles from the blast. My insides are shimmering. I am reconfigured.

I have six weeks of daily radiation coming up. I have scans all the time. I have waiting rooms in my future, full of Golf Digest and Time from four months ago and that same issue of W that’s always there. I have waiting ahead. If you don’t like waiting, cancer is not for you.

I could have avoided all this if I had been tested for the BRCA mutation. All Ashkenazi Jewish women should be tested, because we have it at least 10 times the rate of the rest of the population: Up to one in 400 women is BRCA-positive, as opposed to one in 40 Ashkenazi Jews.

It seems I am the designated driver at my Seder table.

I could have had a mastectomy with reconstruction and skipped the part where I got cancer. I feel like the biggest idiot for not doing so.

The statistics vary wildly, but they are scary at the low end: According to a 2012 article in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, the lifetime breast cancer risk for BRCA carriers is between 56 and 84 percent. From where I am, if you are BRCA-positive, you get breast cancer — because, voilà.

All I know is I have the BRCA mutation most unexpectedly, and, still in my 40s, I had the kind of cancer that meant three surgeries in six months.

I did not know I was a carrier because I do not fall within testing parameters. Most insurance companies cover testing specifically for Ashkenazi Jewish women only once we present with breast cancer. Before that doomed moment, testing is only for women who have a family history of BRCA or who have had breast cancer at a young age, or who have close relatives with the disease.

But that is not how mutations operate. They are sneaky.

I could not have guessed I am BRCA-positive. My mother has not had breast cancer, nor has her sister, nor did her mother. My first cousin — my mother’s sister’s daughter — did have breast cancer at the same age as I did, but not as a result of BRCA.

I did not think of my father in this situation, or perhaps I did not think of my father at all, as I last saw him in 2001. At the time he told me to beware of gum disease, and maybe something else. But I know his mother lived to be an old woman, and she did not die of breast or any other cancer, and my father made no mention of anything going wrong with his sister.

A 2009 Genetics in Medicine study of Ashkenazi women with breast cancer in New York found that about 10 percent carried the BRCA gene — but of these, only 50 percent “had any family history of breast cancer among the first or the second degree relatives.”

I assume that the BRCA mutation comes from my father’s father, and after a couple of generations of silence, it expressed itself through me. This happens frequently. Which is why insurers should cover BRCA testing for all Ashkenazi Jewish women. Protocols for health care professionals must be amended.

“A large percentage of women who have the gene would not have been eligible to be tested,” said Elisa Port, chief of breast surgery at Mount Sinai Medical Center, co-director of the Dubin Breast Center and author of “The New Generation Breast Cancer Book.”

“Anyone can be tested if you are willing to pay for it,” she told me. “For most insurance companies, you cannot get tested just on the basis of being an Ashkenazi Jew. Now the push is toward testing Ashkenazi Jews, because the hit rate is above 2 percent.”

The science is ahead of policy: A University of California, Los Angeles, study published this month found that for every 10,000 Ashkenazi Jewish women tested, 62 breast cancers are averted. In Dr. Port’s view, all women of Ashkenazi Jewish descent should get tested, because “every BRCA patient that develops breast cancer is a failure of prevention.”

According to Force, an advocacy group concerned with hereditary breast and ovarian cancers, an estimated 90 percent of BRCA carriers do not know that they are. That means untold thousands of people in the United States don’t realize they are likely to get a bad case of breast cancer.

The BRCA mutation entered the Jewish community in Poland some 500 years ago, and because the Jews of Eastern Europe lived in isolated communities, they incubated it among themselves. Entire families of women were wiped out by breast cancer, and no one knew why as they buried their dead.

Even though the 14 million Jews of the world today have scattered and intermarried, the BRCA mutation still disproportionately affects Ashkenazi Jews.

Jewish organizations have done too little about BRCA. Hadassah, one of the largest and oldest Jewish women’s groups, has supported research on BRCA, but so much for that. In April, its president, Marcie Natan, released a statement titled “Testing Is Not for Everyone.”

“The test sounds simple enough,” she said, “but understanding what to do with the results can be a complicated, gut-wrenching journey.” Yes, it can. But not nearly so much as cancer.

As Dr. Port said on National Public Radio this week, however early a BRCA-related breast cancer is detected, it is “associated with the risk of death.”

If you have the BRCA mutation, you want to know.

I wish I had done what I did anyway, except without the whole cancer part. I am not sure why anyone with the BRCA mutation would not opt for a prophylactic mastectomy.

Breast cancer is considered especially sensitive because it involves breasts, which are special. I loved my breasts: I posed topless on the cover of my book “Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women,” so I must have. But I love the new breasts I have now more. I had nipple-preserving surgery, which is often a possibility. My new breasts are more real than real.

I recovered from drug addiction in 1998, and that will teach you to take any disaster as a day in the life. But now I live in the atmosphere of cancer.

According to the PET scan, I am cancer free. I am cured. But cancer plays hide and seek in wunderkind ways. It is the sparkle of dirt at the bottom of the dustbin that never gets tossed.

But I live in an age of miracles and wonders, when they cure cancer with viruses. If I ever meet cancer again, I will figure it out. You see, I am very Jewish, which is to say, I am Jewish: I am undefeated by the worst.

But I would have preferred to skip this. That would have been much better.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/27/opinion/sunday/elizabeth-wurtzel-the-breast-cancer-gene-and-me.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=opinion-c-col-right-region&region=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region

"The idea that you have to share the identity with the subject of your art is a primitive one, particularly in music"....

How an Anti-Semitic, Gentile Composer, Created 'Kol Nidre' and 'Moses'

Any performance, much less an American one, of Max Bruch’s oratorio “Moses” from 1895 is a rarity. Yet this is a fabulous and important piece of music. First, however, one fact that no Jew interested in classical music ever seems to want to believe must be mentioned: Bruch was not Jewish.

He may have written the iconic music for “Kol Nidrei” and it may be his most famous work, but his Protestant credentials would have more than satisfied the Nazis. More surprising, Bruch also was not particularly philo-Semitic, unlike his friend Johannes Brahms. He was typical in his everyday anti-Semitism, and even a bit nastier than some.

So the question arises: What was he doing writing “Kol Nidrei” and a massive oratorio on a subject central to Jewish religion and history? Bruch’s oratorio, the story of Moses, begins at Mt. Sinai and ends with Moses’ death. It is about the birth of the Jewish nation and the search for its home.

By the time Bruch got around to writing this oratorio in the 1890s, the whole notion of a work for chorus and orchestra based on a biblical theme was considered old fashioned. There had been all too many failed attempts at setting the Moses story to music. A contemporary of Felix Mendelssohn, A.B. Marx — a music theorist and himself a Jew— wrote a massive oratorio on the subject that was a colossal failure and the source of a personal breach between Marx and Mendelssohn. The only lasting biblical oratorio written in the 19th century in German-speaking Europe was Mendelssohn’s own “Elijah.”

The easiest way to think about a non-Jew setting “Moses” to music is to remember that George Gershwin, the composer of “Porgy and Bess,” was, after all, not black. The expectation that Bruch must have been Jewish in order to write this oratorio or “Kol Nidrei” derives from a distorted perception of the place of Jews in late 19th- and early 20th-century Germany. Bruch’s choice of Jewish subjects and even Jewish materials was a reflection of the extent to which Jewish assimilation into Germany was successful, our retrospective post-Holocaust history notwithstanding.

Jews were a crucial part of German culture. They were eager participants in amateur musical societies, and they represented a disproportionate share of the audience for concerts. The accommodation that assimilation represents is no different from the accommodation and symbiosis that blacks in America have lived with for more than a century. It demands that the object of prejudice feel at home despite daily encounters with racism.

The persistence of racism and prejudice have not gotten in the way of African-American writers, painters and musicians succeeding and their “white” counterparts freely availing themselves of the materials of African-American culture. So it was in the Germany of the 1890s with Jews.

Bruch was known as a major defender of a musical aesthetic and tradition that was explicitly critical of Richard Wagner and the rage for all things Wagnerian that had come to dominate the musical culture of the 1890s. Bruch allied himself with Johannes Brahms and Brahms’s close friend, the Jewish-born violinist Joseph Joachim, who was a colleague of Bruch in Berlin.

These composers and musicians believed in the continuing validity of traditional genres such as the symphony, sonata, quartet and oratorio, and classical norms with regards to musical composition. They rejected what they saw as the subordination of music to verbal narration in the Wagnerian music-drama. They held fast to the traditions of Viennese musical classicism and the early romanticism of Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann.

These staunch anti-Wagnerian beliefs in matters of music coincided with skepticism about the politics associated with Wagner and his followers. Bruch and Brahms were far more liberal, and admired the English political system. To Bruch, the promise of German unification had been thwarted. Under Otto von Bismarck, it had not led to a constitutional monarchy in the English style. Among the “national liberals” in the decades after 1871, the national part overwhelmed the liberal part, and the national became tied to the autocratic and defined in terms of racial superiority and cultural chauvinism.

For so-called musical conservatives like Bruch and Brahms, patriotism and even the deep conviction that German musical tradition was the greatest of all did not lead them to abandon a fundamentally tolerant and cosmopolitan attitude that was resistant to the race-based nationalism propagated by Wagner.

One can speculate that “Moses” is about charismatic leadership per se and therefore provides a veiled metaphor for the career of Bismarck. Bismarck, whose iron grip and will helped forge Imperial Germany, had been dismissed in 1890. By the mid-’90s, Bismarck had become a focal point of criticism against what were blind and stupid policies of Emperor Wilhelm II, who fired him. What made Moses a wonderful subject in the ’90s was that German citizens had come to depend on larger than life leadership and believe less in the processes of politics. Their faith in the charisma of one man to guide the state would lead to disastrous consequences.

The music of Bruch’s “Moses” is therefore organized in an explicitly anti-Wagnerian and traditional manner. There is not one continuous musical fabric but a sequence of set numbers. In Bruch’s neo-Handelian emulation of “Israel in Egypt,” to which “Moses” might be regarded as a latter-day sequel, there is nevertheless an imposing sense of drama that was unwittingly influenced by Wagner. For the audiences of the 1890s, listening to “Moses” made them think of Wotan, and hearing Aaron, they could not but compare that tenor role to Siegmund or Siegfried.

By the 1890s, Bruch had already written many fine oratorios. “Moses” was one of his last. His first, a setting of Homer’s “Odyssey,” was a great success. It used Greek myth to celebrate the unification of Germany in 1871. Odysseus’s homecoming to Penelope became a metaphor for German unification. A quarter century later, Bruch used a biblical framework to express the mixture of sadness and triumph that accompanied the 25 years of success for the empire. In “Moses,” the years in the desert, the residues of slavery, the uncertainty about the future, and the protagonists, including the ever-present chorus representing the people of Israel, reveal the full range of human emotion from despair to triumph. Bruch’s “Moses” may be an oratorio, but it has more than its share of opera in it. It follows a model clearly articulated by Mendelssohn in “Elijah.” Both composers believed that music, when combined with a great text and story, did not require the apparatus of the theater. It did not require a change in musical procedure so that it could narrate and be self-consciously dramatic in the style of Wagner. Yet Bruch’s “Moses” is a true drama, and a poignant and moving one at that. It marshals all the craftsmanship of musical art accumulated by the 19th century in a manner that pays just homage to precedent.

Will Bruch’s “Moses” ever rival “Messiah” in popularity? No. But it deserves a regular place in the all too narrow repertoire of professional and amateur choruses. Choral societies would do well to look into Bruch’s oratorios, not only “Moses,” for a welcome respite from the routine defined by the endless repetition of a few standard works.

And Jews, no matter their various religious persuasions, should come to “Moses” with the same bemused tolerance with which our fellow African-American citizens purchase tickets to “Porgy and Bess.” For all the revisionist criticism Gershwin’s opera has suffered for its lack of authenticity, it is a great piece of music, and a tribute to the human imagination. The idea that you have to share the identity with the subject of your art is a primitive one, particularly in music. The music of Aaron Copland, a gay Brooklyn-born Jew, has become the voice of a muscular patriotism and the landscape of Appalachia and the American West. In Bruch’s score, more than a little of what makes the biblical figure of Moses so mesmerizing, particularly to Jews, comes to life through music. So we might as well forgive him for being a prejudiced non-Jew; he nonetheless clothed the essential narrative of the Jewish nation in music of eloquence, drama and beauty.

Leon Botstein is the president of Bard College and the music director and principal conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra for whom he is conducting Max Bruch’s ‘Moses’ at Carnegie Hall on March 27 at 8:00 PM.

Read more: http://forward.com/culture/194853/how-an-anti-semitic-composer-created-kol-nidre-and/#ixzz3mhNIDpb4

"The two other works of Bruch which are still widely played were also written for solo string instrument with orchestra: the Scottish Fantasy for violin and orchestra, which includes an arrangement of the tune "Hey Tuttie Tatie", best known for its use in the song "Scots Wha Hae" by Robert Burns; and the Kol Nidrei, Op. 47, for cello and orchestra (subtitled "Adagio on Hebrew Melodies for Violoncello and Orchestra"), which starts and ends with the solo cello's setting of the Kol Nidre ("All Vows ... ") incantation which begins the Jewish (Ashkenazic) Yom Kippur service. This work may well have inspired Ernest Bloch's Schelomo (subtitled "Hebrew Rhapsody") of 1916, an even more passionate and extended one-movement composition, also with a Jewish subject and also for solo cello and orchestra.

The success of Kol Nidrei led to the assumption by many that Bruch himself was of Jewish ancestry — indeed, as long as the National Socialist Party was in power (1933-1945) his music was banned because he was considered a possible Jew for having written music with an openly Jewish theme. As a result, his music was largely forgotten in German-speaking countries. There is no evidence, however, that Bruch was of Jewish origin. As far as can be ascertained, none of his ancestors were Jews. Bruch himself was given the middle name Christian^[1]:15 and was raised Protestant.<sup>[1]:109"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Bruch</sup>

The Great Pervert Race - Jonathan Rosenblatt, Rabbi or Congregation Who Stayed?... There was embarrassment when The New York Times at the end of May made public the rabbi’s longtime habit of inviting teenage boys, and later young men, to shower and join him in the sauna for private talks after playing racquetball...

In Riverdale, Split Deepens Over Rabbi 

 

Jonathan Rosenblatt

On High Holy Days, hundreds choose to pray elsewhere as Rabbi Rosenblatt presides at RJC.

Ludwig “Lou” Bravmann, a prime force behind the direction and financial stability of the Riverdale Jewish Center for decades, says that lately he wakes up in the middle of the night “feeling terrible, depressed — I’ve never felt this bad.”

At 90, after more than 45 years of daily prayer attendance and lay leadership at the 600-family Modern Orthodox synagogue, he has resigned from the board of the congregation and is praying on the High Holy Days at a newly formed service a few blocks away.

The service, now known as The Riverdale Minyan and made up of more than 100 families, was created this summer as a response to widespread dissatisfaction among some members of RJC over decisions made in the last three months by the rabbi, Jonathan Rosenblatt, and its lay leadership.

On Rosh HaShanah, making the trek with a wheelchair and walker, Bravmann was one of an estimated 240 adults, almost all RJC congregants, and 40 children, who prayed at an Orthodox service in a room rented in a nearby Reform temple. A similar service was scheduled for Yom Kippur, and efforts are under way to find a more permanent space for the group to use for Shabbat, and perhaps daily, services — a potentially stunning blow to the makeup and sustainability of the RJC, which was founded more than 60 years ago.

The source of disappointment and distress for Bravmann, and the reason he and the others — including Jack Bendheim and two other former presidents of the congregation and a former assistant rabbi — came together to pray is the action centering around Rabbi Rosenblatt, the RJC’s long-admired spiritual leader of three decades.

There was embarrassment when The New York Times at the end of May made public the rabbi’s longtime habit of inviting teenage boys, and later young men, to shower and join him in the sauna for private talks after playing racquetball. Since then the congregation has gone through a series of tactical shifts over how to respond to media reports. It has struggled with whether to praise or criticize the whistleblower who publicly called out the rabbi’s unusual behavior, and it was conflicted about whom to trust and whom to blame when the lay leadership of the congregation shifted from calling for the rabbi to step down to supporting his commitment to continue in his pulpit.

An impetus for the new minyan, one organizer explained, was “concern that the noise around the rabbi was having a negative effect on new families with young children moving into Riverdale, which over time could have serious consequences” for the congregation and SAR, the Modern Orthodox community day school. (An estimated 30 percent of its student body comes from RJC families.)

While an apparent majority of RJC members remains loyal to the rabbi and insists the criticism has been overblown, others are frustrated by what they consider to be a lack of transparency as key decisions about the rabbi’s status were apparently made by a handful of leaders in private.
Most poignant, perhaps, are those who say they have lost their faith in the rabbi, shaken that he is holding on to his position even as the flock he has led and tended to is divided over his presence. Even stalwart supporters had hoped Rabbi Rosenblatt, seeing the empty pews and growing dissension, would step down from his pulpit for the good of the congregation. But that was not to be.

The High Holy Day season, a time designated for seeking — and granting — forgiveness, is bringing out strong emotions this year for many longtime congregants, including Lou Bravmann.

“I suggested his name to the selection committee chairman” three decades ago, Bravmann said of Rabbi Rosenblatt (no relation to this writer) in a conversation we had the other day. “I had good contact with him over the years. But I think that the rabbi, whether he did anything [inappropriate] or not, should step down from the pulpit.

“The congregation and its leadership is guilty, I among them, for not taking care of this” years ago, he continued.

“We should have seen … listened to what was going on. I spoke to the rabbi briefly in 1996. I said I’ve heard rumors and I suggested that he get some help. I didn’t hear about it again for years, when I heard he was going to the sauna with the rabbinic interns,” an issue that came to light in the last several years.
Rabbi Rosenblatt, who declined to comment for this article, addressed the issue publicly in late June when he told a packed audience at RJC that he felt “fragile and embarrassed” for the “shame” he has brought his family and community. He described his behavior with boys and young men as “lapses of judgment” and said, “That I have been a source of desecration of the Divine Name and of a noble calling brings me nearly to despair.”

He concluded his 20-minute address by saying, “I still love being a rabbi. I still believe I have contributions to make. In short, with God’s grace, I am ready to serve Him, and with yours, I am ready to continue to serve Him here.”

Most of those in the audience stood and applauded at the conclusion of the rabbi’s talk. But the situation soured as attention focused on the actions — or inaction — of the congregational board, which initially voted 34-8 to seek an amicable resolution with the rabbi. It was widely presumed that the congregation would buy out the rabbi’s contract, which extends through August 2018. But when it became clear that Rabbi Rosenblatt intended to stay, and it was learned that, according to New York State law, a church or synagogue cannot terminate a religious leader in mid-contract without a full vote of the membership, RJC’s top lay leaders opted not to risk splitting the congregation over such a vote.

“It would likely further inflame the community and risk permanent fracture,” RJC’s president, Samson Fine, told me on Monday. He said there was no move among the membership for a congregational vote.
There was no board vote, either. And more than a dozen board members resigned their posts (though they retained their synagogue membership), complaining that the decision over the rabbi’s status had been made without the full board’s input.

“This summer was a time of high emotion,” Fine said, “and some of the extreme and polarizing views expressed hampered our efforts to have constructive dialogue with the community and with the rabbi.” For the most part, he added, life goes on as usual at RJC. He said that contrary to some rumors and reports, “the shul’s finances are satisfactory to maintain our current level of activities. We are on sound financial footing.” He pointed out that only a handful of members have resigned and that regular congregants and those who now attend The Riverdale Minyan celebrated a bar mitzvah together at RJC last Shabbat, and there was no discernible tension.

Still, the reverberations from the reports of Rabbi Rosenblatt’s activity with young men and his insistence on keeping his pulpit are likely to continue for some time. The RJC is doing its best to look forward, and not dwell on the embarrassing episode. The Riverdale Minyan families hope to stay together and expand their numbers in a new, if temporary, home. And local rabbis and school administrators who have long welcomed Rabbi Rosenblatt to their pulpits and classrooms no doubt are reviewing their policies toward inviting him. In this High Holy Day season is all forgiven, if not forgotten, or will there be some tangible consequences for the rabbi’s admitted “desecration of the Divine Name?”

Meanwhile, Lou Bravmann is saddened by the turn of events and disappointed with Rabbi Rosenblatt’s decision to stay put. “What he is doing now,” he said, “is the worst he could do for his legacy.”

Gary@jewishweek.org

Read more at http://www.thejewishweek.com/editorial-opinion/gary-rosenblatt/riverdale-split-deepens-over-rabbi#YiUe8WQW4HufqkyU.99

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But of the 14 preventable diseases that young children are vaccinated against, Dr. Offit said, “the only one you could reasonably say does not kill is mumps.” And mumps can cause permanent deafness and sterility in men after puberty, he said. The other 13 diseases can be deadly. “Tetanus kills, rubella kills unborn children, measles kills, hepatitis B virus kills,” Dr. Offit said....

Vaccine Issue Arises at Republican Debate, to Doctors’ Dismay

Donald J. Trump at the Republican debate on Wednesday night. Mr. Trump claimed that vaccines could be linked to autism, a contention disputed by scientists

When Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist in Tennessee, flicked on the television last night to catch the end of the Republican debate, he watched a scene that felt unsettlingly familiar: A candidate was talking about vaccines and autism.

Dr. Schaffner has spent much of his career trying to debunk the contention that childhood shots can cause serious medical conditions, but he had hoped that national soul-searching this year after an outbreak of measles at Disneyland had moved the country past some of these old notions.

“I think it’s sad,” said Dr. Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University, who said he cringed through the autism exchange at the end of the debate. “I would have hoped, since two of the discussants were physicians, that there would have been a ringing discussion about safety and value of vaccines, and an affirmation of the schedule set out by the American Academy of Pediatrics.”

Continue reading the main story

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  Political Science: One Statement from Bachmann, Two Steps Back for HPV VaccineSEPT. 19, 2011

For infectious disease doctors around the country watching the exchange, it felt a little bit like “Groundhog Day.” In 2011, during the last election cycle, Michele Bachmann, at the time a leading Republican candidate, called the vaccine to prevent cervical cancer “dangerous,” setting off a controversy that damaged the image of vaccines and set back doctors working to promote them as safe.

Opponents of a mandatory vaccination bill in California outside the state capitol in June. 

This time, it was Donald J. Trump who vigorously asserted a connection between vaccines and autism, telling an emotional story of an employee whose “beautiful” baby fell ill with a fever after having a vaccine and, he said, became autistic. While the two candidates who are doctors — Rand Paul, an ophthalmologist, and Ben Carson, a retired neurosurgeon — said that childhood vaccines were safe and important, even they shied away from the strict schedule set out by the medical profession.

“We have extremely well-documented proof that there’s no autism associated with vaccination, but it is true that we are probably giving way too many in too short a period of time,” Mr. Carson said. “I think a lot of pediatricians now recognize that and are cutting down on the number and the proximity in which those are done.”

Mr. Paul agreed. “One of the greatest medical discoveries of all time were vaccines,” he said. “I’m for vaccines, but I’m also for freedom. Even if the science doesn’t say bunching them up is a problem, I ought to be able to spread my vaccines out a little bit, at the very least.”

Doctors watching the debate were despairing.

“I was thinking: There’s a reason why we have a schedule,” said Dr. Saad Omer, an infectious diseases expert at Emory University in Georgia. He watched the beginning of the debate, then stopped to do work, but ran back in to turn it on again when some vaccine expert friends started posting on Facebook about the back-and-forth on the stage.

Camero Fierro, 1, received the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella at a doctor's office in California  in January.

“I had hoped was there would have been a stronger endorsement of the schedule,” he said. “It’s not one person’s opinion. It’s not even just the government’s opinion. It’s based on very broad scientific advice.”

Still, the endorsement by Mr. Paul and Mr. Carson of delaying vaccines is in keeping with what many pediatricians and family physicians reluctantly do behind closed doors. If parents demand an alternative schedule, physicians often agree to postpone one or more vaccinations. A recent survey of a nationally representative sample of 534 primary care doctors found that a third said they “often” or “always” allowed parents to delay vaccinations or space them out.

The downside is that this leaves children vulnerable to potentially fatal infections like measles and whooping cough.

“When you delay vaccines, you increase the period of time in which you are susceptible to those diseases,” said Dr. Paul A. Offit, a pediatrician specializing in infectious diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “We are seeing the effects of that. The outbreak we saw this year in Southern California was among parents who had chosen to delay or withheld vaccines for their children.”

In a bit of political jockeying, Mr. Carson suggested at the debate that only vaccines that “prevent death or crippling” were very important. “There are a multitude of vaccines which probably don’t fit in that category, and there should be some discretion in those cases,” he said.

But of the 14 preventable diseases that young children are vaccinated against, Dr. Offit said, “the only one you could reasonably say does not kill is mumps.” And mumps can cause permanent deafness and sterility in men after puberty, he said. The other 13 diseases can be deadly. “Tetanus kills, rubella kills unborn children, measles kills, hepatitis B virus kills,” Dr. Offit said.

He lamented, “Why is it that everyone on that stage got vaccines wrong last night?”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/18/health/republican-presidential-debate-vaccines.html?hpw&rref=health&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well

When a faith community follows a path that endangers children, those children have few if any defenses. Only other adults can help them....

The Plight of Children at Risk in the Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Communities and the Failure of Government and Pandering Politicians to Protect Them

 

Children in the United States are routinely sacrificed on the pyre of their parents’ faith by pandering politicians without a moral compass. Children don’t vote but insular religious communities often vote as a bloc mandated by the male officials at the top, and that fact is not lost on power-hungry politicians like those in Utah who let the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS) patriarchs marry off girls and abandon boys so that the men will have a better place in heaven. The same relationship between elected officials and the ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities exists: there are known risks to children but these politicians look the other way as they are feted by the rabbis and a community that keeps children at risk.

It is the time of year when Jews observe a series of important religious holidays beginning with Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. I submit this column as a subject to be pondered in the midst of celebration and reflection.

As with the FLDS, the ultra-Orthodox communities have put children at risk due to inadequate medical treatment, educational neglect, and mostly undeterred child sex abuse. In an interesting twist, the gender most severely affected in this community is male. Boys are at risk of herpes infection from metzitzah b’peh, or MBP and boys are less educated than girls because their education is focused on the Torah rather than secular subjects. Both, however, are at risk of sexual abuse. As in every community, that risk is significantly higher for the girls than the boys. Therefore, boys and girls in this community need prompt attention from the authorities, and politicians pandering for bloc votes need a conscience check.

MBP Rule Repeal: Leaving Mohels to Use Oral Suction Following Circumcision
Last year, I wrote here about the risk posed to male infants in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community who are subjected to the religious practice of MBP: the practice of following circumcision by a mohel with the mohel engaging in oral suction on the wound. The practice creates a foreseeable risk that the infant will contract herpes, which at such a tender age can be deadly or cause permanent disability. At the time, the New York Health Department had issued the weakest of prevention strategies by requiring mohels to produce an informed consent form to the parents as a prerequisite to doing the procedure. It was a typical political grandstand by which Mayor Bloomberg and his Health Department were saying they intended to protect these children at risk while they created an unenforceable and toothless policy they knew the community would ignore.

In fact, some in the community did pay attention and filed a lawsuit alleging a violation of religious liberty. The Second Circuit mistakenly agreed in Central Rabbinical Congress v. New York City Dept of Health & Mental Hygiene, because the policy was specific to one faith. So the Department went back to the drawing board for the protection of this voting bloc and not infants, and simply repealed the MBP informed consent rule.

There is no reason to expect the Health Department to do anything else for these at-risk infants. They have sailed to the bottom of the slippery slope of unaccountability. Therefore, prevention seems out of the question.

The only hope for these children is if doctors report such infections in young infants recently circumcised to the authorities and then the authorities choose to investigate and prosecute when a child dies or is permanently disabled. Former Brooklyn D.A. Charles Hynes made noise about such an investigation but he never pursued it, which brings his treatment of this issue into line with his studious refusal to prosecute child sex abuse perpetrators in the community. The other possibility is a serious public information campaign, but that is hampered by the next problem.

Educational Neglect: Failure to Teach English and Other Secular Subjects
The reporter who deserves a Pulitzer Prize for uncovering risks to children in the ultra-Orthodox communities, Hella Winston, recently released her in-depth reportage on the failure of the ultra-Orthodox to educate their children in secular subjects, including English. She tells the story of boys who can’t speak English, do simple math, or know any history or science, because they spend the vast majority of their school day studying Torah, or religious texts, instead of even the basics in secular subjects.

The result is that children are deeply disabled from being able to function in the larger community, and have virtually no chance of ever making their own decisions regarding faith or community.

The failure of most New York and New Jersey officials to ensure that these children are educated is attributable in part to the wrongheaded free exercise decision at the US Supreme Court, Wisconsin v. Yoder. As I have discussed in God vs. the Gavel: The Perils of Extreme Religious Liberty and elsewhere, this is the only decision in which the Supreme Court applied strict scrutiny to a neutral and generally applicable law (Wisconsin’s compulsory education law).

The result is that the Supreme Court cleared the Amish to take their children out of school after eighth grade and to move them into an agrarian life. The decision is based on unrealistic and foolish assumptions about the unfailing goodness of the Amish (which is not to criticize the Amish per se but rather to point out they are human). Unfortunately, all religious parents gained a toehold on refusals to adequately educate and a route to incapacitating their children. Children in these communities are virtually walled off from the outside world, and the ones who do choose to leave suffer dearly for their lack of education.

Yoder, however, does not stand for the proposition that children have no rights. Prince v. Massachusetts before it stated baldly that parents may not make “martyrs” of their children. Elected officials have an obligation to ensure that they do not.

Much of the educational neglect in this community has occurred with federal, state, and local officials fully aware of what is happening. Finally, New York City is looking into the issue. For the sake of the children and our future as a society, may New York do significantly more for these children than it has on the MBP issue.

Sex Abuse: Weak District Attorneys Put Children at Risk
Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes was widely criticized for his failure to prosecute child sex abusers in the ultra-Orthodox communities for political reasons. It was a primary reason he lost to Kenneth Thompson, the current Brooklyn D.A. Last month, 107 rabbis signed a public statement agreeing to report child sex abuse directly to the authorities, with a number from the community, but the list is missing the heavy-hitter leaders in this world.

Agudath Israel, however, is notably silent on the issue. The community also has engaged in extreme practices to persuade those that do come forward to be quiet as I discuss here. Thompson has cut some sweetheart deals with defendants from the community that led many who had championed his cause to wonder if he will make a difference for the children being sexually abused in the faith, for good reason.

For example, witness-tampering is usually deeply disfavored by prosecutors, and Thompson did initiate an investigation into it in the Lebovits sex abuse trial in April 2015. Yet, the investigation was closed without prosecution. The victims of child sex abuse in this community desperately need a champion in law enforcement.

When a faith community follows a path that endangers children, those children have few if any defenses. Only other adults can help them. When their faith-filled parents can or will not protect them, in the United States they become the responsibility of the government and elected officials. When the government and vote-pandering politicians turn the other way, these children suffer.

The time has come to rip off the rose-colored glasses and to treat children in every setting as humans with rights—even if religion is in the picture. Their suffering and disabilities are our problem.

Marci A. Hamilton is the Paul R. Verkuil Chair in Public Law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University, and the author of God vs. the Gavel: The Perils of Extreme Religious Liberty and Justice Denied: What America Must Do to Protect Its Children. She also runs two active websites covering her areas of expertise, the Religious Freedom Restoration Acts, www.RFRAperils.com, and statutes of limitations for child sex abuse, www.sol-reform.com. Professor Hamilton blogs at Hamilton and Griffin on Rights. Her email address is hamilton02@aol.com.

One of Mike Huckabee’s top snake handlers, has decided to leave the sinking campaign, sources reported Thursday.

Top Snake Handler Leaves Sinking Huckabee Campaign

LITTLE ROCK, AR—Dealing yet another blow to the former Arkansas governor’s presidential hopes, Dalton Hobbs, one of Mike Huckabee’s top snake handlers, has decided to leave the sinking campaign, sources reported Thursday. “This guy was one of the most loyal campaign staffers on the Huckabee team, and no longer being able to rely on his extensive experience with handling poisonous cottonmouths at stump speeches and town halls is a loss Huckabee really can’t afford right now,” said a campaign insider who wished to remain anonymous, adding that Hobbs had been at the candidate’s side using the power of Scripture to protect himself from the serpent’s bite since Huckabee’s brief Senate run in 1995, but had reportedly become frustrated in recent weeks by the campaign’s apparent lack of focus and inability to make headway in a crowded GOP field.

 “Sure, Huckabee can find somebody else to warm up the crowds by drinking strychnine and speaking in tongues, but he’ll never really be able to replace Dalton. He was a key member of the campaign’s brain trust.” At press time, Huckabee had reportedly suffered another major setback as word broke that several of the campaign’s leading faith healers had bolted for the Cruz camp.

http://www.theonion.com/article/top-snake-handler-leaves-sinking-huckabee-campaign-51329

Anti-Vaccination Rabbis Murder With Their Mouths!

732,000: American Lives Saved by Vaccination

Carmen Lopez and her 18-month-old son, Daniel, after he received a measles-mumps-rubella vaccine from Dr. Charles Goodman, right, in Northridge, Calif., in January. Credit Damian Dovarganes/Associated Press

The vaccination of children from 1994 to 2013 will prevent 732,000 early deaths in the United States, according to a recent estimate by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In a report published last month, the agency announced that 90 percent of children under age 3 were vaccinated against polio, measles, mumps, rubella, hepatitis B and chickenpox in 2014. But fewer than 90 percent received DTaP — the vaccine against diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis — or the vaccines against Haemophilus influenzae Type B, pneumococcal disease, hepatitis A and rotavirus.In addition, fewer than 90 percent received the recommended hepatitis B dose at birth.

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About 71 percent of children received the combined vaccine series — shots containing more than one vaccine, including the DTaP (at least four doses); polio (at least three doses); measles, mumps and rubella (at least one); Haemophilus influenzae Type B (at least three or four); hepatitis B (at least three); chickenpox (at least one); and pneumococcus (at least four doses).

Only 0.7 percent of children received no vaccines at all.

Vaccination coverage varied in 2014 by geographic area and the type of vaccine. For example, 93 percent of children in Maine received the DTaP vaccine, but only 73 percent of those in Wyoming did.

Over all, there was lower coverage among non-Hispanic black children, compared with non-Hispanic whites, a disparity probably explained by greater poverty among blacks. Fourteen percent fewer children living below the poverty line were vaccinated against rotavirus, for example, compared with those living above the poverty line.

“The really positive message here is that even though we hear a lot about vaccine refusal, most parents choose to protect their children,” said Dr. Amanda Cohn, a pediatrician with the C.D.C. “It’s impressive that so many parents are coming in to get their children vaccinated on time. Parents, providers and government have worked together to accomplish this.”

In addition to preventing more than three-quarters of a million deaths, vaccination has prevented an estimated 322 million illnesses and 21,000 hospitalizations over the past two decades. The C.D.C. estimates that this has produced a net savings of $1.38 trillion in health care costs.

“We sometimes forget how much disease we’re preventing,” Dr. Cohn said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/15/science/732000-american-lives-saved-by-vaccination.html?mabReward=CTM&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&region=CColumn&module=Recommendation&src=rechp&WT.nav=RecEngine

"No Do-Overs!" Take the time to savor this moving talk, which asks big questions about how we think on death and honor life....Shana Tova To All...

 At the end of our lives, what do we most wish for? (Every day could be your last)

For many, it’s simply comfort, respect, love. BJ Miller is a palliative care physician who thinks deeply about how to create a dignified, graceful end of life for his patients...and much more, about life itself!

BJ Miller:

What really matters at the end of life... 
 

  View interactive transcript

At the end of our lives, what do we most wish for? For many, it’s simply comfort, respect, love. BJ Miller is a palliative care physician who thinks deeply about how to create a dignified, graceful end of life for his patients. Take the time to savor this moving talk, which asks big questions about how we think on death and honor life.

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CLICK ON LINK BELOW FOR AN AMAZING INTELLECTUAL & MEANINGFUL EXPERIENCE VIA VIDEO: 

http://www.ted.com/talks/bj_miller_what_really_matters_at_the_end_of_life?utm_source=newsletter_daily&utm_campaign=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_content=button__2015-09-10