Uncategorized
From ‘how to’ to ‘why bother?’: Michael Strassfeld writes a new guide to being Jewish
(JTA) — “What the son wishes to forget the grandson wishes to remember.” That’s known as Hansen’s Law, named for the historian Marcus Lee Hansen, who observed that while the children of immigrants tend to run away from their ethnicity in order to join the mainstream, the third generation often wants to learn the “old ways” of their grandparents.
In 1973, “The Jewish Catalog” turned Hansen’s Law into a “do-it-yourself kit” for young Jews who wanted to practice the traditions of their grandparents but weren’t exactly sure how. Imagine “The Joy of Cooking,” but instead of recipes the guide to Jewish living had friendly instructions for hosting Shabbat, building a sukkah and taking part in Jewish rituals from birth to death. Co-edited by Michael Strassfeld, Sharon Strassfeld and the late Richard Siegel, it went on to sell 300,000 copies and remains in print today.
Fifty years later, Rabbi Michael Strassfeld has written a new book that he calls a “bookend” to “The Jewish Catalog.” If the first book is a Jewish “how to,” the latest asks, he says, “why bother?” “Judaism Disrupted: A Spiritual Manifesto for the 21st Century” asserts that an open society and egalitarian ethics leave most Jews skeptical of the rituals and beliefs of Jewish tradition. In the face of this resistance, he argues that the purpose of Judaism is not obedience to Torah and its rituals for their own sake or mere “continuity,” but to “encourage and remind us to strive to live a life of compassion, loving relationships, and devotion to our ideals.”
Strassfeld, 73, grew up in an Orthodox home in Boston and got his master’s degree in Jewish studies at Brandeis University. Coming to doubt the “faith claims” of Orthodoxy, he became a regular at nearby Havurat Shalom, an “intentional community” that pioneered the havurah movement’s liberal, hands-on approach to traditional practice. He earned rabbinical ordination from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College when he was 41 and went on to serve as the rabbi of Congregation Ansche Chesed on the Upper West Side and later the Society for the Advancement of Judaism, the Manhattan flagship of Reconstructionist Judaism.
“To be disrupted is to experience a break with the past and simultaneously reconnect in a new way to that past,” writes Strassfeld, who retired from the pulpit in 2015. This week, we spoke about why people might find Jewish ritual empty, how he thinks Jewish practices can enrich their lives and how Passover — which begins Wednesday night — could be the key to unlocking the central idea of Judaism.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: I wanted to start with the 50th anniversary of the “Jewish Catalog.” What connects the new book with the work you did back then on the “Catalog,” which was a do-it-yourself guide for Jews who were trying to reclaim the stuff they either did or didn’t learn in Hebrew school?
Michael Strassfeld: I see them as bookends. Basically, I keep on writing the same book over and over again. [Laughs] Except no, I’m different and the world is different. I’m always trying to make Judaism accessible to people. In the “Catalog” I was providing the resources on how to live a Jewish life when the resources weren’t easily accessible.
The new book is less about “how to” than “why bother?” That’s the challenge. I think a lot of people take pride in being Jewish, but it’s a small part of their identity because it doesn’t feel relevant. I want to say to people like that that Judaism is about living a life with meaning and purpose. It’s not about doing what I call the “Jewishly Jewish” things, like keeping kosher and going to synagogue. Judaism is wisdom and practices to live life with meaning and purpose. The purpose of Judaism isn’t to be a good Jew, despite all the surveys that give you 10 points for, you know, lighting Shabbat candles. It’s about being a good person.
So that brings up your relationship to the commandments and mitzvot, the traditional acts and behaviors that an Orthodox Jew or a committed Conservative Jew feels commanded to do, from prayer to keeping kosher to observing the Sabbath and the holidays. They might argue that doing these things is what makes you Jewish, but you’re arguing something different. If someone doesn’t feel bound by these obligations, why do them at all?
I don’t have the faith or beliefs that underlie such an attitude [of obligation]. Halacha, or Jewish law, is not in reality law. It’s really unlike American law where you know that if you’re violating it, you could be prosecuted. What I’m trying to do in the book is reframe rituals as an awareness practice, that is, bringing awareness to various aspects of our lives. So it could be paying attention to food, or cultivating attitudes of gratitude, or generosity, or satisfaction. My broad understanding of the festival cycle, for example, is that you can focus on those attitudes all year long, but the festivals provide a period of time once in the year to really focus on, in the case of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, for example, saying sorry and repairing relationships.
In “Judaism Disrupted: A Spiritual Manifesto for the 21st Century,” Michael Strassfeld argues that the challenge of each generation’s Jews is to create the Judaism that is needed in their time. (Ben Yehuda Press)
Passover is coming. Probably no holiday asks its practitioners to do so much stuff in preparation, from cleaning the house of every trace of unleavened food to hosting, in many homes, two different catered seminars on Jewish history. Describe how Passover cultivates awareness, especially of the idea of freedom, which plays an important part thematically in your boo
The Sefat Emet [a 19th-century Hasidic master] says Torah is all about one thing: freedom. But there’s a variety of obstacles in the way. There are temptations. There’s the inner issues that you struggle with, and the bad things that are out of your control. The Sefat Emet says the 613 commandments are 613 etzot, or advice, that teach us how to live a life of freedom. The focus of Passover is trying to free yourself from the chains of the things that hold you back from being the person that you could be, not getting caught up in materiality or envy, free from unnecessary anxieties — all these things that distract us or keep us from being who we could be.
The Passover seder is one of the great rituals of Judaism. We’re trying to do a very ambitious thing by saying, not, like, “let’s remember when our ancestors were freed from Egypt,” but rather that we were slaves in Egypt and we went free. And at the seder we actually ingest that. We experience the bitterness by eating maror, the bitter herb. We experience the freedom by drinking wine. We don’t want it just to be an intellectual exercise.
Unfortunately the seder has become rote. But Passover is about this huge theme of freedom that is central to Judaism.
I think some people bristle against ritual because they find it empty. But you’re saying there’s another way to approach rituals which is to think of them as tools or instruments that can help you focus on core principles — you actually list 11 — which include finding holiness everywhere, caring for the planet and engaging in social justice, to name a few. But that invites the criticism, which I think was also leveled at the “Catalog,” that Judaism shouldn’t be instrumental, because if you treat it as a means to an end that’s self-serving and individualistic.
Certainly rituals are tools, but tools in the best sense of the word. They help us pay attention to things in our lives and things in the world that need repair. And people use them not to get ahead in the world, but because they want to be a somewhat better person. I talk a lot these days about having a brief morning practice, and in the book I write about the mezuzah. For most Jews it’s become wallpaper, but what if you take the moment that you leave in the morning, and there’s a transition from home to the outside and to work perhaps, and take a moment at the doorpost to spiritually frame your day? What are the major principles that you want to keep in your mind when you know you’re gonna be stuck in traffic or a difficult meeting?
And a lot of traditional rituals are instrumental. Saying a blessing before you eat is a gratitude practice.
But why do I need a particular Jewish ritual or practice to help me feel gratitude or order my day? Aren’t there other traditions I can use to accomplish the same things?
Anybody who is a pluralist, which I am, knows that the Jewish way is not the only way. If I grew up in India or Indonesia and my parents were locals I probably wouldn’t be a rabbi and writing these books.
But a partial answer to your question is that Judaism is one of the oldest wisdom traditions in the world, and that there has been a 3,000-year conversation by the Jewish people about what it means to live in this tradition and to live in the world. And so I think there’s a lot of wisdom there.
So much in Jewish tradition says boundaries are good, and that it’s important to draw distinctions between what’s Jewish behavior and what’s not Jewish behavior, between the holy and the mundane, and that making those distinctions is a value in itself. But you argue strongly in an early chapter that that kind of binary thinking is not Judaism as you see it.
Underlying the book is the notion that Rabbinic Judaism carried the Jewish people for 2,000 years or so. But we’re living in a very different context, and the binaries, the dualities — too often they lead to hierarchy, so that, for example, men matter more than women in Jewish life. And we’ve tried to change that. We are living in an open society where we want to be more inclusive, not less inclusive. We don’t want to live in ghettos. Now, the ultra-Orthodox say, “No, we realize the danger of trying to live like that. We don’t think there’s anything of value in that modern world. And it’s all to be rejected.” And it would be foolish not to admit that in this very open world the Jews, as a minority, could kind of disappear. But I think that Judaism has so much value and wisdom and practices to offer to people that Judaism will continue to be part of the fabric of this world — the way, for example, we have given Shabbat as a concept to the world.
You know, in the first 11 chapters of the Torah, there are no Jews. So clearly, Jews and Judaism are not essential for the world to exist. And that’s a good, humbling message.
OK, but one could argue that while Jews aren’t necessary for the world to exist, Judaism is necessary for Jews to exist. And you write in your book, “If the Jewish people is to be a people, we need to have a commonly held tradition.” I think the pushback to the kind of openness and permeability you describe is that Jews can be so open and so permeable that they just fall through the holes.
It certainly is a possibility. And it’s also a possibility that the only Jews who will be around will be ultra-Orthodox Jews.
But if Judaism can only survive by being separatist, then I question whether it’s really worthwhile. That becomes a distorted vision of Judaism, and withdrawing is not what it’s meant to be. I think we’re meant to be in the world.
Your book is called “Judaism Disrupted.” What is disruptive about the Judaism that you’re proposing?
I meant it in two ways. First, Judaism is being disrupted by this very different world we’re living in. The contents of the ocean we swim in is very different than in the Middle Ages. But I’m also using it to say that Judaism is meant to disrupt our lives in a positive way, which is to say, “Wake up, pay attention.” You are here to live a life of meaning and purpose, and to continue as co-creators with God of the universe. You’re here to make the world better, to be kind and compassionate to people, to work on yourself. In my mind it is a shofar, “Wake up, sleepers, from your sleep!” “Judaism Disrupted” says you have to pay attention to issues like food, and justice, and teshuva [repentance].
You were ordained as a Reconstructionist rabbi. Do you think your book falls neatly into any of our current denominational categories?
[Reconstructionist founder] Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan’s notion of Judaism as an evolving religious civilization is the one that I feel closest to. But I feel that the denominational structure isn’t particularly useful anymore. There’s basically two categories, Orthodox and the various kinds of liberal Judaism, within a spectrum. The modern world is so fundamentally different in its relationship to Jews and Judaism that what we’re seeing is a variety of attempts to figure out how to respond. And that will then become the Judaism for the next millennium. It’s time for a lot of experimentation. I think that’s required and out of that will come a new “Minhag America,” to use Isaac Mayer Wise’s phrase for the emerging custom of American Jews [Wise was a Reform rabbi in the late 19th century]. And we don’t need to have everybody doing it one way. As long as people feel committed to Judaism, the Jewish tradition, even if they’re doing it very differently than the Jews of the past, they will be writing themselves into the conversation.
—
The post From ‘how to’ to ‘why bother?’: Michael Strassfeld writes a new guide to being Jewish appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Trump Tells Iranian Protesters ‘Help Is on Its Way’ as Regime Fears Defections
Iranian demonstrators gather in a street during anti-regime protests in Tehran, Iran, Jan. 8, 2026. Photo: Stringer/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
US President Donald Trump on Tuesday urged Iranians to keep protesting their theocratic, authoritarian government, vowing “help” was coming as the regime continued its brutal crackdown on the nationwide demonstrations.
Trump’s message came amid growing concerns from Iran that it could see defections among the security forces, which have been killing and arresting thousands of protesters to crush the biggest threat to the regime’s stability in years.
“Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING – TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!” Trump posted on Truth Social. “Save the names of the killers and abusers. They will pay a big price. I have canceled all meetings with Iranian Officials until the senseless killing of protesters STOPS. HELP IS ON ITS WAY. MIGA [Make Iran Great Again]!!!”
Trump did not elaborate on what support may be coming. When asked what he meant by “help is on its way,” Trump told reporters that they would have to figure it out.
However, Trump has said multiple times over the last two weeks that he will intervene against the Iranian regime if security forces continue killing protesters. Adding to threats of military action, Trump late on Monday announced that any country doing business with Iran will face a new tariff of 25 percent on its exports to the US.
According to reports, Trump was to meet with senior advisers on Tuesday to discuss options for Iran, including military strikes, using cyber weapons, widening sanctions, and providing online help to anti-government sources.
Iran has continued to face fierce demonstrations, which began on Dec. 28 over economic hardships but escalated into large-scale protests calling for the downfall of the country’s Islamist system.
The regime has responded with an increasingly violent crackdown on protests. An Iranian official told Reuters that about 2,000 people had been killed in the protests, marking the first time authorities have given an overall death toll from more than two weeks of unrest.
US-based rights group HRANA said that of the 2,003 people whose deaths it had confirmed, 1,850 were protesters. It added that 16,784 people had been detained, a significant increase from the figure of 10,721 it gave on Monday.
However, thousands more people are feared dead.
“Based on available data and cross-checking information obtained from reliable sources, including the Supreme National Security Council and the presidential office, the initial estimate by the Islamic Republic’s security institutions is that at least 12,000 people were killed in this nationwide killing,” reported Iran International, a Persian-language news outlet.
According to CBS News, the figure could be as high as 20,000.
With the regime imposing an internet blackout since Thursday, verification of such figures has been difficult.
Trump continued to urge Iranian protesters to “take over” institutions while speaking at an economic event in Detroit, Michigan on Tuesday.
“And by the way, to all Iranian patriots, keep protesting, take over your institutions, if possible, and save the name of the killers and the abusers that are abusing you; you’re being very badly abused if the numbers are right,” Trump said.
“They’ll pay a very big price, and I’ve canceled all meetings with the Iranian officials, until the senseless killing of protesters stops. And all I say to them is, help is on its way. You saw that,” he continued. “I put tariffs on anybody doing business with Iran just went into effect today. And I say, make Iran great again, you know, as a great country until these monsters came in and took it over.”
Iran has warned that any military action would be met with force in response.
“Let us be clear: in the case of an attack on Iran, the occupied territories [Israel] as well as all US bases and ships will be our legitimate target,” Iranian parliament speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf told a crowd in Tehran’s Enqelab Square on Monday, adding that Iranians were fighting a four-front war: “economic war, psychological warfare, military war against the US and Israel, and today a war against terrorism.”
Following Trump’s social media post the following day, Iranian security chief Ali Larijani said on X that the US president and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were the “main killers” of the Iranian people.
Despite the protests, there have been few examples of fracture among the security forces and regime elites that could topple the clerical system, which has been in power since the Islamic Revolution in 1979. However, there are signs of Tehran fearing defections.
The Intelligence Organization of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), an internationally designated terrorist group and a key force responsible for suppressing dissent, issued a statement on Friday castigating the protests as part of a “terrorist” plot orchestrated by the US and Israel to topple the regime. In a now-deleted section of the statement, the IRGC also warned that any “defiance, desertion, or disobedience” among the military would be met with “trial and decisive action.”
“The apparent removal of this language likely reflects concerns about triggering a panic, but it nevertheless exposes the depth of anxiety among regime officials,” wrote Janatan Sayeh, a research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a think tank based in Washington, DC.
Meanwhile, the IRGC’s Intelligence Organization also said that it was “dealing with possible acts of abandonment,” similarly suggesting that some Iranian security forces may have already defected or that the regime is concerned about such a possibility.
A Kurdish human rights organization reported last week that the regime had arrested “dozens” of security officers in Kermanshah City who refused to fire on protesters.
“The regime may be framing protesters as ‘terrorists’ and linking them to the United States and Israel to increase security forces’ willingness to use lethal force against protesters and reduce the risk of defections,” the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) wrote in a new analysis.
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has reportedly ordered the IRGC to take control of the crackdown in part due to fears of defections by the police and regular armed forces.
“He [Khamenei] is in closer contact with the IRGC than with the army or the police, because he believes the risk of IRGC defections is almost non-existent, whereas others have defected before,” a senior Iranian official told The Telegraph. “He has placed his fate in the hands of the IRGC.”
The Institute for the Study of War noted that the regular Iranian military “is generally less ideological and more representative of the Iranian population than the IRGC, which increases the risk that [army] members could defect.”
Defections could tip the scales in favor of the protesters. But even if the regime succeeds in stamping out the unrest, some observers argue the Islamist theocracy has no long-term future in Iran.
“I assume that we are now witnessing the final days and weeks of this regime,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said on Tuesday, adding that if it had to maintain power through violence, “it is effectively at its end.”
Germany, along with Britain, France, and Italy, all summoned Iranian ambassadors in protest over the crackdown, decrying what British Foreign Minister Yvette Cooper called the “brutal killing” of protesters.
Meanwhile, the European Union has indicated it will impose harsher sanctions on Iran in response to the repression of anti-government demonstrations.
“The rising number of casualties in Iran is horrifying. I unequivocally condemn the excessive use of force and continued restriction of freedom,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen posted on X. “Further sanctions on those responsible for the repression will be swiftly proposed.”
China and Russia, meanwhile, have backed the Iranian regime, warning against foreign “interference” in what officials described as Iran’s internal affairs.
Amid the unrest, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi told Al Jazeera that he and US envoy Steve Witkoff have been in contact.
Witkoff met Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s last shah and a prominent voice in the Iranian opposition, this past weekend, Axios reported.
Uncategorized
In a stylish mystery, Jodie Foster releases the dybbuk of French Jewish identity
Dr. Lilian Steiner isn’t really listening.
Yes, she hears the thunderous strains of the Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer” playing from an upstairs neighbor’s apartment above her psychiatry practice in a tony arrondissement of Paris. She is committed to recording the sessions on mini-discs for future reference, even if she has to bug her digital native son to buy replacements on Amazon. But when a patient dies from an apparent suicide, without any of the usual warning signs, she knows she’s missing something.
French director Rebecca Zlotowski’s A Private Life, a semi-dark comic mystery takes Lilian out of her routine. The film has the therapist, played by a captivating Jodie Foster, principalement en français, working to solve the case of her patient, a middle-aged German language teacher named Paula. When Paula’s daughter, Valérie (Luàna Bajrami), approaches Lilian with what she believes is a message, Lilian listens back to their sessions and begins to suspect foul play — i.e., murder. Soon she’s sleuthing around, and hooking up with her ex-husband Gaby (Daniel Auteuil).
Things take a turn for the sinister when Lilian shows up to pay her respects — later to be thrown out by Paula’s irate widower, Simon (Mathieu Amalric). Shortly after arriving, Lilian removes a sheet from a mirror, and a woman warns her that in doing so she will “awaken the dybbuk.”
The moment of cultural unawareness is telling if not entirely plausible. While Lilian is Jewish, and establishes her knowledge of the custom of burying a body quickly, she’s firmly secular. We see her slurping back an oyster and learn she didn’t circumcise her now-adult son, Julien (Vincent Lacoste). For whatever reason, she didn’t get the mirror memo. What she does detect, perhaps more acutely than most as an American expat, is antisemitism.
A hypnotist Lilian consults to fix her newly compulsive crying informs her that Freud stopped practicing hypnotism when he realized it was less “interesting” financially than the longer process of psychoanalysis. Lilian wastes no time dubbing this remark “borderline antisemitic.”
But their session produces a real breakthrough, linked to an infamous episode in the Holocaust. In a surreal sequence, Lilian sees herself in the body of a male cellist in 1942 Paris, witnessing a raid of a concert hall by the police in what can be assumed to be the Vel d’Hiv Roundup, the mass arrest and deportation of Paris’ Jews.
In the trance, Lilian sees Nazis in the house seats, a woman who looks exactly like Paula is playing next to her whispering something indistinct, Simon conducts, and her son Julien’s face is on the body of a militiaman — not a Nazi, she insists, but a French collaborator. Indeed, they were the ones who carried out the arrests. When Lilian returns to her tape of her hypnosis to reenter the scene, she finds more clues, including a postcard that takes her out of Paris for a stakeout. (Zlotowski co-wrote the film with author Anne Berest, whose autofictional book The Postcard uncovers her family’s story in the Holocaust.)
When Lilian brings this hypnotic vision up at Julien’s birthday dinner — noting his interest in German at school — he scoffs at the story and calls her paranoid. Gaby is shocked that Lilian, a woman of science, would suddenly buy into woo-woo notions of past lives. She really, truly, seems to believe her vision holds the key to Paula’s death, while her French-born family takes it all in stride.
Why, then, is history erupting in this modern story, a kind of continental arthouse spin on Netflix’s Murder Mystery franchise?
As motives are clarified and red herrings reveal themselves, the Pétain years Lilian glimpsed show themselves as very much alive in the present. A disgruntled patient draws a swastika by her office: “A very small one,” he says in his defense, “by the doorbell.”
Zlotowski took on the period just before Nazi occupation in her 2016 film Planetarium, a sort of roman à clef about persecuted Jewish French film producer Bernard Natan. In Private Life, as in her films Dear Prudence and Other People’s Children, Zlotowski masterfully sketches a French Jewish family and all its messy intersections in a society that privileges the principle of laïcité, the state religion of secularism. (I can’t account for her choice to have Paula’s family say kaddish over her dead body at their home before the funeral, but the rest feels right and an autopsy did delay burial.)
Long on style, with scarlet giftboxes and blood on white snow that reminded me of Resnais’ Stavisky and mirror shots that recalled Joseph Losey’s Monsieur Klein, the film has something elemental on its mind that seems inseparable from the Jewish question. It ponders how Jews may continue on in a culture that rejects them with some regularity, even as Lilian says at one point — and this holds mostly true of the cast of characters — “everyone here is Jewish.”
What Lilian picks up on is the “very small” swastika on the national fabric, a country still haunted by the Vichy regime. It’s a dybbuk that has yet to be exorcized, and like all dybbuks its business is unfinished.
The post In a stylish mystery, Jodie Foster releases the dybbuk of French Jewish identity appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
The Mississippi synagogue arson suspect has a Christian fitness site. Here’s what that tell us
Stephen Spencer Pittman, the suspect in a Saturday arson attack at a historic Mississippi synagogue, targeted Beth Israel Congregation because of its “Jewish ties,” according to the FBI. In an interview, he called the shul the “synagogue of Satan,” and his recent social media posts included an antisemitic cartoon.
But on a Christian fitness site registered to Pittman and linked across his social media profiles, Hebrew is liberally sprinkled throughout workout advice and scripture study.
That a man who would burn a synagogue would also be so interested in Hebrew language study, or pepper it throughout his Christian fitness site, may seem surprising. But understanding the reference points of Pittman’s fitness website helps explain the cultural touchstones and media diet he was likely consuming, one that may have influenced his thinking.
Pittman’s site, called One Purpose, advertises “scripture-backed fitness.” It refers to its users as “brothers” who are building their “temple” — women are not mentioned and presumably not the target audience. Instead, it pairs a veneer of biblical truth and Christianity with rhetoric about masculinity.
At the top of the homepage is the tetragrammaton in Hebrew, one of the biblical names for God. The site also says that it has modeled its fitness program after the “biblical patriarchs,” listing some of the oldest men in the bible — Adam, Methuselah, Noah, and others — with their Hebrew names. The site also notes several Jewish fast days, including lesser-known days usually only observed by Orthodox Jews, such as the Fast of Daniel and the Fast of Esther, again with their Hebrew names.
A post on Pittman’s Instagram about a “Christian diet/testosterone optimization” advises eating only raw milk and eggs as well as limiting oneself to “God-made fats,” listing the Hebrew words for oil and butter. Clicking through the site’s instructions for its fitness regimen brings the user snippets of Hebrew vocabulary, such as derekh, meaning path in Hebrew, and ma’atzor, meaning obstacle, scattered among copy about striving to live up to one’s true manliness and strength as ordained by God.
But beyond the biblical sheen, the site — which costs $99 a month to access in full, or $599 for the year — is full of the kind of “grindset” hustle culture advice on masculinity, charisma and workouts that regularly populates the so-called manosphere. Advertised among the premium features are training modules for “looks-maxxing,” which promises a “complete aesthetic optimization” and “test-maxxing,” which is not about acing exams but instead about raising testosterone levels.
This rhetoric is common among influencers widely regarded as proponents of toxic masculinity, including self-proclaimed misogynist Andrew Tate, who was arrested for sex trafficking in Romania; Myron Gaines, who wrote a book titled Women Deserve Less, and even Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, a manosphere elder who regularly inveighs against feminism. They often alternate between “negging” — internet slang for insulting — their participants, and pumping them up, promising a whole new life full of sex and money if they follow the advice of these influences. If they don’t, they will be weak “simps” or “cucks.”
One Purpose uses similar tactics at each click, just with a religious overlay. Users are offered the choice to “take up the cross” and “walk in the purpose God created for you,” or else, if they do not sign up for the site’s weight-lifting, diet and prayer program, to “let your temple fall into ruin” and “drift further from God’s purpose.”
Over the past few years, much of the manosphere has increasingly merged with Christian influencers, particularly traditionalist Catholics, or “tradcaths,” and the TheoBros, adherents of Reformed Christian theology. The overlap is borne largely out of shared values over women’s subservience and male dominance — which manosphere leaders such as Tate believe is biological, and TheoBro leaders such as Joel Webbon believe is biblical.
Many of the TheoBros, such as Webbon or Brian Sauvé, run YouTube series and podcasts where they also discuss their lifting routines and beard care, aligning with the manosphere values. And these TheoBros are often openly antisemitic, viewing Jews as Satanists who have rejected Jesus, and endorsing numerous antisemitic conspiracy theories, including Holocaust denial. Manosphere leaders including Tate and Gaines have done the same; Webbon and Gaines have also both hosted outspoken antisemite Nick Fuentes on their shows.
This manosphere interest among Christian influencers has grown alongside an increased attention to Jewish practice and the Hebrew Bible among many Christians, who see it as a way to grow closer to Jesus’ own practices and add a sense of mystery and spirituality via Jewish rituals that are unfamiliar, and feel esoteric, to most Christians.
Hebrew, in these contexts, largely serves to add a sense of authenticity to Christian practice — a way to advertise that their version of Christianity is ancient, from the time of Jesus. But it’s a mistake to see this interest in Hebrew and Jewish texts as philosemitism; while it sometimes manifests as friendliness toward Jews, it often has little relationship to Jewish people today.
Pittman’s One Purpose does not contain the overtly antisemitic or misogynist language that many TheoBro and manosphere influencers use. But the rhetoric of his biblical fitness site echoes their content, placing itself firmly in the same ecosystem. Its subtext aligns with a world rife with conspiracy theories about Jewish governmental control and Satanic rituals.
We don’t know yet exactly what Pittman’s media diet was. But his biblical fitness site’s imitation of Christian masculinity influencers indicates he likely consumed a lot of content that, alongside lifting routines or nutrition advice, contained antisemitic conspiracy theories. On his Instagram, he follows numerous accounts that describe themselves as a “soldier of Christ” or a “watchman for Christ,” some of which also contain conspiracy theories. When the beliefs on what it means to be a “real man” and a good Christian combine, they paint a vision of Christian masculinity that requires defeating Satan — and Satan, in this case, is the Jews. As Pittman said, according to an affidavit, he was due for a “homerun.”
The post The Mississippi synagogue arson suspect has a Christian fitness site. Here’s what that tell us appeared first on The Forward.