Abraham Feinberg

Abraham Feinberg (14 September 1899 – 5 October 1986) was an American rabbi who lived much of his life in Canada. In his obituary, The New York Times declared about him: "He was always ready to march, lend his name or send a telegram if there was a protest for disarmament or for a treaty on a nuclear test ban, or against racism in South Africa, radical injustice in America and United States policy in Vietnam."

From rabbi to pop star Feinberg was born in Bellaire, Ohio, to Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi-Jewish parents, immigrants from Grinkishki (modern Grinkiškis, Lithuania) in the Russian empire. Feinberg always called Grinkishki "the birthplace of my spirit". Another source describes Nathan Feinberg as a cantor and umbrella repair man who left the Russian empire for the United States. In his memoirs, Feinberg stated his parents moved to the United States in 1882. Feinberg was the 7th of the 10 children in his family. After graduating, he went to work as a menial laborer while saving up enough money to attend university. Rabbi Kohn went on to say: "Rabbi Feinberg is an idealist, and his remarks were those of an idealist, and when he refers to commercialism in organized religion, his remarks are the remarks of the disillusioned idealist. He was premature. He should have remembered that it is not fair to condemn the religious institution as a whole because some human errors had upset his inspiration. It would be just as unfair to condemn the entire judicial system of a nation because one magistrate had yielded to corruption." Feinberg's radio career began at WMCA radio station, but he was soon promoted up to WOR, a station with a more powerful radio broadcaster that covered much of the northeast of the United States.

In 1945, he was the inspiration behind a legal challenge to the "restrictive covenants" that forbade the selling or renting of property to Jews by supporting the Re Drummond Wren case. In a calculated risk, a Jewish group, the Workers' Education Association (WEA) had purchased a property in Toronto known to have a "restrictive covenant" in order to build a home for veterans of World War Two. Only after construction was well under way was it announced that the property had a "restrictive covenant" and was thus illegal as the WEA was a Jewish group. The historian Philip Giarad observed the Drummond Wren case appeared to have been a set-up as the WEA should have known the property had a "restrictive covenant", and the case appears to have been launched to take advantage of a moment when public opinion was much more sympathetic towards Jews. In April–May 1945, the last of the death camps and concentration camps of Nazi Germany had been liberated, and newsreel footage of emaciated Holocaust survivors had suddenly made antisemitism unfashionable. On 31 October 1945, Justice John Keiller MacKay ruled against the "restrictive covenant" laws as a violation of the law in the Drummond Wren case. In a pamphlet he printed praising MacKay's ruling, Feinberg wrote: "It clothes in concrete reality, for specific cases, the universally acclaimed principles for which World World Two was pursued to a victorious end".

In February 1947, Feinberg was part of a Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC) delegation who met Social Credit Party leaders in Ottawa to ask them to purge their party of its vocal anti-Semitic wing. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, there was a "Never Again!" attitude in the Canadian Jewish community and there was a feeling that antisemitism must not be tolerated in any form. At the meeting in Ottawa, the CJC delegation complained that the Social Credit French language newspaper Vers Demain had been printing extracts from The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion and in general the newspaper was very hostile towards Jews. The meeting did not yield positive results. Feinberg attended later in 1947 a meeting of the CJC leaders that concluded that the Social Credit movement, whose support was mostly found in western Canada and in Quebec, was the most dangerous anti-Semitic movement in Canada, and the CJC should do everything within its power to discredit Social Credit. At the same summit of the CJC leaders, Feinberg argued that all racism must be fought, not just antisemitism, saying: "The French-speaking Catholic in Ontario, the Japanese deportee from British Columbia, the Negro economic pariah are no less a Jewish obligation than we are a moral crisis for the Christian". At a meeting in late 1947, Charles Daley, the Ontario minister of labour dismissively told Feinberg "that these days, racial discrimination is to a great extent imaginary".

A supporter of Zionism, when on 6 December 1947, the United Nations declared that the Palestine Mandate would be partitioned into an Arab state and a Jewish state, Feinberg put on a pageant at Holy Blossom starring the children of his congregation in celebration. The pageant portrayed "2, 000 years of pogroms, antisemitism and travails", ending in with Israel being declared. Concerned that the Jews might be accused of having dual loyalties, at the same time Feinberg told the Globe & Mail: "Palestine has always been the center of our pristine Jewish culture and faith and the shrine of our sacred memory. Canada, however, remains the soil on which young Canadian Jewry has been born".

In 1948, Feinberg attended a conference of the World Jewish Congress in Paris, where he criticized Canadian immigration law for excluding Jewish nurses and domestic workers from coming to Canada. In a sermon, Feinberg stated: "Little Black Sambo in the public schools encouraged race prejudice by creating a pattern of Negro minstrel show comicality in the minds of white children, and by arousing a sense of persecution and emotional insecurity in colored children. Neither potential arrogance nor an inferiority complex is a proper seed-bed for Canadian citizenship." Feinberg asked to meet the Lions Club's leaders to press them to reconsider, but was refused. Feinberg argued that the government of Canada should "encourage" inter-racial marriage and relationships as the best way to end all racism in Canada. The "rabbi" mentioned in "Give Peace a Peace" is Feinberg.

At the time, Feinberg told The Montreal Gazette that he had gone to join the "Bed-In" out of admiration for Lennon, saying "he is one of the most powerful influences in the modern world, and I feel he is doing a phenomenal thing for peace." Feinberg was described having bonded with Lennon, forming an instant friendship.

In June 1969, Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panthers visited Algeria and declared his support for Al Fath group of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). In a letter to the editor of The Black Panther published on 9 August 1969, Feinberg identified himself as a "Jew", "Rabbi", and a "Panther supporter" who expressed his dismay at Cleaver's pro-Palestinian remarks. Feinberg asked for the Black Panthers to dissociate themselves with the PLO, which he described as a group committed ending to Israel via violence, and to driving the two million Jews of Israel out. No reply to Feinberg's letter was ever given, and The Black Panther continued to take a very anti-Israeli, pro-Palestinian line, depicting the PLO as a heroic freedom fighters engaged in the same struggle as the Panthers.

In December 1969, Feinberg spoke at a rally attended by American draft dodgers living in Toronto, where he praised them as American patriots, saying: "You should not feel that you are betraying America, you are saving it. I deny that I'm anti-American. I'm far more loyal to the United States than the silent majority" [supporting Richard Nixon, a reference to Nixon's "silent majority speech"]. On 11 March 1970, Feinberg was a lead speaker at a Toronto fundraiser hosted by Red, White and Black group that sought raise money for the defense lawyers of the "Chicago 7". Red, White and Black was the support group for American draft-dodgers living in Canada that sought to help them integrate into Canadian society while protesting the war by holding anti-war rallies in front of the American consulate in Toronto. On 14 February 1971, Feinberg's wife died in Toronto of cancer. From 1976 to 1978, he hosted another radio station in Reno called Grey Lib Plus.

His last book, Sex and the Pulpit, was a demand for Judaism to acknowledge more the healthiness of human sexuality as a source of happiness. Feinberg argued what he called "sex negationism" was a distortion of Judaism. Feinberg used books from the Tanakh such as highly erotic the Song of Songs and the Book of Proverbs with their remarks about how a husband should keep his wife happy to base his case against "sex negationism". Making a feminist argument, Feinberg argued that men in the ancient Middle East were afraid of female sexuality, and that many of the more patriarchal aspects of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were based on an effort to control the sexuality of women. Feinberg argued that women have a greater desire for sex as the clitoris produces more sexual pleasure than the penis, causing sexual repression to emerge as a way to control women. He maintained that female genital mutilation, which involved cutting out the clitoris, was an especially brutal form of male control. He also noted that female genital mutilation is very common in the Near East. Feinberg wrote that for men the greatest fear when a woman gives birth is whatever the child is theirs or not, hence the fear that uncontrolled female sexuality would mean that they would never know if they really fathered the children that they believed to be theirs. Feinberg noted on his visits to Jerusalem that he saw in the Orthodox neighborhoods signs that denounced women who wore short skirts or uncovered their arms as "prostitutes". He also reported that he saw students from Orthodox yeshivot scream "prostitutes" at any Israeli women dressed in any manner that might in the slightest excite male sexual desire, which he used to argue that there was a strong fear of female sexuality in Orthodox Judaism.

He noted that many of the peoples the ancient Hebrews were in conflict with such as the Egyptians, the Phoenicians and the Greeks worshiped goddesses such as Isis, Ishtar, Diana, and Aphrodite, which increased the contrast between the patriarchal Yahweh vs. the goddesses of their enemies. He further noted that many of the goddess cults in the ancient Middle East such as the Great Mother of the Gods with her seven breasts openly displayed, had both priests and priestess who were equals. However, in the Great Mother of Gods cult, which originated in Phrygia and spread all over the Roman empire, the priests had to castrate themselves to honor the Great Mother and dress as women while the priestesses did not have to sexually mutilate themselves and did not have to wear male clothing. Feinberg argued that such cults increased the male fear of women in Judaism, observing the Prophets of the Tanakh denounced with great vehemence the licentious religion practiced by the peoples of Canaan and Phoenicia. He also argued that Judaism had more respect for women, observing the cult of Ishtar required all women to serve as sacred prostitutes in her temples at least once a year while the worship of Moloch required human sacrifice by burning children alive.

Feinberg also argued against what he called "penis imperialism", and for women to have control of their own sexuality. In the same book, Feinberg had an entire chapter entitled "Salute to a Gay Friend" arguing for the tolerance and acceptance of homosexuality as normal. Feinberg also argued for the acceptance of gay rabbis and gay synagogues as being a correct expression of Judaism. He argued that the Sodom and Gomorrah story in the Book of Genesis was not a condemnation of homosexuality, observing the crime of the people of Sodom and Gomorrah was that they were hostile and unfriendly towards strangers by wanting to gang-rape the two angels whom Lot had accepted as his guests. Finally, Feinberg argued that God loves peoples of both sexes equally, meaning that it was acceptable for women to serve as rabbis.

In 1983, Feinberg married Patricia C. Blanchard. In 1986, he died in Reno of cancer.

Books by Feinberg Storm the Gates of Jericho (1964) Rabbi Feinberg's Hanoi Diary (1968) Sex and the Pulpit (1981).

Books and articles