At a moment when one after another the stories meant to shield political incompetence, moral inertia, and a catastrophic failure of imagination are beginning to collapse, texts like this become necessary precisely inside the community. That is where the temptation is strongest to confuse loyalty with silence, defense with repetition, and continuity with the management of decline. A community that can no longer hear unwelcome intelligence from within does not protect itself. It protects its own anesthesia. The real question, then, is no longer whether difficult things may be said. It is whether there remains any capacity to hear them without immediately triggering the border reflex of offense, dismissal, and procedural calm. This framing is my analysis, but it is the right frame in which to read the older Jewish struggles over herem, authority, and legibility.

A recent Times of Israel article on Mordecai Kaplan recalled a scene familiar in the history of religious communities: change is often rejected before it is understood. Kaplan’s 1941 New Haggadah removed the Ten Plagues and restored Moses to the center of the Passover narrative. A few years later, his revised Shabbat prayer book led to a herem and to the public burning of the book at New York’s McAlpin Hotel. This was never just a quarrel over text. It was a signal that someone had crossed the line of who gets to alter the transmissible form of Jewish continuity.

But that mechanism is not confined to liturgy. It also governs voice, body, and social legibility. That is why Evelyn Torton Beck belongs beside Kaplan. Beck, a scholar of Jewish and women’s studies, became one of the central figures of Jewish lesbian visibility through Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology, first published in 1982 and later expanded. Archival and oral-history sources describe the book as groundbreaking and recall how explosive even the title sounded at the time.

This is where the real issue begins. The problem is not simply that communities exclude. The problem is that they often react most violently not to error, but to a new form of legibility. Nice Jewish Girls was not shocking because it created a new reality. It was shocking because it named an existing reality too clearly. Jewish. Lesbian. Public. Unapologetic. Beck herself later recalled how striking the title was, and how widely the anthology was discussed, including in Jewish newspapers. The scandal was not the private existence of such a life. The scandal was that this life began to speak in print, in title, and in the first person as though it belonged to Jewish continuity itself.

At that point, the liberal language of “tolerance” becomes too weak. The deeper question is who may be recognized as a bearer of memory from within the community, and who is immediately treated as an intrusion, a stain, or an impossible conjunction. Kaplan touched the transmissible form of liturgical memory. Beck touched the transmissible form of social presence. In both cases, the real problem for gatekeepers was not only content. It was that something began to speak as Jewish without passing through the old checkpoint. That last sentence is my interpretation of the parallel.

This is why herem must be read more broadly than as a traditional religious sanction. Herem is also a boundary practice inside communal language. It does not merely say, “this is wrong.” It says something harsher: “this will not circulate among us as one of our own forms of continuity.” In other words, herem does not only exclude a person or a book. It regulates legibility. It decides which forms of life may be translated into the shared language of memory, and which must remain outside as unassimilable. That is no longer just a problem of doctrine. It is a problem of jurisdiction over what may still be read as Jewish. This is my analysis of the cases, not a direct quote from the sources.

This is also where Tiphaine Samoyault becomes useful. Current descriptions of Translation and Violence present her argument as a warning that translation is not an innocent bridge but a field of asymmetry, erasure, and domination. In the age of AI, those same descriptions warn that algorithmic translation can deepen inequalities in linguistic representation, reinforce the dominance of a few languages, and accelerate the disappearance of vulnerable ones. What promises universal access may also narrow the world to whatever is easiest to carry across.

If that insight is taken seriously, herem and translational violence meet at one point. A community does not defend itself only by declaring some claims false. It also defends itself by declaring certain voices untranslatable from within. It says: this voice does not carry properly; this body does not signify correctly; this conjunction cannot be received without damage to the whole. Contemporary systems of selection often work in a similar way. They do not need formal prohibition. It is enough to reduce legibility, lower transmissibility, or smooth difference into an acceptable paraphrase. The analogy to contemporary translational systems is my inference, grounded in Samoyault’s framing.

That is why Beck’s case still matters. Nice Jewish Girls did not simply ask for a seat at the table. It exposed the structure of the table itself. A community can tolerate private contradiction much longer than public articulation. It can endure what remains scattered, half-silent, and deniable. What it struggles to endure is a voice that gathers what has been dispersed and says: I am from here. That is why the first reaction is so often not argument but recoil, not thought but threshold enforcement.

History, as usual, is rude to gatekeepers. Kaplan’s Reconstructionism became a durable part of American Judaism, and the influence of his ideas spread far beyond its formal denominational boundaries. Beck, too, now belongs to Jewish and queer history not as an appendix, but as a turning point in visibility. What once had to be pushed outside the camp later reappears as part of the archive.

So the real question is not whether a community is “open enough.” That question is too polite. The question is whether it can recognize its own future when that future arrives in a form it did not authorize. If it cannot, then what it calls fidelity may be little more than a monopoly over recognition.

Herem, then, is not only exclusion. It is an attempt to decide in advance which futures may still count as Jewish.

Yochanan Schimmelpfennig

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)