The weird world of Chabad, an influential Hasidic sect that’s been taking America (and Israel) by storm

Chabad represents the cutting edge of Zionist Jewish life in America — a movement that draws disillusioned Jews from progressive and liberal corners of Judaism and funnels them to the right.

In 2013, when I was a reporter at the incredible-but-now-deceased NSFWCORP, Cory Booker was gunning for the Senate. He was an up and coming neoliberal star politician back then. And to America’s liberal media and political class, Booker represented a bright new hope for the future. But there was a weird, little-known side to Booker’s meteoric rise: his political career got going largely because of support from Chabad, an old Jewish religious sect that originated in the 18th century in a village in modern day Belarus:

Chabad is a fascinating and kinda scary movement.

While a lot Jews in the west drift away from the bankrupt integrationist world of conservative and reform Judaism and settle into a totally secular identity, a lot of Jews also drift towards Chabad — a sect that purports to give modern Jews a much more “real” and zealous and religious experience. Because of its extreme recruitment efforts — it spends awesome amounts of energy and resources to convert non-Chabad Jews to Chabadism — the sect went from being fringe just a few decades ago to blowing up as one of the main Jewish religious movements in America today.

How pushy are Chabad members about roping non-practicing Jews into their sect? Consider that a psychiatrist I went to in Los Angeles for my meds — who happened to be a member of Chabad — tried to convert me right there in the office. I had just moved back to California from Moscow and every time I’d go in to see him, he’d push me hard to attend Chabad events — “you could meet people and make friends.” I’d brush it off because I wanted the meds. But I was shocked at his behavior. A psychiatrist was pushing his patient into joining a religious cult. And, according to certificates he had hanging in his office, he billed himself as an expert on cults and deprogramming. What a great, ethical guy!

Here in the states, Chabad tries to sell itself to outsiders as a moderate, almost unpolitical movement. In Israel, it lets its full genocidal, law-of-the-bible worldview fly right in the open. And it’s been a huge player in the extreme-rightwing drift of Israel’s already extreme rightwing politics. But Chabad isn’t just a big deal in America and Israel, it’s been taking over Jewish religious and cultural life all around the world — including the former Soviet Union, where I had plenty of contact with it as a young stringer for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency years ago.

Anyway, when I found out about Chabad’s role in Booker’s political career, I decided to do a deep dive into Chabad and its history.

Today Chabad represents the cutting edge of Zionist Jewish life in America — a movement that draws disillusioned Jews from progressive and liberal corners of Judaism and funnels them to the Zionist right. And my sense is that the movement is only gonna exert more and more power as the liberal Zionist consensus collapses here in America.

Chabad is important to know, so I figured I’d try rescue my reporting from the gaping memory hole of the Internet. Check it out!

—Yasha Levine

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The Neocon, The Messiah, and Cory Booker

Yasha Levine • NSFWCORP • August 25, 2013

“The difference between a Jewish and a non-Jewish person stems from the common expression: ‘Let us differentiate’ ...between totally different species.”

—The Chabad-Lubavitcher Rebbe

Cory Booker, the Democratic candidate for New Jersey Senator, has been endorsed by the New York Times as the next progressive hope...a younger, more populist version of Barack Obama, a guy who’s not afraid to get down and dirty. The Times’ op-ed wizards described Booker as a “deeply unconventional politician,” known for “once rushing into a burning house before the fire department arrived— saving a woman and traumatizing his security detail,” and they predicted that he “will be able to use his political star status to fight for the neglected, the powerless, people who are working and people who need to work in New Jersey and nationally.”

Unconventional indeed. But there’s one unconventional side to Booker’s progressivism that has received much less recognition. His political career was launched with the help of the Chabad-Lubavitchers, a right-wing Hasidic cult that considers its dead Rebbe a messiah and that pushes a regressive right-wing worldview that would horrify Booker’s prog supporters: deep-rooted racism, violent Islamophobia, medieval positions on everything from abortion to homosexuality and women’s rights, and a nasty tendency to normalize sexual abuse and protect serial sexual predators in its ranks. In the early 1990s, Chabad’s passive-aggressive racism helped trigger a three-day race riot in Brooklyn. Earlier this year, a prominent Chabad rabbi mocked victims of childhood sexual abuse who went public, comparing their sexual abuse to “diarrhea” which is “embarrassing but it’s nobody’s business.”

Booker’s relationship with the sect goes back to the early ’90s, when he became an active member of Chabad outfits at Oxford and Yale. The connections he forged through Chabad have provided him with a wealthy and powerful right-wing donor network that helped seed his political career. But the relationship was more than a simple political alliance: Booker became mesmerized with Chabad’s teachings and began studying with Chabad rabbis. He now reads Hebrew, recites portions of the Torah from memory, helps Chabad fundraise and—most disturbingly—genuinely shares the sect’s messianic worldview. As Booker told a room full of wealthy Chabadnik funders in Morristown, New Jersey, back in 2000, when he was a just a lowly Newark council member:

“...the reason why I say that I am humbled to stand before you is that I am truly empowered by the Lubavitch movement, and specifically by a number of Lubavitcher rabbis I have come to know over the last few years. They helped me take seeds that were planted by my elders, my parents and my grandparents, and nurture them in a way that allowed those seeds to flourish and blossom into the kind of work to which I have dedicated my life.

“Right now, I am on the streets of Newark, battling what I think is one of the most important battles in the city, in this nation, to try to make the spirit of God alive and well. As one of my rabbi friends told me—to try to truly bring about, through effort and sweat, or whatever necessary—the Messianic Era.”

Yes, you read that right. Cory Booker, progressive star and likely future Senator of New Jersey, is “humbled” and “empowered” by Chabad, and helping “make the spirit of God alive and well ... to truly bring about ... the Messianic Era.”

What the hell is going on? Why is Booker throwing in with a far-right apocalyptic Jewish cult? And what does it say about his politics? To understand why Booker’s relationship with Chabad is so disturbing, you first have to understand what Chabad is all about.

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The Chabad-Lubavitcher is a Hasidic Orthodox sect that originated in the late-18th century in a village on what is now the border between Russia and Belarus. One of many competing Hasidic right-wing biblical nonconformist sects, it differentiated itself by stressing the study of mystical Jewish texts. The sect expanded, battled other Jewish sects, opposed Napoleon, sucked up to the Czar, produced various religious texts and commentaries, and generally did what all Hasidic sects did at the time.

Things started to go bad in the 20th century. Chabad nearly went extinct, first losing power to modernism and secularization, then getting booted out of the Soviet Union and finally being decimated by the Nazis in WWII. Joseph Isaac Schneersohn—then-head of Chabad and the great-great-great- great-grandson of the guy who started the whole thing—escaped to Crown Heights in Brooklyn, where he began preaching that the end times were near.

Joseph Isaac’s son-in-law Menachem Mendel Schneerson—MMS, for short—took over the family racket and became “the Rebbe.” Rebbe took this messianism to a whole new level in that he saw himself as a messiah. The world was about to end, so it was imperative to prepare, which meant bringing secular Jews from America and around the world into the Chabad fold. The group began cobbling together a wide network of outreach centers, installing Chabad rabbis near college campuses and in remote communities, and making rabbis accessible and available for funerals, weddings and other Jewish rituals. Because Chabad’s regressive

Judaism would scare away most secular Jews, these outreach efforts presented
a softer, more tolerant and mainstream version of the faith. Chabad’s emissaries/missionaries became amazingly good at putting a modern, inclusive face on Chabad, and began to aggressively steal marketshare from Reform and Conservative Judaism. Professor Marvin Schick, an expert on Jewish education, described Chabad as the “Walmart of Jewish life, a mega- phenomenon that keeps growing at a remarkable rate by entering new and underserved areas, and by exploiting the vulnerability of existing service providers. Growth provides the impetus and resources for additional growth.”

But as it strengthened its mainstream credentials with the Jewish public, internally Chabadniks were hyper-radicalizing and becoming more and more messianic.

The Rebbe saw the collapse of the Soviet Union as a sign that apocalypse was at hand, that the old enemy of Chabad had finally been destroyed.

It also meant that millions of secular Russian Jews were now available and ripe for conversion. For weird reasons, Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait and the Gulf War were also seen as a sure sign of the end days. Chabad began to be associated more and more with evangelical Christians, right-wingers, Zionists and neocons.