NEW JERSEY
Jewish Standard
BY JOANNE PALMER April 21, 2016
Rabbi Steven Pruzansky of Congregation Bnai Yeshurun in Teaneck is no stranger to controversy.
A lawyer and the rabbi of the biggest, oldest, and arguably the most prominent Orthodox synagogue in town, Rabbi Pruzansky has strong views, which he often lays out strongly and at some length in his blog, rabbipruzansky.com.
Over the years, Rabbi Pruzansky has angered many people — and made many friends — with harshly worded attacks on Yitzhak Rabin, soon before he was murdered; on President Obama’s re-election, which he blamed on stupid greedy people wanting “free stuff”; on the Jewish Week, which he compared to the Nazi propaganda rag Der Sturmer (although later he said the comparison of course was purposely ludicrous), and on Israeli Arabs, for whom he advocated severe mass punishment, possibly including deportation. Earlier this year, dismissing Hillary Clinton as a “liar, a crook, an active participant in the largest pay-for-play scheme in the history of mankind…,” he also called her “an awful speaker, shrill when she tries to be passionate…” Instead, he endorsed Donald Trump.
In that endorsement, on March 17, he touched on a theme that has resurfaced in the last few weeks — the theme of victimhood, which he sees as an occasionally improperly assumed mantle. “People have had enough of the moral posturing of the faux victim, which has resulted in nothing less than in the increase of the numbers of faux victims and even the possible causes of victimhood,” he wrote in that March post. “People are tired of having to whisper the truth because murderers, evildoers, or sinners will have their feelings hurt by it, even unintentionally.”
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