MY (VIRTUAL) DINNER
WITH LUKE FORD
1. Luke and Me
The
first time I ran into Luke Ford was back in the summer, when he called to
interview me for his new book on Jewish journalists. I felt flattered as a
schoolgirl made homecoming queen (but with less fluffy attire). This was also
my first opportunity to see Luke’s work. I had been entirely unaware of him.
Having closed down USAJewish shortly after 9/11, I
started a new very local magazine
on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and stayed off the Jewish beat.
Luke
sent me the piece. It mirrored our phone conversation perfectly. Actually, it
was an untouched transcript of our phone conversation. I thought Luke had been
generous to share such an early draft with me, but then found out that was it.
There weren’t going to be any other drafts.
So
my ramblings on over the phone early on a Sunday morning is what stays for
posterity, with virtually no edits, no context, no interviews with friends and
enemies. So I fixed some of Luke's Hebrew spellings
and sent back the document. Ah, and I told him politely it was OK that he stole
my slogan: “JTA: Yesterday’s News Tomorrow,” applying
it to the world of
2. Ambush
In
the last few years I’ve visited
I
met Hershy in 1989, when I reviewed his gallery show for Israel Shelanu. The special thing about
it was that he was a total haredi guy, with a wife
and six haredi kids, but his images were Super
Realistic American, complete with breathtaking portraits and a couple of full
frontal boobs. So I was instrumental, with my review, in getting Hershy in
trouble. But Hershy was a permanent resident of Trouble, so it wasn’t like such
a big bad on my part.
It
was an instantaneous friendship, the kind I only share with three or so other
people. I love Hershy, even though at times I’m ready to dump something heavy
on his balding head. All year long we speak on the phone and via email, and
twice a year we meet: On Passover, when I bring my family over to his house,
and on Yom Kippur, when I fly over by myself to hear him serve as cantor at a
local shtieble.
One
late night in October 2004, shortly after the high holidays, I received an email
from another close friend, with a URL to the now
discontinued Jewish
Protocols site. I had been as unaware of that site as I had Luke Ford before
our interview. It was a shocker. Ford used the site to announce that “Chicago
Orthodox rabbi J. (Jeremy) Hershy Worch is being
investigated for allegedly using his hypnoeroticism
techniques to rape women. Though he has a cult-like following, a string of
women have come forward to complain about him.”
I
advise you to “search and replace” Hershy’s name with
your own, to try and comprehend the horror one would experience in seeing this
paragraph posted about them.
The
perplexing unanswered questions emanating from that passage and many like it, were numerous:
Who
was investigating Hershy? The
police? The District Attorney’s office?
What
are hypnoeroticism techniques?
And, of course, Rape? Hershy
Rapes? My sweet friend Hershy who sings to God on Yom Kippur, with his
grown sons and the congregation harmonizing so beautifully, we forget about the
fast, forget about the awe, forget about everything but the yearning to sing,
sing, sing to God, the way children do, absent all cynicism and mannerism,
absent all denials and regrets, with melody and harmony as the ultimate priestly
sacrifice: One – One and One – One and Two – One and Three – One and Four –
One and Five – One and six – One and Seven…
It
wasn’t just that none of the information in that evil paragraph was true. It
was that it was phrased with such arrogance; the arrogance of the executioner’s
clerk, staring with half-blind eyes through a huge magnifying glass at his
enormous volume of beheadings: “Worch… Yes… he’s
under investigation currently… Yes… We think it’s
rapes… Yes… Hypnoeroticized them, the bastard… Yes…”
Was
the author of that horrible note aware of the Kafkaesque role he was
undertaking? Why would he do such a terrible thing to a man so dear to me? What
was Hershy’s recourse?
3. Luke Ford
According
to countless Google sources, each copying from another,
Luke is a boyish, thoughtful 39-year-old chap who came from Australia in the
1970’s and for a while was intensely reviled by the guys and gals of porn for
his blog, which monitored the “comings and goings” of
the adult industry. The son of a Christian evangelist, Ford, who converted to
Judaism in 1992, abandoned the flesh pot in search of higher things.
In
his own biographic notes,
Luke wrote:
“During
the early '90s, in the years leading up to and from my conversion to Judaism, I
determined that I would not hurt people needlessly. For instance, I would not
pass on gratuitous negative information about persons. I would not gossip. Even
if the gossip did not return to hurt the objects of my gossip, it would smudge
my soul. Now that I'd heard the call of God and His Moral Law, I'd strive to
live my life in accordance with that call.”
So
this was Hershy’s special inquisitor: A lad with a
passion for avoiding gossip, a gentle soul tormented by the pain of the smear. Oh,
Lord, Hershy would have been so much better off with a remorseless Neo Nazi…
4. Luke's and My Interview
My
website offers ample illustration of the horror
which has emanated from semi-official vigilante groups such as Vicki Polin’s
Awareness Center. Use it as exposition, because otherwise this will be an intolerably
long piece. Also, use Ford’s
own relentless posting of our email exchanges as background for all the
material herein.
It
began with an email from Luke, "Do you think we should do an on-the-record
discussion/debate of this stuff FOR PUBLICATION via the phone?"
The
code he was using, capping the “for publication” part, was presumably to
establish that everything we say from that point on would be “on-the-record.” By
accepting this term I was waving my rights to complain later. Luke is quite
trustworthy in that department. His relentless copyandpastes
are often self deprecating. I could rely on him to paste into the record
everything, including the points where I nail him. So far I haven’t been
disappointed.
We
started with friendly notes. I told Luke about a Tivo'ed
The Long Goodbye I had watched the
night before, with Elliot Gould as Marlow (Bob Altman, 1973) – very LA of the Rockford Files era. The movie made me
think about Luke. “It must be very difficult to own a brain in a town like
“Anyway,
the Gould character is so freaking passive, absorbing blows by the cops, the
thugs, the other thugs. Then, in the end, he just takes out a gun we never knew
he owned and shoots the culprit. Then he's back to his passive stance,
whistling carefree. Only in LA. In
“No insult taken. I'm hard to insult,” said Luke Ford. “I'm a lot like that Gould character you describe. I'm passive in most everything.”
5. Anonymity As Attack Weapon
I
suggested, only half jokingly, that the topic of our conversation should be:
"Why did you try to kill my best friend?" Something lighthearted and
humorous like that...
Luke
wasn’t taken aback. "Why did you try to kill my best friend?" he
said, “Sounds like an appropriate topic…”
But
he chose to begin with one of the most nagging complaints about his style of
work: The perpetual parade of anonymous sources who
point a firebranding finger at respectable members of
the community and manage to humiliate them without any recourse for the latter.
(Indeed, I found very disturbing today’s interview
with Rabbi Joseph Blau, by Steven I. Weiss, where the
good rabbi complains: "Since The Awareness Center’s a very small
operation, and there’s no opportunity to say 'we hired a bunch of guys and we
checked it out'... [Advisory Board members] get nervous" about the legal
liability. In this regard, he cited in particular "the supporters of Gafni, the supporters of Worch."
When an alleged abuser is identified, he said, "that person has supporters
and defenders, and that becomes a very difficult situation…” Oh, how
troublesome it is, indeed, when the accused wouldn’t go down quietly but would have
the chutzpa to fight back…)
“I'm
not going to be able to get into a lot of details about women who've brought
accusations but it is certainly a fair topic for discussion,” said Luke Ford. “Yes,
it is unfair that they can bring anonymous accusations and not be held
accountable for anything false they allege (but if I ever found one was lying
to me, I'd out her as a liar).”
Blogger as
final arbiter of the Truth. Interesting.
“But
then will you also feel obligated to trace down all of Jewish Chicago to inform
every last acquaintance of Hershy's that you did him
wrong?” I asked. “False accusations on page 1 and retractions on page 22 under
the Classifieds satisfy only lawyers and ratify nothing… Let's say Elijah came
down and showed you in no uncertain ways that Hershy is blameless of these
charges. How would you remedy his injury in a way that is meaningful to him?”
“If
Elijah did that, there would be no way for me to fully remedy the damage,” said
Luke. “I'd do everything that Hershy asked me to try to repair.”
6. Why Hershy?
One
of the most troubling questions regarding the attack on Hershy Worch had to do with choosing him as a target: A private
man, who hadn’t held a public position in three years.
Luke
said, “Rabbi Worch was still actively representing
himself as a rabbi at the time I published. The
public interest is that people make better decisions when they are better
informed… If I were a person who was learning from Rabbi Worch's
teachings, I'd want to have read my profile of him. Or if I were someone
considering dating or befriending him or employing him, I'd prefer to know.
“I
was aware of the allegations in the letter and its solid sourcing before I
published anything on Hershy. Just because I don't or can't go with everything
I have at once doesn't mean I don't have it. It just means I can't/won't
publish it at that time.”
So
it came down to the quality of Luke’s methodology in assessing the truth of an
allegation without assistance from Elijah. I asked for an opportunity to
examine that methodology and Luke agreed.
7. Does Luke Read That Which He Publishes?
I
said to Luke, “When Vicki releases on TAC posts that Hershy ran away to Turkey to flee a custody hearing, and
the story has no veracity whatsoever, yet you publish it without any comment–how
would you then fix it for him, so the world knows he's not a deadbeat father,
that, in fact, he is a loyal and devoted father?
“I
suspect that even if you spent the better part of your life trying to remedy
the damage, you'd still miss a few people who only heard of the accusations and
not the fact that they're baseless. Are you not responsible in the least for
the consequences of your actions?”
Luke
said, “The court records on his custody hearings etc. are public record which I
checked before posting about them. I am completely responsible for the accuracy
of my postings… All I can do is rate the coherence and truthfulness of the
accusers and compare what they say with other sources of information about Worch… [I] Spend hours talking/emailing
with a person, see if their stories inherently cohere or contradict. See
if they ever mislead you. Contact others to check on the person's credibility.
Check to see if what they allege that is verifiable can be verified.”
“Frankly,
I don't think you did,” I told him. “Show me where it says that Hershy failed to
appear for the March 15 hearing. Show me the custody dispute. Luke, this one
smells... Give me an example of this rating process.”
Luke
Responded: “I
posted that link.”
I
went to the link and said to Luke, “Can you read?” The web page for the Clerk
of the Circuit Court for
“Where
did you get the custody [dispute] from?” I asked. “Where did you get the
failure to appear in court on
“This
is total hogwash and you know it. This is not a document,
it's the cover of a folder for crying out loud. No one gave you documents, and
you never read any.”
8. Luke Repents
I
hammered on: “What about fact checking and cross-referencing? What about
contacting the accused? Why isn't this on your list [of things you do to verify
an accusation]?
“You
see, what emerges is the image of a lonesome, rather submissive fellow, sitting
in his little room, making blind allegations based on his gut feelings. The
process of verification is you get an email, you look at it for a few hours,
and if your computer didn't crash you post it….”
At
this point Luke experienced the email equivalence of a witness breaking down on
the stand.
“I
was wrong when I said that [I checked the source for the custody dispute
allegation]. I retract that. To the best of my knowledge, I have not seen any
documentation in public records about Hershy Worch's
custody issues. I only recall the link to his divorce which I posted months ago
in his profile.
“My
information about his lack of paying child support comes to me from women who
have been involved with Worch… You are right. I have
no documentation to support this. I took the report of JWB
at his word on the March 15 [2005] hearing. I did no independent verification
of this report aside from talking to two sources (one of whom was intimately
involved with Worch within the past three years) near
the Worch case.
“I
republished that information [“Rabbi Hershy Worch fled
the
9. Luke Admits Letting Vicki Polin Slide on her
Satanic Cult Membership
Impressed
by Luke Ford’s capacity for admitting a grave mistake (although he hasn’t
specified how he would compensate Hershy Worch for
the damages he caused him), I pressed on.
“Luke,
I read your interview with [Vicki Polin] and it is not even softball, its nerf ball. Come on, the woman is accused of going on Oprah
as ‘Rachel’ and saying she's from a Jewish Satanic cult. The woman is full of
so much hurt. And tops: the woman was seeking spiritual support from Rabbi Worch, the very
men she then attacked so viciously and without any shred of fair play. The
woman was accused of stealing from friends and colleagues. If you knew all that,
you never let on.”
Luke
Ford said, “I believe that Vicki appeared on Oprah in 1989 as alleged and that
she said things that as of now I don't believe are substantiated. I believe
that her allegations were so heinous about her experience with part of the
Jewish community that the ADL persuaded the Oprah
show not to make the show available and I have been unable to track down a copy
of the show nor a transcript.
“I
have been aware of this for about six months. Vicki was not ready to talk about
this at the time I did the interview with her and to this day I don't believe
she is ready to give an interview (to me anyway) about her appearance on Oprah.
I am of course greatly interested in getting her to do an interview about her
time on Oprah and getting a transcript of the show and a videotape copy of the
show.”
So
he let it slide in the interview?
"I
didn't let it slide,” Luke defended himself. “There are many stories I can't
publish now because people won't let me publish their remarks yet (I had agreed
to not publish until they gave me permission) and for other reasons."
This
after he went at some length to explain why it was crucial to defame Rabbi Worch as a rapist despite his holding no official post,
lest a student or a lover be done in by him. But when it comes to the Executive
Director of a self-appointed vigilante organization affecting countless lives,
Luke is in no rush.
Phil
Marlow would have been mildly chagrinned.
Yori Yanover,