“The stories of mohels down on their luck, but who can perform three circumcisions at once, strain credulity at best, and constitute outright fraud at worst.”
Los Angeles, November 21 – Rabbinic circles buzzed today with emerging allegations that the most popular venue for aspiring authorities in Jewish law to strut their stuff on the national stage seldom presents a realistic picture of contestants and their situations, and at times engages in outright deception in a bid to increase drama and thus TV audience attention.
Former contestants and a number of still-anonymous employees at Torah Network Television (TNT), which carries the weekly America’s Got Rabbis program, leveled accusations this week against producers of the show according to which contestants are encouraged to play to stereotypes, exaggerate hardships, and feign reactions to scripted developments, and that the judges do not exercise independent assessment of the contestants’ prowess with Talmudic and medieval sources, but instead issue decisions regarding whose success or failure will bring greater attention, and therefore advertiser revenue, to the show.
In a letter to several media outlets, the accusers charge that America’s Got Rabbis personnel ordered contestants to engage in stereotypical “Hasidic,” “yeshivish,” or “Carlebach hippy” behaviors backstage on camera, when in fact the contestants in question seldom act that way, if at all. Moreover, they allege, the producers embellished the backstories of contestants to increase the drama or engage viewer sympathy, when in fact the edited narratives bore little resemblance to the truth.
Additionally, the letter contends, the panel of experts judging contestants’ performances allowed considerations foreign to the prowess of the contestants to enter their thinking, such as what outcome, in their assessment, the producers of the show would prefer. Thus, for example, last season’s finalists included a New York yeshiva student who could use an a fortiori argument from the biblical text to prove that a rat carcass should in fact not confer ritual impurity on contact – a display of analytical ability that indicated qualification to serve on the legendary Sanhedrin – but whose achievement, allege the letter writers, “wasn’t ‘sexy’ enough.”
“The stories of mohels down on their luck, but who can perform three circumcisions at once, strain credulity at best, and constitute outright fraud at worst,” the letter claims. “And not a single ‘Hasidic’ contestant keeps his payos as curly in everyday life as any of them did on stage – at the urging of the backstage crew, who would not consider letting them on stage to be mattir an agunah unless they were wearing a streimel,” the traditional fur hat that many Hasidim don for the Sabbath or festive occasions.
A publicist for America’s Got Rabbis accused the writers of violating nondisclosure agreements, and, since this is 2018, suggested the accusers were motivated by antisemitism.
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