Zackary Sholem Berger has a new baby daughter, a new article in the Forward on chevrei kadisha and an upcoming article in New York Magazine with myself on the Williamsburg Chasidic anti-hipster protests.
A busy man he be.
Good luck with the kid, big fella.

Adina takes issue with an earlier post of mine that said the frum gals who demand respect on textual ability and then demand that guys pay for their dates are, "Playing dress-up feminist."
You'll notice, of course, that Adina's new post conveniently side-steps the issue of paying for dates, addressing only the idea of guys' holding the door open, declaring:

Don't view a woman as an object or as man's tool, but as a person entitled to her own ideas, opinions, and feelings - whether that be in the home, workplace, schools, or yeshivot, - as well as entitled to equal pay, for ex.
[...]
However, the tradition of chivalry, as posited throughout history in various forms (i.e. kissing of the hand vs. kiss on the cheek, in some societies, or ?holding the door open?), has not been disputable because it very much treats women with respect. Chivalry has always been welcomed - it is decent, polite, and courteous ? so who wouldn?t welcome it?

Is it "feminist" for a woman to argue that she has a right to vote? Maybe, maybe not. By your definition, I would think so. But regardless, that doesn't mean that that woman is being inconsistent if she doesn't want to become a rabbi (and not because of the politics and bad pay).

Here's the CJR article on the Forward. I haven't read it yet; will have comments later.

In the Truth Is Funnier Than Satire department:

Occasionally, I come across a website or article that is so exquisitely realized that were it to be parodied, the absurdity in the satire would only be a pale reflection of the actual, real life item.
This is one of those things.

Apparently, sensing the gaping hole in contemporary Haredi Judaism's knowledge of Rabbi Falk's "monumental" (thick, anyway) work on tzniut - oz vehadar levusha - a Passaic kollelman instituted - brace yourselves - "The Oz Vhadar Free Home Study Program" !

Ok, so some kollel wives wanna learn a work (conveniently translated into english so they don't need to worry about pesky things like real jewish education and textual capability) that tells them they need an extra tznius button on their shirts? Kol Hakavod - I personally think they'd be better off having a learning group in the "39 melachos" or "the shabbos kitchen", but whatever floats their boats, I guess.

What is truly amazing about this program though, is the level of breathless promotion, vacuous testimonial and laughably chipper colloquialism present in the website describing the goals and ideals of the tznius challenge.

I don't think the Onion's writers could dream up lines like:


"Mrs. L from Lakewood describes the intense satisfaction she derives from the home-study program. With a large family to care for, she steals time from her busy schedule to coordinate a group of her own and is an active participant herself. Some nights she may find herself pacing her husband’s study, baby in one hand and Oz V’hadur sefer in the other"

Or perhaps, for an account of the ambitious project's genesis:

"Rabbi Katz, a mechanech who lives in Passaic, NJ, is the founder and director of the home-study program. It all started when the sefer came into his hand one day. He read through some sections and was immediately inspired. The beauty and eloquence of the sefer touched his heart. He was so moved and uplifted that he knew wanted to start learning groups for women.

One day Rabbi Katz came home to find his wife deep in the midst of one of her bi-weekly n’tzor l’shoncha tests (At the time, Mrs. Katz was a participant of the N’tzor L’shoncha Home-Study program, based on the sefer "Guard Your Tongue"). Something in his brain clicked. Why not take Rabbi Falk’s sefer and do the same! ""

And, my favorite example of doublespeak:

"We are targeting everyone," Rabbi Katz says. By that he means that the program was designed for women from all walks of life. The sefer may not jive with your present lifestyle. But as in limud ha’Torah, one learns in order to purify one’s soul, to broaden ones mind, to iron out one’s hashkafos hachaim, and eventually this is m’chazek the person to elevate his or her maasim."

So in other words, the sefer was designed for everyone - as long as they're like us.

Truth be told, I find most of this (including the challenge itself, which offers women scoring 85% or higher on the biweekly quizzes the chance to enter a monthly raffle for a $50 gift certificate - one wonders if the certficate is redeemable in Victoria's Secret) hysterical, but not a bad thing, per se.

What's disturbing is that they actually refer to the work as the "‘mishna berurah’ for women." Perhaps they confused it with "tzena urena." I thought the point of beis yaakov education was to squelch ignorance like this.
I find myself amazed at the haredi world's eagerness to canonize quasi halachic english works provided that they are machmir enough.

SIW has discussed the Grama book with me on a few occasions, and has stressed (including on this website) that the danger in letting such work go unchecked lies in the possibility if its dissemination down the line as an authoritative work and a justification for a future lunatic's rationale for violent crime. The absurdity of a haredi taking an activist position on ANY issue (I'm not talking about williamsburg Hasidim, who won't have anything to do with a lakewood hashkafic work - they have their own specious hashkafic works - but rather about the litvish and moderate hasidic community that might conceivably encounter Grama's sefer down the line) aside, I feel that the Oz vehadar levusha program illustrates why the grama book has done nothing more than touch off a tempest in a teapot.
What sells in the haredi community? Not hashkafa. Not Nice little compendia of boich toirahs (sorry, it doesn't quite translate) and moldy old extracontextual rabbinic vignettes that have been kicking around the yeshiva world for generations (which is, essentially, what Romemut Yisrael is).

What sells is chumra, preferably in easy to read hebrew, or, better yet, in english, so the wife can read it too.
Grama's book will not inspire anyone (no matter how demented or misanthropic) to start a Romemut yisrael free home study program. Consequently, it will be out of sight and out of mind, left to molder in the upper shelves of the Misc. section in most yeshivas' libraries.

What will continue to inspire (ugh) people is the relentless pursuit of chumra, coupled by the move to dumb down and democritize (read - appeal to the lowest common denominator) the study of the rank and file haredi family.

Read it and laugh. Or weep. I did a little of both.

Interesting piece in Haaretz on conservative and reform rabbis blasting habad shlichim in Small Town USA for poaching congregants.

My favorite line:

"Yoffe describes Chabad as being narrow-minded, "selling a minimalist form of Judiasm door to door." He says that, while in a Reform synagogue the preparation for a bar mitzvah can take up to three years, with the participation of the family, "the Chabad emissaries will organize a bar mitzvah for a boy they met half an hour earlier." "

Uh huh. And I wonder which of the two bar mitzva boys is statistically more likely to come back and make his kid's bar mitzva 25 years down the line?

For those anticipating it, there's no Forward story on Beis Yitzchok this week; it will likely run next week.
UPDATE: Which isn't to say there's no discussion of the sixth commandment and its interpretation in the issue; there most certainly is.

The current issue of the Columbia Journalism Review has an article about the Forward, though it's not online.

Someone sent me a link to this article this morning, and I still haven't gotten to read it, but one thing that pops out is this advertisement:

It's pretty surprising to see Chovevei advertising on Ha'aretz, given their pretty significant efforts to tamp down on leftist perspectives on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.

Bruce Hill, aka "Tom Paine," was refused a kosher meal on Emirates airline (Thanks, Simcha). I can't say that this seems awfully surprising. Any info as to their relative prices to other airlines on such flights and additional information to indicate whether Jews, or any non-Arabs, would have good reason to fly on their airline for any other reason than just to fly on their airline, is welcome. I'm pretty sure I take issue with this part of his post:

The first is that I believe by having this policy which deliberately targets Jews, Emirates is in fact breaking international air transport regulations, and that it is in flat contravention of New Zealand’s anti-discrimination laws.

I have spent a good part of my adult life arguing in favour of peaceful coexistence between Jews and Arabs. I was a co-founder, along with former Labour Party president Michael Hirschfeld, of New Zealand Jews for Peace in the Middle East.

I helped organise the first Jewish-Arab Peace Dinner in Wellington to mark the commencement of the Oslo peace process. I have marched in Peace Now rallies in Tel Aviv, and have argued within the Jewish community that coexistence and cooperation with the Arab/Muslim world is possible.

And now I find my arguments are being thrown back in my face by this experience of flying Emirates. Some other members of the Jewish community teased me about flying on an Arab airline, saying I would be asking for trouble.

I told them that I was flying Emirates because I’m a Jew who is not prejudiced against Arabs.

Unfortunately, it turns out the reverse is NOT the case.

If this is the “traditional Arab hospitality” mentioned in your brochure, then what am I to tell my friends about my experience? What lessons should I draw about Jewish-Arab relations from this?

Mr xxxxxxxxxxx, I understand that you are in a position where you have to carry out a policy set by your head office in Dubai, and that you may or may not agree with it, so I hope you do not take this personally.

Is Matis Weinberg reading blogs? Is the comment here for real? Who knows?
UPDATE: A source asked his family about this, who say they don't know of his having a Hotmail account.
UPDATE: Okay, so even if he's not hanging out at the Chakira blog, he could have other Web haunts, right? Like, say, a book discussion on a new version of The Count of Monte Cristo? Thank Reader Shaya for leading us to this:

The Count of Monte Cristo--revisited, 2 September, 1998
Reviewer: ravmatis@netvision.net.il
To all who devoured the "Count of Monte Cristo", this ought to be fun. It's all here: betrayal, incarnation, an old man who supplies all needed information, and at last: the discovery that revenge is not worth it. It's here, but now the magic supplies the revenge instead of an endless sourse of money. It doesn't really matter: the count of Monte Cristo was always a fantasy anyway.
Is it a great book? No. But it does keep you hooked, and some scenes have real power (such as the steward's--I cannot pronounce his name--death scene, and Astines nightmares). The characters are reasonably good, though the relationship between Glannian and Tradain was too sketchy and stereotyped. Also, the moral was apllied a little too heavely. Let us enjoy the book, and figure out the moral for ourselves.
Still, despite it's flaws, it was a very enjoyable book.

Holy crap! I know this Israeli kid on Extreme Dating right now! He's Ariel Gabbai and went to Camp Stone (I'm not sure if I was on staff when he was a camper or if we're closer in age)...wow. Someone TiVo this!!
UPDATE: He didn't win. Awwww...

Rabbi Josh Yuter blogs on Beis Yitzchok. On a factual level, some of what he says is not the case:
He mentions issue 31, in which two students published an article that relied on the thought of Lieberman, and says that no one would have noticed if "authors themselves hadn't pointed out to everyone that were able to publish this piece in the typically 'traditional' BY." I disagree; issue 31 was in a number of ways designed to pursue untraditional avenues by the editors themselves, and it seemed that many were generally aware of what was going on.
I'll also contest that the article in question for the current issue has received an "extreme reaction." It's being discussed, but not really in extreme terms.
Overall, he says he "didn't like" the article in question or the other one by the same author.
One paragraph worth noting:

I'm not a fan of censorship, but on the other hand we can't accept every single possible position as part of every discussion. For now, I'm just advocating accountability. Accountability for Roshei Yeshiva in terms of their own methodologies and how closely they follow Torah. Accountability for the critics to demonstrate why they disagree. And finally accountability for the "netizens" for their comments.

Slashdot and Kuro5hin both depend on the community moderating itself such that the insightful get read over the trolls.

The impetus for my previous post was this non-story suggesting Britney Spears' wedding may have had some kabbalistic reason for getting hitched but not giving any indication what that reason could be (the story was noted earlier by Elder Avraham).
But could there be any kabbalistic reasons related to her hitching. On a standard Judaism level, she could have been, "getting married for a night." But is there anything relating to the calendar or whatever that could have sparked this on a kabbalistic level? Any members/leaders of Kavvanah care to comment?

Having been annoyed too many times by JPost's registration requirement and long sign-up, I've set up an account that we and our readers can use, as many other blogs are doing at other papers.
Username: Protocols
Password: Protocols
We might do this if any other site we link to regularly has a user-unfriendly registration requirement. Of course, if you read those publications regularly, it's probably to your benefit to register with them on your own.
As a reminder for those who don't want to register at the Commentator's site, you can just use the e-mail address wecker@ymail.yu.edu; it should only need to be entered once.

Not Observant Anymore is a book project by Faranak Margolese that appears to be quite dated with no book having actually been produced. It's described thusly:

This site is gathering information about why orthodox Jews stop being observant for a book which is being written by Faranak Margolese. It will be the first book published on the subject and will aim to clarify the true feelings, experiences, and reasons that people stop observing Orthodox Judaism.
There is much speculation concerning this important subject and there are few, clear answers. Without these answers, there can be no tolerance and understanding toward those who stop observing, and the orthodox Jewish world will never understand what, if anything, it can do to improve. Your open, honest feedback can make an important difference.
If you were once an observant Jew and stopped practicing either for a short period of time or permanently, please fill out the questionnaire and tell your story. All responses are 100% anonymous.
Your voice is the most important tool for making a change. Thank you for sharing it.

Too funny. Last week I posted a link to Frumsex, a Yahoo Group that I made no claim to having read.
To get a decent sense of what the discussion is like there you can just jump 1000 messages at a time and see what's going on; it's good for a 10-minute summary of what's there. Of course, the first thing I did when I went to look at it earlier this week was to search for Protocols, getting no hits. Then we received a comment from one of their female members, so I just went back and searched for Protocols again; sure enough, the moderator posted this message:

The big news is that we've been discovered by the Protocols web site!
Protocols.blogspot.com is a site run by a long-haired, pseudo-intellectual, very-modern-orthodox, politically liberal YU grad (not that that reflects anything about YU people) who posts his thoughts and collects those of others in all things related to Judaic thought and activity in the world. It's a very popular site with 'thinking' Jews, and now, perhaps, the level of discourse here will rise as well.
If you're just joining us now, having heard of us through Protocols, welcome. If you'd like a summary of the discussions over the years to date, reach out and engage some of our veteran members.
That's all I have to say at the moment -- I just got excited to see us on Protocols and decided to jump in with a hello.

Just saw an ad indicating that the next episode of Extreme Dating will feature a sketchy Israeli guy who sings Hebrew folk songs.

On Stupidity and Open-ness.
It's been interesting to note how different people within the YU structure have responded to the possibility that the current issue of Beis Yitzchok may contain a controversial article.
There have been two main approaches utilized -- one smart, one stupid.
The smart approach in dealing with this, as with any potential controversy, is to immediately open up all information for examination and trust the caring public's ability to interpret information. This is why a corporation facing rumors of accounting improprieties does best to produce its books -- the people who care and are capable of interpreting such things will examine them, the relevant and capable members of the press will report on them, and whether the company is to be castigated or commended will become readily apparent to whomever might participate. There will be a minority of idiots refusing common consensus on the matter, but they would likely go on chattering as such anyway.
The alternative approach (the stupid approach, for those keeping score) is to clam up, suggest that even asking such questions is an insult to the integrity of corporate structures as a whole, and selectively chastise and punish those who make an effort to make the inner goings-on known.
The analogy here to the Beis Yitzchok article is quite obvious: YU's elders and its students could make an effort towards transparency on the matter, so that those who know and care about the matters at hand could make their own decisions, or it could make a feeble-hearted attempt at sweeping all issues of the journal under the rug and silencing by threat or by shame those who seek to let the truth out.
Let's compare the story of Saadia Grama's book to the story of Beis Yitzchok. Grama's book made declarations that were universally condemned as outside the pale of Judaism and Lakewood's rabbis showed themselves to be quite adept in dealing with the scandal by being entirely candid with their thoughts on the book. The result was that a fringe text with a mainstream approbation became a fringe text without a mainstream approbation and a mainstream rabbi who could otherwise have been associated with a fringe idea clearly distanced himself from it. All told, Grama appeared as someone who had gone outside the bounds of Judaism and R' Aryeh Malkiel Kotler appeared as someone willing to reduce the reputation of his book approbations in order to maintain the integrity of what he and others viewed as the true body of Jewish thought. The situation was explained to fellow experts in the field in an open and transparent manner, and the capable and relevant journalists reported it in an straightforward manner.
Within the scheme of the Beis Yitzchok article, people from across the country knew about it early last week. Well before my post on Protocols, many alumni and at least one Jewish newspaper were already discussing the article; information flows quite fast these days, and my post requesting some clarification went up in mid-week, and was quickly responded to by someone who decided that transparency was the right way to go; within hours, Protocols' 1000+ readers were able to read a decent translation of the text in question. Had my request not been responded to with a translation in a matter of hours, it would have been a .pdf of the scanned text or a copy of the journal itself in a matter of days. Had I not requested a copy of the article, it may have taken more days or possibly weeks for some other blogger or journalist to pick up on, but given what people thought about it, its notice was inevitable. More to the point, its notice was necessary: if an article says something it shouldn't, the people have a right to take notice and make efforts to correct that; if an article says something that it should, the people have a right to be aware of that and emphasize it as well. Information flows, and there's nothing anybody anywhere can do to completely stop it, certainly not among free and thinking people.
So we are left to consider the thoughts of people like commenter AAK here, not the first to "blame" the blogger there for translating portions of the Beis Yitzchok article, and were he to do so, he'd not be the first to "blame" Protocols for bringing the article to more public attention in the first place.
I place "blame" in quotes because such outcry is grounded in an explicitly wrong-headed notion regarding what scandal is and what causes it.
Again, let's take the example of Grama's book. People have claimed and, stupidly, will continue to claim that the Forward's article on the book caused a scandal, that it has caused and will cause a growth in anti-Semitism. Such claims forget the idea that the actual wrong -- as articulated by the Torah leaders quoted in the article -- is the book itself.
Let's run the hypotheticals: The Forward takes the approach suggested by the head-in-the-sand crowd and decides not to run it's Grama story; Lakewood's authorities ostensibly breathe a sigh of relief, tell Grama not to make his mistake again, and toss whatever copies of the book he still has in his ownership on the trash heap. In this first hypothetical, the ostriches have succeeded in assuring that the Forward's readership doesn't ever hear of the book, that R' Kotler will not be given a venue to make a public retraction, and Torah scholars everywhere will never get to state for the record their opinions on the matter. But here's where it gets sticky: In not allowing R' Kotler to make a public retraction and in not allowing Torah scholars to condemn what they feel is worthy of condemnation, the portion of the book's publishing run already in circulation (which is to say the entirety of the first run and some portion of the second) is considered, so far as the Jewish public is concerned, within the mainstream of Jewish thought and worthy of the imprimatur of mainstream Jewish scholars. Thusly, the ostriches have succeeded only in clamping down on the solution, not the problem -- that is allowed to roam rather freely. Someday the problem lands on some already relatively-radicalized Jew's desk and he notes its mainstream credentials, says to himself that this is the text he's been waiting the entirety of his bigoted existence to find. Maybe he republishes it, maybe he doesn't, maybe he starts a cult around it, maybe he doesn't, but either way at some point -- likely in the 21st century -- we find some racist Jew standing over a kneeling gentile pleading for his life as the the racist holds a gun in his right hand and the book he's come to love in his left. All the television stations are there because the racist Jew is doing his demonstration at 42nd and Broadway because the whole point of this exercise is to emphasize the unspoken truths of Sefer Romemut Yisrael that other Jews aren't willing to recite because they're too polite or dainty or tied to goyishe interests, and our racist Jew is the only one willing to explain the truth and he wants to make sure the whole world is there to hear it. And when the news reports wrap up the bloody ending of this standoff -- however it ends -- they've got a book written some decades previously that has the approbation of a famous rabbi who lived not too far away and not too long ago, and its the peg in their story.
In the second hypothetical, the book is condemned by Torah authorities, bookstores are instructed to remove it from the shelves with a clear purpose, and whenever that book lands on some already relatively-radicalized Jew's desk, he's probably already heard that it's been rejected, since the book is precisely the kind of affirmation he's been searching for. Sure, it ends up as yet more fodder for some anti-Semitic group, but that group was going to be anti-Semitic anyway, and it still has to have the headline announcing that "Charedi Rabbis Rush to Disavow Anti-Gentile Book." This is not just a win against racism within the Jewish community, but a win against anti-Semites who have the unfortunate job of explaining why a story they feature doesn't really cohere with their message.
Now on to Beis Yitzchok. The arguments in it are clearly more tepid, but the imprimatur is clearly more a part of the publishing process, what with current/future rabbis rather closely engaging in an editorial process. The article isn't necessarily scandal-worthy per se, but discussion of it in light of the efforts the Modern Orthodox make to cohere the values of their traditional texts with the values of the modern world that they've come to know and appreciate, especially after the leading figure of the institution helped draw the bright line in front of Grama's book, seems rather appropriate. And so we have a story, a question really, of just how the Modern Orthodox -- including the Modern Orthodox rabbinic leadership -- will conduct themselves when questions start getting asked about some new texts they've put together in an academic journal. This is both the perfect opportunity to practice Modern Orthodoxy's attempt to engage the outside world forthrightly and display it's willingness to admit the struggle that it is, as much as it is also the perfect opportunity to display that all that talk about standing up to intellectual challenges was hoo-ha and that really all Modern Orthodoxy will do when asked questions about its thought is to batten down the hatches and silence those who would answer.
So, again we have two hypotheticals. In the first, all students of this scholarship, including editors and authors of this and recent issues of the journal engage the question posted online at Protocols, providing either their own input in the comments or on other blogs, and when asked to comment about it by any press, they freely explain their relative level of expertise on the matter and offer to be as helpful as they can, at times guiding the reporter to a more appropriate source for a given question. Maybe the article ends up being of questionable scholarship and the students and rabbis admit that; maybe it stands up to scrutiny and the students and rabbis put that message forward; maybe the validity of the article is a matter of dispute among friends, and they all express their opinions as well as the rights of others to theirs within certain limits. All told, the result is that the story reflects an ongoing intellectual discussion within Modern Orthodoxy, within the institution that bears the brand of Torah U'Madda, and the understood emphasis is that its participants will have the courage and freedom of inquiry to engage all of this openly and without prejudice.
Then there's the second hypothetical. Older students engage younger students in an endeavor to silence public discussion of the article at hand, those who choose the public discussion are shouted down or berated. When questions arise from those outside this group as to the nature of the article, the response is clear: that one has to be within the group to understand it, that it isn't a good idea to translate or spread and thus open to public scrutiny the contents of the article, and frankly it's disrespectful of anyone to even ask questions about it. The relative validity/non-validity of the article and the students' thoughts on it are now immaterial: the public face is one of collective silence and thus one of solidarity in not only supporting the contents of the article (whatever they may be), but as well in supporting the idea that Modern Orthodoxy and the efforts at Torah U'Madda will not subject themeselves to inquiry from those outside the group, will not engage in serious self-examination when questions are raised and will rather remain secluded from those who would seek to understand it.
In neither of these Beis Yitzchok hypotheticals do we see murder or rampage, but in the latter we most certainly do see scandal, and that is one of forgetting the ideals that we intended to utilize when sitting at the table for this life-long conversation we're having, refusing to have the confidence in our own conclusions to subject them to a more public discourse, and being stupid enough to think that such an effort will pass muster in this day and age.
Are the two scandals equivalent? Absolutely not -- one ends in a rampage of a racist and potentially genocidal maniac, the other ends in the collapse of a set ideals.
But it is important to understand that, especially within the construct of our modern ideal of free inquiry, failure to engage in that free inquiry is our failure against the system we're trying to build.
Josh Harrison, a freshman at YU by route of Ner Yisrael, exemplified the ideal of free inquiry into our thought perfectly when he brought to the table of open discussion and inquiry a source worth discussing; all the senior rebbeim who've yet commented on the matter have taken a similar tack in dealing openly and honestly with the press. Within this discussion, the experts are weighing in, the capable and relevant press is playing it's role, and the caring public is interpreting the information it receives.
For the sake of those who care about the discussion, let's hope that those who tried to clamp down on it have not had too much of an effect, have not hurt the efforts of the capable and relevant press or the attempts of the experts to take part in the discussion by asserting that the information is not to be shared, that the caring public is not welcome to take part, for surely that will become part of the public discussion, part of the press coverage, instead of the more appropriate efforts that guys like Josh Harrison, as well as the senior rebbeim, have chosen. The smart approach should always win.
Whatever the result, the open table for discussion is always just that: open. Should any additional members of the Modern Orthodox world and Yeshiva University decide to start their own blogs, we'll link to them, just as we do to all other Jews'; should they choose to engage in discussion in the comments here at Protocols, we'll welcome them just as we have everyone else.

Scientists Seek Place for God While Embracing Reason | theledger.com:

A question that science and religion may never agree on is the meaning of the universe. Weinberg has stated that scientific progress exposes the universe as essentially meaningless.
'With all due respect, that's just wrong,' said Clayton, the Claremont professor. 'The question about the ultimate significance of the universe is not decided by new facts. The question of significance is not reducible to facts. Even if everything was known about the universe, you can still watch a sunset and hold a baby and sense the presence of God.'

Jpost wonders if Brittney Spears got married over the weekend for Kabbalistic purposes. I have nothing more to say, except for another chance to use my line about the Kabbalah Center as Scientology Done Jewish.

Dr. Laura back at it:

On Friday, Schlessinger, whose coast-to-coast show is heard by 12 million listeners, read a letter from a listener who criticized the lack of attention given to children in some day-care centers, especially those calling themselves ''Child Development Centers.''
Dr. Laura said: ''It sounds like something out of Nazi Germany.''