Book Review
When Rabbis Abuse
1/5 stars
"Defining everything and excluding nothing as sexual abuse cannot help anyone. Feminazi author squandered an opportunity here."
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Of the book:

-375 pages of prose over 14 chapters. 27pps/chapter
-235 citations over 375 pages. 0.62/page. (Not impressive.)
-Almost all of the sources are to blogs and newspaper articles.

The training of the author is from two fields that really are not suitable for this type of book. 

1. Anthropology is concerned with endless anecdotes, and that's because they don't have actual data to work with (unlike population geneticists, for example).

2.  Education. And that is because they tend to not attract the most academically gifted / insightful people. (Those who can't do, teach.)

This book has a lot of problems, and I can see why Sztokman could not get it published with a reputable label: even for all of the great bulk of this book, it just doesn't have that much to say.

∆∆∆FIRST major problem is that the definition of sexual abuse is way too expansive. 

So, by the lights of this author

1.  If some Rabbi describes a woman as a "beautiful blonde cantor" (p.49) or

2. If a woman is "lured" into a long-term sexual relationship (p.50) where she goes with a man of her own volition,

Then Sztokman treats this the same as if some grade school aged boy (likely from a lower status family) involuntarily gets sodomized by some Haredi Rabbi (let's call him "Yoseph Ungar," p.113) with no one to speak on his behalf and no recourse, nor justice.

Just, no. 

Author also seems to come from this school of thought (that has been debunked and is in the process of going down the memory hole even as we speak) that sexual abuse / sexual assault is about "power" and not about the pleasures of the sexual experience. (Who ever heard of a rapist going after somebody with gray hair? Why do you think that these guys are after the tender bits of young ones and not menopausal ones?).

And I guess that supports Sztokman's theory of rabbis doing this ONLY because they are in power and not because they're actually interested in crotch.

I hate to impinge on what-is-not-really-even-a-very-interesting-theory with reality, but: as any moderately successful musician can tell you, being in a position of exposure to a lot of women can lead to.... Indiscretions. (A lot of bands admit that the purpose of forming a band was to meet women. Everybody knows that being a singer in a band adds about 4 inches. Everybody, that is, except for one particular "Jewish feminist anthropologist, educator, and activist.")

She even adds the term psycho-sexual abuse (p.172) just in case the definition of sexual abuse is still just a bit too narrow to include Every. Possible. Thing.
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And the bad news is that: REAL sexual abuse is a problem in Jewish contexts, and this author wasted an opportunity bring that across.

These MANY, regular, frequent cases in which Haredim choose some victim because they know about the status differential between the two parties happens on a regular basis and for often two or three decades per case. (And just a few well selected cases could have been enough to illustrate this, rather than 1,001 anecdotes.)
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∆∆∆SECOND major problem is that the book is just too wordy. Everything that she said in 375 pages could have been said equally well in 225 by cutting out the waffle.
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∆∆∆THIRD problem is it the book just doesn't have a sense of reality with respect to:

1. Donors; I don't think anybody who has an IQ above room temperature can fail to notice that institutions send out young, attractive girls to solicit donations from these Big Shots. And these Big Shots are used to easy access to the loins of almost any woman that they fancy.

If you are a nice looking woman going to ask someone for a large donation to an organization, is it surprising when the encounters go sideways / turn sexual?

And let's not forget that in this land where there is separation between church and state, somebody has to do the dirty work of getting donations to keep synagogues open.

And sometimes that entails dealing with unsavory people.

2. The sexual dynamics of boys and girls. Men don't have anything to go on with respect to a woman's sexual availability except for asking and being rebuffed. And if every man immediately gave up after one single rebuff, probably 90% of us would not have been born. 

Where to draw the line between persistence and harassment is something that people are bound to miscalculate--and it may be completely innocuous.

There is a whole chapter on grooming tactics, which *could* actually be a chapter on how men pursue women (It is called "putting in coupons"): flattery / ingratiation / prizes and candy/repetition.

3. Hoeflation is making it such that a lot of women over-interpret even tangential interest as "traumatizing sexual abuse." Even for the girls that resemble elephants and don't bathe regularly, there is NOTHING that could not be construed as abuse.

4. The author uses the word "rape" to mean too many different things: if some lady has drunk sex with a guy or later regrets having sex with him, she does not get to retroactively define that as "rape."

∆∆∆FOURTH problem is that the book is just sloppy and needs some editorial work.

For instance: Malka Leifer is indexed on pages 33, 113, 148, 169, 283.

I find nothing about her on page 113 or 283. There is a bit about her on page 114, but nothing either before or after page 283.

Because some of these people were so famous, an editor might have suggested to this author to put everything about them in one place as a story.

Each of those stories could have been used to illustrate what happens more often than not in the Haredi case:

1. Higher status people are believed over lower status ones;

2. Rather than fire the predator or press charges, they would just reassign him / her;

3. If aggrieved party goes to the secular authorities, they will be the one that is dismissed from school or run out of town. (Aharon Sorscher/ Yosef Kolko case.) This is to do with the prohibition against "mesira."
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Page 133 is this exact point that the author has gone off the deep end: A man who is openly gay is supposedly sexually abusing a woman. (Talk about everything looking like a nail to a hammer. Sheesh.)

Verdict: This is a very silly book. Don't waste your time.
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Prototypical sexual abusers:

Yosef Kolko
Baruch Lanner
Yona Metzger
Yehuda Meshi Zahav
Yosef Ungar
Leib Trooper
Malka Leifer
Barry Freundel
Chaim Walder
Eliezer Berland
Macy Gordon
George Finkelstein 

Not sexual abusers:

-Yonasan Abrahamson (voluntary relationship)
-Any other person who is in a voluntary sexual relationship (>70% of the non-Haredi Jewish people profiled in this book)