Thirty years ago, a short, stocky, in-your-face American arrived in Oxford and arguably transformed the face of Jewish student life in Britain.
Rabbi Shmuel Boteach (better known as Shmuley), with his wife, Debbie, created the Oxford L’Chaim Society, which grew to be the second biggest student society ever in the university city, attracting high-profile speakers from the worlds of politics, arts and culture.
And the astonishing thing about Boteach’s work is that he was only 22 when he got to Oxford, not much older than most of the students.
Talking to the man who styles himself “America’s rabbi” today, there is the distinct impression of a person in a hurry.
The defining event in his early life was his parents’ divorce when he was only eight years old, the youngest of five children. It’s not too much of a stretch to think of everything Boteach has done since — his 32 books, with controversial titles such as Kosher Sex or Kosher Jesus, his daytime relationship shows on American TV, or his friendship and fights with Uri Geller, Michael Jackson, Roseanne Barr, and now Senator Cory Booker — as his way of proving himself.
Boteach has transformed himself — perforce — from being a Chabad rabbi to being a scrappy street fighter on behalf of Jews and Israel. He regularly takes full-page adverts in the New York Times to attack those he perceives as being antisemitic or anti-Zionist, crowd-funding for the thousands of dollars it costs to place such adverts.
What the august American “institution” organisations such as Aipac or the American Jewish Committee make of Boteach’s actions is unknown. He himself is unsure how he is regarded. He is sure of one thing, however — that “we can win the argument in the marketplace of ideas”.
His message to British Jews for Rosh Hashanah is clear: “I do not believe that the British people are antisemitic — but I do believe that we have to fight back on every issue.”
Boteach was born in Los Angeles but brought up primarily in Miami Beach. His family, he says, were “modern Orthodox, no rabbis at all, all business people”.
But as a boy, after his parents’ divorce, he went to a Chabad camp — and fell in love with Judaism. “I bonded with the camp counsellors,” he says. “I found their passion for Judaism contagious.”
By the time he was 10 or 11 he had already been to see the Lubavitcher Rebbe, who became his great patron, in New York, and at 13 had decided to join the Chabad movement. This meant going to a series of yeshivot in Los Angeles, Israel and New York. It also meant great domestic turmoil.
“My mother was very upset,” he says. “She felt I was joining a cult and said that what she called my ‘crush’ on the Rebbe was unseemly. She thought that Chabad took kids away from their homes. My siblings told me I was upsetting my mother.”
Boteach paints a picture of himself at 16, very serious, with a penchant for teaching Torah at the dinner table. What would he say to his younger self today?
He laughs. “A good question, I’ve never been asked that before. Maybe I would tell him to lighten up — but it was appropriate for me at the time.”
The young Boteach had a lot of catching up to do with his Chabad classmates. Not least was the fact that his family didn’t speak Yiddish at home and all his peers had been brought up with Yiddish as their first language.
Some people might have been deterred by the hurdles in front of them. Boteach was determined, however, and was chosen to be one of 10 Chabad students sent to Sydney, Australia, to work with the community there and to launch a yeshivah.
It sounds incredibly hard work, for as well as their own studies, the students were expected to run weekly Saturday night activities with the community on various Jewish themes, all of which had to be prepared during the week.
But it brought Boteach a bonus — he met the parents of his future wife, Debbie, because they were taking part in these post-Shabbat study sessions. Not every prospective groom gets to meet the parents before the bride.
After Australia, and back in New York, he took semicha, his rabbinical ordination, and the suggestion was made that he should go to Oxford. “I went there for four or five days in the summer of 1988. I felt I didn’t know if Britain was right for me, or vice versa.”
But he thought it over and eventually agreed, hitting the ground running immediately by holding, with his new wife, Debbie, massive Friday night events and Shabbat dinners.
By the following academic year, Boteach had created the Oxford L’Chaim Society, a phenomenon in its day for its breadth and reach both to the student body and academics.
As Boteach explains it, by the winter of 1989 the PLO presence on campuses had grown. “I thought that was becoming the new normal, and we had to respond,” he says.
And L’Chaim took off like a rocket, a student society different from anything Oxford had ever seen. Among its star guests, he says, were “six Israeli prime ministers — today that would be unthinkable, the police wouldn’t allow it”. Former Australian premier Bob Hawke and former Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev, plus actor Jon Voight, were also guests.
“Nobody competed with L’Chaim,” Boteach remembers fondly. Even the Oxford Union Society, bowing to the L’Chaim “pull” of world-renowned speakers, began to hold joint events with it.
Boteach himself, thinking back to those days, remembers that at 22 he was more or less the same age as many of the students — not least the post-graduates, many of whom were American. He also had the benefit of regular meetings with such academic aristocracy as the philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin.
But, he says, though Chabad expects its rabbis to stay in its outreach communities for life, that rule does not apply to rabbis on campus. “It can become tiresome, starting afresh every three years. It’s not a stable community and to some extent you are building on quicksand.”
As well, Boteach was getting older. “Your interests change. Eleven years after I arrived in Oxford, I was 33 and had six kids.” He and Debbie went on to have nine children in all.
In the end, the very inclusiveness of L’Chaim — which became infamous or famous, depending on your viewpoint, for the large number of non-Jewish students involved — spelled the end of Oxford for Boteach.
A number of things coincided: the death of his great protector, the Lubavitcher Rebbe in 1994; the pressing need to do something about his children’s Jewish education; and the fact that Boteach was writing books and was travelling to the United States to promote them, awakening in him a great desire to go back to America.
There were some rumbling fights between him and Chabad in the UK. One related to homosexuality, but Boteach, who has a gay brother, dug his heels in and refused to reject gay Jewish students.
Another was his contention that it was acceptable to offer aliyot, or honours in the synagogue, to those who had married out of Judaism.
“It’s one thing to discourage people from dating non-Jews,” he explains, “but it’s different if they are already married. We have to bring people closer, with love.”
But the issue of non-Jewish students, which took L’Chaim’s membership to a record 5,000, was, says Boteach, “insurmountable. We were trying to teach Jewish students how to affirm Jewish ideas with their non-Jewish friends.”
But that — and the co-presidency of L’Chaim by the black Baptist American Rhodes Scholar Cory Booker — proved too much for Chabad leaders in the UK and what Boteach calls the “insular” Anglo-Jewish community.
“Nobody stood up for me,” reflects Boteach today. He was told by Chabad UK to stop having non-Jewish students in the society, and “purge” Booker as co-president: but Boteach, loyal to his friend, refused. “Even Aipac welcomes Christians these days,” he says, insisting his mission was to “affirm Judaism in a multicultural society”.
Perhaps — considering that Cory Booker became first the mayor of Newark and then a United States Democratic senator, before declaring his run for the 2020 presidency‚ Boteach was taking the long view. He demurs, and says now that he was “not predicting anything, I was just watching the trend”.
And the trend for him was that Jews “had no choice but to fight” wherever Israel or the Jewish people were attacked. Forging alliances outside the Jewish world seemed to make sense to Boteach; but without the Lubavitcher Rebbe to speak up for him, it became clear that his time in Oxford was over.
Instead, after a brief period running L’Chaim independently of Chabad, Boteach and his family returned to the US where he began another kind of outreach career, writing provocatively titled books. He also presented a TV show, Shalom in the Home, and provided some relationship counselling.
He is pretty sure that he is correct about standing up and fighting, citing Churchill as someone who “got it right about the Nazis and Stalin”. But he laughs at the suggestion that he is comparing himself to Churchill.
“I definitely don’t consider myself a great leader,” he says. “I have some modest accomplishments. I come from a pretty broken place and [what I wanted was to be] a loving husband and father.”
But Boteach’s talent for hitting the headlines continued, with a series of high-profile friendships such as with Uri Geller — who introduced him to the troubled singer, Michael Jackson — and the actress Roseanne Barr.
Barr, whose TV series was cancelled last year after she posted a racist tweet about the former Obama administration official Valerie Jarrett, metaphorically took to Boteach’s shoulder to express her sorrow.
She blamed a side-effect of medication — and Boteach, who made podcasts with Barr, says today that she “deserved to be defended.
"She had no history of racism, and I am a great believer in apologies. She cried throughout [our radio interview], made financial restitution, and she still wasn’t forgiven. She was treated very shabbily and unfairly.”
Boteach met Uri Geller while still in Britain and the two “got on like a house on fire”. Geller gave Jackson a copy of Kosher Sex and before long Boteach, who described Jackson then as “way too reclusive”, was affixing a mezuzah on the door of Jackson’s new home and introducing him to Ariel Sharon.
But since Jackson’s death in 2009 and the revelations about his sexual behaviour, Boteach now believes that “we must reassess his legacy in the light of these serious allegations.
"The Michael Jackson estate needs to respond properly, and we cannot simply dismiss what the two men [who allege Jackson preyed on them when they were children] said.”
Almost certainly Boteach’s biggest falling-out has been with Senator Booker, with whom he parted company over Booker’s failure to condemn President Obama’s Iran deal.
“Our friendship lasted nearly a quarter of a century,” Boteach says. “But I have a red line, and that is genocide. Cory’s girlfriend publicly supports BDS, but that wasn’t a red line for me. The Iran deal was genocide, and I told him, you owe it to the US, and the Jewish people, to go to the floor of the Senate and condemn it. He wouldn’t do it.”
Bitterly, Boteach says of Booker: “I took a bullet for him, I was prepared to be severed from my movement [Chabad]. I lost my job and he knows it. And he is the single biggest recipient of Jewish PAC [political action committee] money.
"He was so concerned that Obama would censure him. And what really bothered him was that I was so vocal in criticising him.”
Booker, for his part, has claimed the friendship ended not over Iran, but because he believed Boteach was using it for self-promotion. In a Washington Post article earlier this year, the senator is quoted as saying:
“Friendships are based on trust. This was somebody who was using the personal in public in a way that was deeply unfortunate.”
The feud has rumbled on with Boteach criticising Booker this summer for using the Torah to attack President Trump.
Boteach also fought with the high-profile Jewish lawyer Alan Dershowitz, whom he calls “one of the great modern champions of Israel”. But Dershowitz’s decision to visit Qatar drew the rabbi’s derision. “I said to him, have you lost your mind? Qatar is the single biggest funder of Hamas!”
Dershowitz has responded by saying that he challenged the Qataris over Hamas.
The rabbi’s latest fights have been very public, too, consisting of full-page adverts in the New York Times and the Washington Post attacking those he perceives to be Israel’s enemies, including congresswomen Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar.
He has also run adverts criticising the Israeli-born actress Natalie Portman for refusing to visit Israel to receive an award, and the New Zealand singer Lorde, for changing her mind about performing live in Israel after pressure from boycott campaigners.
He is upfront about his confrontational tactics. What Boteach labels as antisemitism has, he says, “never been heard in the halls of Congress this overtly. This is new territory. These people are absolute haters.”
Boteach ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2012 for the Republicans, but no one should rule out his re-emergence on the political scene. Rabbi Shmuley — still only 52 — clearly enjoys a scrap.
