Today is Baruch Lebovits’ 59th birthday. He’s spending it in a New York jail awaiting sentencing for molesting a 16-year-old boy. You have to assume that it will be a particularly gloomy day, since Lebovits faces a maximum 32 years, plus the possibility of a further sentence as he awaits trial for abusing two more boys.

Lebovits’ trial was a strange one. But If only cases like his were rare. As I have found in recent months writing for the Jewish Chronicle, sexual abuse in the Orthodox Jewish community is a major problem, one that has been exacerbated by an unwillingness on the part of community leaders to acknowledge and deal with it.

Instead, victims and their families are dissuaded from going to the police, while community leaders continue to protect abusers. The shame of opening this problem up to the wider community is seen as more damaging than the pain inflicted on the abused. Ben Hirsch, who advocates on behalf of victims, has an excellent piece on this subject in this week’s Jewish Week.

Barring a last-minute act of clemency from Florida governor Charlie Crist, Martin Grossman will be executed today at 6 pm EST. (In about three hours.) I just got off the phone from Florida Department of Corrections, who gave me the details of Grossman’s last meal request: a banana cream cookie, a peanut butter cookie, fruit punch and a chicken sandwich.

Update: My story about the execution is here.

In memory of Walter Fredrick “Fred” Morrison, a short video of Frisbee freestylers in Central Park.

Last summer, I collaborated on a Web video to promote UJC’s Jewish Community Heroes awards (and inadvertently ended up putting on tefillin for the first time in about 15 years).

What Makes A Hero? from William Levin on Vimeo.

UJC used a very short version of the film for their campaign. But lately, our producer William has been screening a longer, rough cut to audiences. Earlier this month, it was presented to about 700 people at Limmud NY where, I am told, it was very well received. I hope to be doing more of these in the year to come.

Produced and directed by Jewish Robot, shot and edited by Simon Weaver, interviews conducted by me.

The sartorial gene in our family definitely went to my sister Judy, who owns a personal styling business, a clothes-swapping website, and a vintage fashion fair that travels all over the UK

I can’t stand shopping of any kind, least of all for clothes. So it comes as something of a relief to have a member of the family who, in the space of an afternoon, can kit me out with half a dozen items of clothing.

Better still, I don’t even have to deal with hunting through clothes racks and dealing with salespeople. She takes care of all of that. If I’m lucky, all I have to do is stand in the changing room while she flings shirts and trousers over the door.

Every time Judy visits New York, we take a trip to the Brooklyn Flea and the growing number of vintage fashion stores in the borough.

Last week, Judy styled a vintage fashion photo shoot for the UK’s Big Issue newspaper and one of the dresses she picked up during a previous visit to the Flea, and a pair of earrings she found in a Brooklyn vintage store, made it into the spread. There are more pics on my sister’s blog.

Do I detect a mellower side to the Jewish Robot’s latest educational cartoon?

Related: Previous Todd and God episodes on EiNY.

The Guardian has a fascinating interview (video and text) with NYU professor Tony Judt, who was diagnosed with motor neurone disease in late 2008. Judt is managing to work on essays and books, and to continue teaching, despite the rapid onset of the disease:

Judt is already working on the book, using the same memory technique that he deployed for his NYRB essays. During the night he builds in his mind a Chinese memory palace – or in his case a modest Swiss house – and into each of its rooms he imagines placing a paragraph or theme of the piece he is composing. The next day he recalls each room in sequence, unloading its contents by dictating it to his assistant.

Some people have tried to comfort him with the thought that such mental discipline renders Judt’s condition bearable. How wrong they are. “There have been people who have said to me, ‘Tony, you are so lucky. More than anyone you live the life of the mind. It could have been so much worse.’”

To which he replies: “Hello! Are you from Planet Zurg? This is one of the worst diseases on Earth. It is like being in a prison which is shrinking by six inches each day.”

‘A bunch of dead muscles, thinking’ (The Guardian)

Years before Bret from Flight of the Conchords there was – Ben.

Ben was a reporter on the Cornish Guardian while I was a reporter at the Western Morning News, almost ten years ago.

Cornwall is one of the most beautiful parts of England but it can be a bleak and miserable place, especially when you are in your twenties and your girlfriend lives about 3,000 miles away.

Fortunately, Ben was always there to cheer me up. He was adept at getting into odd scrapes, such as the time someone broke into his car in Newquay purely for the purposes of using it as a toilet, provoking an anguished appeal by Ben to Devon and Cornwall Police to test the offending material for DNA. Or the time he tried to intimidate a bouncer with the only threat he could make – “I write things down” – which, needless to say, didn’t get him very far.

But Ben was also gifted with the ability to come up with odd songs at a moment’s notice. My favorite ditty was “Dorothy Perkins,” which Ben composed about a girl who worked in a clothes shop opposite our offices in Bodmin.

Ben now lives in Coventry and writes a blog about Coventry news. (His video about the perils of Coventry Ring Road is a must.) He contacted me recently to say that when he mentioned his songwriting to a local band they offered to record Dorothy Perkins professionally. The result is embedded below for your listening pleasure.

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