The most specious comparison I've seen in quite some time comes from Rabbi Shmuely Boteach, written in defense of his friend Noah Feldman:
…MANY HAVE written to me that Prof. Feldman's circumstances are different, seeing that he was raised in an Orthodox home and went to an Orthodox Jewish day school. He should have known better.
I know something of this matter. The award I was honored to receive last year from the American Jewish Press Association for Excellence in Commentary came from an article I wrote which designated Jewish day school education as the single greatest bulwark against assimilation and intermarriage. But that does not mean it is foolproof. And not just for the Prof. Feldmans of this world, but for all of us.
How many who have written to me critical of Feldman are themselves guilty of lapses in Jewish observance? I know scores of Orthodox Jewish businessmen who take their yarmulkes off at their Wall Street and legal offices, even though they are stalwartly Orthodox in all other practices. But they still feel a need to make an accommodation with the world. And do they really want to be dismissed as goyim because they do so, or do they want their communities to be just a little bit understanding of the challenges they face?…
First, let us be clear. A head-covering for men is not a commandment. It was something Jews began to to with regularity only in Talmudic times, and it became the accepted, normal custom (note that word: custom, minhag) only late in the Geonic era. And even then, large sections of world Jewry did not accept it.
The Vilna Gaon, normally the most terse commenter on the Shulkhan Arukh, writes at length about this custom. He says that it is a minhag kept by the extremely pious, but it is not a requirement. He goes on to say that one can eat, walk, learn Torah and even pray without one's head covered. (For details, see the latest issue of Hakirah: The Flatbush Journal of Jewish Law and Thought; Dan Rabinowitz, "Yarmulke: A Historic Cover-up?")
To equate wearing a yarmulke in a work environment not conducive to religious expression – where, by all normative understandings of Jewish law one is permitted to work with his head uncovered – with marrying a non-Jew – which, by all normative understandings of Jewish law is a flagrant sin – is mind-boggling. Did Boteach never learn halakha?
That being said, Rabbi Boteach's larger point is that Feldman should not be shunned. While I agree that the average intermarried Jew should not be shunned, a Jew out-married who, with Feldman's training in Jewish law and his firm background in Orthodoxy, writes a piece in the NY Times questioning his own very partial and low-level shunning at the hands of his former yeshiva high school is quite another matter.
Feldman knows in great detail what the Orthodox Jewish community thinks about out-marriage. And he knows that no day school or yeshiva can celebrate his marital choice.
Rather than leave things as they are and continue with his chosen path, Feldman instead wrote a piece in the NY Times that raised issues of Orthodox bigotry and the Orthodox view of non-Jews. This accurate (but highly unflattering) portrait irked many in Orthodoxy and beyond.
Feldman raised the issue of his intermarriage to a very public level and joined it with Orthodox Judaism's inherent bigotry toward non-Jews. He publicized that bigotry in a most public of forums. By doing so Feldman has removed the issue of his bed partner from a inter-family affair to a very public debate about what it means to be an Orthodox Jew in good community standing.
As such, Feldman is calling out Orthodoxy, baiting Orthodoxy, in effect, to a public debate on Orthodoxy's place as a moral religion. That is a far different 'sin' than simply marrying the non-Jewish woman he loves.
Like the choice of who he sleeps with, Feldman has made a choice – am I a lapsed member of the Orthodox community or am I a public critic of that community?
Feldman has clearly chosen the latter and Orthodoxy, rightly, views him as such.
I would go so far as to posit that Feldman is not Modern Orthodxy's "embarrassment" – he is Rabbi Boteach's. It is Boteach that accepted Feldman's marital choice and it is Boteach who prized Feldman's intelligence and celebrity over fealty to the Orthodoxy Feldman was raised in. It is Boteach who gave Feldman a free pass and, by so doing, raised Feldman's expectations and allowed Feldman to dream of the same level of acceptance from Modern Orthodoxy, acceptance that would have his non-Jewish bed-partner featured alongside him in his yeshiva day school's alumni newsletter. It is Boteach who muddied the waters and led Feldman astray.
Imagine how this might have been different if, instead of Rabbi Boteach, Feldman had as a resource at Oxford some of the best and brightest of Yeshiva University, who had gone to Oxford after ordination to set up an Orthodox presence there. For most of us, this type of altruistic behavior from Yeshiva University and its graduates is difficult to imagine because it so rarely in actuality takes place. That – the lack of overall compassion and vision from the rabbis who lead YU and the students whom they ordain – may be the real back-story of the Feldman affair.
Rabbi Boteach makes another error, this one of history:
The greatness of the Lubavitcher Rebbe was his genius in distinguishing between religious and moral sin. Before the Rebbe those who ate non-kosher were treated as though they themselves were unkosher.
Of course, this largely false. All over America, in the 1920s–1960s, Observant parents were faced with children who ceased keeping the Sabbath and ceased keeping kosher. Were these children routinely ostracized? No, they were not. Outside of some haredim that came to America largely after WW2, ostracism was for the most part not practiced. To say this was an innovation of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, who came to America in 1942 and only became rebbe in 1951, both dates well after non-ostracism had become the norm in America, is foolish.
But then, so is much else of what escapes the self-deluding mind of Rabbi Shmuely Boteach.