Whipped Cream Difficulties

I was all set to snark on this NYT headline:

For Its Latest Beer, a Craft Brewer Chooses an Unlikely Pairing: Archaeology

After all, craft brewers going back and doing beer anthropology isn’t exactly a new thing.

However, the paper of record gets a pass from me, because the brewer in question is Great Lakes Brewing Company, a personal favorite of mine.

Enlisting the help of archaeologists at the University of Chicago, the company has been trying for more than year to replicate a 5,000-year-old Sumerian beer using only clay vessels and a wooden spoon.

Sam Kellner believed his son had been sexually abused by a Hasidic cantor. Mr. Kellner lobbied the Brooklyn DA to prosecute the cantor. As a result, he was shunned by his synagogue and other members of the Hasidic community.

In April 2011, after the district attorney’s office gained a conviction against that cantor, Baruch Lebovits, the prosecutors turned around and obtained an indictment of Mr. Kellner. They said, based on a secret tape and the grand jury testimony of a prominent Satmar supporter of Mr. Lebovits, that he had tried to extort hundreds of thousands of dollars from Mr. Lebovits.

The conviction of Mr. Lebovits was reversed:

Even today, Alan M. Dershowitz, one of Mr. Lebovits’s lawyers, portrays Mr. Kellner and other prominent whistle-blowers as extortionists. “We see Kellner as a leader of a major extortion ring,” he said in an interview. “He is not a do-gooder.”

On the other hand:

Two weeks ago, I talked with the three-member rabbinical court — known as a Beit Din — in Monsey. These rabbis rarely grant interviews, but spoke now of their moral obligation. Their community for too long has resisted coming to grips with sexual abuse.

They view Mr. Kellner as a brave pioneer. He did not seek out witnesses at random; rather their court, with the help of local leaders in Williamsburg, gave him the name of a victim.

“Lebovits is known to have a long history” of sexual abuse, Rabbi Chaim Flohr said. But Mr. Lebovits has powerful supporters, and people are fearful, he added.

The NYT spin on this is that Charles J. Hynes, the Brooklyn DA, gets a lot of political support from the Hasidic community, and is therefore very deferential to their wishes. But if he is so deferential, why did his office bring the case in the first place? It seems like he could easily have ducked the prosecution by claiming the evidence was insufficient or some other issue. The NYT‘s timeline is a little fuzzy, but I’m picking up at least an implication that Hynes’s office had the tape in their possession at the time of the Lebovits trial.

(Also, if you go back to the NYT article on the reversal of the Lebovits conviction, the extortion plot is mentioned in passing by Dershowitz. But the actual reason given by the appeals court for overturning the conviction is not the alleged extortion plot, but a failure by the prosecution to turn over evidence to the defense in a timely fashion.)