Whole Foods CEO John Mackey is standing by his friend Marc Gafni, a controversial New Age guru and former rabbi accused of abuses of power through his career, including molestation of a teenage girl. Mackey until recently sat on the board of Gafni’s think-tank, Center for Integral Wisdom. Activists have been pushing Mackey to publicly…
Disgraced spiritual guru Marc Gafni has suffered another black eye as Whole Foods co-founder and CEO John Mackey has left the board of his vaunted think tank, The Forward has learned. The Center for Integral Wisdom, writing about its annual conclave, noted that Mackey had left as chairman of the board. A spokesman for Gafni…
After a firestorm of protest about spiritual teacher Marc Gafni’s upcoming workshop at Esalen, a California retreat center, Gafni and co-teacher Sally Kempton have “voluntarily” chosen to withdraw, said Esalen president Gordon Wheeler. The workshop was scheduled for February 5. Asked if Gafni might return someday to Esalen, Wheeler said “it’s very, very complex, so…
No matter what happens at the Oscars, the very best film of 2015 was “Spotlight,” the improbable drama of how a team of newspaper reporters painstakingly revealed an institutional cover-up of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. The film’s excellence lay not only in its superb acting and storytelling, but in the way it…
With all the accounts that have come out about Marc Gafni, the former rabbi and spiritual guru, you may wonder what more I have to offer. But this story is not over, even if Gafni never teaches or abuses again. Right now there are children in the Jewish world, and in other communities, who are…
Marc Gafni, a once-promising Jewish leader dogged by allegations of sexual improprieties stretching back years, has returned to the public eye as a leader of a California think tank. But his stunning re-emergence, trumpeted in a recent New York Times article, has elicited a new wave of condemnations from Jewish leaders. Rabbi David Ingber, an…
With the recent New York Times profile airing the troubling past of Jewish spiritual guru Marc Gafni, issues of sexual impropriety by spiritual leaders in the Jewish community are again being brought to the surface. Past reports include Washinton D.C. Rabbi Barry Freundel’s covert filming of more than 50 women in the mikvah; New York-based…
