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As Jewish enclaves spring up around NYC, so does intolerance

JacksinPA

JacksinPA

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As Jewish enclaves spring up around NYC, so does intolerance

MONSEY, N.Y. (AP) — For years, ultra-Orthodox Jewish families priced out of increasingly expensive Brooklyn neighborhoods have been turning to the suburbs, where they have taken advantage of open space and cheaper housing to establish modern-day versions of the European shtetls where their ancestors lived for centuries before the Holocaust.

The expansion of Hasidic communities in New York’s Hudson Valley, the Catskills and northern New Jersey been accompanied by flare-ups of rhetoric aimed at new development that some say is cloaked anti-Semitism.
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In Brooklyn, Jewish enclaves are just a traditional characteristic of that borough of NYC. But as they spread across the Hudson River, tolerance is wearing thin. And their refusal to get pre-school vaccinations on shaky religious grounds is starting to make the pot boil.
 
Recently Washington got rid of religious exemptions for vaccinations for public schooling. More states should do that.
 
JacksinPA said:
As Jewish enclaves spring up around NYC, so does intolerance

MONSEY, N.Y. (AP) — For years, ultra-Orthodox Jewish families priced out of increasingly expensive Brooklyn neighborhoods have been turning to the suburbs, where they have taken advantage of open space and cheaper housing to establish modern-day versions of the European shtetls where their ancestors lived for centuries before the Holocaust.

The expansion of Hasidic communities in New York’s Hudson Valley, the Catskills and northern New Jersey been accompanied by flare-ups of rhetoric aimed at new development that some say is cloaked anti-Semitism.
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In Brooklyn, Jewish enclaves are just a traditional characteristic of that borough of NYC. But as they spread across the Hudson River, tolerance is wearing thin. And their refusal to get pre-school vaccinations on shaky religious grounds is starting to make the pot boil.
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That is kind of like saying that attacks on Muslims are a result some of the members of the Islamic community's stance on Female Genital Mutilation. It is purely a pretext for hatred and murder, not the actual reason. The kinds of people who want to go around attacking Muslims do not care one fig about FGM. And I doubt the people who are attacking openly-religious Jews are the kinds of folk who care about their various stances on vaccination.
 
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JacksinPA said:
In Brooklyn, Jewish enclaves are just a traditional characteristic of that borough of NYC. But as they spread across the Hudson River, tolerance is wearing thin. And their refusal to get pre-school vaccinations on shaky religious grounds is starting to make the pot boil.
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As an unwritten rule, Orthodox Jewish parents do not oppose vaccinations. Only a very small minority within that very small minority group. They also love and cherish their children.

Do you really think Jewish doctors could not convince their patients of the values and advantages of vaccinations for themselves and their children? We have a small Orthodox community in my neighborhood. They line up at the local CVS for flu vaccinations, free covered by their insurance or medicare for the elderly. They are on the line with their entire families, from the youngest to the most elderly come flu season.

You are repeating an antisemitic caricature of Orthodox Jews. Shame on you.
 
OldFatGuy said:
As an unwritten rule, Orthodox Jewish parents do not oppose vaccinations. Only a very small minority within that very small minority group. They also love and cherish their children.

Do you really think Jewish doctors could not convince their patients of the values and advantages of vaccinations for themselves and their children? We have a small Orthodox community in my neighborhood. They line up at the local CVS for flu vaccinations, free covered by their insurance or medicare for the elderly. They are on the line with their entire families, from the youngest to the most elderly come flu season.

You are repeating an antisemitic caricature of Orthodox Jews. Shame on you.
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There are orthodox scholars who point out passages in the talmud that can be interpreted as being anti-vaccination. That's some, not all. But in a classroom environment it only takes one student to infect a bunch of the rest.
 
I attended an Orthodox anti-vaccine rally. Here's what I saw. - Jewish Telegraphic Agency

NEW YORK (JTA) — The weirdest part of an Orthodox anti-vaccine conference here was probably when the emcee, a rabbi wearing a black hat and white beard, quoted the Gospel of Luke.

“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!” he cried, reciting the Gospels nearly verbatim.

Rabbi Hillel Handler wasn’t referring to the 200 people gathered in the basement of a haredi Orthodox wedding hall in Brooklyn to hear about the alleged dangers of vaccines. Rather, he was talking about the doctors, rabbis and politicians who he says are all hoodwinked by a massive conspiracy orchestrated by drug companies and the Centers for Disease Control to make money off of vaccines.
 
Just remove religious exemptions from vaccination requirements to attend public school, problem solved.
 
Despite Measles Warnings, Anti-Vaccine Rally Draws Hundreds of Ultra-Orthodox Jews - The New York Times

Despite Measles Warnings, Anti-Vaccine Rally Draws Hundreds of Ultra-Orthodox Jews

A “vaccine symposium” in Rockland County was denounced by health authorities and some ultra-Orthodox rabbis, who said the speakers were spreading dangerous propaganda.

MONSEY, N.Y. — An ultra-Orthodox rabbi falsely described the measles outbreak among Jews as part of an elaborate plan concocted by Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York to deflect attention from “more serious” diseases brought by Central American migrants.

A pediatrician questioned whether Jews were being intentionally given “bad lots” of vaccines that ended up giving children a new strain of the virus. And Andrew Wakefield, the British doctor whose study linking measles vaccines with autism was widely discredited and condemned, appeared via Skype to offer an almost apocalyptic vision of a world in which vaccines were giving rise to deadlier immunization-resistant diseases.
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There is more to this story than one would assume.
 
JacksinPA said:
There are orthodox scholars who point out passages in the talmud that can be interpreted as being anti-vaccination. That's some, not all. But in a classroom environment it only takes one student to infect a bunch of the rest.
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The incidence of antivaxers in the Orthodox Jewish communities, and they are not homogenized, is no different per capita than in the general population, actually less. Talmudic scholars can point out laws and commentaries of the Talmud that can justify and rationalize any point of view. So what?
 
OldFatGuy said:
The incidence of antivaxers in the Orthodox Jewish communities, and they are not homogenized, is no different per capita than in the general population, actually less. Talmudic scholars can point out laws and commentaries of the Talmud that can justify and rationalize any point of view. So what?
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They've succeeded in making themselves more unlikable.
 
JacksinPA said:
I attended an Orthodox anti-vaccine rally. Here's what I saw. - Jewish Telegraphic Agency

NEW YORK (JTA) — The weirdest part of an Orthodox anti-vaccine conference here was probably when the emcee, a rabbi wearing a black hat and white beard, quoted the Gospel of Luke.

“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!” he cried, reciting the Gospels nearly verbatim.

Rabbi Hillel Handler wasn’t referring to the 200 people gathered in the basement of a haredi Orthodox wedding hall in Brooklyn to hear about the alleged dangers of vaccines. Rather, he was talking about the doctors, rabbis and politicians who he says are all hoodwinked by a massive conspiracy orchestrated by drug companies and the Centers for Disease Control to make money off of vaccines.
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Ahhhh, the Haredis, the Jewish equivalent of the Westboro Baptist Church, except that, in Israel, they're one of the largest outlier groups in society, but even the Haredis are now being forced to do their Israeli mandatory IDF conscription.

So I don't want to hear about how cruel it is to force Haredi to vaccinate their kids. Pass the mandatory school vax laws and let's move on. Public safety health laws have been enforced here for well over a century, this is no different.
A public health emergency is a public health emergency.
 
Checkerboard Strangler said:
Ahhhh, the Haredis, the Jewish equivalent of the Westboro Baptist Church, except that, in Israel, they're one of the largest outlier groups in society, but even the Haredis are now being forced to do their Israeli mandatory IDF conscription.

So I don't want to hear about how cruel it is to force Haredi to vaccinate their kids. Pass the mandatory school vax laws and let's move on. Public safety health laws have been enforced here for well over a century, this is no different.
A public health emergency is a public health emergency.
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I don't think your comparison works. Haredi are not the equivalent of the WBC, a more accurate comparison would be the Amish, or Mennonites.
 
If I read the OP correctly, the disgusting attacks against Jewish people in Brooklyn are caused by the refusal of some Jewish people to get vaccinations.

I very much doubt that the hoodlums who are beating up (and killing) Jewish people even know the word "vaccination." They probably have not been inside a classroom for years.

They are just brutes who want to hurt other people for the thrill that they get out of it. Like walking down the street and suddenly sucker punching someone, and then posting the video online.

I was happy to read in another thread that some Jewish communities do have security patrols. I wish them the best of luck in their duties.
 
JacksinPA said:
They've succeeded in making themselves more unlikable.
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In the eyes of antisemites who didn't respect them anyway. Speaks highly of you.
 
OldFatGuy said:
In the eyes of antisemites who didn't respect them anyway. Speaks highly of you.
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I think there is a piece of truth to what both of you have said.

Conflating all of Orthodox Juadism with the various Hasidic and Haredi sects that are who are anti-vaxxers is incorrect.

But that same thing flips back the other way - there are many reasons why Haredi are disliked, and not all of them are anti-Semitic.

I am Jewish, and I have family members who are Hasidic. And yet, there are many reasons why I dislike much about the Haredi communities in Brooklyn.
 
TheDoctorWasIn said:
I don't think your comparison works. Haredi are not the equivalent of the WBC, a more accurate comparison would be the Amish, or Mennonites.
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Good enough, I'll buy that for a dollar, but I made the WBC reference due to the fact that, in Israel, the Haredi routinely harangue and blast ALL Israeli governments no matter who they are because they don't even officially recognize the State of Israel to begin with, and they are openly hostile to it.

They also lash out openly at all other Israelis. Even if you are a mother walking your little girl to school, if you go through one of their many little neighborhoods in Israel, and you are not dressed just like a Haredi woman, and your little girl isn't, they WILL STONE YOU.

They even attack Israeli soldiers, not even caring if their attacks injure small children in the process.

So I happen to believe it's not outrageous to compare them to one of our own extreme fundamentalist outlier groups like the WBC.
Amish and Mennonites don't generally attack anybody.
 
Checkerboard Strangler said:
Good enough, I'll buy that for a dollar, but I made the WBC reference due to the fact that, in Israel, the Haredi routinely harangue and blast ALL Israeli governments no matter who they are because they don't even officially recognize the State of Israel to begin with, and they are openly hostile to it.

They also lash out openly at all other Israelis. Even if you are a mother walking your little girl to school, if you go through one of their many little neighborhoods in Israel, and you are not dressed just like a Haredi woman, and your little girl isn't, they WILL STONE YOU.

They even attack Israeli soldiers, not even caring if their attacks injure small children in the process.

So I happen to believe it's not outrageous to compare them to one of our own extreme fundamentalist outlier groups like the WBC.
Amish and Mennonites don't generally attack anybody.
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I have no experience with Haredi in Israel, but quite a lot of experience with Brooklyn Haredi. So I can't speak to that.
 
TheDoctorWasIn said:
I think there is a piece of truth to what both of you have said.

Conflating all of Orthodox Juadism with the various Hasidic and Haredi sects that are who are anti-vaxxers is incorrect.

But that same thing flips back the other way - there are many reasons why Haredi are disliked, and not all of them are anti-Semitic.

I am Jewish, and I have family members who are Hasidic. And yet, there are many reasons why I dislike much about the Haredi communities in Brooklyn.
Click to expand...

I agree that it is silly and stupid to conflate all of Orthodox Judaism with these extremists, and I did not intend to give that impression.
For the record, my father was a German Jewish refugee who fled Hitler at age fifteen with pretty much nothing in his pockets.
He came here illegally in 1937 but somehow, in the midst of all our own antisemitism, a la Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh, he managed to correct the issues and become naturalized, just in time to get drafted and sent right back to Germany as a military intelligence specialist. Native German speakers with a beef about Hitler were highly prized and he earned a Purple Heart for taking two Nazi bullets to the head and neck.

So it's not anything against Orthodox Judaism or Judaism in general, although I will say for the record that my father apparently lost a fair bit of his religious convictions in the foxhole and was not especially observant by the time he arrived back home in New York City.
And he even went on to marry a spicy Italian Catholic refugee who together with her family fled Mussolini.

There are a ton of "Jew-talians" in New York, and I am one of them.
 
Checkerboard Strangler said:
I agree that it is silly and stupid to conflate all of Orthodox Judaism with these extremists, and I did not intend to give that impression.
For the record, my father was a German Jewish refugee who fled Hitler at age fifteen with pretty much nothing in his pockets.
He came here illegally in 1937 but somehow, in the midst of all our own antisemitism, a la Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh, he managed to correct the issues and become naturalized, just in time to get drafted and sent right back to Germany as a military intelligence specialist. Native German speakers with a beef about Hitler were highly prized and he earned a Purple Heart for taking two Nazi bullets to the head and neck.

So it's not anything against Orthodox Judaism or Judaism in general, although I will say for the record that my father apparently lost a fair bit of his religious convictions in the foxhole and was not especially observant by the time he arrived back home in New York City.
And he even went on to marry a spicy Italian Catholic refugee who together with her family fled Mussolini.

There are a ton of "Jew-talians" in New York, and I am one of them.
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My family (all Jewish) all came through Ellis Island in the first couple years of the 20th century, from Poland and the Ukraine.

Aside from the branch that married into a Satmar family and lives upstate, any belief in God in my family disappeared 3 generations ago - but we all still identify as Jewish.
 
TheDoctorWasIn said:
My family (all Jewish) all came through Ellis Island in the first couple years of the 20th century, from Poland and the Ukraine.

Aside from the branch that married into a Satmar family and lives upstate, any belief in God in my family disappeared 3 generations ago - but we all still identify as Jewish.
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Pop finally got his parents over here, and when he brought his gal to dinner, his father liked her immediately but his mother was anything but thrilled at the notion that he wasn't marrying a nice Jewish girl. True, she was not a typical blonde shiksa but an Italian shiksa is still a shiksa, and his mother was very passive-aggressive, to the point where she made CHICKEN for Friday night dinner, in a time when the Vatican forbade eating meat on that night.

My mom pushed the food around and around on the plate until my dad and his father figured it out.
After some terse squabbling between grandfather and grandmother in the kitchen, my grandfather came out, and informed my mother that he had some rabbinical training in his youth, whereupon he waved his hands over the plate and said "You're not a chicken, you're a fish" three times, followed by "Now let's eat!"

So my mother ATE "the fish" and promptly went to confession the next morning, whereupon the priest said, "Albina, did you not say he blessed the chicken? God understands, go home, you did nothing wrong." :lamo

And of course the moment she produced a son, she immediately became "My darling Alby"...of course. ;)
 
Checkerboard Strangler said:
Pop finally got his parents over here, and when he brought his gal to dinner, his father liked her immediately but his mother was anything but thrilled at the notion that he wasn't marrying a nice Jewish girl. True, she was not a typical blonde shiksa but an Italian shiksa is still a shiksa, and his mother was very passive-aggressive, to the point where she made CHICKEN for Friday night dinner, in a time when the Vatican forbade eating meat on that night.

My mom pushed the food around and around on the plate until my dad and his father figured it out.
After some terse squabbling between grandfather and grandmother in the kitchen, my grandfather came out, and informed my mother that he had some rabbinical training in his youth, whereupon he waved his hands over the plate and said "You're not a chicken, you're a fish" three times, followed by "Now let's eat!"

So my mother ATE "the fish" and promptly went to confession the next morning, whereupon the priest said, "Albina, did you not say he blessed the chicken? God understands, go home, you did nothing wrong." :lamo
Click to expand...

That's a fantastic story.
 
TheDoctorWasIn said:
I think there is a piece of truth to what both of you have said.

Conflating all of Orthodox Juadism with the various Hasidic and Haredi sects that are who are anti-vaxxers is incorrect.

But that same thing flips back the other way - there are many reasons why Haredi are disliked, and not all of them are anti-Semitic.

I am Jewish, and I have family members who are Hasidic. And yet, there are many reasons why I dislike much about the Haredi communities in Brooklyn.
Click to expand...

The Haredi are a very small fanatical sect, and similar in many manners to other small, volatile fanatical sects of other religions. They all tend to offend and provoke dislike by everyone. Comparing the Haredi to all Jews is like comparing the Westboro Baptist Church to all Christians. All Christians do not preach hate like the followers of the Westboro Baptist Church, just like all Jews, or even Orthodox Jews fear and preach against vaccinations. Mennonites and Amish do not preach hatred even as they reject the outside world.

When any non Jew, uses a caricature based on a relatively small sect of fanatics to describe all Orthodox Jews, that is antisemitism. And that is what has been accomplished by the OP of this thread.
 
OldFatGuy said:
The Haredi are a very small fanatical sect, and similar in many manners to other small, volatile fanatical sects of other religions. They all tend to offend and provoke dislike by everyone. Comparing the Haredi to all Jews is like comparing the Westboro Baptist Church to all Christians. All Christians do not preach hate like the followers of the Westboro Baptist Church, just like all Jews, or even Orthodox Jews fear and preach against vaccinations. Mennonites and Amish do not preach hatred even as they reject the outside world.

When any non Jew, uses a caricature based on a relatively small sect of fanatics to describe all Orthodox Jews, that is antisemitism. And that is what has been accomplished by the OP of this thread.
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Haredi represent about 10% of American Jews.

They're not the tiny minority you think they are. There's more than half a million of them just in New York.
 
And the Democratic party wants to import hundreds of thousands more radical Muslims to terrorize and attack those Jews. That is one of the main reasons Obama imported so many foreign Muslims. He has always hated Jews and this was his way of assuring increasing and endless attacks against Jews.
 
TheDoctorWasIn said:
Haredi represent about 10% of American Jews.

They're not the tiny minority you think they are. There's more than half a million of them just in New York.
Click to expand...

It is currently estimated that more than 7.5 million Jews live in the US. It is currently estimated that slightly less than 400k Haredi Jews live in the US, divided into almost a dozen sub-sects. Despite their huge birthrate, not believing in birth control or abortion, the population of Haredi Jews has not increased as expected from predictions of a decade ago. The main reason, emigration to other locales, most specifically South America as well as in the Caribbean , particularly Brazil and Argentina where land is cheap, and sophisticated cities offer commercial opportunities. These migrations have been spear headed by the Chabad Lubavitch, seeking conversion returns to Judaism from the conversos and marranos. Others have followed.

It should also be noted, that among the count of the Haredi, are the Modern Orthodox, who neither dress nor behave as other Haredi, and are almost indistinguishable from the general population. They account for more than half of the Haredi. They keep Shabbos, keep the laws of Kasruth, but their women do not wear wigs for modesty, and the men work in every possible profession, craft, and so on. They do not wear the black.

I live in Kew Gardens Queens, which has a small population of Haredi. Approximately 200k Haredi live in Brooklyn, 40k in Queens, approximately another 60k throughout the greater Metropolitan area including the population at Kiryas Joel of about 30k and about 15k in the 5 Towns of Nassau County. The second largest concentration of Haredi population is in California, the rest in pockets in southern cities including Philadelphia. Keep in mind Sephardic Haredi also do not wear the black. The largest concentration of Sephardic Haredi live in Israel. Sephardic Haredi are generally not opposed to the State of Israel, and have voluntarily served their duty in the IDF.

My numbers come from studies done under the auspices of the UJA. Feel free to verify them. They have been confirmed through similar studies done by the AJHS (American Jewish Historical Society) and The World Jewish Congress.
 
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