Well, they’re on the warpath. No Pasarán!! they cry; the enemy shall not pass through our sacred gates! So-called Jews who make a PEEP about our way of life (we’re looking at you, Jonathan Tobin) are traitors and will be dealt with as such (remember Jacob Kornbluh!)
A haredi prof at a Brooklyn law school really gets it said:
When asked whether he was concerned about the lack of secular education in many Hasidic schools, [Aaron] Twerski replied, “We make the trade-offs, not the state.”
Haredim to New York:
DROP DEAD
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Nu, so what next?
Nothing. Some violent all-male demonstrations in NYC and upstate. They’ll never be pushed to the wall, so if they were smart they’d shut their traps and do nothing. But who ever said they were smart? They’ve been yeshiva-retarded. They will scream and smash and let out their sexual frustration all over town, and then, on the absurdly slim chance they are, in ten years or so, called to account, they will settle down to cheating on the standardized exam.
You thought Varsity Blues was something. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
OTOH we know nothing will happen as a result of the regents finally saying officially that zillions of schools in NYC and upstate NY – with zillions of students, their numbers growing insanely quickly, and most of them run by schoolboards rife with retarders – must be subject to serious investigation/review, and schools who keep retarding will be shut down/lose accreditation/lose subsidies… We shall do such things!
Look at Israel, babe. Look at England. England’s been failing forever to do something about schools that treat female students like slaves and teach islamofascism. Israel’s situation is hilarious. A corrupt ex-prime minister, desperate to stay out of jail, has just offered the following deal to the retarders in his country: Be part of my coalition and I promise never to interfere in any way with your child-retardation process. Full, fulsome government funding will be maintained for all of your efforts. Puts Andrew Yang to shame.
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Because everyone knows nothing will happen, and because almost no one – from their parents to NY State officials – cares about what goes on in Jewish retardation locations, talk is cheap. Suddenly you’ve got the ex-editor of Commentary, of all people, sweating rhetorical bullets over the dire social implications if America’s big, visible, Jewish community — which is soon to be demographically dominated by the retarders — starts looking like a bunch of skid row bums. Not a good look. Nothing to do to avert it, but lemme get myself on the record saying it’s not a good look.
Jonathan Tobin begins with paragraph after paragraph of boilerplate:
Evil secular rags like the NYT hate Jews and we are right to regard anything they write with extreme skepticism.
NY public schools are shitty too.
‘[P]oliticians and news outlets unfairly scapegoated the ultra-Orthodox for spreading COVID-19.’ Hey Tobin short memory: Google Orthodox Spreader Events, lad. (‘[M]ost [haredim] continue to live in constant poverty and go to the doctor without being able to understand their own diagnosis. The price they pay, as we have seen during COVID-19, as well as the recent polio upsurge and anti-vax sentiments … is high and will remain so unless major changes come.’)
After many we’re the victims! paragraphs, Tobin finally, gingerly, timorously, delicately, reticently, dips a toe in.
You don’t have to share the contempt for religious Jews that may be widespread in the Times newsroom to be alarmed by the fact that test scores in these subjects at ultra-Orthodox schools for boys (girls, who are expected to get jobs rather than merely study sacred texts, get slightly more instruction and do marginally better) appear to be the lowest in the state.
I like that “may.” It may be widespread. Ya think? I don’t think. I think a long-term reading of the NYT reveals just the opposite – an effort to write about religious Jews
(And hey Tobin doesn’t really mean religious Jews, does he? Reform Judaism, in which I was raised, is religious, but of course ultraorthodox Jews think Reform Judaism is an utterly profane obscene joke. In Israel, ultras spit at/shout GOYISH WHORE at eight year old Orthodox girls whose skirts are shorter than they should, ultra-istically, be. I think Tobin needs to specify what he has in mind by the phrase religious Jews. Me, I think a baseline definition of a religious Jew is a person who takes the ethical as well as spiritual tradition of Judaism seriously, which would, religiously, put the endemically corrupt ultraorthodox movement somewhere quite far below the Reform and Conservative movements.)
with the same neutrality/objectivity the paper’s journalists write about everything else. But what the hell is objectivity if you’re a yeshiva-educated ultra? The schools have surgically removed, as a cancer, anything that comes out of the empirical, enlightenment, traditions. This is what makes ultras such perfect Trumpians – it’s all conspiracies, rage, our side’s righteous lies, our side’s unique possession of the transcendent truth. (Bonus point here: One of the many reasons nothing’s going to happen to the ultra-orthodox retardation locations is that politicians are literally frightened of this group, whose … parlous… emotional/intellectual state combined with unquestioning mass obedience/action means … riots. Politicians don’t like riots, and believe me there will be riots if anything seriously disruptive is done to ultra life. Remember the mass attack on Jacob Kornbluh. That’s just the beginning. America’s ultras are way behind Israel’s, who riot pretty much continually; but mess with them and they’ll be torching cars.)
And then a little more delicacy cuz we don’t want to hurt any feelings here: APPEAR TO BE the lowest in the state. Another conspiracy? Have the Jew-haters in the NY State testing bureaucracy fucked with the results? Good to be skeptical about things like this.
Tobin sympathetically explains the ultra POV:
They believe that the issue here isn’t so much poor education as the refusal of the secular state … to accept the desire of the ultra-Orthodox community to opt out of society.
Two points here:
If you want to opt out of society, you don’t get to take society’s hard-earned tax dollars. You’ve opted out of that.
You might want to opt out of society, but society can’t opt out of you. You live among us, you vote in our elections (why?), and – wait for it – we have laws. We have laws against beating kids up and defrauding the welfare system and assaulting children sexually. I know you do everything you can to hush up your bad behavior, but society features people – police, journalists, social workers – who act as society’s conscience and try to make sure that children aren’t being abused, our taxpayers aren’t being ripped off, etc. etc. The big glossy NYT article last Sunday draws many more eyes to your – anti-society? – than were ever on it before. Time to duck. “This is something dark. This is the willful perpetuation of social pathology at the hands of Jewish leaders.” “As Hilly Rubin, a resident of the heavily Chassidic neighborhood of Borough Park in Brooklyn, N.Y., told The New York Times: ‘They could have education and still have the religion. But they don’t, and the people are suffering so much.'”
Tobin eventually says the right, obvious, sane things about ultraorthodox yeshivas, but it’s so hedged about with paranoia and knee-jerk anti-leftism (As many commenters on the NYT article note, it’s nuts to make this a left/right thing. Ultras don’t know shit about politics OUT THERE, in That Distant Evil Society. They go where the ultra-friendliest winds blow.) that it’s worthless.
… whose failed mayoral candidacy did everything but suck the dicks of each of the major ultra rebbes. As a NYT commenter writes:
One day after the story broke and I don’t see any of the major recipients of ultra-Orthodox campaign donation rushing to their defense. Contrary to what some of the commenters have written here, the ultra-Orthodox (or haredim as they are known in Israel) are neither Democrats or Republicans. They vote as they are told by the community big shots who decide based on promises made to them by the politicians. If they were in the pocket of one party, their unholy efforts would be far less effective. The fact is that the community votes as a bloc and those votes are always up for grabs.
The commenter goes on to wonder why Andrew Yang in particular isn’t tweeting that if New Yorkers had voted for him none of this religious persecution would be taking place, and the beautiful diversity that is beating kids and keeping them ignorant would continue to assume its secure, state-funded role in our great city. Not long ago, he went very public with his love of ultraorthodox ways:
The key for Mr. Yang was his early declaration that he intended to take a laissez-faire attitude toward Hasidic yeshivas…
[Yang] criticized the city for allowing investigators “to check for infractions of various kinds” in yeshivas.
… Mr. Yang has sought to appeal to Hasidic voters on issues besides education, including support for the right of parents to choose a circumcision ritual, metzitzah b’peh, which is used by a minority of Hasidic mohels and has transmitted herpes to babies…
Yeah! And what’s even better, Andrew, is that, as you know, all the babies that get blown by infected mohels die! What a way to go, huh? Helluva cultural practice — one you were happy to support.
So here, in their hour of need, with the NYT finally telling everyone what’s going on in the schools and creating a firestorm, where are you? Where’s the great champion not only of shameful schools, but clerical herpetic cocksuckers?
World’s best job: Sit around your entire career futzing with proposals for reform of ultraorthodox education knowing nothing will ever happen. The ultimate sinecure.
These [groups have also been allowed to be exempt] from the obligation to vaccination — [which] they are skirting based on their religious beliefs. Paying them to undermine public health [along with paying them to undermine education] is another wrong we can no longer tolerate for the health of the rest of us. Measles and now polio. No no no.
Another one:
As a public health physician since the 1980’s, I can also note that the disregard of the schools for vaccination requirements are a (large) part of the peril highlighted by yesterday’s polio disaster declaration in New York state, and the detection of polio in the waste water of multiple NY counties, the latest Nassau. The US school age vaccination rates for polio in the US approach 94 %; rates are much lower among yeshiva students, contributing to silent spread of an almost eliminated infection in the US.
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Systemic welfare fraud is something else we allow them.
The article also talks about teachers violently abusing their students. It appears to be endemic. We know that rates of sexual abuse are high in these communities as well.
No one cares. Nothing will change.
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Tell you what. I’ve been studying and following the ultraorthodox scandal, in the US and Israel, for years. I fully admit that I just do not get it. Israel’s ultras are routinely violent against the state as well – street riots galore. No one cares. Nothing will change.
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I will say this: The NYT piece is a brilliant, even exciting example of fearless investigative journalism. The one hundred percent outraged, very lengthy comment thread, full of readers describing themselves as absolutely shocked by the educational gutter the article depicts, tells you what? It tells you that all that’s ever been needed for ordinary taxpayers to be sick with disgust over a scofflaw, rapidly growing, hopelessly welfare dependent subculture in this country is for our paper of record to find the guts to write about it.
Once again, nothing will change. But talk about making the situation graphic. A final comment from the thread:
I never thought I would see a major news publication actually have the audacity to describe the situation accurately, bluntly, and plainly.
WWWWuh oh. WWWWWWWWuh ooooooohhhhh. You is runnin headlong into theology, lady, as in God TOLD you He’s not a sadist but what you gonna do about the fact that God told your male Republican colleagues damn straight He IS a sadist?
This is South Carolina, the Jesus-Told-Me State. It’s like – you played your game of Telephone with the Lord, and He totally told you NOT to destroy mothers and children and babies with a no-exceptions state abortion law; but all them guys played their game of Telephone with the Lord and the Lord told them hell go ahead and force people to give birth even though it might kill them.
Static on the line? Who’s hearing it wrong?
Miscommunication – you said it. Might just make a body wonder ifn basing legislation on who’s hearing Jesus correctly might not be a good idea.
Timed to coincide with the president’s American Fascists speech, gun-toting cultists just showed up en masse at an Idaho public library demanding hundreds of books be removed or they’ll blow everyone’s brains out In Jesus’ Name Amen. The head of the library has already quit and run away, not wanting her brains blown out. “They start showing up at your house with guns on their hips and Bible tracts in their hands.”
A parochial school … baptized 100 students without permission from parents—some of whom were left angry by the surprise. “My daughter calls me from the school and says, ‘Mama, can you bring me some dry clothes? I got baptized today,’” the parent of an 11-year-old told the Fayetteville Observer. “I said, ‘WHAT?’” At least three parents complained to the Northwood Temple Academy principal, who said a handful of students were scheduled to receive the sacrament and the others “just began to respond to the presence of the Lord.”
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The Honey, I Baptized the Kids! problem is more widespread than you might think.
‘Fellow Pennsylvanians: If we go by the most recent numbers, around a million American women had abortions last year, AND EVERY ONE OF THOSE WOMEN (AND RAPED CHILDREN) IS A MURDERER. As I said in a recent townhall:
“If life starts at conception, why do you care what age the heart starts beating at? It’s, you know, it’s still murder, if you were to terminate a child whether their heart’s beating or not.”
But Dr Oz! I hear you say. That’s a lot of women and children to put on trial for murder. Won’t that strain our justice system?
It might. But consider: For a lot of these murders, there are medical records attesting to them, and if I’m elected I will work with others to give the FBI special access to all women’s and female children’s medical, and pharmaceutical purchase, records. We will also of course work to be able to confiscate all abortion clinic patient paperwork going back to let’s say 1980. None of these murders will entail a trial, because irrefutable proof of them exists.
Another question I get a lot is: If hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvania women know that under Senator Oz they will be pursued for murder, won’t most of them flee to states where they will not be hunted down?
Yes, many of them will. This represents a win-win for the state. These scum are removed from the premises without our justice system having to deal with them at all. It’s called exile. Those unable or unwilling to flee will be subject to the death penalty.’
… Jinnah Family Park! Set amid the ancient dusty streets of Bannu, Pakistan, this gorgeous concrete-walled, barbed-wire-topped, Islamist-controlled women-only park boasts lush weed and trash planting and constant surveillance by religious fanatics. As the only place in town where burqa’ed women and children can gather, Jinnah Park is enormously popular with this desperate, degraded population. But the city fathers, denouncing the park as a cesspool of shamelessness, have now closed it.
… featured multiple injuries because of overcrowding, plus a vicious attack on a random woman who happened to pass nearby. One can only admire the sect’s commitment to its two most venerable spiritual rites: Finding women to set upon, and destroying its own people through wanton neglect of their welfare.
Catholic universities can sometimes be a bit… off the grid when it comes to the hiring process.
Or perhaps UD should call it the highering process, for Houston’s University of St Thomas was so excited by Mario Enzler’s heavenly contacts (it’s who you know) and the effects of their, uh, secondhand-sainthood-smoke?, that the school hired him as their b-school dean even though he had zero credentials in that particular field!
Not to worry! He had heart! For that betimes he had encountered not merely Mother Teresa, but Pope John Paul II! He would bring a warm “climate of values” to the chilly b-school world.
Some faculty complained from the start (they took him on in 2020) that his hiring process was rushed, that he was forced on them, that he seemed a bit bogus… But with God on their side, the … uh … higher administration said fie to the devil with you you know not what you do etc. etc.
But now. Gevalt. He has hastily resigned. Faculty are calling him a charlatan, a cheat, and a con-artist.
These are not high things. Rather, they are low.
Turns out all this time, instead of relying on things like peering into his heart plus his having friends in high places, faculty have been trying unsuccessfully to verify his resume’s putrid, prolific, and very pious bullshit.
A New York Times writer begins by speaking the harsh truth (see above), and then suddenly davens over backwards to absolve New York’s ultraorthodox community of decades of public health irresponsibility.
Quoting only one person as an authority on the subject of vaccine hesitancy – a member of the ultraorthodox community – she would have us believe that this particular group of Jews is justified, by its tragic history, in its appalling indifference to any state authority (this approach also lets them off the hook for endemic welfare cheating and refusal to educate their children to a state standard). The writer does not ask why groups of Jews around the world with similar tragic histories seem able to discriminate between a Nazi state and a democratic state. She does not consider that the crucial problem may be that this group obeys only its authoritarian rabbis and has contempt for profane entities outside of its sacred realm.
“Vaccine hesitancy is not rooted in Orthodox religion,” [Nesha] Abramson says. “It’s fueled by people who come from outside the community to spread lies and sow fear.” Indeed Israel’s ultraorthodox also seem captive to the same outside forces, since, as Samuel Heilman points out, their community is as just as “perfect… an incubator for epidemics” as New York’s.
Trace the problem back, in both cases, to a refusal to educate their children in basics like the germ theory of disease; but don’t forget primitive powerful rabbis, in some cases, who tell their followers not to bother vaccinating. The notorious tendency of some ultraorthodox communities to incubate epidemic is rooted in the form religion takes among them – in particular, blind obedience to a rabbi, and a shocking lack of basic cultural literacy that makes people credulous in regard to conspiracy theories, and easily manipulated, by outsiders as well as insiders.
Brazil’s former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has formally launched his campaign to reclaim the presidency with a ferocious broadside against his rival, Jair Bolsonaro, who he claimed was “possessed by the devil”.
Catholic Integralist Vermeule has taken a leave of absence from Harvard to run Lula’s campaign. Should be interesting.
You don’t have to agree with Kim Holmes’s overbroad denunciation of the left to appreciate his well-observed attack on the motley crew of right and left American Robespierres who know ever so much better than we how to live, and who intend to shove that way of life right down our throats.
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People who believe in individual liberty as a founding national value need to know their enemies.
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UD’s favorite from the motley Holmes assembles:
Michael Baxter, for example, a DePaul University professor writing in America: The Jesuit Review in 2013, argued that [John Courtney] Murray’s “Catholic version of American exceptionalism blinded him to the danger of Catholics being absorbed into U.S. political culture.” As a result, “Murray got the story of American Catholics wrong. The United States is not unique among modern states.” The implication is the American order is fundamentally flawed. Baxter even goes so far as to hope that “providence will bless us with a revolution” to change this order.
Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam. New York Times
George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days. The Electron Pencil
It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading. Professor Mondo
There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life. AcademicPub
You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics. truffula, commenting at Historiann
Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption. Dagblog
University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings. Dissent: The Blog
[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho... The Wall Street Journal
Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo. Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education
[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile. Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University
Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure. Roland Greene, Stanford University
The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan... Carlat Psychiatry Blog
Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant... Perplexed with Narrow Passages
Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here... Outside the Beltway
From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip... Money Law
University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it. Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association
The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ... Medical Humanities Blog
I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic... Ducks and Drakes
As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ... The Bitch Girls
Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard. Tenured Radical
University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know. Mary Beard, A Don's Life
[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter. More magazine, Canada
If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot. Notes of a Neophyte
