UD loves to chronicle the high-minded excuses some Jewish studies professors offer for the sickening irresponsibility of many haredim amid a pandemic. Here’s her current favorite.
Dartmouth Jewish Studies professor Susannah Heschel contends that, for many Jews, the restrictions “brought to mind times when religious persecution closed down synagogues.” In this sense, she said, the Haredi response “is a sort of defiance and affirmation of Jewish identity combined.”
Let other Jews learn from our defiant and affirmative Jewish identity; and let the world catch the virus we’re so nobly helping spread.
Nu, you could forget that for a very long time the ultraorthodox have been among the most powerful voting blocs in New York City; but viral containment restrictions in that same city understandably send us right back to a horrific world of synagogue closures.
Many Jews, like UD, whose own Jewish identity is thoroughly denied by the ultraorthodox establishment, are rightly appalled. Not least because ultraorthodoxy is far from Judaism’s definitive form. It represents one iteration of the faith, and a rather recent one at that.
Continuity is the biggest ultra-Orthodox myth. Their belief [is] that their way of life is the thousands year-old Jewish tradition, and that all Jews in all time aspired to… study Torah their entire lives. Of course, this is an invention.
The Haredi ideology of voluntarily closing their community off from the world is about 200 years old and came about as a reaction to enlightenment and emancipation. The practice of every man studying Torah all day, every day, only exists from the mid-1950s when the concentration of most ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel and the U.S. allowed them to live while learning, at poverty-level, but to live, in welfare societies.