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.