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.'”
Here, Tobin. Feast your eyes.
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.
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UD in front of the Israeli Embassy,
Washington DC, 2013. Photo: Jewish
Daily Forward.