It is also not necessarily to Israel’s advantage that an American Jewish community that is able to exercise considerable political influence is in the process of disappearing and being replaced by an isolated, impoverished population that will not be in a position to influence anything outside of the states and localities in which they are concentrated.
Well, yes. Israel has its own socially/economically destructive ultraorthodox community with which to reckon; it now correctly and anxiously views an earlier stage of this community taking shape in the US.
Our immigrant grandparents coped with poverty by working, not by stretching out a begging basket. Time to harden our hearts.
I’ve always been amazed by the way the truly hardened hearts – those of the hostile and exploitative haredim – are reliably sentimentalized as warm and shtetl-hamish by the non-ultraorthodox. This commenter is right – we’re the nostalgic pushovers, the easy marks (given what the ultraorthodox have accomplished in schools that we subsidize, ‘easy marks’ is putting it politely) who regard the perverse, self-punishing practices of this totally rejectionist community as somehow true Judaism. ‘What Haredi communities are really after is autonomy from the state, not advancing a principled religious liberty.’