Breaking what rules? They’re following rules – the only rules that matter to them.

‘Rules’ like you need to vaccinate your kids, you need to educate your kids, you can’t steal from the welfare state, and you have to quarantine are … nothing.

[Illegal ultraorthodox] gatherings have led to disaster. Williamsburg, Borough Park and Crown Heights (the three major Hasidic neighborhoods in Brooklyn) have experienced horrific death tolls. Other Hasidic Jews and I have heard of weddings and other mass gatherings followed shortly by a rash of infections and deaths.

This is a systemic problem that won’t go away just by pointing out that other areas of New York have had moments of people gathering, or that they are a minority within the community (both of which are true, but have little relevance in a discussion about communal dynamics).

Many leaders were slow to act, and even when they did, it has been clear that they were unwilling or unable to stand up to the extremists in their communities who refuse to listen.

******************

You can keep throwing it all at the wall – antisemitism, it’s just a few extremists, how ’bout those spring breakers doing it too, we have to gather outside cuz our apartments are stifling, we didn’t get the memo cuz we’re too pure for any form of communication with the outside world, our rabbi said fuck that, if I don’t keep going to the ritual bath my husband won’t fuck me and we can’t get me pregnant, etc. etc. Go ahead and throw it all at the wall. You’re still killing yourselves and others and deserve all the condemnation coming your way.

… amplify, amplify again.

But it isn’t only romantic suicide, lad; it’s romantic homicide.

Throughout yet another opinion piece urging us to admire the haredim and castigate ourselves because we’ll never be the Jews they are, the writer stresses only the self-harm the haredim generate by breaking virus containment laws. It killed many of them. Yes, and continues to do so.

And, because they’ve carried the virus to the rest of us, it is killing many of us.

See?

The writer doesn’t see. His argument seems to be that because the haredim believe divine promises to the point of communal decimation, they deserve a kind of backhanded admiration, rather in the way one has to admire the fervor of Mad Mike, even if his belief that his steam-powered rocket would make him famous rather than dead was flawed.

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.

Commentary, Jerusalem Post.

It’s one of those more in sorrow than in anger pieces, but let’s concentrate on the anger.

The ultra-Orthodox are the victims of their own sociology. Many of the massive [coronavirus] deaths in the ultra-Orthodox community are, in large measure, self-inflicted. Many of them have no internet. They only listen to their rabbis. Their knowledge of what is going on beyond the pages of the Talmud is seriously limited…

This is what I want to say to them.

How dare you?

How dare you, my brothers and sisters, sacrifice your communal gains on the altars of your own stubbornness and/or lethal lack of knowledge and/or your cultic overdependence on your rabbis?

How dare you squander Torah this way? How dare you willingly let more Jews die?

How dare you endanger the lives of your fellow citizens — yes, rebbes, civic responsibility is a traditional Jewish value.

Far vus, I say in their native Yiddish: For what?

To paraphrase Dylan.

Mayor Bill de Blasio lashed out at Hasidic residents of the Williamsburg section in Brooklyn late Tuesday night after personally overseeing the dispersal of a crowd of hundreds of mourners who had gathered for the funeral of a rabbi who died of the coronavirus.

Hey, maybe now that the mayor has been willing to lash out, he could turn to Hasidic noncompliance with childhood vaccinations… Or, hey! How ’bout them education standards!

For decades, the communities have largely been allowed to evade government oversight, thanks to politicians who have enjoyed their support as one of the state’s most powerful voting blocs. The price of that support has been largely paid by Orthodox children.

As in, they get measles and coronavirus and as a special bonus are unemployably ignorant. What will it take, observers have wondered for years, for city and state government to lash out? And now we have our answer.

America eats shit in some obvious ways (see the post below this one), but is also an amazing place. When idjits on the school board in Palmer Alaska banned some of the twentieth century’s greatest novels (details here), people there rose up and blew them a big ol’ collective raspberry.

Ever since an Alaska school board voted to remove five books from elective high school classes, the titles of the works have come alive throughout the community. One city council member reads excerpts from her favorite book on Facebook every night. An attorney began a movement to reward students who read them. Hundreds have joined a Facebook group to voice their opposition to the removal. And a local bookstore owner says donations have been pouring in since the vote from community members who want her shop to give teenagers those books for free. “There’s been a huge response from the community,” says Mary Ann Cockle, owner of Fireside Books in Palmer. “The outpouring of support and concern about banning and censorship has been quite a surprise — but in a good way.”

Nice one.

Only Vinod Khosla and his beach (scroll down) can hold a candle to the story of this house in LA.

America!

Yes, we know you do.

The question is why any rational human being, let alone a government tasked with protecting citizens, listens to a word you say.

Israel has, post-coronavirus, so much to answer for.

When a member of New York’s Hasidic sect “filed a complaint with New York City’s social distancing complaint hotline” after he found forty people gathered in a synagogue that was supposed to be locked, he became Hasidic Enemy Number One, his photograph posted all over town with words identifying him as a snitch.

So far, this is absolutely typical cult behavior, including the suggestion that he be killed. (Same stuff in Israel right now in similar cults: “On April 14, in the Kirya Haredit … police had to rescue a man from a mob angry that he informed authorities about a ritual bath that had remained open in violation of government regulations.”)

Oh but then the JTA found a Yeshiva University professor to explain it all!

“The origin of this situation is that in much of Jewish history, Jews weren’t treated fairly before the law,” said Moshe Krakowski, a professor at Yeshiva University who studies haredi Orthodox society.

“Ultra-Orthodox culture is a very learned culture, so everybody’s got exposure to the same texts. So you’ll have people who will accuse others of all sorts of things, including mesirah, on the basis of their understanding, but not necessarily sanctioned by any rabbinic authority.”

Moshe, Moshe, Moshe. Do you really want to go on record telling us that we have to understand that because Jews have been treated badly they flout public safety laws and talk about killing law-abiding fellow Jews who report them to the police? Does that make sense, Moshe?

And why are you telling people who know better that ultraorthodoxy is learned? Let’s go back to your second statement and see if we can make sense of it.

Point One: UItraorthodoxy is learned. Memorizing prose passages, reciting them aloud repeatedly, handing your children appallingly substandard educations, and blindly following the opinion of your rabbi ain’t learned, my man. The same text exposure, absolutely, which is of course the primary sign that they don’t know much – people of one book and all that. So let’s not have any learned bullshit, please. Even their rabbis, if we can judge by some of the most prominent in the US and Israel, are dangerous idiots.

Point Two: So you say ‘so.’ So – because they are all learned and all read the same texts, they’ll accuse others of all sorts of execution-worthy offenses because… uh… huh? Oh, because for instance in their learnedness they learn that Judaism sanctions death for people who call the cops on Jews who break the law. Others may disagree! But you have to admire the intellectual ferment here…

The Matanuska-Susitna school board bans The Great Gatsby, Invisible Man, Catch-22, The Things They Carried and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings cuz they so naughty, but sees nothing wrong with flaunting one of the world’s largest quims in front of Wasilla High.

Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy

Says College Football System is ‘Immoral’

One other issue shaking up the Haredi community relates to promises made by its rabbis. During the campaign leading up to the March 2 election, United Torah Judaism released a video in which Rabbi Kanievsky’s grandson says to him: “There is this disease that is spreading in the world that they call corona. Many people in the world have died from it, and thousands of people are sick from it. And many people have great fear that it will reach them. So, people are asking: will voting for United Torah Judaism in the election be a protection for them that they won’t become sick from this disease?”

Rabbi Kanievsky nods his head in approval, and this video became part of the UTJ campaign. Many people who voted for the ultra-Orthodox party have died from corona, and hundreds if not thousands have contracted the virus. This has led to large-scale questioning of the guarantees made by the rabbis, who continue to promise that if people donate to specific charities then they will be protected from corona. The community is now challenging the validity of these blessings, to the point where Rabbi Kanievsky’s son had to go on the defensive in an interview with the ultra-Orthodox website Kikar Shabbat. Rabbi Kanievsky’s son explained the mechanism how this blessing works, saying that once the rabbi has issued this promise, then those whom God decrees will receive the virus will be prevented by God from donating to these charities.

When the interviewer pressed him further, pointing out that people who have donated to this charity are sick with corona, the son then gave a long and difficult to follow response that explained how one can lose the merit and protection because of their sins.