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.

On Wednesday, it becomes official: The city’s viral hot spots will be locked down. Life can only go back to normal when these communities are able to bring their shockingly high infection rates (8 percent positivity in some neighborhoods) down; but this is unlikely. More likely are riots, and even more brazen (because now enraged) flouting of masking and distancing. As in Israel, struggling with the same catastrophe on a vaster scale, there’s nothing admirably tolerant about letting populations fail to educate themselves and their children in the germ theory of disease, or fail to grasp basic civic life and social responsibility.

Local leaders said that [the] surge was driven by denialism, wishful thinking around herd immunity and misinformation spread by President Trump, who in 2016 carried some precincts in these neighborhoods with more than 80 percent of the vote.

Meni Schwartz, a prominent ultra-Orthodox communications strategist who served as a special adviser to the Health Ministry regarding the ultra-Orthodox community during the height of the crisis [comments]:

“The ultra-Orthodox [members of Parliament] should have gone from house to house amongst the rabbinic leadership telling them what was happening, each one should have gone on every single radio station to tell the public,” he says, and angrily juxtaposed this torpor with the alacrity with which the MKs take to the media regarding political campaigns and elections. “Since they are connected to the wider world, and understand that there is a danger to life from the coronavirus and saw that it was taking time for their community to understand the danger because they are disconnected from the media, why didn’t they do anything with urgency when they saw that this disease was life-threatening?” he demanded. “How did they not turn the world upside-down to do everything to get the information out and inform the rabbis? Why did it not bother them? Why wasn’t it the first thing on their agenda? Why did you not want to save the lives of your brothers?”

Samantha Bee does a typically hilarious take on the dumbshits who are killing us because they won’t vaccinate their children. (Her visit to Kurdish women soldiers is even funnier.) But with some yeshivas lying about compliance and spreading measles wider and wider, the New York Department of Health isn’t laughing: It has now threatened to close noncompliant yeshivas.

This is a real win-win. Closing yeshivas that lie about their sick students makes children everywhere safer. And simply by virtue of being free of New York’s many substandard ultraorthodox yeshivas, students will almost certainly be able to set out on an actual education. Indeed the shameful noncompliance of some of these schools is shining a much-needed light on their scandalously low standards. Good.

Shame seems to be the big thing at the moment (“And I have — I first started thinking, is it — am I feeling grief? Am I feeling shock, like I’m in a hallucination? But I just think shame, moral shame. It’s a moral injury to see the country you love behave in this way.”) as the US regresses to Second World status, with our would-be dictator and primitive public realm.

Our emerging civic models are disease-vector cults (fringe Mennonites, the Ultraorthodox) and it’s INSANE that we keep giving zealots vaccination exemptions and education exemptions and civic existence exemptions but this is where we are. Eventually our sense of shame will disappear, and it’ll be all Ostrogoth and Visigoth and Mad Max Fury Road.

At least we’ll have plenty of guns for the incipient permanent warfare.

The alarms are beginning to go off — “With the increase in vaccine hesitancy that has been going on since the Covid-19 pandemic, we’re seeing [whooping cough] outbreaks occurring in kids who are not vaccinated.” — but no one’s listening, and with our incoming HHS secretary we can expect the return of a rather wide spectrum of painful and sometimes lethal childhood disease.

Essentially, our country is about to assume the ethos of ultraorthodox Jews – no or few vaccines, and if you have a problem take it up with yahweh – in its approach to contagious illness. What to do?

Remember this mantra: NOTHING BUT NORTHEAST. The northeast states have the highest rates of vaccination; the death-adoring dummy states in the south and west have the lowest. If they don’t kill their kids via the Beretta left on the bed, they’ll do it bacterially.

But you and your kids don’t have to live in Disease Vector RFD. The entire northeast territory of this vast land remains polio and rubella free. Get thee thither.

If health authorities look away while subcultures largely refuse to vaccinate their children, eventually sick and dying children will not be confined to those subcultures.

Covid, measles — these have run rampant in vaccine-resistant ultraorthodox communities. In New York, one young ultraorthodox man recently contracted polio.

In Israel the attitude seems to be it is not worth it to rouse the wrath of the violence-prone ultraorthodox by insisting… Here in the States, we haven’t done much better.

Now look what we’ve got.

Gaza’s Polio Outbreak Won’t Spare Israelis

The country’s unvaccinated ultra-Orthodox population is at risk of contracting the disease

We should be terrified by the polio outbreak in Gaza, another mark of the unspeakable suffering and degradation of the innocents in that conflict.

And because Israel has allowed its primitives to reject modern science, all of its efforts to defend its population against enemies may come tumbling down via warfare directed against a group so absolutely lost that it doesn’t even believe in the germ theory of disease.

Dr. Matan Bar Yishai, a family doctor from the Maccabi healthcare service who has decided to relocate to New Zealand, told the Walla news site: “I am very sorry to everyone for the decision I made. I really love the country and my patients, but in the end, it is a family decision.”

Look. Give the people driving out Israel’s doctors, and provoking impressive numbers of Israeli pilots to stop flying, what they want. The people about to take over Israel didn’t give a shit about whatever “covid” was and refused vaccination and thereby killed a bunch of their people. Germ theory of disease? Our rabbi calls bs on it. The old ways are the best ways! He alone (to use the words of one of the heroes of the world’s ultraorthodox) can save us. What we need and what Israel needs is prayer, which is why our people don’t fight to defend the country, but only pray to defend the country, the way we prayed to keep all those children and old people from dying of covid…

Not that the haredim recognize the country “Israel,” since the messiah isn’t here yet or something. Many make a point of ignoring the national moments of silence on Holocaust Remembrance Day, pointedly cavorting about while Israelis stand in mourning. These people do not want vaccines, doctors, or even a country. They don’t want an economy of workers. So let them have what they want. Large numbers of people with money and skills are leaving Israel; investors are leaving Israel. The economy’s tanking. The ultraorthodox are giddy with excitement. They have always gloried in poverty and ignorance, and now all the people bothering them about teaching basic literacy to their children or getting jobs instead of rioting are finally going to shut up. Gottze dank!

… that this nation’s first case of polio in many years originated in an ultraorthodox Jewish sect. The Times of Israel summarizes:

Young man who recently got married is suffering from paralysis; was not vaccinated; is a resident of Rockland County, which has a history of low vaccine compliance

The story is getting wide coverage. What it represents is the shame of a nation. A modern, enlightened country like the US should see no polio at all, since any outbreak is the result of absolutely basic disregard of personal and civic health norms.

Imagine: A highly contagious disease like that lurking, and a community’s indifference to basic science and the well-being of its children allows people to go unvaccinated. It’s of a piece with these same communities refusing to educate their children to national standards, breaking tax laws, and breaking non-discrimination laws. Not to mention refusing vaccines for other easily avoided scourges.

The new polio case comes amid fierce backlash against vaccination in some Orthodox communities fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic and following a measles outbreak in Rockland County in 2018 and 2019 that was centered in the area’s Haredi Orthodox population.

The New York Times:

[This] community was also a nexus of a measles outbreak in 2018 and 2019, with hundreds of cases in the county and in Brooklyn, which is also home to many Orthodox residents. Rockland County’s rate of polio vaccination for small children is significantly lower than the rate for other counties outside of New York City, according to state data.

These communities, which voted at a higher percentage for Trump than any other community in America, and which sent busloads of community members to, er, various January 6 events in Washington (the insurrection was one of the very few places on earth where you could watch ultraorthodox Jews and neo-Nazis cavorting together), will fight national authorities tooth and nail if any government agency actually tries to make them behave. We have already witnessed, in the streets of New York, how shockingly violent they can be.

Indeed these are the Trumpian shock troops, communities of people who recognize that Trump’s violent nihilism is their own. If government has any defensive purpose at all, it is to respond to the threat profoundly non-compliant sects like this one represent.

One long, highly produced, article after another appears there, highlighting the destructive primitivism, and the law-breaking, of Israel’s large, politically powerful, and often violent, ultraorthodox population. Today’s piece recounts the sickening synergy of a government that refuses to deal with the covid-burdened haredim, and the determination of many ultraorthodox to flout any form of compliance with health rules.

I mean, literally sickening. A recent El Al flight full of secular and religious Israelis returning from New York featured a group of ultraorthodox – maskless and gathered in groups in the aisles, both against all safety/security rules – boasting among themselves about having forged documents declaring that they were not covid positive. Of course some were indeed infected, so everyone on that flight has had to enter isolation, etc., etc.

[D]ozens of passengers were notified by the Health Ministry that 11 of those on board were found to be infected with the coronavirus and that they must enter quarantine.

A woman on the plane claimed that she heard ultra-Orthodox passengers boasting that they had used fake coronavirus tests to get on the flight, Hebrew media reported. Other passengers said that during the flight ultra-Orthodox passengers did not wear masks at times and that the cabin crew did little to encourage them to cover up.

… Tal, a passenger on the flight, told the Ynet website that as passengers were getting on the plane she noticed a group of young ultra-Orthodox men boasting that they had obtained faked tests “and saying that they hadn’t taken them at all.”

Tal said that she had approached staff about the matter and was told there was nothing they could do. She also said that although the cabin crew assured her they would require all passengers to wear masks during the flight, the ultra-Orthodox passengers moved around, stood in groups praying, and did not wear masks.

“I pleaded with the stewardesses to ask them to put masks on but I got the response ‘you are hysterical, you have nothing to fear,’” she said.

Another passenger, who declined to be identified, told Channel 12 News that the cabin crew did not intervene when he raised the issue of the masks.

“We approached the cabin staff, we asked that they make sure they wear masks, but they assured us that everything was okay and we are panicking for nothing,” said the passenger.

“They were playing with our lives,” he said. “The flight attendants were afraid to confront them and we paid a heavy price.”

You bet they were afraid. Angry, massed haredim are a nasty business on the ground; you really don’t want to rile them in the air.

Like most cults, ultraorthodox have cults within cults, breakaways that get up to even more violent stuff than the mainstream ultraorthodox.

In the 1980s, the “operations officer” of the extremist Jerusalem sect Eda Haredit, Yehuda Meshi-Zahav, led a gang that, among other violent acts, set fire to all Jerusalem bus stops that featured advertisements with images of women.

The descendants of such groups today torch buses, not just bus stops. They spit and shout “whore!” at primary school girls whose skirts fall an inch too short. Tinier and tinier sectarianism has made accommodation to covid measures weak at best:

[S]ome in the community now adhered to the [finally rabbi-mandated] regulations even more avidly than the secular population. But not every sect agreed. Followers of the radical “Jerusalem Faction” — who split from the main community years ago, arguing that [the larger group was] too soft in their attitude toward the secular state — and other extreme splinter groups refused to obey the new orders.

And maybe it’s because years of living with absurd cultists have made Israel itself absurd, but its not uncommon to hear even people in responsible positions say things like this:

“We are talking about a community with values, with a lot of love for mankind. But it does not think of itself as belonging to Israeli civil society.”

What a pretty cliche, love for mankind. But of course for this value-community Israeli civil society can curl up and die.

And, given their mindless defiance, these lovers of mankind are killing themselves too. They’ve already cut quite a swathe among their oldest, and they’re making impressive inroads among younger people.

Among the ultra-Orthodox, the percentage of those testing positive is more than double that of the rest of the population. The true impact of the pandemic is expressed in the death toll: One in every 100 ultra-Orthodox people over the age of 60 has died from the disease, three and a half times as many as in the general population.

Expect more NYT features, as the drama of state failure emanating from powerful, destructive cults plays on.

Jacob Kornbluh, a journalist who knows the ultraorthodox community intimately and is recovering from having been beaten up by rioting members of that community (as we speak, hundreds of them have gathered threateningly around his house), says the most important thing of all. He took part in a Haaretz-sponsored zoom session this afternoon (UD watched it) about the (sometimes violent) refusal of ultraorthodox Jewish communities in New York and Israel to mask and distance and stay home, and when asked about the motivation of these people, he said… see the title of this post.

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

A relative of Kornbluh’s asks the haredim, on his Twitter page, “Are you all out of your minds?”

But I don’t think it’s a madness of crowds thing. Like Kornbluh, I’m not sure there is a reason. You have to contort yourself until you’re way off the charts intellectually to get anywhere with this mystery.

Haredi Jews in Israel and to a lesser degree in the United States live in crowded conditions and have less access to information, not to mention fewer intellectual tools for fully understanding the pandemic by virtue of an education devoted almost exclusively to the study of religious texts. However, unlike any other impoverished, undereducated minority, the Haredim have consciously chosen this way of life by adhering to an ideology that looks upon the modern world as a threat. It undercuts the argument that they are blameless victims of a virus.

So UD would like to suggest that consciously choosing an ignorant, impoverished life was the last conscious thing the haredim did. The reason one can’t get anywhere with them is that they are in a group trance; their life is perennial twilight sleep. In her great short story, “Holiday,” Katherine Anne Porter’s narrator recalls visiting a hardworking German American farm family in Texas. She was struck by “the repose, the almost mystical inertia of their minds in the midst of [their] muscular life” – and if you change muscular to communal I think you get the daily existential reality of many haredim, people who intuitively understand the advantages of sleepwalking through life. Saul Bellow used to say that most of us sleepwalk through life; entire spiritual practices – Buddhism, say – are devoted to trying to shake us awake.

The haredim are out to prove that religion really is the opiate of the masses; and, like most people suddenly jolted out of a dream by some rough shove, they are truly not going to be pleasant with the wakened world, the threatening modern enlightened world.

Think of it like this: People coming out of anesthesia are sometimes combative: It happens enough to have a name: Emergence Delirium.

You know: Til human voices wake us, and we drown.

If human voices wake the haredim, they will drown; their rabbis know at least this much.

The threat of death and disease should be a powerful countervailing force, but Haredi leaders live in perpetual fear of their followers’ religious observance slacking off and even of them leaving the community. If the momentum of prayer, study, and mass gatherings is halted for even a few weeks, no one can predict what the consequences would be. One study estimates that 15 percent of young Israeli Haredim leave the community.

And after all death (by covid or any other means) is only, if you like, an intensification of trance – Shakespeare calls sleep “death’s second self,” and if UD is correct many haredim, by this reckoning, are already living quite morbid lives, lives quite close to death. The refusal of the world; the refusal of almost everything the world has to offer by way of pleasure, enlightenment, expressivity, discovery; the pale black-suited men and the virtually invisible women… 15% attrition? The rabbis are certainly right that under the unbearable pressures covid places on already unimaginably repressed lives (stuck in a crowded apartment with not much in the way of toys, and no secular books or television or internet) that number will grow. Hence their refusal to acknowledge the existence of a pandemic.

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

Zzzzzz: “Borough Park Synagogue With COVID-Positive Rabbi Still Holding Large Indoor Prayer Services, Despite $15,000 Fine”

He has this disease because he’s more afraid of not being seen as a man than dying… I don’t think he’s afraid of killing himself if the price would be to avoid what he feels is the humiliation of wearing a mask and submitting to common sense and care for others…

Didn’t take much time for UD to find a commentator who agrees with her about DJT’s suicidality. Giridharadas’s theory of the president’s self-destruction tracks precisely with theories about why so many macho men in Alaska, Wyoming, and Montana (America’s BIG suicide states) kill themselves. (This blog has covered our suicidal macho/nihilist states forever.) Angry, isolated, obsessed with projecting strength, these are men who, like Trump, can look back on sordid personal lives that make unavoidably graphic the lovelessness they feel and inspire. Care for others, in Giridharadas’s words, is felt as a humiliating depletion of their strength; rage at others for … for obscure reasons, I guess having to do with others trying to draw love out of these men… ? … eventually finds its way inside the man himself and attacks him. As Andrew Sullivan notes, Trump is “dead inside apart from regular swoons of rage and resentment.”

Goes without saying that these same presuicides in our reddest states represent the very heart of Trump’s voting bloc, his demographic par excellence. Everyone noticed, during the last campaign, that Trump’s most solid support unerringly came from America’s most pilled-up, ginned-up, gunned-up, nihilistic counties and states (see, for instance, West Virginia).

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

Look at it this way: These guys really need their guns, since they’re probably going to want to use them on themselves. They really need a president who supports the NRA.

A New Republic writer identifies Trump as the leader of the “Flailing Masculinity Death Cult.”

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

And Trump’s other high-profile, 80% support demographic? Self-destructive ultraorthodox Jews – many of whom, by the way, share the heartland presuicide’s love of violence (this group spent last night rioting, burning masks, and assaulting people on the streets of New York) – cultish enclaves seemingly unmoved by the many covid infections and deaths among them.

How unsurprising that these two morbid, isolated constituencies are viscerally drawn to our nihilist in chief, whose “psychotic unraveling [is there] for all to see.”

… sets NY on fire (while shouting “TRUMP! TRUMP!“), an Israeli journalist offers a fascinating account of the escalating violence among ultraorthodox Jews in both countries.

[T]here are elements in the Haredi community intentionally generating hatred of Haredim among the rest of the Israeli population.

The “barriers should be higher,” these people believe; you can never be too separatist a cult, and making people outside the cult loathe you guarantees they won’t get anywhere near you. So — refuse basic health measures in a pandemic. To be sure, a lot of cult members will die; but this is the will of God. What’s more important is that viciously, insistently, imperiling the life of anyone anywhere near you keeps appalled outsiders far, far away.

But is this really a good way to guarantee the flourishing of your cult?

Well, consider your hero, Mr Trump. He and his vile advisor, Giuliani, obsessively say and do things that make people sick. Does this work to repel and intimidate their enemies, so that they stay hands off?

No. Reason? There’s an escalation written into the strategy. Almost all human beings respond strongly to cruelty; cruelty attracts sadists, to be sure, but there aren’t that many sadists. Mainly there are normal people horrified by cruelty. When you intentionally generate hatred by your cruelty, you eventually mobilize some outsiders against you.

If you’re an ultraorthodox Jew, your cultic paranoia may overreact to these mobilized people and double down on that which sets you apart, which builds the walls higher: You look and act increasingly bizarre (your mohels refuse to stop sucking infants’ penises, for instance); your contempt for state authority becomes more and more violent; your disbelief in the germ theory of disease becomes more and more adamant.

Trump and the ultraorthodox take the path of escalating grotesquerie – and the grotesque certainly stops people in their tracks.

But then we recover from being stunned, and we realize that there are basic human values we need to defend against Trump and his battalion.

Unlike Trump and his battalion, we hate war. But we are willing to fight.

They’re both currently reaping the personal rewards of cruelty, shamelessness, arrogance, and ignorance. And since the disease they recklessly invited to overtake them is insanely contagious, they are sharing those rewards with the rest of us.

“Most of the [ultraorthodox] community had it already, so we’re not so worried.“

***********

“Most people had it way back,” [Tzvi] Rosenberg told The Daily Beast, enjoying a cigarette unmasked a few feet from a similarly unprotected friend. “… We’re not wearing right now, because we’re smoking.”

***********

[M]any in the community believed in the Trump-touted … treatment of hydroxychloroquine…

[One man] approached his wife in synagogue and warned her … that masks cause COVID-19 infection.

***********

One man walking through Williamsburg provided the simple explanation. 

“We all had it already,” he said of COVID, not stopping long enough to give his name. 

An 18-year-old walking nearby said the same.

“I had it already and my community had it already,” he said…

***********

No major Hasidic rabbis in New York City have been seen wearing masks. In fact, photographs of large indoor gatherings — weddings, large prayer services and tisches, gatherings in which the rebbe sits at the head of a table surrounded by followers — have circulated on local news sites and social media.

***********

[M]ost of the rabbis themselves had the virus earlier this year and believe they have immunity.

***********

To some, the disregard for masks is evidence of an outlook in which everything in life is up to God.

“I don’t sense a lot of fear,” an administrator at a network of clinics in Williamsburg said. “I think there is a fatalistic attitude, like if it’s meant to be, I’ll get sick.”

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

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

And Trump’s epitaph? UD takes it, with a small alteration, from Larry Kramer’s great play about AIDS, The Normal Heart:

Being defined by [the president’s cock] is literally killing us.

In his swagger lies our doom.

Many of New York’s ultraorthodox true believers can hardly wait to leave this world of sin. But for them there’s an extra verse to the gospel standard:

And I won’t be alone

When I fly to that throne

I’ll sneeze and spread disease.

Let’s leave this world of sin

Where we have too long been

And to heaven have the keys!

Trump’s most solid voter bloc (a huge majority of America’s ultraorthodox will ultra-enthusiastically vote for Trump) has “embraced” his “views on masks and the pandemic.” “No major Hasidic rabbis in New York City have been seen wearing masks.”

To some, the disregard for masks is evidence of an outlook in which everything in life is up to God. “I don’t sense a lot of fear,” an administrator at a network of clinics in Williamsburg said. “I think there is a fatalistic attitude, like if it’s meant to be, I’ll get sick.”

The obvious results have multiple haredim dying of covid in NY hospitals in a short time-span – and not all of them are elderly. Deaths are growing. Fast.

“There’s rampant COVID denialism and misinformation … in the community,” one person familiar with the situation said. “People are not getting tested and are refusing care even when sick. This is deeply distressing.”

________________________

[I]f the outbreak spreads further in the Orthodox community, it could begin to take hold elsewhere, with even more serious consequences. If the city’s overall positivity rate hits 3 percent, that would trigger a new [citywide] lockdown, including the closing of public schools.

________________________

“In the absence of our doing the right thing, we will need to be in a lockdown type situation, as occurred in Israel because they haven’t been able to control the spread of the virus.”

________________________

“It took them seeing deaths – and unfortunately that community saw many deaths – it took that to change,” he said of the decision to close schools and synagogues in March and April. “When it gets to that point, it’s already too late.”

_______________________

The fanatics among the haredim of Israel and New York are ignorant, sadistic, and suicidal. Add to that, now, homicidal. The sane among this sect have never been able to control the insane, and governments fear looking bigoted. So take a deep breath, New York.

Or wait. Don’t.