The Anti Defamation League defines and anti-semite as: The belief or behavior hostile toward Jews just because they are Jewish. It may take the form of religious teachings that proclaim the inferiority of Jews, for instance, or political efforts to isolate, oppress, or otherwise injure them. It may also include prejudiced or stereotyped views about Jews.
Ben Calhoun This American Life recently talked about the effect the Hassidic community was having on its neighbors with a radio essay titled A Not So Simple Majority
Also here for your convenience:
I decided to collect some published information from what I consider credible sources after I read this from the recent president of the East Ramapo school board:
The school board president, Daniel Schwartz, said in an interview that the petition, filed by Advocates for Justice, represented the views of chronic complainers. He said any insinuation that Orthodox Jewish board members could not focus on the needs of non-Jewish children was offensive and anti-Semitic.
O-kay, so you played the anti-semite card. I say, maybe you’re just an asshole Dan.
In recent years, resentment on the part of yeshiva and day school families has escalated, particularly because local property taxes — the major source of public school funding — hit even low-income families who may not earn enough to pay income taxes.
But low income? And Why?
Religion and Welfare Shape Economics for the Hasidim
New York Times
By JOE SEXTON
Published: April 21, 1997
“The job interviews take place with practical, unspoken calculation in Southside’s dozens of Hasidic schools. The schoolteacher is desperate for work; the school administrator, short of funds, can offer only the most minimal of wages.
But the offers, at perhaps $150 a week for 30 hours of teaching, are made and almost always accepted for one central reason: welfare. The teacher knows welfare payments will supplement a meager income; the school knows employees who also receive welfare will be able to survive on low salaries.
”It’s a mutual understanding, I suppose,” said the director of a Bedford Avenue yeshiva in the Southside section of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. ”I know the price they will go for, and that’s what I pay.”
Rabbi Leib Glanz, whose United Talmudic Academy employs about 700 teachers in Southside, said: ”If they can’t take what I can pay, I get someone else. I do not count on welfare when I hire. But clearly welfare has been beneficial to the yeshivas.””
Also from the same essay:
“One foundation of the Hasidim’s economy is an organized, aggressive approach to winning welfare benefits. For example, the office of the United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburg, the Hasidim’s main social services center in Southside, has a staff that fills out applications for aid and telephones city officials to contest adverse decisions. Advocates for Southside’s Latino poor cite with envy the Hasidim’s unified efforts at obtaining public assistance. Current and former city welfare officials regard the Hasidim’s pattern of obtaining public assistance — the widespread listing of nearly identical incomes that fall just within qualifying guidelines — as circumstantial evidence of manipulation, or even fraud.”
But if I even hint that the Hassidim are commiting out and out fraud, out comes the anti-semitic card and a list of generations of injustices done to Jewish peoples. But why can’t you accept that you bring it on yourself?
And more from Mr. Sexton:
“. . . their religious emphasis has created economic dead ends for many of the Hasidim of Southside. The focus on religious studies results in children ending secular education at age 13, curtailing job skills. Other factors also limit opportunity: discrimination in the mainstream workplace exists; the neighborhood’s once-dominant industries, like the jewelry and garment trades, have dwindled; some have difficulty with English, their second language, and the neighborhood’s substantial network of private charity, built around wealthy households and loan societies in every synagogue, is already overtaxed.”
The Amish, another group that refuses to assimilate and change with time, supports itself through farming and manufacturing. Why can’t the Hassidim do the same?
