Founded in 2006, Moishe House is an organization that has established residences where young Jews can live together and host various Jewish activities (such as Shabbat dinner) for their peers living nearby. Less than a week after moving into one of these houses, Gabriel Katz learned that they have an important, if unwritten, rule: political conservatives are not welcome. The trouble began when he mentioned to a housemate’s boyfriend that he was working for a defense contractor:
The next evening, my roommates sat me down in our living room and demanded that I move out. They explained that when they agreed to accept me as a roommate, they did not know I was politically conservative. [One roommate], Michelle, said that she felt “unsafe” around me, and that she would not be able to take her birth control or bring her queer friends around me. My other roommate, Sarah, said that she did not think to ask about my political views because I was the first young conservative she had ever met.
Throughout the entire ordeal, I dealt with both regional and national Moishe House staff. They behaved throughout as though I had done something wrong. . . . They never acknowledged that my roommates were asking me to leave because they did not agree with my political views. Instead, they portrayed my roommates’ behavior as taking issue with the supposed animus I had towards gay people, Native Americans, and other minorities. (I have none.) This allowed them to label the whole ordeal as a “roommate dispute.”
Moishe House’s website states, “We embrace and encourage a variety of voices, backgrounds, and perspectives.” . . . . Moishe House’s Resident Handbook explicitly states that “Moishe Houses are intended to be spaces of community and comfort regardless of political affiliation.”
So long, that is, as that political affiliation isn’t a conservative one.
Read more on Common Sense: https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/jew-vs-jew