As the now routine attacks on ultra-Orthodox Jews in New York City and its environs have become more frequent, and far more deadly, Abigail Shrier reflects on her experience at Yale Law School nearly two decades ago, and the way her classmates treated the school’s sole ḥaredi student:
Yale Law School was about as secular a place as I had ever been in—an institution where God seemed not only absent but strangely irrelevant. . . . But the open snickers of our classmates surprised me. They imitated how [this student] raised his hand in class (palm a little too rigid and tilted slightly forward). They joked that it looked like a Nazi salute. They rolled their eyes whenever someone mentioned his name.
In an institution pledged to champion the downtrodden, contempt coalesced happily on his head. Most surprising to me was how readily and wordlessly our classmates seemed to have agreed on their target. How did they know whom to kick around? Their defense of minorities stopped at his feet. So many unspoken rules of communication arranged themselves in a target on his back.
Not so different, suggests Shrier, is the way the media and local government have responded to the current epidemic of violence:
The Associated Press tutted in a tweet that has since been removed: “The expansion of ḥasidic communities around New York City has led to predictable civic sparring, but also flare-ups of what some call anti-Semitic rhetoric.” This came days after a madman charged the home of a ḥasidic rabbi, hacking at Jewish heads with a machete. NBC New York tweeted from the same script: “With the expansion of Orthodox communities outside NYC has come civic sparring, and some fear the recent violence may be an outgrowth of that conflict.” Some fear . . . what exactly? That the Jews got what they deserved? That the attacks are a logical response to gentrification? Good people on both sides, is it?
This is Bill de Blasio’s New York, but it could just as easily be David Dinkins’s. And perhaps that is why we are seeing this again: the demon of hate, never exorcised, floats freely around. Our sin was to have whitewashed the Crown Heights pogrom of 1991 and lavished its instigator Al Sharpton with respectability.
Read more on Wall Street Journal: https://www.wsj.com/articles/yale-al-sharpton-and-the-attacks-on-new-yorks-jews-11578093532