Lessons on Looting and Liberal Racism from the 1977 Blackout

In 1977, when New York City was at the nadir of its urban decay, a 25-hour electrical blackout struck much of the city leading to widespread looting and destruction of property. Midge Decter responded with a seminal essay in Commentary analyzing both its causes and the invidious prejudice white middle-class liberals (perhaps especially Jewish ones) revealed in their reactions. With unrest once again besetting America’s cities, her words are worth revisiting:

It is cant to call the looters victims of racial oppression, and it is still worse cant to say that their condition is the result of our apathy. But it is cant above all to say of the looters’ conduct—as Herbert Gutman did in a truly disgraceful piece (which also appeared on the New York Times Op-Ed page), in which he compared them with a group of Jewish housewives in 1902 who organized what turned into a rowdy protest against the high cost of kosher meat and threw meat into the street to rot—that they were giving us “a pained message.”

Anyone who actually watched the looters at work, as those of us who live in looted neighborhoods were privileged to do firsthand and as millions of Americans did briefly on television, knows that they were doing no such thing as expressing rage or even blindly giving vent to some pent-up experience of torment: they were having the time of their lives. . . .

“Pained messages” are being transmitted and received, all right, but in exactly the opposite direction from the one suggested by Herbert Gutman. Young blacks are getting the message from the liberal culture, more subtly but just as surely as from any old-time Southern sheriff, that they are, inherently and by virtue of their race, inferior. There are virtually no crimes they can commit that someone with great influence does not rush in to excuse on the grounds that we had no right to expect anything else.

The message they are given [by liberals], in short, is that they are not fully enough human to be held morally responsible for their own behavior. They are children, as the Southerners used to say, or ironically, they are, in the terminology the New York Times editorialist so much objected to but so inevitably himself implied, “animals.” This is the message that has for some time now, at least since the late 1960s, been consistently transmitted by the “best” people, and certainly widely received by their intended interlocutors. It is, to be blunt about it, the message of liberal racism.

Read more at Commentary

More about: Liberalism, Midge Decter, New York City, Racism

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society