On Tuesday, New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo announced neighborhood-specific lockdowns in areas with high rates of coronavirus infection, making explicit the fact that these “red zones” hold large concentrations of Orthodox Jews, and threatening synagogue closures if restrictions aren’t observed. In response, anti-lockdown protests erupted in ḥasidic parts of Brooklyn last night, resulting in at least two instances of intrareligious violence. Jonathan Tobin writes that, although the problem of Orthodox noncompliance with social-distancing measures is a real one, Cuomo—like New York City’s hapless mayor Bill De Blasio—has needlessly encouraged anti-Jewish hostility:
The spectacle of Orthodox Jews taking to the streets this week in closely packed crowds, eschewing masks (and in one case, even burning them) to protest Cuomo’s new edicts, cannot be defended. Yet it’s equally fair to ask questions that were raised [previously] when Mayor De Blasio singled out “the Jewish community” as such as the sole source of COVID scofflaws. It’s also reasonable to ask by what logic, let alone scientific principle, they are making decisions that mandate the closing of religious institutions while allowing other secular activities to go on unhindered.
Just as importantly, why have Cuomo and De Blasio, as well as so many other local and state leaders around the nation, treated religious activities and protests against these restrictions as inherently illegitimate and illegal while turning a blind eye towards the mass protests and violence in the streets that have taken place under the banner of the Black Lives Matter movement?
As those “mostly peaceful” protests continued and violence spread, governments that sent cops to shut down synagogues and churches, close playgrounds, or arrest people without masks—while doing little or nothing to stop rioters—lost whatever credibility they once had. If preventing looting by non-socially distanced criminals is not a government priority but stopping people from praying in a house of worship is, something is profoundly wrong, and it’s no good blaming people—whether they are Orthodox Jews or anyone else—for noticing.
Seen from that perspective, the anger of the Ḥaredim who have been resisting COVID-19 restrictions can be understood, if not excused, as a natural reaction to hypocritical policies and a troubling willingness to make the easily identifiable Orthodox Jewish community the scapegoats for the pandemic.
Read more on JNS: https://www.jns.org/opinion/why-are-cuomo-and-de-blasio-singling-out-orthodox-jews-as-covid-scofflaws/