Growing Up Hasidic — and Racist

Posted on December 15, 2017 by Luke Ford

Shaindy Urman writes:

In the ultra-Orthodox Hasidic community I grew up in, racism is a common aspect of life. It is seen as necessary in order to maintain the separation from goyim, or gentiles, and uphold the status of chosen nation (and as Hasidim, chosen Jews). As young children, we were educated about the horrors of the gentiles, who were out to destroy the pious Jews. ”In every generation,” we read aloud each Passover, “they [the other nations]stand ready to destroy us.” We are further taught that Esau, who symbolizes gentiles, forever hates Jacob, the Jewish nation.

As a young child I accepted what I was taught about the outside world without question. My exposure to non-Jews was limited to the few words I exchanged with the old Polish woman with the tattered kerchief on her head who cleaned our house once a week, and to passing by our black neighbors on the streets of Crown Heights. Any interactions with people outside the community were nonexistent — and unnecessary — since everything we ever needed was accessible through other Hasidic Jews just like us.

As a female I was taught to think, act and appear modest and demure at all times, hidden behind a mechitzah, the partition in the synagogue, and by layers of clothing wherever I went. I couldn’t talk or interact with boys past preschool, sing around men once I turned 12 or learn the intricate Jewish texts like the males in my family did.

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Manners, multiculturalism, and the battle of Stamford Hill

Posted on December 15, 2017 by Luke Ford

The Independent in the UK:

On Wednesday, The Independent’s columnist Christina Patterson wrote a column detailing how rude she believed many Charedi Jews were to non-Jews. A gentile resident of Stamford Hill for 12 years, she described how the ultra-orthodox community had made her feel “about as welcome in the Hasidic Jewish shops as Martin Luther King at a Ku Klux Klan convention”.

“I didn’t realise,” she wrote, “that a purchase by a goy [a Yiddish phrase for a non-Jew] was a crime to be punished with monosyllabic terseness, or that bus seats were a potential source of contamination, or that road signs, and parking restrictions, were for people who hadn’t been chosen by God. And while none of this is a source of anything much more than irritation, when I see an eight-year-old boy recoiling from a normal-looking woman (because, presumably, he has been taught that she is dirty or dangerous, or, heaven forbid, dripping with menstrual blood) it makes me sad.”

The article – headlined “The limits of multi-culturalism” – went on to criticise the Islamic veil and laments the lack of successful prosecutions for female genital mutilation, a form of female circumcision which is practised by a number of different cultures and faiths.

Within hours of the article appearing online The Independent’s website Patterson’s email account was inundated with emotional comments from readers who were either delighted that the author had dared to write about such a contentious subject, or were outraged by what they perceived to be a vicious attack on Judaism.

Jewish columnists rounded on Patterson in unison with Stephen Pollard, editor of the Jewish Chronicle, accusing her of “unrelenting unadulterated anti-Jewish bigotry”.

Miriam Shaviv, one of the paper’s most prolific columnists, waded in with her own response to the article which she said was “one of the ugliest, most vile pieces ever published in the British press”. “You rather get the feeling that [Patterson] a) hates the Jews and Muslims really, seriously more than is necessary and b) feels they really ought to thank her for generously giving them permission to exist,” she wrote.

Yet Damian Thompson, a well-known Catholic blogger who regularly defends Israel and Judaism in his writing, came to Patterson’s defence and said it was right to highlight the sense of superiority some Jews have towards gentiles.

“Monosyllabic terseness towards goyim?” he wrote in a recent blog for the Daily Telegraph. “I’ve experienced it and it’s maddening. Jewish hostility towards Christians isn’t confined to the ultra-Orthodox… I could tell stories, of unbelievable haughtiness by leaders of Anglo-Jewry, which would have led to diplomatic incidents if the Christians involved weren’t afraid of being accused of anti-Semitism. I suppose I’m afraid of that, too.”

Thompson’s blog has since prompted a further response from Ms Shaviv who said that Jews do need to recognise how they are sometimes perceived by friends, neighbours and strangers alike. “There is today no excuse for Jews holding racist attitudes,” she wrote. “We need to make sure we all understand that the odd comment about “the goyim” is not just a joke; that there are consequences to treating non-Jews as if they are inferior.”

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WHY ARE ORTHODOX JEWS SO RUDE?

Posted on December 15, 2017 by Luke Ford

From Jew in the City:

I asked a Hasidic friend about this, as most of the complaints I’ve heard about rudeness seem to be about the Hasidic community. (Modern Orthodox students at Yeshiva University were recently named one of the ten most polite college kids in the country!) He made an interesting point and explained that a culture of politeness is a very American phenomenon, whereas Hasidic culture stems from the Old Country which operated very differently – more distant, more serious. However, he noted that lack of politeness should not be equated with a lack of kindness. Visiting the sick, having over lots of guests for eating and sleeping, and preparing meals for the needy are all very common in these communities. Far more kindness and giving is engrained into the people of these communities than what most “polite” people would do! (I would say the ultra-Orthodox world also practices more of these kindnesses than the Modern Orthodox world.)

Something else to keep in mind: one of the major divides between the Modern Orthodox world and the ultra-Orthodox worlds (particularly the Hasidic world) is how much interaction occurs with the larger world. While Modern Orthodox philosophy is that God gave us an entire world and we should use as much of it as is kosher, the Hasidic approach, particularly after the Holocaust (as a reaction to the destruction) is that the outside world ought to be avoided as it is both physically dangerous and will cause observant Jews to lose their way. So not only is much of the Hasidic community insular, it is fearful of interacting with the outside world.

Now why have some of the men been friendlier than the women? It’s a good question, and our Educational Director, Rabbi Jack Abramowitz had an interesting answer when I asked him why he thought this was: the men are more likely to have a job in the secular world and have therefore interacted with and are more comfortable around different types of people.

One final point: A story is told about a great rabbi (one of the greatest in his generation) named Rav Yaakov Kamenetsky (an ultra-Orthodox rabbi) who lived in New York and died around 20 years ago. After his funeral, when his family was sitting shiva (the Jewish week of mourning), a prominent nun from the community came to the house of mourning to pay her respects. She said that this rabbi would pass her by on the street every day with a big smile and a friendly “hello” and it really meant so much to her. This story of Reb Yaakov is very meaningful to me, because despite the fact that some communities conduct themselves in less friendly ways, I believe that Reb Yaakov’s approach captured the essence of what it means to be a religious Jew.

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Jews, Women & The Ordeal Of Civility

Posted on December 15, 2017 by Luke Ford

Steve Sailer writes:

Jews have taken on the role of society SuperEgo, while wanting to remain the Id in private. This is an unstable combination, has the high proportion of Jews have gotten in trouble attests.

…When I was a kid, National Review was fascinated by a 1974 book by the New York Irish-American sociologist John Murray Cuddihy, The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Lévi-Strauss, and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity. Cuddihy had been trained by New York Jewish intellectuals, and he turned his hyper-intellectualized style back on Jewish intellectuals. Forty plus-years ago, this kind of turn-about was seen as fairly fair play, and Cuddihy was nominated for a National Book Award. But since then he and his book have disappeared down the memory hole.

I’ve only read a couple of chapters of The Ordeal of Civility. Cuddihy’s style isn’t too my taste. I’d sum up the idea as that, as Heinlein said, “An armed society is a polite society,” and Ashkenazi society wasn’t very armed and thus was, despite its high literacy rate, pretty crass. So it ended up less civil than gentile polite society of similar wealth levels, which caused post-Jewish Enlightenment Jews a lot of distress and agitation when they tried to enter the broader society.

In a new article in Thermidor, Hoyt Thorpe summarizes Cuddihy in relation to Trump’s highly Jewish crassness…

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* Until the Sexual Revolution ™ , how common was it really for women to be solicited for sex?

A not yet married young girl was owned by her father who would not take kindly to random men soliciting her for sex. Married girl obviously owned by their husband and soliciting one I think had a credible threat of getting killed attached to it.

With marriage at much younger ages than today, I don’t think that “single women” were really a thing. Prime reproductive age women were not just wandering around on their own in big anonymous cities.

And going back to evolution, way way back, all women were owned by the top male, who definitely discouraged other males from soliciting.

So I dunno. Like I said I agree with you, but I’m not sure if history really supports that women should have plenty of experience and be good at this because western civilization.

And – they definitely aren’t equipped to handle this specific scenario where we made a tiny little world called a federal court and made Kozinky the king shit within that world, and then on top of that he’s the girls boss so he directly controls her economic livelihood, and then he hits on the girl. A lot of parts of her are saying “yup, sounds good Judge, let me open my legs right now” and so it’s expected that she would not know what to do.

* It goes beyond women. Your average well-bred WASP does not want to eat at the same table with some neurotic, fussy Jewish guy who tantrums over what he’s being served and who is rude and harassing to the waitstaff. This is profoundly irritating to someone who’s been properly brought up.

Well-bred WASPs were raised to deal with mishaps calmly and politely and not freak out over them. Making a terrible scene in public is a major faux pas in WASP culture, because one of the defining characteristics of people who run things in life is that they are hard to rattle, they stay in control of their emotions, they fix problems quickly and easily, and they do all of these things with panache.

The generation of Jews who complained about not getting into the country clubs were only 1-2 generations themselves from being peasants on the Russian shtetl, and they were taught peasant manners.

* Howard Stern is a modern day American version of the same project.

Stern’s mission seemed to be a relentless assault on the WASPs from the point of view of a hideously ugly, sexually vulgar low rent Jew from Long Island.

Trump routinely appeared on Stern’s show and was a listener of it for 20+ years.

Stern’s format included a relentless sexual harassment of his female guests over commercial broadcast radio.

I don’t know if would be tolerated today. Now he’s hiding on satellite radio and even more obscene.

Stern’s fundamental obsession is the sexual relations between black males and White women. Especially in pornography and among his celebrity guests.

It has always been obvious to me that in no small way this is his fascination with “degrading” White women/shiksas by fixating on this “defilement” of White America’s women black males.

James Toback shares the same world view and made a movie expressing it called “Black and White”. He has also fixated on the sexuality of Mike Tyson and Jim Brown.

Brett Ratner apparently was the liaison between somewhat naive White girls and black alleged rapist Russell Simmons.

* Sailer is the therapist we need for our time. In addition to psychoanalysis therapy, there is a vital need for cultural-analysis. Find the courage to peer into the dark heart to understand hidden cultural motives for our behavior that fuel so much misunderstanding and conflict. Our very reluctance and cowardice to confront these probably doom us to endless unsatisfactorily unresolved conflicts between our tribes. “Diversity is our strength” is the empty platitude aimed to placate us and make us ignore the real problems and conflicts between citizens, neighbors and colleagues hailing from different tribes and traditions. Rather than demanding that we actually put in effort to understand the different kinds of motives and styles of negotiation we are dealing with and to create institutions that could hope to accommodate these diverse styles of interaction, we’ve chosen to close our eyes, see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil in order to hold on to the fiction that “we’re supposed to be all exactly the same progressive Universal Unitarian rainbow flag worshipping, Whole Foods shopping, bourgeois bohemians with the same tastes and values but with different pigmentation, features and stature.” Indeed this expectation of uniformity of values and tastes is such hypocritical contradiction to the oft proclaimed yet apparently hollow pieties to “diversity.”

Perhaps independent outsiders like Sailer’s will continue to influence the more authoritative voices of the establishment to examine our cultural differences with a greater honesty that actually respects the integrity of these people much more by viewing all their features and foibles without the need to replace these with more palatable idealized fantasies. What makes Sailer’s observations and musings about various cultures and ethnicities so remarkable and constructive is that he’s never rude, condescending or dismissive about it. Sometimes his observations are obviously jarring, especially to any forged in this context of a culture that views such frank but statements beyond the tolerable range of polite discourse. Despite the many calls for frank discussions of race, almost nobody demanding this actually wants anything resembling frankness or even real discussion for that matter. Sailer’s indifference to the kind of etiquette that prohibits the honest consideration of various races and cultures has exacted a great cost of his exclusion from the Cathedral establishment, marginalizing a voice that might have otherwise been rewarded with more social success and status had he given his “cultural superego” more control and bitten his tongue to compromise in order to choose a different trajectory. Yet his indifference to these rules of etiquette have freed him to explore territory other less courageous but otherwise great minds have ignored and have fueled his curiosity to understand the real reasons, motives and origins for behaviors and characteristics of the various cultures. Even though he’s already violated this key taboo, he’s not completely dispensed with civilization and become something like another Andrew Anglin. Absent civilization, men don’t monstrous barbarity doesn’t automatically erase the nobility, humanity and dignity that exist along with the selfishness and wrath that compete with them. Even when examining the most difficult areas aspects of weaknesses that challenge or bedevil the various races and cultures, Sailer does so with a tenderness that shows a genuine desire to appreciate the reality and depth of all of their features and characteristics, not only the good ones that their idealized image of themselves wish to incorporate and present for a public image of their “cultural ego.”

Perhaps the Id, Ego and Superego are useful after all, even as metaphors also for races, nations and cultures to understand themselves? Will Dr. Sailer and others continue their thankless mission to help therapy these? How can communities most in need of therapy be moved to seek help to gain a better awareness of themselves?

* It’s very common for Jews to boast about their lack of civility, and I see as a overcompensation for a lack of physical stature. It may work in the Northeast, but it goes over like a lead weight down South. My wife had a scrawny accountant/business development contracted to her workplace call himself the “Hebrew Hammer.” His presence at a workplace staffed with Scots-Irish and Italian women was a morale bust, but her delusional boss thought he was the kick in the pants the company needed.

* “Courtesy” is the word Kenneth Clarke used. In his 1969 book (and tv series), he defined courtesy as “the ritual by which we avoid hurting other people’s feelings by satisfying our own egos.”

* Our barbaric impulses NEED sublimating; it is like wearing clothes to ward off the cold.

Our civilization has cast off the clothes that checked barbaric impulses and is now, figuratively, naked and freezing to death. Thanks, Freud et al.

* The Ordeal of Civility is so obtuse because what Cuddihy is trying to say is Freudianism really is just a projection of …Jewish perversity onto Christian culture.

Likewise Marx is all about critiquing the Jewish exploitation of others, especially the goyim, but of other Jews as well if necessary(or possible), but then again projecting it all upon the goyim.

If Steve finds Cuddihy to be obscurantist then E. Michael Jones may be more accessible.

For E Michael Jones, “The Ordeal of Civility” presented by Jews is really just their rejection of Logos as symbolized by their persecution of Jesus Christ.

* It’s like blacks wallowing in culture of violence but throwing fits about violence done to blacks.
It’s like homos wallowing in culture of pansyass vulgarity and flamboyance but bitching about how people find them ridiculous.
It’s like Jews wallowing in a culture of hostility and nastiness but getting so antsy about hostility shown to Jews.

If you start a forest fire, it can destroy your side too. But we live in such an egotistical and ‘ethnotistical’ age. Some groups want to subvert rules and act more freely… but are shocked when greater licentiousness or lack of inhibitions lead to behavior by other groups that offend them.
Homos still haven’t owned up to the fact their sicko behavior led to AIDS disaster in the 80s. If anything, they were turned into saints and gifted with ‘pride’ parades, ‘gay marriage’, and homomania as new religion. Identity Politics is shocked that whites also want an identity.

* I remember in the 80’s how seriously everyone who was intellectually anyone took Freud, and thinking that while this whole id/ego/superego thing made sense, the whole secretly wanting to kill my dad to sleep with my mom thing made absolutely no sense, but that’s supposed to be subconscious, so am I a rube for not accepting this thing that goes against every fiber of my being and is literally supposed to be unprovable simply because all the smart, sophisticated people say I should? Being a dissident on that was the beginning of my intellectual nonconformism, and honestly as socially trying as being a Trump supporter is today.

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What Are The Main Threats To Jewish Safety & Prosperity In America?

Posted on December 13, 2017 by Luke Ford

Steve Sailer writes:

Granted, while more than a few Jewish pundits have an unfortunate tendency to portray anything that triggers their career insecurities as merely a hop, skip, and a jump from Auschwitz, their real worry is more mundane and realistic: that the left’s program of ethnic diversity, inclusion, and proportional representation will eventually get imposed on the ethnic group that is pound for pound the undisputed world champion.

In an era in which Foucault’s sadomasochism-inspired obsession with “power” as the all-purpose explanation for everything has filtered down to seemingly every community-college lecturer, the fact that the median Jewish person outranks the median anybody else on virtually every realistic metric of power, such as wealth, influence, accomplishments, celebrity, IQ, funniness, or campaign donations, means that Jewish thinkers are going to be antsy.

Granted, the overwhelming volume of Jewish fire at present is not directed toward the social justice jihadis who are increasingly threatening heavily Jewish institutions like the Weinstein Company movie studio, but toward the pro-Semitic rightists like Trump and Putin.

Why? Think about the career risks from the perspective of a Jewish journalist: We’re the world’s richest identity-politics group, but we’ve been promoting leftist resentment. Okay, so far we’ve been able to direct that hatred away from us and toward whites in general. But now there’s this rightist president who thinks Jews are great…but we can’t control what he says. He could say anything!

Trump, despite being more or less America’s first culturally Jewish president, might well blurt out some inconvenient truth, such as that Jews make up something like one-third of all billionaires in the U.S. and an incredible one-seventh or so of all billionaires on earth despite being only 1/500 of the human race.

And then Putin might buy one…hundred…thousand…dollars’ worth of Facebook ads. Using irresistible Slavic skills at publicity and media manipulation, he could get everybody in the world to learn this fact!

Perhaps that sounds ridiculous, but notice how various trends over the past few years have not necessarily been good for the Jews in the long run.

For example, until quite recently, the focus of most affirmative-action controversies didn’t much affect Jewish Americans. The big 2009 Supreme Court quota case focused on New Haven, Conn., but it didn’t have anything to do with Yale. The Supreme Court instead pondered whether it was okay for New Haven to cheat fireman Frank Ricci out of a promotion just because he was white. (By a 5–4 vote: no.)

During Obama’s first term, some major Democratic donor industries such as Silicon Valley and Hollywood acted like the EEOC rules against unintentional disparate impact discrimination didn’t apply to them because they were, you know, progressive and therefore virtuous.

By Obama’s second term, though, there wasn’t all that much left to loot in the name of fighting racism and sexism from conservative institutions. So the SJW hordes were pointed in the direction of universities (as in the Haven Monahan gang-rape hoax), the tech firms, and, most recently, Hollywood.

Objectively, the Obama administration ginning up attacks on colleges, tech, and the entertainment industry was not good for the Jews.

To take an ironic example, apparently one member of the U. of Virginia-Charlottesville fraternity that was libeled by Rolling Stone’s anti-gentilic gang rape on broken glass fantasy about blond beast frat guys (and then had its windows smashed by a leftist mob) was the son of former Republican House majority leader Eric Cantor. (Cantor’s older son had previously been a member of the frat when Haven Monahan would have rushed, if Haven hadn’t been nonexistent.)

Of course, in the ongoing Sex Purges of guys with really good jobs in the media, as Larry David pointed out on Saturday Night Live, Jewish people obviously are overrepresented by an order of magnitude or more compared with their share of the population.

Why so much disparate impact? The most obvious reason that Jews are involved in Weinsteingate at far more than their share of the population (about 2 percent) is because they tend to fill a very high percentage of the really good jobs.

The media feels that the fact that whites in general tend to have an above-high percentage of the really good jobs, such as movie mogul, is the most pressing social problem of the age. On the other hand, observing that Jewish people tend to have an even more disproportionate fraction of the best jobs just leads to blank stares and accusatory questions of “Why are you interested in the ethnicity of billionaires and moguls?”

Why? Well, when anybody mentions that Jews tend to have a high percentage of the top jobs, some of the Jews with the top jobs get extremely upset, and they have a lot of power.

Why do they get angry? Is it because they are rightly terrified that another Holocaust might ensue?

I don’t think so. I presume it’s because these powerful individuals have an admirable degree of career ambitiousness—that’s how they got where they are—and thus they react with great hostility to any line of thinking that could conceivably lead to the kind of hiring and promotion quotas that have been routinely imposed upon whites in general being imposed upon Jews in particular.

Consider the history of discrimination and why Jewish Americans might fear that, as Sarah Silverman would say, losing control of the media could be bad for their careers.

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