Greene and the entire right wing are currently using “cancel culture” in the same way Rudy Giuliani used to deploy “a noun, verb and 9/11”—as
a handy-dandy phrase to inoculate themselves from wholly valid
criticism. (Rhetorically, “political correctness” is its more direct
predecessor, but then Black Twitter invented the term “cancel” and white conservatives decided that, like everything else, they just had to
have it.) The current ubiquity of the phrase belies its central thesis,
since all the airtime and column space conservatives are given to talk
about cancellation proves they were never cancelled in the first place.
The recent story of Michael Elkcohen, the undercover Christian
missionary who masqueraded as an Orthodox Jew and infiltrated an
Orthodox community in Jerusalem, sent shockwaves around the world. The
father admitted his missionary intentions in 2014 but managed to avoid
further scrutiny by relocating to the Anglo community of French Hill. A
year ago, a journalist familiar with his confession notified Shannon
Nuszen, the director of Beyneynu, a new watchdog organization that
exposes missionary activity in Israel, about the couple. They had been
spotted using two separate Facebook profiles – one with Jewish
identities and one with Christian identities.
“The forced removal of long-time Palestinian residents in Sheikh
Jarrah is abhorrent and unacceptable. The Administration should make
clear to the Israeli government that these evictions are illegal and
must stop immediately,” Elizabeth Warren, senator from Massachusetts,
said in a tweet Saturday.
The
property under dispute was owned by a Jewish organization before 1948
until it was captured by Jordan in Israel’s War of Independence. The
land was taken back by Israel during the 1967 war, and a law was passed
in 1970 allowing Israeli Jews to reclaim property in East Jerusalem that
was held before the 1948 war. The property has been the subject of a
legal battle ever since.
Israel’s Supreme Court is set to meet Monday to review the Palestinian residents’ appeal of a court-ordered eviction.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the representative from New York, also weighed in. “We stand in solidarity with the Palestinian residents of Sheikh Jarrah
in East Jerusalem. Israeli forces are forcing families from their homes
during Ramadan and inflicting violence. It is inhumane and the US must
show leadership in safeguarding the human rights of Palestinians,” she
said in a tweet Saturday.
These four houses, subject to the pending eviction notice, have
already been the subject of extensive litigation in Israel, with appeals
going all the way up to Israel’s very liberal Supreme Court and with
all parties receiving representation and due process. The court
determined last week that these homes must be returned to their legal
owners and that another four homes shall be returned to their legal
owners by the end of the summer. The court further determined that
the people currently living in these homes had been illegally squatting
in these homes for decades without paying rent or holding proof of
ownership.
AFTER MORE than 15 years of teaching in the Modern Orthodox yeshivot and
seminaries in Israel, I have found that the students themselves are
confused about Modern Orthodoxy and perceive it as some sort of “diet
orthodoxy,” same great beliefs, but fewer observances. To quote Kaplan
yet again, who is in turn citing Heilman, the Modern Orthodox Jew sees
himself as a criminal. He is “in theory committed to meeting the demands
of both modernity and Orthodoxy; however, insofar as he perceives these
demands as being inherently contradictory, his commitment to the
demands of modernity results in his selectively violating or, at the
very least, not wholly living up to the full range of the demands that
Orthodoxy makes upon him. To be involved in the modern world, ipso facto
means to live a life that involves the constant compromising of the
rigorous norms of Orthodoxy, norms whose legitimacy the Modern Orthodox
Jew fully recognizes; in a word, it means to live a criminal existence.”
Often my students will report having spent Shabbat with their “really
religious cousins.” When I ask them what they mean by that, they usually
explain that they are haredi (ultra-Orthodox). As if there is this
understanding that haredi Jews are the ones who are “really religious”
while what we do as Modern Orthodox Jews falls short of the real thing.
As early as 1986, Jack Bieler argued
that “The modern Orthodox school itself is undermining rather than
supporting the religious outlook that it should be encouraging within
its student body.”[11] Samuel Heilman, in his landmark 2006 study of the American Jewish Orthodox community, describes several factors that have contributed to this reality.[12]
First, he notes that with increasing professional specialization and
training in fields of medicine, law, and business, Modern Orthodox
parents find themselves without the religious training or free time to
be actively engaged in the education of their children. As Heilman puts
it, “The school had hoped not to replace the family and community, but
in practice in the modern world it did.”[13]
This growing divide between the roles of parents and teachers – indeed,
between school and home – means that students’ lived communal and
familial experiences develop separately from their educational
encounters; they often learn one thing at school and then see something
very different at home. To make matters worse, the very teachers that
students engage with at school are often at odds with the core values
that Modern Orthodoxy espouses. This reality creates significant
additional barriers to communicating a Modern Orthodox worldview within
our schools, as Heilman further notes that
the teachers in their schools and many
rabbis did not share their values and remained unprepared to endorse the
modern orthodox life trajectory even tacitly… the teachers often did
not share the same neighborhoods and certainly not the same community as
the families of the students they taught.[14]
Indeed, identifying, recruiting, and hiring Modern Orthodox faculty role models (especially for limmudei kodesh
classes) is a such a daunting task that Heilman estimates that by 2003
up to two-thirds of Judaic studies teachers in schools were Haredi.
Unsurprisingly, haredi Orthodox Jews — the fervent “black hats” who
populate enclaves like Monsey, New York, and Lakewood, New Jersey —
abide by halachah. Indeed, a whole subculture has grown around adopting
“chumrahs,” or more stringent ways to observe Jewish law.
But among self-identified modern Orthodox Jews, the picture is more
diverse, says Pew. Nearly a quarter say religion isn’t “very important”
in their lives, more than a fifth aren’t certain of their belief in God
and 18 percent hardly attend services.
When it comes to Judaism’s legal particulars, nearly a quarter of
modern Orthodox Jews don’t light candles on Friday night, 17 percent
don’t keep kosher in the home and about a fifth handle money on Shabbat.
Alas, the survey did not ask about golfing.
As a child in New York in the 1960's I attended school in what would now be called a Hareidi institution. What distinguished this school from other, non-Hareidi schools was not so much the stricter standard of halakha to which we were held, but rather the pervasive sense of alienation from everything outside our narrow circle. We were cynical about law and order, about high-sounding ideas, about goyim, about Jews, you name it.
Such an attitude is perhaps easily dismissed as the inevitable consequence of being the children of Holocaust .survivors. But in fact. it was merely a slightly exaggerated form of an attitude of wary subversiveness that serves as the backdrop for everything Jewish. "Avadai hem"- Jews are slaves of Hashem, but, more to the point, of nobody else. In any case that's what all the real Jews I knew were like; if there were any wild-eyed and bushy-tailed ones, they were somewhere else. To this day I think of alienation and its social corollary, subversiveness, as inseparable from Yiddishkeit, This attitude is deep in my bones (and, of course, I regard it with suspicion).[...]
At some point, we ourselves couldn't help but notice that there were plenty of things that goyim did a lot better than we did. In fact, as we got older we began to suspect that some of our role models might have been a bit more clever than they were wise and that, in a few cases, cynicism about rules and regulations had led to just plain crookedness. Not that I thought then, or I think now, that the rest of the world is any better, but suffice it to say that unpleasant moral dilemmas that pitted loyalty against rectitude arose more frequently than they should have. Beyond all that, for an adolescent kid looking to find himself and develop his own particular interests and talents the atmosphere was just a bit stifling. Ultimately,,we had to decide between buying into the whole system despite misgivings or leaving. I left.
I didn't go far. In the Modern Orthodox institution to which I eventually migrated, the underlying principle was openness. Openness to art and music, to science and literature. Not to mention sports and movies and television. My new friends really were more articulate, more knowledgeable in most areas and often more naturally ethical than many of my friends in the yeshiva world. Of course, I had to get used to the idea of guys with names like Jerry and Stuie who wore jeans and had girlfriends. Apparently, I was hopelessly square but at least I had found what I took to be a healthy rebellious spirit that held the promise of a more thoughtful Yiddishkeit and I identified with it.
There were some problems. The version of Yiddishkeit that was upheld there as an ideal was different in disturbing ways from that to which I had been accustomed. The place suffered from a Litvish coldness that had adapted neatly to the American technocratic mindset to produce a somewhat formal and not very heimish version of cookbook Yiddishkeit. You asked somebody there if it was okay to daven in your gatkes, they started pulling books off the shelf. Lacking a sense of the heimish and hankering above all for middle-class American respectability, they tended to undervalue the little hard-to-pin-down gestures and manners that give substance to Jewish distinctiveness.
Moreover, the yeshivish rule that "if it's not Jewish, we don't like it" was flipped in the modern Orthodox world to read "if we like it, it's Jewish." These two formulations are equivalent in logic books but not on the ground. It turned out that my casually-clad new friends had few rebellious thoughts after all; they were simply practicing Yiddishkeit often with rather quaint earnestness as it had been taught to them. It was the chnyoks in the yeshiva world, who managed to maintain some emotional distance from the trappings of middle-class respectability, who were actually the subversives. I wasn't quite home yet. […]
Let me be absolutely clear: where the demands of halakha are unambiguous, you must submit to them. But how does one navigate between much less well-defined traditional attitudes and strong personal inclinations? When I was your age I didn't know the answer I still don't but one proposition that seemed self-evident to me at the time was that it was essential to be consistent. In other words, I felt that I had to somehow make sure that the way 1 defined Yiddishkeit and the way I defined my commitments even my own inclinations would be perfectly aligned. [...]
The ideologues who ran the yeshivish institutions I knew tried to inculcate a set of ideological commitments so comprehensive and intense as to suffocate an individual's personality. One result of this was a kind of cynicism that sometimes amounted to the complete annihilation of any moral and aesthetic compass. The good news is that this mostly worked on the feeble; the normal people's cynicism extended also to their own education: Most of us lived rather comfortably with, for instance, the idea that in principle great rabbanim have da’as Torah whatever that might mean, but that in fact some of the rabbanim we actually knew were, how should I put it, not necessarily especially sharp.
Conversely, in some Modern Orthodox institutions that I know: many of the subtle attitudes that form the core of Yiddishkeit have been diluted out of existence. What remains is a bare-bones even if scrupulously observed-halakha that constitutes a kind of obstacle course that needs to be negotiated in the pursuit of self-fulfillment. But what is worse is that this pursuit of self-fulfillment doesn't consist merely of individuals unselfconsciously pulling received attitudes in directions suited to their own personalities; rather its acceptable forms are defined for one and all in accordance with prevailing cultural tradewinds-nationalism feminism, humanism, whatever. This can lead to an eviscerated Torah forever subordinated to passing intellectual fads. The encouraging fact is that, in general, fads pass-or else they're not fads after all. […]
It would be most perverse and criminal of us to seek to instill in
our children a contempt, based on ignorance and untruth, for everything
that is not specifically Jewish, for all other human arts and sciences,
in the belief that by inculcating our children with such a negative
attitude we could safeguard them from contacts with the scholarly and
scientific endeavors of the rest of mankind…You will then see that your
simple-minded calculations were just as criminal as they were perverse.
Criminal, because they enlisted the help of untruth supposedly in order
to protect the truth, and because you have thus departed from the path
upon which your own Sages have preceded you and beckoned you to follow
them. Perverse, because by so doing you have achieved precisely the
opposite of what you wanted to accomplish…Your child will consequently
begin to doubt all of Judaism which (so, at least, it must seem to him
from your behavior) can exist only in the night and darkness of
ignorance and which must close its eyes and the minds of its adherents
to the light of all knowledge if it is not to perish (Collected Writings
7: 415-6).
