[CLIP] Rabbi Yaakov Menken on the Vilification of Orthodox Jewish Communities | ATL:NOW

I want to talk about a series of things, but it came to my attention that just yesterday, as we're filming today, Governor Hochul in New York State has announced new provisions following up on the Biden approach to anti-Semitism, an anti-hate and education center. I just wanted to get your thoughts on this. Well, the idea of having an anti-hate effort and combating, countering anti-Semitism, the fact that the administration now has a united strategy is obviously a very good concept. The problem that we identified with the countering anti-Semitism strategy as it emerged from the White House is that it really has taken a partisan approach. And I guess my biggest concern about the New York center, I mean, obviously New York needs a huge effort to combat anti-Semitism. The majority of hate crimes in the city are being committed against visibly Orthodox Jews. Overall, obviously much larger minority groups in the city. And the focus has been on Orthodox Jews. So having this critically important idea, but at the same time, the partisan shade obfuscates certain forms of anti-Semitism and allows it to flourish. And that's what we're concerned about. Well, explain to me how that works then. When the anti-Semitism strategy was announced, President Biden said a great deal about Charlottesville and neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville. Well, Nazi hatred of Jews, the facade that they used at the time, was the scientific study of race. Today, that has no cultural purchase. Really dirty people are Nazis. Nobody wants to be identified with a Nazi. So you find a new socially acceptable way to mask your hatred. That's what anti-Semitism has always done. And so as Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sachs, the late chief rabbi of the United Kingdom, put it, he said, you know, it used to be about religion. Then they said it was about science. Now they say it's about human rights. We don't hate the Jews. We just hate their ethnicity. No, now it's we don't hate their ethnicity. We just hate their country. Well, okay. But what people will say, well, that's a kind of a defense against any criticism of Israel, right? That's what actually I hear quite often being said. Obviously, that's a good dodge. I mean, I criticize Israel policy all the time. I certainly hope that you spend some time criticizing American policy. Do you say that America should be destroyed? Do you think that Americans should all leave in favor of—there's unquestionably an indigenous population here. Should we all leave the United States because there were other people here? No, nobody says that, except with regards to Israel. I call it the promised land paradox. Everyone knows what the promised land is, where the promised land is. Everyone understands its centrality in the Jewish religion. In fact, from the beginning, the name Palestine was a European colonialist term to disenfranchise the Jews from Judea. And that's how it's being used today. And everybody should know it, because everybody knows what the promised land is. And yet they say, oh, no, it's Palestine. And Arabs who come from Arabia are the new indigenous Palestinians, when for 2,000 years, a Palestinian was a Jew. We could do a whole episode on this, and I appreciate that. I want to jump to the topic we were going to cover at the outset, which is basically, I couldn't help but notice that since the beginning of the pandemic, the Orthodox Jewish community reacted differently than a lot of the rest of society, and was overtly vilified by all sorts of authority, all sorts of people in reaction. But it turned out that their response was actually a more sensible response than much of society. So I want to touch on that a little bit, and the viewpoint of how people have been looking at the Orthodox community since. I think that's really important. And this plays right into that conversation about an anti-hate center that may or may not focus on the way that the state government itself treated the Orthodox community with a double standard during the Cuomo administration, to the point where his chief medical director admitted that the Cuomo administration was drawing red lines and saying, oh, these neighborhoods are unsafe, and these neighborhoods are safe. And they said they were doing it for political reasons. The numbers couldn't prove it. And those politically drawn lines just happened to demonize Orthodox communities. That's the sort of thing that we're looking at. People think that the Orthodox community is a monolith. It's clearly not. I'm from Baltimore. So my son, who at the time was living in Brooklyn, made a reception, the typical reception after the birth of a baby boy. We meet in the synagogue, and I'm sitting there in my mask. This was pre-vaccination. And I'm from Baltimore, and we're all wearing masks. And whenever somebody would sit within six feet of me, I would say, would you please wear a mask? And every one of them said to me, I already had it. They're a community in New York, not in Baltimore. But the community in New York had been there and done that. And they all knew it. So they wanted to gather in synagogues. They wanted to reopen schools. And government was saying, no, no, no, you can't do this. You can't do this. And they were all like, we've all had it. The one guy who sat near me who didn't say, I had it, said, I cared for my sick uncle all through his COVID, and I never caught it from him. I seemed to have an immunity. If he ever had it or developed antibodies, he never felt it. And this was before the blood tests and the nasal tests. So who's to say, right? But these schools, they obviously wanted to reopen. Now we understand that actually closing schools did more damage to kids than the virus ever did. The idea of closing schools was a mistake from day one. But certainly when you had a community that had been through the virus and wanted to reopen schools, absolutely the right thing to do, and government said, you can't do it. And we can go into the double treatment, double standard there because the Amish community had the same thing and faced none of the same opprobrium from other parts of the public. Is that really the case? That's interesting because I see all sorts of, I don't know, like casting shade at the Amish community, for example, especially around vaccination and things like that. They generally have chosen not to do it. And let's say their health levels are pretty darn good from what I've seen. I have not heard, maybe you're right, because obviously I focus more on what's going on with the Jewish community. But from what I understood, the Amish were very proud about the fact that they all got COVID immediately because apparently they pass around a chalice in their services and they all drink from the same cup. So if one guy had COVID by the end of the service, everybody had COVID and brought it home, gave it to their family, and that's it. They went through COVID and they were done. And they weren't wearing masks and their schools were open and they were back to work. And from what I understood, especially I guess because they're not intermingled the same way on the same streets of Brooklyn, therefore they didn't face that kind of blowback. And just a vignette from my son that he used to drive around in his car alone and get ugly stares. He's alone in his car. He's not wearing a mask and he's getting ugly stares. Are you supposed to wear a mask when you're alone in your car? It was crazy. And then he hung a mask from his rearview mirror and the stares stopped. It was a virtue signaling thing.