No one thinks that New York's leaders harbor any antipathy to the Jewish community. What the rules betray is their ignorance of exactly what prayer and religious education mean to Orthodox Jews.
Rightly or wrongly, many in New York’s Haredi, or “ultra-Orthodox” Jewish, community have concluded that Governor Andrew Cuomo has not engaged in a good-faith effort to balance the needs of their families with his responsibility to keep them and all New Yorkers safe.
Some members of Haredi communities, to be sure, have acted less than responsibly at times, but they are not alone, even among religious groups. Yet the governor (and New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio) has repeatedly and exclusively focused on Haredi neighborhoods, saying things like: “What’s happening there is the rules were never enforced… they never followed the first rules.”
Most Haredim, like most members of other religious or ethnic groups, very much did follow those rules.
Anger at the governor’s statements has fueled two nights of loud protests in Brooklyn, which, along with a much-videoed rabble-rouser’s ugly words and threats, garnered national attention.
The new rules, despite the governor’s claim, were widely perceived as an attempt not to protect but to punish. He shut down not only entire Jewish schools, but also, in some Haredi neighborhoods, limited houses of worship, no matter how large their space, to a 10-person maximum occupancy.
However, establishing a limit of 10 people to all buildings used for a specific purpose, no matter how large they might be, is something short of scientifically sound.
What’s more, according to Awi Federgruen, a professor and chairman of the Decision, Risk and Operations division at Columbia Business School, the governor was wrongly relying on the COVID-19 positivity rate — the proportion of positive tests per those seeking to be tested. In child-rich but resource-poor communities like the Haredis’, testing is usually only sought out by people experiencing clear symptoms.
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Measuring the true rate of virus transmission in such communities, Federgruen insisted in an oped in the New York Daily News, would be to establish incidence rates based on an unbiased random sample of a population, something that was never done.
And, Federgruen added, even if incidence rates in a particular area were higher than elsewhere, “it would be both absurd and irresponsible” to attribute the rates “to less compliance with health rules.” There are, he explains, just too many other factors in play.
Putting the blame for New York’s spreading infections on Jews is more than unfair: It could encourage people with the pre-existing condition known as anti-Semitism to act on their disease. The memory of murderous attacks on Jews in New York and New Jersey isn’t — or, at least shouldn’t be — a distant one.
Newsweek’s opinion editor, Josh Hammer, accused Cuomo and DeBlasio of having “settled on a convenient COVID-19 ‘super spreader’ scapegoat of choice,” adding: “Their choice should be surprising to no one: the Jews.”
Those who know the governor at all, however, know that the friction over coronavirus with Haredis, even if they beggar logic and fairness, is not born of any anti-Jewish sentiment. Neither man harbors any antipathy to Jews or to any part of the Jewish community.
What the rules betray is their ignorance of exactly what prayer and religious education mean to Orthodox Jews. Read more at RNS
