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At event inspired by The Moth, yeshiva graduates drop the mic on their haredi Orthodox upbringings
(New York Jewish Week) — One spoke of using binoculars to watch TV through a neighbor’s window. Another talked about an abusive rabbi. Another said that, as a student, he would draw swastikas when he was upset — but he didn’t know what they looked like, so he wound up repeatedly writing Z’s in his notebooks.
A series of graduates of New York yeshivas gathered Tuesday night to talk about what they described as their often harrowing, sometimes humorous experiences growing up. As children and young adults, they studied in the kinds of haredi Orthodox schools that were at the center of a high-profile investigation by the city’s Department of Education.
The investigation ended late last month after eight years with a report that said 18 of the city’s yeshivas do not sufficiently teach secular studies such as math, English and science.
Tuesday’s event, called Yeshiva Stories, was run by Yaffed — the nonprofit that has taken a leading role in pushing for greater oversight of the yeshivas — and was inspired by The Moth, the popular live storytelling series. Most of Tuesday’s speakers spoke in loosely-connected vignettes, and most were critical of the broader haredi Orthodox world in addition to the yeshivas.
“I gotta be a little honest here — I went to the Footsteps gala dinner,” said one speaker named Tzvi Cohen, referencing an organization that offers assistance to people who choose to leave haredi Orthodox communities. “I drank a lot of wine, and the next day I was told that I agreed to do this. So, much like my secular education growing up, I don’t know if it actually existed.”
On Wednesday morning, just over 12 hours after the event, Yaffed detailed its response to the results of the city’s investigation at a press conference outside the Tweed Courthouse in lower Manhattan, which houses the Department of Education. The group announced that it filed a petition with the department on Wednesday to try to force government officials to “re-look at the schools that were deemed compliant” with state education standards during the investigation.
The investigation found that five schools were considered compliant because they were affiliated with high schools that meet state approval. The schools that the city judged to be failing now need to come up with plans for improvement. It is unclear what repercussions await if they do not.
“I call upon New York City’s education leadership to address the humanitarian crisis — one of many — currently taking place, conclude the investigation into failing Hasidic schools and give my grandchildren and their peers a taste of the American Dream,” said Beatrice Weber, Yaffed’s executive director, on Wednesday.
In all, it was a whirlwind 24 hours for the group whose complaints with the city more than eight years ago opened the investigation.
Tuesday night’s event attracted around 50 people — mostly yeshiva graduates or their friends as well as other Yaffed supporters, such as longtime New York State Assembly member Deborah Glick, who represents part of lower Manhattan — to a small arts space called City Lore in the East Village. The night was meant to bring out the individual stories of those affected by what Yaffed describes as neglectful and at times abusive yeshiva leaders. (Yeshiva administrators and their advocates say the schools turn out successful graduates and offer a quality education that is rooted in the haredi communities’ religious values. Some have accused advocates for secular education of harboring bias against haredi Jews.)
“When you actually hear [peoples’] stories, that’s what you realize, oh, like, this is real,” said Weber, who has performed at Moth events.
Libby Pollack, who has a YouTube series on “Advice and awareness about growing up with religious fundamentalism and coping in the ‘afterlife’ transition,” was one of the speakers. In addition to using the aforementioned binoculars in her Hasidic Williamsburg household, she spoke of trying to hack into nearby radio signals and secretly listening to non-religious music — which she said elders in her community called “jazzy music.”
“If you listen to jazzy music, it would come home to you when you get married,” she said. “When you’re standing under the huppah… and you only want to think holy thoughts, the last thing you want is for jazzy music to come up.”
She also told a story about going on a Birthright trip in her early 20s, after her transition out of the Orthodox community had started. She went out one night with some of the people on the trip and described not knowing how to dress or what the word “club” meant — besides being the word for a weapon meant to hurt people.
“It’s a verb? It’s an activity? So what happens, do people beat each other up?” she said.
Not all the stories were lighthearted. Many spoke of physical or emotional trauma perpetrated by their teachers and Hasidic “royalty,” or prominent members of their communities. Jay Fishman, a 25-year-old software engineer who attended the event and grew up going to a yeshiva until he was 15, said the event featured a good balance of humor and seriousness.
“So many people hear about these stories, but just in the news, right?” Fishman said. “It’s very kind of disassociated. I feel like this was good to humanize people.”
He added, “For me, I grew up with this. I know what it’s like, I know the human part of it. So many other people realize it’s bad, but you can’t really connect it in a way.”
The last storyteller was Ari Goldman, the former New York Times reporter known for his years on the religion beat. He grew up Modern Orthodox, but his parents opted to send him to a haredi Orthodox yeshiva. It was on the 90-minute subway rides each day from home in Jackson Heights, Queens, to Crown Heights, Brooklyn, that he learned to love reading newspapers, he said.
Goldman is married to Shira Dicker, who handles public relations for Yaffed and planned the event. He said the event — which Weber hinted could be the first in a series, though plans are still in early stages — struck him as a unique platform on a scale he had not seen before in his reporting on Orthodox Jews in New York.
“Storytelling is a big thing now,” he said, referring to The Moth. “I think it’s been adapted to the Yaffed culture around this.”
He added, “And I love what Beatrice said at the end — you tell your story and it empowers you.”
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The post At event inspired by The Moth, yeshiva graduates drop the mic on their haredi Orthodox upbringings appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Anti-Israel Group Lambasted for ‘Desecrating the Name of Raphael Lemkin’ in ‘Infuriating Abuse’
Raphael Lemkin being interviewed on Feb. 13, 1949. Photo: Screenshot
Pressure is mounting on a Philadelphia-based nonprofit organization that has usurped the name of a Jewish lawyer and anti-genocide activist to pursue a campaign of strident anti-Israel activism.
Earlier this month, The Algemeiner exposed the extreme anti-Israel activities of the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, reporting that family members of Raphael Lemkin are outraged that the name of Lemkin, who died in 1959, is being used without their permission to groundlessly vilify the world’s lone Jewish state.
Jewish organizations and Israeli government representatives voiced alarm at the situation disclosed in the article. Lemkin was an ardent Zionist who coined the term genocide and spearheaded the effort to win passage of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, while the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, founded in 2021, has repeatedly and — despite all evidence to the contrary — accused Israel of planning and perpetrating a genocide in Gaza.
“The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention (@LemkinInstitute) is desecrating the name of Raphael Lemkin and the word ‘genocide’ by falsely labeling the Gaza war as ‘genocide,’” the Simon Weisenthal Center said in a social media post linking to The Algemeiner story. “Lemkin was a Jewish lawyer who coined the term ‘genocide’ and dedicated his life to exposing the horrors of the Holocaust. While the Lemkin Institute is entitled to its political agenda, it has no right to besmirch Lemkin’s legacy.”
An Israeli diplomat, Tammy Rahaminoff-Honig, posted about the article from her official government account: “An important story by @IraStoll in the @Algemeiner reveals infuriating abuse by @LemkinInstitute of Raphael Lemkin’s name and legacy, as well as the terms Holocaust and Genocide, for political bashing of Israel.”
The Azerbaijani Jewish Assembly of America wrote in response to the article, “Finally, @LemkinInstitute has been exposed. It has been a platform for not only antisemitic rhetoric but also blatant Azerbaijanophobia. Backed by funding from the Armenian lobby, it has relentlessly targeted Azerbaijan, promoting the dehumanization of the Azerbaijani people.”
The Lemkin Institute, which didn’t answer The Algemeiner‘s inquiries before the article was published, issued “a note on recent criticism of the Lemkin Institute.”
“We are proud of our record and of our unfailingly frank assessments,” the statement said. “It is almost never popular to call out genocide as it is happening or to point to red flags as the process is getting started.”
In a social media post, Michel Elgort characterized the Lemkin Institute’s note as “a very long, vague, and empty statement that didn’t answer the most basic question that was asked by The Algemeiner: Did you or did you not co-opted the name of Raphael Lemkin to appropriate the good will associated with his name and works, without his family and successors approval?”
The post Anti-Israel Group Lambasted for ‘Desecrating the Name of Raphael Lemkin’ in ‘Infuriating Abuse’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Mayor Olivia Chow’s city hall has yet to adequately address antisemitism in Toronto, based on Jewish community complaints
It’s been a rocky year for relations between Toronto’s Jewish community and city hall following the Oct. 7, 2023, assault on Israel—which led to an ongoing regional war in the […]
The post Mayor Olivia Chow’s city hall has yet to adequately address antisemitism in Toronto, based on Jewish community complaints appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.
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Amsterdamned: The Shame of Femke Halsema
Mayor of Amsterdam Femke Halsema attends a press conference following the violence targeting fans of an Israeli soccer team, in Amsterdam, Netherlands, Nov. 8, 2024. Photo: Reuters/Piroschka Van De Wouw
JNS.org – In the arsenal of the antisemite, denial is a key weapon. Six million Jews were exterminated during the Holocaust? Didn’t happen. The Soviet Union persecuted its Jewish population in the name of anti-Zionism? Zionist propaganda. Rape and mutilation were rampant during the massacre in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023? What a smear upon the noble resistance of Hamas. And so on.
No surprise, then, that the left-wing mayor of Amsterdam, Femke Halsema, is now publicly regretting her use of the word “pogrom” in her summation of the shocking antisemitic violence unleashed by Arab and Muslim gangs in the Dutch city in the wake of the soccer match between local giants Ajax and visitors Maccabi Tel Aviv two weeks ago.
One day after the violence, Halsema noted that “boys on scooters crisscrossed the city in search of Israeli football fans, it was a hit and run. I understand very well that this brings back the memory of pogroms.” She could have also mentioned (but didn’t) that the Dutch authorities ignored warnings from Israel that the violence was being stoked in advance in private threads on social-media platforms, resulting in a massive policing failure; that Ajax supporters were not involved in the attacks, undermining claims that what happened was merely another episode in the long history of inter-fan violence at soccer matches; and that the “boys” engaged in the assaults were overwhelmingly youths of Moroccan or other Middle Eastern or North African backgrounds, who gleefully told their victims that their actions were motivated by the desire to “free Palestine.” But at least Halsema grasped the nature of the violence. Or so we thought.
A few days later, she rolled back her initial comments. “I must say that in the following days, I saw how the word ‘pogrom’ became very political and actually became propaganda,” she stated in an interview with Dutch media. “The Israeli government, talking about a Palestinian pogrom in the streets of Amsterdam. In The Hague, the word pogrom is mainly used to discriminate against Moroccan Amsterdammers, Muslims. I didn’t mean it that way. And I didn’t want it that way.”
On the left, the enemy is “Jewish privilege,” and on the right, it is “Jewish supremacism.”
Halsema’s discomfort does not, of course, mean that what happened in Amsterdam was not a pogrom. Nor does she speak for the entirety of the Dutch political class. Both the center-right VVD Party and the further-right PVV Party, for example, continue to describe the violence as a pogrom and have suggested strong measures for countering further outrages targeting local Jews and visiting Israelis. Both parties have urged a clampdown on mosque funding from countries promoting Islamism, such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia, and have called on the Netherlands to follow Germany’s example in denying or removing citizenship from those convicted of antisemitism.
But the mayor’s 180-degree turn speaks volumes about how the left in Europe enables antisemitism by denying that it is a serious problem. To begin with, there is a refusal to situate each incident in its historical context, which makes it all the easier to portray violent explosions as an anomaly. Listening to Halsema, you would never know that the Amsterdam pogrom was preceded in March by a violent demonstration at the opening of the National Holocaust Museum, where pro-Hamas protestors masked with keffiyehs and brandishing Palestinian flags—this century’s equivalent of a brown shirt and a Nazi armband—lobbed fireworks and eggs in protest at the presence of Israeli President Isaac Herzog. What you will realize, however, is that Halsema is terrified of being labeled “Islamophobic.” That explains her pleas for understanding for a bunch of Moroccan thugs who express contempt not just for Israel but for the country that has provided them a sanctuary with housing, education and many other benefits.
Not only are Jews expected to take all this abuse lying down; they are then told by non-Jewish leftist politicians—often aided by Jewish “anti-Zionist” lackeys—that they have no right to situate the violence directed against them within the continuum of Jewish persecution over the centuries. What happened in Amsterdam, we are badgered into believing, was different because it wasn’t motivated by hatred of Jews but a righteous rejection of Israeli policy.
That’s why the behavior of some of the Maccabi fans is brought into the equation. Video showing fans descending into a subway as they chanted “F**k the Arabs” spread like wildfire on social-media platforms, along with reports that Palestinian flags adorning some private homes had been torn down. I am not going to endorse these actions, even if, as a Jew, I can understand and empathize with the feelings that motivated them, but I also consider them essentially irrelevant to this case. The advance planning of the pogrom, coupled with the wretched record of pro-Hamas demonstrations around the Netherlands in the previous year, proves that the Maccabi fans would have been hounded and attacked even if their behavior had been impeccable. Moreover, legally and morally, violent assaults are in a different league than acts of petty vandalism or the singing of distasteful songs. There can be no comparison, and nor should there be.
What the Amsterdam pogrom underlines is that the extremes of the left and the unreconstructed elements of the nationalist right are now at one in their attitudes towards Jews. On the left, the enemy is “Jewish privilege,” and on the right, it is “Jewish supremacism.” Both terms carry the same meaning, but are expressed in language designed to appeal the prejudices of their respective supporters. For the left, claims of antisemitism are dismissed as expressions of Jews exercising their “privilege,” dishonestly seeking victim status at the same time as the “colonial” state they identify with is persecuting the “indigenous” inhabitants. For the right, claims of antisemitism are a tactic to shield the contention that Jews are superior to everyone else. Translated, both communicate the same message: The violence you experience is violence you bring upon yourselves.
To her eternal shame, Halsema is now trafficking in this noxious idea while presiding over a city in which no Jew can now feel safe, less than a century after their ancestors were rounded up and deported by the German occupiers. She should resign.
The post Amsterdamned: The Shame of Femke Halsema first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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