Elizabeth Dwoskin, author of such insightful pieces as “Too Hot To be a Banker” and “Hopping Around Wall Street’s Holiday Parties”, has a hit piece out that asks in her best shocked voice HOW CAN RELIGIOUS JEWS BE SLUMLORDS. Plenty of non-Jewish slumlords go to church. The Village Voice doesn’t do pieces asking how can politicians go to church and lie to voters. Or ask how Mafia members can reconcile Communion with whacking their enemies.
No other community would be dragged out this way, scapegoated, demeaned and forced to justify itself to outsiders for something that is not unique to that community. There would be no such roundup of black leaders to denounce themselves for dealing drugs. No roundup of Latinos to denounce themselves for car thefts. Any newspaper that tried to do it would have its ass kicked for even trying it.
Singling out a minority that way is bigotry. And the Village Voice knows it will get away with it. Because some kinds of bigotry are still hip.
The Village Voice won’t do a piece asking how the Ground Zero Mosque’s Imam Rauf can justify being a slumlord. But they will do a roundup of Jew bashing by pathetic weasels like Shmuly Yanklowitz under the pretense of a serious investigation.
Speaking of Shmuly Yanklowitz…
When it came out, we publicized it and tried to create awareness around it. When it came out, we held a beit midrash—a study session—in Washington Heights to raise awareness about the issue.
Shut up weasel, you don’t know what a beit midrash is. When you touch a chumash, it bursts into flames. The only awareness you create is internet trolling to promote your fake organization which exists only to raise money from liberal groups and harass religious Jews.
It’s always been a personal priority of mine to get into this issue. I figured someone would step up, but I haven’t seen that happen at all. There’s clearly a big problem with certain sects of the Jewish community in how they are treating their tenants. It’s a national problem. It’s a New York City problem, and it’s a Jewish problem. I am currently deliberating the best approach to take this on.
Boycott Judaism, Shmuly. That will show us. Convert and become a Methodist. Then you’ll be their problem.
It’s always a concern of mine that ultra-Orthodox Jews are going to get scapegoated. So I think it’s up to us to clean it up, and not for outsiders to point fingers at Jews. . . .
So Shmuly fights scapegoating by appearing in an outside newspaper’s scapegoating piece that targets one group for a specific type of crime. That makes so much sense it hurts.
On to Jill Jacobs
Judaism has a lot of things to say about how to create a just society. There are a lot of people who are outwardly religious but ignore a whole section of the Jewish tradition.
Like keeping the Sabbath, not eating pork, no same sex nookie… she can find all that in her own synagogue.
I’m interested in what my community does. And I want my community, which is a Jewish community, to be exemplary.
It’s not your community. Go away.
And as long as there is one Jewish slumlord, then there’s reason for me to raise a public discussion. Any criticism of the Jewish community that comes from the outside is going to be perceived as anti-Semitic.
But if we have Jewish figureheads doing it, then suddenly bigotry is Kosher. Like when black people tell fried chicken jokes on a white owned network.
Sometimes it’s a fair characterization, and sometimes it isn’t. Some people will say, “But this is a stereotype! There are so many other slumlords that aren’t Jewish.” But my attitude is if this is my community, and I am a leader in my community, then I want it to follow Jewish values and laws.
Then maybe Jill Jacobs should start with her community, instead of talking about other communities she has no connection to anyway, in a newspaper that’s hostile to those communities.
Fuck this shit. I don’t have the stomach to read through more of it. It’s a disgusting minstrel show and I have trouble believing that I’m reading this in 2010 and not 1910. It’s arrogant, condescending bigotry at its worst.
I’m looking forward to that piece the Village Voice isn’t going to do on Imam Rauf and how he can justify being a slumlord and an Imam.