Borough Park, Brooklyn... A Living Journey Back In Time-- WAY Back In Time... And, Of Course, Thick With COVID And Trumpists

 

When I was growing up in Brooklyn, there were always rumors of Republicans being there-- just not very many, and certainly never enough to be an electoral factor. Even last cycle, decades later, Hillary won Brooklyn 595,086 (79.7%) to 133,653 (17.9%). Still... where the hell did those 133 thousand people come from? Oh, basically Russia... and Israel. Russian neighborhoods in south Brooklyn are breeding grounds for treason and full-on fascism, and Ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods like Borough Park are bizarrely alternative and nearly self-contained universes that have more in common with speaking-in-tongues and snake-handling communities in Tennessee and Arkansas than anything to do with Brooklyn.

Yesterday, the [Jewish Daily] Forward reported that in Borough Park, New York's pandemic central, an anti-shutdown protest turned into a Trump rally, complete with a reporter being assaulted. Keep in mind, the Ultra-Ordthodox in New York, like the Ultra-Orthodox in Israel are willful super-spreaders because they don't think man's laws apply to them-- just a warped Eastern European version of the Old Testament by which they live their lives. They're far more like extreme evangelicals than they are like actual Jews. A trio of Forward reporters wrote that "The religious Jews of Brooklyn’s Borough Park neighborhood often pour into the streets during the harvest holiday of Sukkot to dance with Torahs in a celebration called Simchat Beit HaShoeva, a ritual having to do with rainfall." [Yes, these are very, very primitive people who have barely progressed from the Bronze Age.] "On Wednesday night, they danced along Borough Parks’s 13th Avenue holding Trump flags."

Heshy Tischler, a community agitator and candidate for New York City Council, drew a crowd for the second night in a row to protest new social-distancing restrictions that Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio have imposed on the neighborhood and eight other ZIP codes with at least double the city’s positivity rate for coronavirus. And though he promised no violence after a counter-protester on Tuesday was beaten to the point of critical injuries, a Hasidic journalist was hit in the head, kicked and berated as a “Nazi” during Wednesday’s gathering of more than 300.

“Here is my army!” Tischler said Wednesday night pointing to the crowd that included Haredi-- or ultra-Orthodox-- Jews of all ages, some from outside the neighborhood. “We’re gonna fight back. This is our city, our town, our country.”

Tischler is not a rabbi, scholar or elected official, but he has emerged as a popular figure in this deeply religious neighborhood because its usual leaders have not been able to manage their communities’ resentment against the news media and government officials they see as biased against them, or even antisemitic.

“Community leaders all have their issues with standing up to the government,” said one protester, Avraham Mintz, who lives in Borough Park. “They don’t want to fight with Cuomo and de Blasio. So Tischler stood up and said, ‘I’m just going to stand up and scream.’”

Tishler had put out the call via social media and WhatsApp for people to find him at 13th Avenue and 50th Street at 9 p.m. The crowd included many young families with strollers, some grandfathers wearing masks, and teenaged boys from yeshivas in nearby neighborhoods, eager to see what would unfold. Women and girls stood on the sidewalk, as men gathered in the middle of the street to listen to Tishler and also dance to religious music played on loudspeakers.

After some protesters burned masks on Tuesday in a sign of defiance against the coronavirus restrictions, there was something of a concerted effort to show compliance with social distancing on Wednesday. Volunteers walked around handing out masks, and early into the festivities, some Hasidic teenage boys approached a news photographer and asked him to take pictures of them wearing masks.

The gathering was the place to be in a neighborhood unusually quieted for the holiday by the pandemic. “The boys are bored,” said one Hasidic mother who declined to give her name, pointing to the teenagers gathered in the street, rushing about in groups, clutching onto their kosher phones. “They didn’t have camp, they’re off from school now. This is all they have now.”

A teenage girl who said she was visiting from Israel, standing with a gaggle of girlfriends, also refused to identify herself to a reporter. “We’re here for both the protest and the party,” she said. “There’s not enough holiday action this year, so we came to see what’s happening here.”

Tuesday’s rally came a day after Cuomo’s announcement of new coronavirus restrictions that would essentially shut down the final weekend of the Jewish High Holidays in many of the state’s Orthodox communities. Synagogues are limited to 25% capacity with no more than 10 people inside, public and private schools have been ordered closed as of Friday, along with restaurants.

At that rally, protesters burned masks, and two people were attacked. One went to the hospital.

...Tishler, a gadfly who got 4% of the votes when he ran for City Council in 2017, has not issued demands or described specific goals for this new protest movement. He does say that he is running again in 2021 in the 48th District, which includes the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Midwood and Sheepshead Bay-- also subject to Cuomo’s new crackdown-- but not Borough Park.

The coronavirus might have provided him with a new lease on political life, although it is not clear what he is going to do with it.

“He tapped into the vacuum of no leadership,” Jacob Kornbluh, a Hasidic Jew who, like Tischler, lives in Borough Park, and is a journalist for Jewish Insider, said in an interview earlier on Wednesday.

Kornbluh has previously sparked the community’s ire by calling out violations of social-distancing rules. Tischler threatened him in a video he tweeted on Wednesday during the day. And on Wednesday night, when he recognized Kornbluh among the journalists covering his rally, Tishcler sent the crowd to chase him down the street.

Kornbluh was hit in the head and kicked by protesters, who screamed “Nazi” and “Hitler” at him.

Most of Tischler’s neighbors are Hasidic, but he is not. He does not wear the community’s uniform for men of black and white clothing, or curled sidelocks.

He works as an “expediter,” who facilitates official permits and other paperwork for construction professionals, but he also runs a weekly call-in show on YouTube and Facebook. After studying in yeshiva, he served time in prison for immigration fraud. He ran for City Council, but got only 4% of the votes.

Yet since the summer, when he gained wide attention among Orthodox Jews for taking bolt cutters to the chains around playgrounds in Hasidic neighborhoods, his profile has been rising.

“I don’t understand, why only the Jews?” Tischler said in an interview Wednesday, expressing the widespread Orthodox conviction that Cuomo’s rules unfairly single out their communities. “We contribute to this country more than anybody else, so you will respect us.”

In recent weeks, as coronavirus cases have spiked in Orthodox neighborhoods in Brooklyn and other parts of the state, he has risen in prominence because religious and government leaders failed to explain that the community could open in the summer, but would likely need to shut down religious life again in the fall to accommodate a second wave, Kornbluh said.

“What they did is basically argue for a reopening process without communicating a message of adhering to certain measures: Wear a mask, social distance,” Kornbluh said.

The community also felt alienated by city workers and contact tracers, who Orthodox groups have suggested were culturally insensitive. The city admitted last month that it had only five Yiddish-speaking contact tracers on staff. “We have been targeted terribly,” said one Hasidic female protester at the Wednesday rally. “That’s what we are feeling right now.”

Tischler provides an appealing alternative.

“Heshy Tischler is popular because he has a certain charisma, a certain charm,” said Ezra Friedlander, a Borough Park resident and political consultant, adding that Tischler’s rhetoric is “totally unacceptable.”

And he expresses people’s anger for them.

“Coronavirus is a new flu, until God brings us a new virus,” said one Hasidic woman at the Wednesday night protest. “This is part of galus [exile]. People are gonna die and gonna live. If Hashem wants you to live, you live. If He wants you to die, you die.”

"Haters of Israel"

On Wednesday afternoon in Borough Park-- between the two evening protests-- life resumed as normal, with men carrying bags with prayer shawls, as well as the palm branches and etrog fruits that are used in prayer services during the harvest festival of Sukkot, which is this week.

Few in the neighborhood knew Tischler’s name, but the things they said demonstrate that he knows the grievances they harbor against both media and government.

At Amnon’s Kosher Pizza at 4814 13th Avenue, a man turned to a woman and warned her in Hebrew that there are “journalists, she should be careful,” pointing to a corner where TV stations were setting up. She turned to them and screamed, “Haters of Israel!”

“De Blasio and Cuomo hate us Jews,” said one Hasidic woman who declined to give her name.

Cuomo and de Blasio have repeatedly said that they are enacting the restrictions based solely on rates of positive coronavirus infection, which are highest in Orthodox areas.

In Borough Park, the rate was about 6% at the beginning of this week, according to state data. In Rockland and Orange Counties, rates are considerably higher: In Kiryas Joel, the Hasidic hub, positive test rates reached nearly 30%, the highest in the country. The New York state average is just above 1%.

Tischler maintains-- without evidence-- that those numbers are fake.

“These are not real tests,” he said of results from state-administered coronavirus tests.

Tischler’s comments reflect a widespread skepticism in the Orthodox world of the statistics on which the government is basing its shutdown of Orthodox areas. He suggested that the city’s testing machines are not giving accurate results, and that there are few people actually getting sick from contracting the coronavirus at the moment. Cuomo has said that hospitalizations are rising.

Orthodox organizations should do their own testing, privately, and report their results to the state, Tischler said.

“Let me do the testing,” he added. “My tests are negative.”

...His Twitter account has under 1,000 followers, and only 790 people watched a recent show on YouTube from September.

But his videos are shared widely on WhatsApp, where he occupies a role once played by one of his inspirations, Donald Trump, as the community’s outspoken id who tells it like it is.

Tischler said Trump’s return to the White House after being hospitalized for COVID-19, and the president’s claims of recovering from the disease, had inspired him to protest the new restrictions. Tischler also downplayed the deadliness of the coronavirus, claiming without evidence that Orthodox Jews who died from COVID-19 more often died from poor hospital care than the disease itself.

“When I’m on the street, I don’t have to wear a mask, just like the president,” he said.

...On Wednesday, Aron Wieder, a Rockland County legislator representing the Hasidic hub of Monsey, released a video urging his community to continue to distance and wear masks, not for Cuomo’s sake, but because it adheres to Jewish values that promote saving a life over religious obligations.

“When people lose trust in government, chaos happens,” Wieder said in an interview. “I was trying to mitigate that by acknowledging” the community’s anger at Cuomo.

So far, Tischler’s political strategy seems to be more about amplifying anger than mitigating it.

Some of the protesters were grateful to him for his community organizing. “I don’t know what he’s doing but he opened our parks for our kids, and now he organized this,” said one Hasidic mother, pointing to the young men dancing in the street. “He is saying that it’s time for us to get out and show we have a voice, too.”

Life is dangerous for Jews who behave, Tischler said.

“We tried to follow the laws and the governor and mayor still came after us. My father is a concentration camp survivor,” Tischler said. “We were quiet then, and we behaved. Not anymore.”

Time to roll out the classic definition of "idiot" again-- a kind of a palate cleanser after before the dueling OpEds coming up:

First is by Eliezer Brand, a right-wing rabbi in Brooklyn who senses a kinship between his own primitive Haredi tribe and the worst of the evangelicals-- and is all gung-ho on Amy Coney Island and writes that Mike Pence represents him and "has been a great leader for religious people in general and for Orthodox Jews in particular." It starts with Pence's anti-Palestinian and pro-Zionist beliefs "but," he wrote, "it’s not just Pence’s foreign policy that has gained him support in our community. It’s his larger view of life-- specifically, how deeply and unapologetically impacted it is by his religious beliefs."

Early in the Trump presidency, the Washington Post reported that Pence never eats alone with a woman other than his wife Karen, and that he won’t attend events that serve alcohol without her by his side.

This became known as the Pence Rule and was widely misunderstood, mocked, misrepresented as something sinister and outright ridiculed. Even Kamala Harris, now his opponent, jumped at the chance to attack his faith. “I disagree with him when he suggests it’s not possible to have meetings with women alone by himself,” she told Politico. “I think that’s ridiculous-- the idea that you would deny a professional woman the opportunity to have a meeting with the vice president of the United States is outrageous.”

But Pence’s rule is not about denying women opportunities; it’s about making sure you are living by your values every minute of the day.

It’s something we Orthodox and Haredi Jews are well versed in. We, too, have a rule about not being alone with a woman who isn’t your wife or a man who isn’t your husband. It’s one of a few things that unites us with evangelicals, many of whom adhere to the practice known as the Modesto Manifesto, which Pastor Billy Graham created. It was meant as a display of integrity, a means of avoiding sexual temptation, just like our rules of yichud-- not being alone with members of the opposite sex.

This isn’t something we choose to believe in; it’s a tenet of our larger belief system that is not optional. And yet, it’s not something we can discuss openly without facing the mockery, derision, and blowback Pence faced.

And though I was dismayed at the media reaction to Pence’s adherence to his religion, I was also happy that it did garner attention. To have this in the national news helped bring this issue to the forefront and normalized it somewhat. It made us Orthodox Jews feel less alien to the culture at large.

There’s another front on which Pence is a friend to religious Jews. He has since his days as Governor of Indiana has been a champion of religious liberty, and not just for evangelicals.

He has been a strong supporter of Indiana’s private-school voucher program, a meaningful position for Orthodox Jews who largely send their kids to private school. And in 2015, Pence signed a state bill protecting religious liberty, hailed by local Orthodox Jewish leaders as positive.

Now, together with President Trump, he is backing another proudly religious person for the Supreme Court-- Judge Amy Coney Barrett.

Listening to Pence talk, I feel that he represents my interests and my fears as a Haredi Jew. He is a friend to the faithful, and, like me and my community, he does not compromise on his religious beliefs, even when they are unpopular, even when they come in for mockery.

In this sense, he is something of an avatar for Orthodox Jews in public life, despite being an evangelical Christian.

Yesterday, The Forward published an OpEd by Joel Swanson warning Jews about what Trumpism really is. "Sharing video of the protests, right wing Twitter activists decided to portray the tensions between Orthodox Jews and the police as 'rounding up Jews,' which President Trump retweeted with the added commentary, 'Wow, what does this grim picture remind you of? I am the only thing in the Radical Left’s way! VOTE.' It’s not the first time President Trump has sought to portray himself as a defender of the Jews, though comparing Democrats to Nazis is a new low."

But in light of new evidence confirming where the true threat to Jews comes from, it went from dangerous and disingenuous to absolutely galling. On the same day that the massive protests against new coronavirus restrictions broke out in Borough Park, the Anti-Defamation League released a massive new study of social media usage in the run-up to the 2020 election. The organization had uncovered what it called a “deluge” of antisemitism directed against Jewish members of Congress. According to the ADL’s findings, at least 10% of social media attacks against Jewish politicians are explicitly or implicitly antisemitic in nature, with 39% of those attacks focused on the false, antisemitic claim that Jewish Holocaust survivor George Soros is responsible for “funding and organizing the political careers of Jewish incumbents, the media, and Black Lives Matter and Antifa protests in order to assert a Communist or ‘Jewish supremacy’ agenda in the United States.”

The ADL particularly attributes what it calls an “alarming” rise in Soros-linked antisemitism directed against American Jewish politicians to the spread of the QAnon conspiracy theory on the far-right. But Trump himself has played a role in mainstreaming this fringe, antisemitic view, praising supporters of the conspiracy theory for their support for his candidacy and calling some its most prominent adherents “rising stars” in the Republican Party.

For President Trump to try to cast himself as some champion of the Jews in light of his own mainstreaming of one of the biggest antisemitic conspiracy theories of our time is absolutely ludicrous.

...[T]he coincidence that these anti-mask protests happened on the same day that the ADL released its new report on rising election-related antisemitism in the United States, showing that the overwhelming majority of this antisemitism comes from the far-right directed against Democrats and the left, reveals the breathtaking cynicism of politicians like President Trump trying to portray themselves as some kind of protector of the Jews.

On a week when the Department of Homeland Security has itself acknowledged far-right white supremacy as the leading cause of terror in the U.S., no one should be taken in by President Trump’s cynical attempts to portray himself as the protector of the Jewish people. A lot of new information came out this past week about where the real violent threats to the Jewish community in the U.S. lie in the final weeks leading up to the 2020 election. And President Trump is not going to protect us from those threats.

What do we know about religionist extremists (especially ones who wear uniforms as their everyday garb)?

• You can do anything and everything, no matter how savage and inhuman, in the name of their God
• They are extremely paranoid and way beyond self-righteousness and over the line into insanity
• They don't live in the contemporary world (except as leaches)
• They are, by definition and mass self-image, better than anyone else (outsiders)
• Magical thinking is A-OK, in fact, critical thinking is blasphemous, heretical and punished by ostracism if not death
• Members with normal IQs flee as soon as they can get away... which is very bad for the gene pool of the remaining community
• Classically speaking, the members are idiots, a problem for society
• And they gravitate towards authoritarian movements like Trumpism.