Opinion

Being an Orthodox Jew is expensive. I know you read newspapers for the news, and I’m sure that this comes as a shock. Well, that’s the kind of hard-hitting journalism you can come to expect in this paper every week. But it’s true. With the regular expenses of everyday life here in the New York metropolitan area, and the added costs of yeshivah tuition, kosher food, and the premium we pay just to live in a Jewish neighborhood, the money adds up. And we don’t really help ourselves, either. On top of that, we, like all other walks of life, tend to spend above our means. The obvious example is in the simchah department. Before COVID, weddings could easily cost more than $50,000, and often go well above that. Bar and bas mitzvahs are slightly lower, but aren’t split by two sides. Even smaller occasions like a shalom zachar, a bris milah, and a kiddush are often a shock in how expensive they are to first-timers.

For the last few weeks, I have been diving into the issue of anti-Semitism in the Black community. Unfortunately, this is not a one-way street. Despite many Jews being at the forefront of both the civil rights movement of the 1960s and today’s BLM movement, anti-Black racism certainly exists in the Jewish community – and I would venture to say that it’s more common among Orthodox Jews than it is elsewhere.

If you are a strong follower of interracial victims of lethal violence, you may be familiar with some of the top headline-getters of the past decade. People like Trayvon Martin, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, Michael Brown – and more recently: Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd – have all become household names. Following these high-profile stories, you may be swayed to think that when there is interracial violence, black people are the exclusive victims; but if we are judging an entire society on anecdotes, we need to look at possibly the most horrific case of interracial violence this country has seen in decades.

In the last few weeks, there have been a number of prominent people who have outed themselves as, at worst, anti-Semitic bigots or, at best, subscribing to some historically anti-Semitic tropes. We’ve seen rappers Ice Cube and Sean “P Diddy” Combs. We’ve seen pro athletes DeSean Jackson and Stephen Jackson (and to a much lesser extent, Dwayne Wade). And perhaps most prominently, we have seen television personality Nick Cannon. Before we get into this story, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out the voices that have come out against these sentiments, especially in the sports world. Last week, I mentioned the NFL players who spoke out against DeSean Jackson; but since then, we have seen commentator Stephen A. Smith as well as NBA Hall-of-Famers Kareem Abdul Jabbar and Charles Barkley all condemn the anti-Semitic comments made by the offenders listed above. Barkley even went so far as to call out the individuals by name.

Dr. Seuss once said, “Adults are just outdated children.” Nothing could have proved this point more than the ongoing so called “mask debate” amid COVID restrictions. And no, I won’t go too deep into each side this week because frankly, it’s a tiresome debate. But I will show exactly the types of people who fall on every side of the “debate” and explain what they were like as children.

If history would have taught us anything, this question would be ridiculous. It was only about 85 years ago when white people were trying to wipe out Jews specifically for not being white. Obviously, there are other groups of people who fall under this category – Italians and Irish, just to name two. But in today’s day and age, the question needs to be answered. And for the ease of argument, let’s say that we are talking about all Jews. Ashkenazi, Sefardi, chasidic, Litvish, Orthodox, Reform, unaffiliated – all Jews regardless of whether we keep Shabbos, eat rice on Pesach, or have really long curls of hair tucked behind our ears. Are we white?