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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   38759 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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In Hasidic Enclaves, Failing Private Schools Flush With Public Money

Among the array of Holocaust literature that was required reading throughout public school, one of the worst was surely The Chosen. Although it took place in New York and the Holocaust was only part of the backdrop.

The novel explores the dialectic between Jewish Chosenness and Jewish secular achievement in the form of the Hasidic versus Modern Orthodoxy. Danny is a Hasidic boy being groomed to succeed his father as Rabbi. But he has photographic memory and secretly wants to pursue a career in Freudian psychiatry. Danny pursues secular studies at the library under his father's nose. Reuven is a Modern Orthodox Jewish boy whose father wants him to have a career in academia, but Reuven wants to be a rabbi. For Potok, the resolution is of course a synthesis where Danny achieves his academic goals while maintaining his orthodoxy and Reuven achieves Talmudic enlightenment or something.

But even at the time, what stood out was how poor behavior from the Hasidic was portrayed sympathetically although it was in violation of all the other principles we were supposed to be learning as children. Dogmatic, authoritarian, insular, abusive... Danny's rabbi father raises him in silence, only talking to him when they study Talmud together- because of Auschwitz, or something.

Hasidic power structure is a legitimate problem that needs to be made sense of

Americans are deeply incapable of grasping Jewish power structures. This is due in large part to the lessons they have been taught as children, like in The Chosen, where are are made to sympathize and valorize the worst elements of a cultural tradition as implicit penance for the Holocaust.

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