https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/stop-blaming-jews-for-anti-semitism/
There have been a number of repulsive articles over the past few weeks blaming New York’s Jews for precipitating violence that is, um, “seen by some” as anti-Semitic. Yet, this piece by NBC News, which insinuates that icky ultra-Orthodox Jews bring some of this misery on themselves by having the temerity to move to the suburbs, might be the most tone-deaf of them all:
For years, ultra-Orthodox Jewish families pushed out of increasingly expensive Brooklyn neighborhoods have been turning to the suburbs, where they have taken advantage of open space and cheaper housing to establish modern-day versions of the European shtetls where their ancestors lived for centuries before the Holocaust. (The irritated italics are mine.)
I grew up in suburban Long Island, a place where nearly every Italian, Irish, and Jewish family I knew had, at some point, moved out of one of New York City’s boroughs to take advantage of “open spaces.” In those days New Yorkers were fleeing rampant criminality, litter, and mismanagement, rather than gentrification and high prices, but it was always about easier living.
Oftentimes, the refugees from the city would import the ethnic character of their neighborhoods to their new towns. Many suburban enclaves were mostly inhabited by one tribe or another, including the predominately Jewish “Five Towns.” Jews — and especially orthodox Jews who won’t drive on Sabbath — live near synagogues and form close-knit communities around them. This is nothing new. Yet no one, as far as I can recall, ever made the argument that Cedarhurst was a modern-day European shtetl.
