Those Irish-American racists

NYT has a recent  article complaining about ethnic solidarity of Jewish communities in New York and their connections to Israel.

Complicating the current embrace from abroad is the gated community’s extreme insularity. Borough Park and Williamsburg are the most Jewish neighborhoods in the city, a demographic makeup that critics say illustrates the enclave’s entrenched xenophobia, a dark flip side, perhaps, to all that ethnic pride. The consul general of  Israel said he and others had made special efforts to avoid the impression of “the Jews looking after their own.”

Actually, I made some substitutions. The article is actually about Breezy Point, an Irish enclave in New York City receiving aid from Ireland following Hurricane Sandy. The article refers darkly to Breezy Point being “the whitest area of the city,” its “extreme insularity,” its “entrenched xenophobia,” and its ethnic pride.

The critics who are supposedly making these accusations are unnamed, but it’s noteworthy that the author of the artcle is Sarah Maslin Nir. Mondoweiss points out that Nir, has strong connections to the Israeli far right. 

She surely knows about the problems of ethnic solidarity. Her father went from being an Israeli to being American. As we reported a couple years ago:

Nir’s father Yehuda served in the Israeli Defense Forces in 1948 and after moving on to the U.S., sought to rejoin the Israeli army in ’67 and ’73. “I had to fight our enemies and rejoin the Israeli army,” he writes  of the second war in his autobiography. Huh; I wonder how Sarah Maslin Nir feels about Israel…

I bet Sarah Maslin Nir knows a lot about the xenophobia of ethnic pride, the racism inherent in trans-national ethnic claims. Maybe one day she’ll write about the American Jewish relationship to Israel. [See here.] 

Orthodox neighborhoods in New York are notoriously insular, ethnocentric, and strongly connected to Israel. JTA notes (“As N.Y. haredi Orthodox population surges, battles over city neighborhoods ensue“)  “the explosive growth of the Orthodox Jewish population in America’s most Jewish city,” bringing Jews into conflict with Blacks and Latinos as their neighborhoods expand.

The haredi migration can be tracked by the new construction, which often has specifically Orthodox amenities, such as staggered balconies that allow residents to build sukkahs during the fall harvest holiday with unobstructed views of the sky. … the Broadway Triangle Coalition — a group that includes blacks, Latinos and UJCare — is suing to block the plan, claiming that large apartments deliberately favor Jews over other groups that have, on average, smaller families. They also argue that haredi developers deliberately limit construction to eight stories because some Chasidic Jews will not ride in an elevator on the Sabbath. 

In the case of these Jewish neighborhoods, their insularity can even be seen in the architecture. But the point is that I rather doubt that Sarah Maslin Nir would find that the concentration of haredi Orthodox in particular neighborhoods, their ethnocentrism and their insularity to be worth nothing in a NYTimes article. And surely any critic of the insularity and ethnocentrism apparent in these neighborhoods would be labled a raving anti-Semite.

As noted many times on TOO, Whites are the only group whose ethnocentrism is a problem in the eyes of the elite media.