Are We All Hasidim?

“We are all Monsey, we are all Crown Heights, we are all Williamsburg… .we are all Jersey City, we are all Poway…we are all Hasidim…we are all Jews,” shouted activist Devorah Halberstam to a crowd of 20,000 assembled in Brooklyn on January 6, 2020, protesting the epidemic of anti-Semitic violence in the New York area and elsewhere. I could not agree more. But are we? “Our community is a complicated one,” Eric Goldstein, CEO of the United Jewish Appeal-Federation of New York, opined. A true statement. But in a world in which any Jew is a potential target of anti-Semitism, it is the most visible Jews who are most threatened. Jews with black hats, with tight curls hanging down below their ears and black coats and women wearing modest head coverings, they are the most vulnerable. Jews in synagogues. In Brooklyn, as in Jersey City and Monsey, violence against individuals in their Hasidic communities is almost an everyday event. If someone wants to do harm to a Jew, Hasidic Jews and their communities are and have become easy targets. The rest of us blend in. And it’s complicated. Most of the Hasidim live apart in tightly knit communities. Some, as seen in a photograph of the aftermath of the Jersey City shooting, have their own emergency response groups. They stay apart from the rest of us Jews because they want to. Conversely, the great majority of American Jews, even religious Jews, do not identify with the Hasidim. To paraphrase the Biblical passage, we are a people living apart – from each other.