Last week I discussed Richard Samuelson’s Mosaic essay painting a rather dire portrait of the prospects for religious liberty in theUnited States. In a response essay on Mosaic conservative George Mason University law professor David Bernstein agrees that things are indeed as bad as Samuelson makes them out to be and asks what this portends for the future of Jews and Judaism in the United States.
He notes that based on current demographic trends the active Jewish community will be divided among a large but shrinking population of religiously liberal Jews a smaller but vigorous group of modern and centrist Orthodox Jews and a large and rapidly growing group of chareidi Jews “whose current rate of per-year population growth stands at an astonishing 5.5% [and] will form a significant element of the public ‘face’ of American Jewry. The Jon Stewarts Bernie Sanderses and Ralph Laurens of the world [Note: To me and you they’re Stewart and Lauren but to their mothers they’re Liebowitz and Lifschitz — EK] will compete in the minds of Americans with various ultra-conservative rabbis and community leaders.”
So far so good. But Bernstein continues “[s]ome of these Haredi notables may demand (or may be perceived as demanding) housing and other subsidies from the government for their followers who barely participate in the general civic life of the country. This is unlikely to ingratiate them with American conservatives and it will provide fodder for ‘alt-right’ anti-Semites.”
Stop. Reasonable minds can differ about the wisdom of Orthodox dependency on government largesse but this community takes advantage of programs that have been made available to all and I don’t think I’ve ever heard of an Orthodox notable “demanding government subsidies.” In a post just last year Bernstein cited the 2013 Pew survey of American Jewry’s finding that “about six-in-ten Orthodox Jews (58%) say they would prefer a smaller government that provides fewer services over a bigger government providing more services compared with 36% of other Jews.” He would have done well to cite that here.
