Though both the chareidi and national religious communities frequently find themselves in the crosshairs of the secular media it is very rarely over the same issue. For instance the ban by over fifty rabbis many of them the rabbis of cities against selling or renting apartments to Arabs was almost purely a national religious issue. Greedy landlords who structure their apartments to cram in Sudanese refugees on the outskirts of Bnei Brak or who rent to Arabs who have no permission to live within Israel have occasioned bans in the past by leading chareidi poskim. But in those cases there was no public outcry in part because no effort was made to publicize the ban beyond those who needed to hear it and in part because the bans were clearly understood to be purely local in context.
About two weeks after the rabbis’ ban on selling or renting to Arabs a group of fifty national religious rebbetzins issued their own letter decrying national religious girls working with Arabs and warning them against doing so. Once again cries of racism filled the headlines for a day or two. I happen to think that the rebbetzins were absolutely correct in their warning but the charge of racism would never have been raised against the chareidi community over such an issue because chareidi girls tend to avoid mixed workplaces altogether regardless of the religion or ethnicity of the male workers and when they do work in such a workplace are trained to be far more circumspect in their exchanges with all male employees.
The night the story broke I happened to catch a radio program discussing the “racism” of the rebbetzins’ letter. One of the panelists was Bambi Sheleg who frequently takes the place marked “enlightened Orthodox” on such panels. In the course of her discussion she argued that Judaism does not view Jews as “superior” to others — unique perhaps but not “superior.” It is hard to know whether Sheleg was engaging in mere apologetics or whether she actually believes what she said but she said it with such confidence that I suspect she truly believes it.
The modern world — the world by which Ms. Sheleg must justify her Judaism — is hostile in the extreme to the notion of inherent differences between people. The Jews’ claim to have been chosen by G-d has always enraged gentiles but today it is more antithetical to the zeitgeist than ever before. Most Jews also dismiss the idea of their own chosenness out of hand. It makes them deeply uncomfortable as it clearly did Ms. Sheleg.
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