Gut Shabbos. I'm sure I'm not the only person in America who's never known an ultra-orthodox Hasidic Jew and who has been learning about them and their culture via Netflix during the shutdown.
As Yossi Gestetner explained in a Wall Street Journal OpEd last week, Hasidic Jews are much more likely to be living in poverty than other Jews or than most Americans.
Trump's overtly racist campaign for president in 2016 increased Jewish participation and their percentage of the electorate rose from 2% in 2008 and 2012 to 3% in 2016. You know what else rose? In the 2012 election 69% of Jewish voters cast their ballots for President Obama and 30% voted for Mitt Romney. With Trump on the ballot, 71% of Jews voted for Hillary and just 24% voted for Trump.
The last time I was in a synagogue was in 2016 in St Petersburg when I went to see if I could reconnect with my grandfather's spirit, who had spent his last night in his native Russia there before fleeing to America as a young boy in 1905. Nice building but my grandfather's spirit wasn't there. He wasn't very religious and his spirit would be more likely to be hanging out in a socialist workers club.
A ballroom filled with aggressively right-wing Jews with "Make America Great Again" yarmulkas on, cheering loudly when America's very own would-be Hitler oozed how he would turn away refugees was horribly sickening to me. Most of my blood relatives are in Recife, Belém and Salvador in Brazil because, the U.S. turned them away as undesirables when they were fleeing for their lives from Czarist persecution.
Robert Mueller by Nancy OhanianRight-wing propagandist Dennis Prager and I were born a few months apart and we lived near each other in Brooklyn. I went to James Madison High School; he went to the nearby Yeshiva of Flatbush on Avenue J., as did a number of other crackpots like Meir Kahane and Abraham Foxman (as well as non-crackpot, fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi), Like me, he washed up in L.A.
