For the past 20 years, I’ve lived in and around the Pico-Robertson neighborhood of 90035. It contains about 100 Orthodox synagogues and about 30 kosher restaurants. About 10,000 Orthodox Jews live within a mile of the intersection of Pico and Robertson Blvds. So how did they achieve this distinctly Jewish quality of the neighborhood? Jewish homeowners deliberately decided to not sell to anyone who was not Jewish.
Jews have no problem organizing in their group interest. Orthodox Jews in particular need close-knit communities because Jewish law does not permit driving on the Sabbath, so they have to live within walking distance of their shul (and this produces close-by Jewish schools, mikvehs, Jewish supermarkets and restaurants, book stores, etc).
But if whites did the exact same thing, wouldn’t that be met with an outcry? Wouldn’t that be regarded as illegal? What if whites in a neighborhood banded together and resolved to only sell their homes to a fellow white? Why is segregation OK for Jews but not for whites?
Orthodox Jews hold by a principle in Jewish law that no woman and no non-Jew and no convert to Judaism should be their king (nor president of their shul), but imagine the outcry if Christians in America decided that only Christians should be elected to public office.
Dr. Amitai Etzioni writes for The Atlantic about microaggressions:
The study that I believe could have helped a great deal was conducted by a research assistant of mine at Columbia University who disappeared before she completed her Ph.D. Carolyn (I am withholding her last name in order to acknowledge her without embarrassing her) asked members of 80 groups in New York City what they felt about other such groups. She avoided broad strokes and asked not about divisions between black and white, but what African Americans felt about Africans from Nigeria and blacks from the West Indies. She asked Hispanics about Dominicans, Haitians, Mexicans, and Cubans, and so on.
What Carolyn found was that there was little love lost between any two groups. Members of all the 80 groups she studied attached all kind of unflattering labels to members of other groups, even if they were of the same race or ethnic group. When she interviewed members of subgroups, they were unsparing about each other. German Jews felt that Jews of Polish origin were very uncouth (and surely would not want their daughter to marry one or to share a synagogue with them). The Polish Jews, in turn, felt that those of German background were stuck up and “assimilated,” and hence one was best off crossing to the other side of the street if they neared. Iraqis from Basra considered those from Baghdad to be too modern, and those from Baghdad considered their brothers and sisters from Basra as provincial—and so on and so on. Today they would all be called at least microaggressive.
None of this is surprising to sociologists, who have long held that one major way community cohesion is promoted is by defining it against out-groups—and that there is a strong psychological tendency to attribute positive adjectives to an in-group and negatives on to the outsiders. In short, it’s part—not a pretty part—of human nature, or at least social nature. Choose any group and you will find its members griping about all the others.
