What is your most unpopular/controversial opinion or hot take?

1. Young adults should be ready for marriage at 18.

2. Husbands should work, wives should stay at home.

3. Young ladies who go to seminary after high school should do so close to home.

4. Don’t dump Zaidy or Bubby into a nursing home.

I was actually gonna start my own post (I still might) but here goes nothing.
The belief that “Antisemitism is NEVER our fault.” is not true.
Sometimes knowingly or not we bring it upon ourselves due to our actions or behavior.

Ujm,

People shouldn’t be in kollel?

Klal yisroel should stop sleeping and living in denial and instead wake up and FACE REALITY and openly accept Hashems wake up call for serious Teshuva Kinnus and Taanis like we did in the story of Purim and our lives were saved because of it and doing it today would bring Mashiach already bkarov.

Let’s not force our loving father Hashem to put any more tzaros Chas VShalom on klal yisroel in order for us to wake up and return to Hashem with serious Teshuva and Achdus together as one loving nation. “Ain poranius baolam Ela bishvil yisroel” nothing in the world -rather good or bad-happens that’s not on account directly as a message to klal yisroel as a wake up call. Even if everyone involved in a tragedy is all not yidden the wake up call message still is a message for klal yisroel.

By default, barring proven extenuating circumstances, divorce, like marriage, must be mutually agreed to. A unilateral demand for it may be vetoed by the spouse.

Republicans only pretend to support the State of Israel because they want Jewish money.

The frum oilom is EXTREMELY susceptible to propaganda and fake news.

>>>Everyone who has claimed & some still claim that “Jews (or Antisemitic officials) changed their last name at Ellis Island is very mistaken as it almost never happened

My grandfather changed his name to a more Americanized one due to the insistence of the Ellis Island officials. I know plenty of other such people.

It’s not for no reason that in Eretz Yisroel people have names like Greinaman and Shteinman while in American there are only Greenmans and Steinmans

The Rebbe is Moshiach

“People shouldn’t be in kollel”

CA: Now THAT kinda opinion _would_ be controversial. But that ain’t what I said. Kollel and working aren’t a stira.

“Emotionally, they may not be ready until 10 years later.”

Dorah: Or until 20 years later, I suppose. Would you suggest young adults wait until their mid-30s to get married?

“Unless, as is frequently the case, the wife is smarter than the husband and can earn 2x or 3x as much so he can stay home, take care of the kids and learn.”

Well, there always might be that unicorn. But we’re talking about the norm, not the exceptional exception.

“Agreed. Drop them off with love and dignity and call them once a week.”

Is Zaidy and Bubby really only worth to you a remote once a week phone call?

“The frum oilom is EXTREMELY susceptible to propaganda and fake news.

Yseribus: You’re living in the wrong circles. The real frum oilom are the least suspectable to any of that.

“I oppose school vouchers, if anyone wants to send their children to private schools then the taxpayer should not pay.”

X-CTL: Why should children be forced to suffer in failed NYC public schools rather than be given the opportunity to choose a private school that teaches successfully and without violence?

A better idea (and one that fits what the OP of this thread is looking for) is that government should get out of the school business and let the free market operate and parents will choose winning schools that produce successful children.

@Ex-CTLawyer

You’re right about one of those three issues.

Smerel,
This is why I posted this in a thread about “Unpopular opinions” It’s a MYTH people’s name changed at Ellis Island. Do you or “people you know” have any proof? I highly doubt it.
Some Jews did in fact change their name once in America but NOT at Ellis Island.
“Was your name changed at Ellis Island? The simple answer is no. It never happened.
Today there are millions of descendants of immigrants to the U.S. who firmly believe this myth and, despite continued efforts of prominent genealogists and immigration experts, it seems impossible to stamp it out.
This could not have happened for the following reasons:
1. The only thing the clerk did was check off the names on the passenger manifest that was compiled before the ship sailed from Europe (as I mentioned). The Ellis Island clerk never asked the immigrant his or her name.
2. In any case, some 30% of the immigration clerks were themselves multi-lingual immigrants and some 60 languages were spoken, with translators available at all times (as I mentioned 9 Yiddish speaking translators, there was ALWAYS Yiddish speakers available to translate).
3. There was no name change form or any process for an immigration clerk to change a person’s name. It was not a court of law.
“According to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service senior historian Marian L. Smith:

The report that the clerk “wrote down” the immigrants surname is suspect. During immigration inspection at Ellis Island, the immigrant confronted an inspector who had a passenger list already created abroad. That inspector operated under rules and regulations ordering that he was not to change the identifying information found for any immigrant UNLESS requested by the immigrant, and UNLESS inspection demonstrated the original information was in error.”

The frum oilom is EXTREMELY susceptible to propaganda and fake news.

This is nonsense!
Just yesterday I read on a frum news whatsapp group that statistics show the Jews are the least gullible ethnic group in NYC!

You can tell what a person is from what he /she writes, talks about….

Fascinating to read posts and watch the common ideologies (is that the word?) , character of each personality follow. As in Gemara lingo – לשיטתו.

Unlocked remotely by a centralized committee? Why can’t you just unlock it yourself?

A big part of the initial success of the Day School movement in America (most were founded around 1945-1955) was the Supreme Court ruling desegregating the public schools in 1954.
Contrary to claims that the “The Jews” supported the Civil Rights movement (many did, many did not) when faced with the reality of actually having their kids go to school with Black kids they ran. If a Jewish family couldn’t move to an area with an overwhelmingly White &/or Jewish school district the next option was to send them to the Jewish school.
The schools were more than happy to have the opportunity to teach these kids Torah true Yiddishkeit & perhaps have a positive affect on them. Which they had some successes.

@SACT5

Pluto will always be a planet

Nostalgia for your very educated mother serving pizza is clouding your eyes. Pluto only barely passed muster as a planet when it was discovered in 1930. Over the intervening years its status as a planet was called into question again and again and again, especially with the discovery of other dwarf planets, like Ceres, Eris, Haumea, and Makemake (they ran out of Roman avodah zoras and started using ones from different cultures). By the time Neil DeGrasse Tyson and the NYC Museum of Natural History Hayden Planetarium decided to get rid of it in 2000, its status as a planet hung by a thread. The decision of the International Astronomical Society five years later was only the last nail in the coffin. So if you’re going to insist that Pluto is a planet, start learning a new mnemonic. Maybe “My Very Educated Mother Can Just Sell Umbrellas, Not Party Hats However Magnificent.”

“If you were a MLB player hitting .333 they’d pay you millions.”

That’s true, but do MLB teams let their players observe Shabbos?

Smerel,
Do you have your grandfather’s documents with his name when he got on the boat & the new name when he exited Ellis Island? Surely you &/or the “people you know” would have the records. That’s generally not something you throw out.
More strangely this concept doesn’t appear until around the 1970’s (amazing with all the literature from 1910-1970 authors never mentioned this concept or used it as a plotline).
Interestingly enough the best guess how this myth went viral is a scene from “The G-dfather” where an Italian immigrant was taken into a room, given a list of American names by immigration officers & told to pick one (which of course is total fiction) but with a surge in ethnic pride during this period people including Jews latched onto this myth without bothering or more likely not interested in finding out if it was true.

@smerel

No, names were NOT changed at Ellis Island (for all you latecomers who arrived there, my family came in 1868 and 1872).
Ships passenger manifests were compiled at the port of Embarkation in Europe and went from the ship to the immigration authorities at Ellis Island. Immigrants were processed with the names they used to board the ship.

Many immigrants assumed Americanized names upon landing in Manhattan or elsewhere after leaving Island.

My late FIL, left Hamburg with his first name o. The manifest listed as Erich. As soon. As he settled in the US he Americanized the spelling to Eric (I not discuss family name whose ending changed from ch to ck). When becoming a citizen he was permitted to formally change his name without having to go to court and pay fees.

GadolHadofi,
(The Nazis loved propaganda & showing the world America was killing Jews by blowing them to piece would’ve put the Nazis on cloud 9.)
But anyway, my unpopular opinion is about bombing the tracks being impossible & wouldn’t have changed anything anyway.
Anyone old enough has heard numerous times, me including from survivors, “FDR (Yimach) was an Antisemite. He refused to bomb the tracks to the camps.”

A VERY unpopular opinion is during the Civil War era which Rabbi sided with who.
Jewish communities being relatively new, (the Jewish population in America jumped from around 15,000 Jews to 175,000 Jews from c.1840-1860), Jews generally sided with where they lived either because they agreed or because they didn’t want to stand out.
But in border places like Baltimore, Jews like Non-Jews could choose which side they were on.
The unpopular opinion is that it’s not surprising that the “Radical Reform Rabbi” was Pro-Lincoln, Pro-Union, Anti-Secession & Pro-Abolition, while the Frum Rabbi (recognized Talmid Chochem, Smicha from Pressburg, many years in Yeshiva, some of his psaks are still in force today) was Anti-Lincoln, Anti-Union, Pro-Secession & Pro keeping Slavery as it had been.
Many Frum are embarrassed by this but looking at today with the Reform generally pushing for liberal values & progressive agendas & the Orthodox not so much is it surprising which Rabbi sided with the Union & which with the Confederacy?

xCTL > I oppose school vouchers, if anyone wants to send their children to private schools then the taxpayer should not pay.

Sometimes, I disagree with someone but can understand their position. In this case, I can’t. Maybe coming from a Teachers Union leader.

Your premise seems to be that it is government job to _directly_ provide education to ALL the children. Not thru shaliach, and not just to poor children. I do not see where this premise comes from, maybe just an un-examined assumption that somehow creeped into your mind,

And without that premise, why not let other institutions provide the same goods (vouchers, under proper controls and testing of results) or make it into program for only those can’t afford it and then let everyone else use a market solution.

I mentioned before Baba Basra story of several attempts of establishing a working educational system, changed when the previous version did not work good enough. Same here, why not any solution that might work? We have lots of ways to experiment and measure results in this country.

SACT5 > My mom interviewed her grandfather for a family history project. He told her “our surname was changed at Ellis Island.”

There are a lot of recorded interviews at Ellis Island. You can find them online and listen to what people actually said.