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Except for the Wall Street Journal (among major news sources) there are very few if any “major” American new sources that still make an attempt at “reporting” the news objectively. This is a return to the status quo ante in the mid-19th century when all newspapers had open political bias, and “reported” the news based upon their own biases. Just as you would expect YWN to be presenting news from a frum perspective (and being very unfair in reporting news of anti-Semites), don’t expect the New York Times (etc.) to do anything other than presenting the news for a WOKE, left wing politically correct perspective (and being unfair to those defined as enemies by the left, which includes frum Yidden and Zionists).
CTALAWYER: “Camelot” was hardly extinguished on Nov. 22. Indeed, the clearest consequence was the Lyndon Johnson was able to get the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed, and for the first time made discrimination against Sabbath-observant Jews illegal, opening up tremendous opportunities for frum Jews to enter professions that had been closed. A large faction of the Democratic party was opposed to civil rights laws, and Kennedy’s death proved to be the catalyst for the coalition of Republicans and Northern Democrats to get the law passed.
The left wing has been anti-Semitic for years. Usually the focus was on traditional Jews, but Hamas has made it clear that the international left sees all Jews as the enemy – something that we frum Yidden have always known, but is a shock to those Jews who used to think of themselves as good members of the politically correct “progressive” movement. The similarity is to German Jews who had seen themselves as good and respected Germans, until they woke up and realized that the Germans didn’t agree.
John Kennedy actually wore a proper frock coat (kapote, as we call it), and a top hat to his inauguration. The hat got misplaced and when he walked down Pennsylvania Avenue he was bare headed. What actually killed hats as part of male dress was the automobile (which also killed kapotes as a standard business dress – though George V decision to stop wearing them was a recognition of the change).
Ideologically, Kennedy’s tax policies (similar to Reagan and Trump, meaning he is a DINO by today’s standards) serious stimulated the economy. His militant opposition to the the Soviet-China alliance was similar to Reagan, and a lot more than most of today’s Democrats. His support for Civil rights is why frum Jews today have career options beyond working for other Jews or opening their own business – while the five day workweek was due to FDR, a prohibition of religious discrimination in employment came from the Civil Rights Act (proposed by Kennedy, the Republicans and the liberal wing of the Democrats – most of the opposition came form the conservative wing of the Democrats).
Kuvult:
1. Public libraries in general have long preferred opening on Saturday and closing on Sunday, even in neighborhoods with large Shomer Shabbos populations. Compare the Saturday hours to the Sunday hours. And as a consequence, they are unable to accommodate staff members who are unwilling to work on Saturday.
2. These biases go way back. Over a century ago, New York State’s librarian was fired at the insistence of the legislature since he was openly anti-Semitic – and the library profession was outraged by the legislature’s bias. Job discrimination even against non-frum Jews continued through the mid-20th century, and even today it is hard for someone who is openly Orthodox (Shomer Shabbos, and whose clothing and preferred days off based on the Jewish calendar) to get a job as a librarian unless working for a Jewish library or as a specialist in Jewish/Hebrew studies.
3. The people running NYPL are left wing Democrats, as is most of the city government. The new “politically correct” position is that all Jews (not just religious ones, though we are the most visible) are public enemies who should be discriminated against. What we would want is for advocates of “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” to be seen as what they are, Nazis if 21st dress and treated accordingly (fired and marginalized) but the reality is that they control most of the political institutes in blue cities and states.
I suspect it has more to do with anti-Semitism. The library profession from which I recently retired has always been very tolerant of anti-Semitism, and the current waive of anti-Semitism which is now considered normative in the WOKE community (and most librarians are very WOKE) is the most likely explanation.
While the NYPL public libraries are government agencies, complaining to the politicians probably won’t help as most of them are progressive Democrats who probably see closing the libraries on Sunday as a cost efficient way to show their dislike of Jews.
1. If you notice a common sort of behavior of the Yismaelim, going back almost 4000 years, you understand that human life is less important to them than it is to us. No hidush.
2. Israel is not willing to execute Palestinian prisoners, especially if they were arrested only for opposing the regime (as opposed to terrorism). The Palestinians have no qualms about executing Jewish prisoners, as they clearly illustrated (and note, most of the Arab world, and the political left, cheered the murder, torture and rape of Jews). By halacha, killing non-combatants is only allowed if Ha-Shem, or at least a Navi, or at least a Kohen Gadol with Urim ve-Tumim says its okay. And whatever you think of Bibi, he is a prophet or even a Melekh Beis Davis.With many goyim, including important political leaders, are marching through the streets of the world calling for the murder of Jews, and clearly not distinguishing between frum or frei, Hareidi or Reform, Israeli or living in golus – then it is not the time to be philosophizing after Zionism or the nature and halachic status of Medinat Yisrael.
The MARC (Maryland commuter rail) has announced that due to a “First amendment event” the trains may be very crowded on Tuesday. I would not be surprised if many non-frum Jews and goyim come. The issue of the WOKE left endorsing murder, kidnapping and rape is actually quite important to more than just the frum community, as they (the pro-Hamas demonstrators) appear to have alienated more than just Orthodox Jews, even if it is probably considered “existential” only to us.
The MARC (Maryland commuter rail) has announced that due to a “First amendment event” the trains may be very crowded on Tuesday. I would not be surprised if non-frum Jews and goyim come. The issue of the WOKE left endorsing murder, kidnapping and rape is actually quite important to more than just the frum community, as they (the pro-Hamas demonstrators) appear to have alienated more than just Orthodox Jews.
If the “left” favored Taiwan and Ukraine, they would be demanding expanding the military to Cold War levels (at least), and reducing domestic spending while raising taxes to pay for it. The same holds true of the “right”. This suggests that the current political leadership is not very serious about supporting Israel, Ukraine or Taiwan, and that the Hamas outrage is calling the American “bluff”.
Coffee addct: Those who supported the Nazis for an ulterior motive but did not support the Holocaust are NOT seen in the same light as the Nazis. This includes Finland (allied with Germany against the Soviet Union, but only as a co-belligerent and never at war with the other Allies, and refused to persecute Jews or even to exclude them from its army) and Japan (allied with Germany but refused German requests to round up and execute Jews within its territories).
Given that the political left is holding rallies calling for genocide of Jews, it might be useful to make it clear we object. The “WOKE” demand is for a Judenrein world, and it is in our interests to force left-wing Democrats to confront this and decide if they really want to include a faction that supports mass murder as a matter of policy.
To the one saying “how many unemployed…”. If one holds that the laws against homicide, and the public international laws against genocide and murder of civilians in war time, no longer apply to Yidden– Kal ve Homer the law as against employment discrimination don’t apply.
Actually most of the “Progressive caucus” opposes American intervention abroad and are just as isolationist as Trump’s “America First.” They oppose building up the military, and regard defense contractors as evil war-mongering capitalists (and in their lingo, “capitalist” is a pejorative).
The ones who support Taiwan and Ukraine, are the RINOs (Reagan Republicans) and DINOs (cold war Democrats in the Truman/John Kennedy model), and there are the ones who support Israel. Though not very enthusiastically (note that none of them favor cutting the domestic spending or raising taxes, meaning they are willing to come up with the money to match China/Russia/Iranian military spending).
1. Quotes from dead rabbanim are irrelevant since political parties change over time. In the last century the core principle of the Democrats was white supremacy. Both parties have gone through phases of being isolationists or interventionists. Quoting a rav about which party to favor would be like quoting a rav on whether to wear a raincoat (without including information such as the weather when he made the quote).
2. In 2023, the Democrats include an openly anti-Semitic wing and they may be able to exercise of veto over the party. The Republicans contain an isolationist wing which while not anti-Semitic, and sympathetic to Zionism, would render the United States incapable of giving Israel meaningful assistance if (as appears to be happening) the fighting shifts from disorganized terrorists, to regular armed forces supported by Russia, China and Iran.
3. We should be asking for the Democrats to treat their WOKE wing the way the Republicans have dealt in the recent past when white supremacists managed to get he Republican nomination (e.g. David Duke, they said to abstain or vote Democrat). One would like to see Democrats refusing to support WOKE candidates who endorse mass murder of Jews.
4. But the Republicans’ price for aiding Israel is to throw Ukraine under the bus, leading to a major victory for the Sino-Russian alliance. Another Republican is deliberately trying to block all promotions for a reason unrelated to national security. What Israel needs now is a strong United States military, which the Republicans are just as unenthused about as the Democrats.
You need to trace the maternal ancestry back at least 200 (or at least until someone who you can establish was frum). For Ashkenazim, the movements towards intermarriage and people going OTD in large numbers began about 250 years ago. Since the Euro-American custom is for a child to have the father’s surname, the name itself gives you no useful information about whether the great-great-great-grandmother was a Yid.
American foreign aid is for weapons. Recipients are normally expected to pay their own military wages.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Russia is actively involved in supporting the people attacking Israel. Eretz Yisrael is a front in a war that includes Ukraine, and threatens to expand to all of Eastern Europe, Taiwan, the Philippines and Korea.
Those who say they support Israel but not Ukraine, or the reverse, are similar to someone who says they support a baseball team but only the players on the left side of the infield, but definitely not the first baseman or the relief pitchers. War is a “team sport”, and our team (speaking as an American) includes Israel, Ukraine, NATO, Taiwan, Philippines, South Korea and Japan. The other team consists of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.
The only difference between war and baseball, is that if one team is really good, the other team loses interest in playing, and unfortunately Joe Biden and the Congresses (meaning, for all purposes both parties) are too distracted to get our team ready for the next season, which could be disastrous.
I suspect the person who posted this gets his information only from left wing secular media (e.g. New York Times, CNN, etc.), rather than secular media such the Wall Street Journal or Fox network. Whereas the Times tries to be the voice of the politically correct, and Fox of the conservatives, the WSJ tries to be the voice of the mainstream establishment, and their coverage of anti-Semitism and of Hamas has not been problematic from a Jewish perspective.
“Do they have a point”
If someone runs a fire safety campaign (there always is in out community, especially in Kislev), they have a point when they say “I told you so” when the house catches fire. But it doesn’t do any good to lecture on fire safety when the house is burning.
The Zionists (both the various socialist groups, and the nationalists) can be blamed for the current war (and arguably the Holocaust) based on dumb decisions made 100 years ago (and sharing credit with the British Colonial Office and the various Palestinian leaders, in that order). But the house is on fire now, and that fire is very much capable of spreading to engulf the world. And absent time travel or going to an alternative universe, there is anything we can do now to repair the mistakes of a century ago (so yes, Neturei Karta has a point, but it is moot).
You much be young. From roughly 1947 until 1991, the United States (and the world) was always within 15 minutes of sudden death (time for a rocket to appear on radar until explosion of the warhead). Both the United States and the Soviet Union (a earlier version of Russia, but much worse) kept a large number of bombers in the air ready to destroy any survivors of the first barrage of ICBMs. Many thought that 1991 was the “end of history” and the world was entering an era of peace, democracy and prosperity – we were mistaken. World wars are not pleasant, but they aren’t “Gog u-Magog”. If you are worried spend less time on the internet, and more time doing something useful. Based on past experiences of our community, Torah and Mitsvos get better results than worrying about what Biden, Trump, Putin, Xi, not to mention Bibi, are up to.
“Hostage” implies a criminal. It suggests Hamas is an organization such as the “Mafia” (which at this point in time probably should not be capitalized). It also means that Israel can execute them after a brief trial, but can not attack civilians or infrastructure in retaliation (just as if the local drug pushers live next door, you can’t blow up the building and everyone in it).
“Prisoner” implies a government. It suggests that Hamas is the lawful government of Gaza (they did win the last election), and its forces and the armed forces rather than a gang of terrorists. This means that their kidnapping civilians violates the Geneva Conventions (which apply to official armies, not criminals).
If Hamas is the genuine armed forces of a largely independent state, it makes things much more awkward for almost everyone.
Persons who supported the Nazis objected to referring to the death of Jewish non-combatants as murder. So what’s your hiddush?
The decisions that matter were made a century ago. Both the moderate zionists and the Hareidim were negotiating with the Arabs for what have been a Jewish “commonwealth” but not a sovereign nation (complete communal autonomy, economic freedom, unrestricted immigration). Two groups were outraged. One were the more fanatical zionists (both nationalists and socialists) since their dreams of a sovereign Jewish state would be destroyed. The other was the British Colonial Office, which greatly feared the emerging Arab state (possibly including all Arabs in western Asia) which included a Jewish commonwealth (and access to western tech) would undermine the British Empire. The Arabs had expected an independent state, as promised by the Allies during World War I, and had no problem if it included a non-sovereign Jewish entity.
The socialist zionists murdered the Hareidi negotiator and told the rabbanim to stay out of politics or meet the same fate. The Brits organized a pogrom targeting the Hareidim (note that encouraging religious and ethnic clashes was the standard modus operandi of the British Empire). Most Hareidim learned to live with the zionists and avoid anything more than asking for handouts and a bissel of autonomy. Neturei Karta went on saying “I told you so”, but its a century too late to do anything to end the war. Almost all Israelis will settle for nothing less the full national self-determination, and almost all Arabs will settle for nothing less than a single Islamic state “from the river to the sea”. It could indeed lead to World War III and the destruction of the world as we know it, but that is up to Ha-Shem, and it would be reasonable to notice that the goyim’s persecution of the Yidden would be the ultimate cause.
Those compiling such statistics often are unable to differentiate between what have become, for all purposes, two separate communities. One community is defined by observance of kashrus and Shabbos (which totally define where you can work and live) and tend to be social conservatives and the other is almost totally assimilated into American culture. The former tend to vote Republicans on a national level, and the latter tend to be solid Democrats. If the Democrats are unwilling to expel the wing of their party that supports mass murder of Jews, there may be some shifting. I strongly suspect the increased gun ownership among Jews is among frum Jews, since we are the only ones who can readily be identified as Jews.
If Israel gets all the hostages back, alive and well, it might be worth it for Israel to avoid having to level Gaza and schecht its population (no other way to do it). They can insist on a rigid ban on Palestinians entering Israel, engage in targeted killings of Palestinian leaders, and annexation of all West Bank settlements – but resign themselves to having to go back to the old system of reserves doing over a month per year, until age 55. Israel was, and probably still is, unprepared for a full scale war, which for Israel would be an “all or nothing” proposition (the “nothing” is a Judenrein Eretz Yisrael. They have assumed they would be dealing with terrorists and occasional rockets – not a full scale war on the model of World War II in which one side wins by permanently eliminating the other.
Israel also has to consider its own internal divisions, that in the United States there are strong blocks of isolationists and anti-Semites (separate blocks who hate each other), and when taken in a global context (including Eastern Europe, Iran, and East Asia) the Middle East would be single theater of world war that the “Free world” is hardly prepared for.
Lack of donkeys. Donkeys are considered noble beasts, hard working. A symbol often identified with Bnei Torah.
American universities are full of thorough bred horses, who are serious “full of themselves” and seriously pampered, but incapable of thought or action. Good for showing off, but not much more.
After the next election, it is unlikely Bibi will still be the leader. The question is will Likud still be considered a right wing party, as opposed to a left wing party in a world in which the “center” are those in favor of “transfer”.
After the war. Just as Golda Meir did. Note that the reason Chamberlain resigned was not the mess he had made, but because he was near death from natural causes. Sometimes they last long enough to turn defeat into victory, and are remembered not as the idiot who got into the mess, but as the great leader who won the war (e.g. Roosevelt and Stalin).
If the reason for Hamas success was something Netanyahu had no control (e.g. they figured out not to use smartphones to communicate, and set up the invasion using only paper and oral commands, without using the cell networks or the internet), then the blame will fall on the military more than the politicians.
Animals do not kill without a reason. When the Romans wanted to throw someone to the beasts (a punishment for religious crimes, and a particularly bad way to die), they had to starve the animals first. If you ever get thrown into a lion’s den (has happened to the best of us), you will probably survive if the manage to get out before the lion gets hungry. Mosquitos don’t bite unless they are hungry. Bees don’t sting unless threatened.
So the people who refer to Hamas (or the Nazis, or whomever is being annoying at the moment – we do encounter more than our share of such people), should stop insulting the “animals”.
The mainstream media are the Wall Street Journal and Fox (especially the former). If you watch politically correct media, that have given up on old fashioned objective reporting, it is your choice.
1. The Israelis have no incentive to target a hospital (since in the end, they’ll have to treat the patients when they retake Gaza) unless it was being used as a military base (e.g. guiding drones from the roof, which the Israelis didn’t claim).
2. The Americans said the Israelis didn’t do it, and Biden stuck his neck out to say so.
3. The Palestinians have a history of inferior weaponry, which is why even though they have been harassing the Israelis for years by sending rockets at civilian targets, they were seen as more of a nuisance than an existential threat (until they switch to ground assaults and started trying to retake territory that was on the Israeli side of the 1949 armistice (green) line. So the “friendly fire” explanation is credible.
Any frum married woman who has anything to do with the world outside the frum community is displaying tremendous mesiras nefesh, since for the last 60 years American women normally go bareheaded, and anyone who wears a hat, with very narrow exceptions, such as softball players, is regarding as weird and subject to varying forms of harassment and discrimination.
The halachos on this are well known, and the style discussion is irrelevant to any halachic discussion (albeit important to anthropologists and historians of costume and fashion).
Perhaps the caption should have been “End game for Zionism”. What happens to the Zionists will be at most an inconvenience. While have legal and political rights, whether in America or Eretz Yisrael is nice, Jewish survival has always been related to Torah and Mitsvos.
The Zionist future in the long run is bleak. Zionism was found on the dual principles of socialism and secularism. The former has largely been sent to the “dustbin of history”, and the latter is incompatible with the other peoples of the Middle East. The Zionists always believed that anti-Semitism was a reaction to what Jews did (dress differently, worship differently, value different classics, etc.), and they never have been able to realize that racism is not based on logic but on hatred.
The Hareidim have always been the heart of of the Jewish world, and will continue to be so in the future, since there is where Torah and Mitsvos rule, and all the secular false idols are rejected – and this makes no difference where we are living, or under what regime.
But like it or not, the Israeli war is with the Muslims, not the Palestinians. To be effective, “transfer” means expelling all the Muslims, and in effect return the world (okay, northern Africa, the Middle East, East and South Asia) to the status quo ante that existed prior to the rise of Islam. The means turning North Africa and the West Asia to be Christian, Iran to be Zoroastrian, Pakistan and Indonesia to be Hindu, etc. Practically it won’t happen. As many gedolim said 100+ years ago, the only viable alternative is to be willing to live in peace with the Muslims, which might be acceptable to some Hareidim but would never be tolerable to the hilonim.
After all, if you don’t go to non-kosher stores that actively support murdering Jews, who will???
The end game could be that a Russian-Iranian force marches into Tel Aviv, while American pursues an “America First” agenda. While the DINOs and RINOs support Israel, the WOKE and MAGA are opposed to foreign wars.
Biden is one of the least popular presidents in American history, and a big chunk of his party cheered the idea of Jewish babies getting slaughtered. The isolationist wing of the Republicans appears to be ascendant. There appears very little support in the US for a massive military buildup, which is probably the only thing that will deter the Sino-Russia-Iranian-North Korean alliance. When the rest of the “free world” sees American chicken out, they’ll realize they have to make their peace with the “new world order”.
Given modern technology, no country can launch a surprise attack involving a large army. Satellites in orbit will see everything. That is why the world press reported the Russian invasion at least a day or two before it happened. Similarly, something such as Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor over 80 years would be impossible in 2023.
One thing a country can do is limit the attack in size, to basically a glorified commando raid, and to have bases close enough to the border that the other side won’t see the troop movements. This is what Hamas did in Gaza.
While on a kabalistic level it is of course true that whatever happens in the fake world is due to what the Yidden do, and if all the Yidden got their act together this world would vanish and we could finally be in the real world – it is not realistic to expect all the Jews, most of whom are so assimilated they don’t realize they are Jews, will do Tsuvah, so we are stuck in the world of lies whether we like it or not, and whether we think we deserve it or not.
Perhaps yes, perhaps no. Golda Meir was politically much closer to her generals in 1973, so it was harder for her to escape the blame. If the Israeli voters perceive the leadership of the military, and especially the intelligence service as allied with Bibi, he is out after the war ends (and remember that most of the current opposition consists of Likudniks who can’t stand Bibi, whereas most of Golda’s oppositions were anti-socialists who rejected her entire agenda rather than just her). If the public perceives the military elite as allied with the economic elites whose demonstrations crippled the government and may have encouraged Hamas to think Israel was “easy pickings”, the reverse is true, and Bibi’s replacement will probably be an ultra-nationalist who can say “I told you so” when pointing to past left wing policies (such as Oslo, withdrawal from Gaza, etc.).
Many if not most people tend to dress better if they start to have more money. And the more affluent you are, the more your accent tends to reflect the “better” class of people you associate with. That is human nature and applies to all cultures.
If the people are Jewish (by halacha, not “culturally” or “genetically”), and they are living together as man and wife, and its their child, the only possible objection to the marriage is that the woman didn’t go to mikva. It might be an issue if they they weren’t living together, or if the child wasn’t there child, or the man was married to another woman -but what the question describes is a proper Jewish marriage by a couple that is already de facto married, and wants to “make it official” for a legitimate reason. Consider if the reason was so that they could easily file taxes as a married couple or to own a house by the entireties (since it is very hard to get a marriage recognized without the expected paperwork, even though it is a valid marriage).
They most probably would need a “get” to marry anyone else, as well as a government divorce, since New York, like most states, recognizes the validity of religious marriage ceremonies even if you don’t have the marriage license (the couple and the clergy might owe a fine, but that’s a revenue measure, not a domestic relations matter).
If you don’t borrow at ribis, you won’t have this problem. There is no law against living frugally and saving up money for things before buying them.
The government’s idea is that by raising interest rates, consumers will cut back on consumption (drive older cars, live in smaller houses, wear older clothes, skip out of town vacations, etc.), which will lower demand, and result in lower prices. In other words, if you are suffering, it means the government is succeeding in what it is trying to do. Congratulate Brandon and the Congress in doing what they set out to do.
Or they will both drop out. Both of them are deeply unpopular which much of the country, and neither wants to be remembered as a one term president whose vanity resulted in an evil opposition movement coming to power and destroying the country. Also, if they lose and the opposition gets control of Congress, Trump or Biden could end up in jail (and in the case of Trump, die a pauper), so they both have an incentive to drop out and support the member of their party with the best chance of uniting their party, and winning independents and discontented members of the other party. And if one drops out an endorses a successor, the other probably will.
Also, based on polling, there is a real possibility of a third party to win the election (for the first time since 1860). Much of the country detests both MAGA and WOKE, and there is still strong support for a foreign policy that favors America leading the “free world” in opposition to Sino-Russian imperialism.
I believe Nikki Haley said that the Senate (without relevance to either caucus) was”most privileged nursing home in the country”, and that largely holds true to the House. On the other hand, does want to force senior citizens, who happen to politicians by trade, to retire merely because they are too old to do their jobs. Look how unhappy Trump and Biden over the prospect of having to be retired, and in all fairness, the Congress largely outlawed compulsory retirement (after seeing who is running the country, maybe a little bit of anti-seniors age discrimination wouldn’t be so bad).
OF course time is not linear. We always have said that Ha-Shem exists outside of “time”. That is why no one has any problem saying how Matan Torah could have impacted Bereisheis (and many other examples in our literature discussing non-linear time).
If you have trouble with visualizing this, I suggest reading the SciFi classic “Flatland” (not about Brooklyn), explaining how a multi-dimensionsal multiverse can exist, even though it is not easily understood by beings (e.g humans) with limited ability to perceive all its dimensions.
IF you look at the frum community from the outside, what you would notice is a community in which learning Torah and doing mitsvos is the overwhelming activity (to the detriment of such activities as hobbies, the arts, recreations the goyim love that we don’t talk about here, sports, secular studies and making a parnassah beyond what is needed to maintain an ever-changing “respectable” standard of living). The fact that a person in modern day America or Eretz Yisrael can learn close to full time and still have a standard of living that 200 years ago would have been considered to be very bourgeois at the least (in terms of housing, medical care, food, transportation, etc.) helps explain why “kollel” people are perceived today to be willing to spend more time learning than in the past. What Yidden like best has always been learning, and there never has been such a good time for it as in the early 21st century.
Frum Yidden, at least the Chareidim, tend to be influenced by their rabbanim (and their families, especially as pertains to clothing).
One should note that most graduates of frum schools that minimize secular studies end up with sufficient skills, including English language, to find employment and in some cases to end up becoming quite successful. Of course, it could be explained by the low standards of instruction in government run schools (at least for the non-elite students) in the cities where most Orthodox Jews live. Historically, westerners who pursued a “classical” course of study studying their classics in Greek and Latin (we prefer our classics in Hebrew and Aramaic) were able to achieve in many areas, suggesting it is the rigor of the curriculum that matters more than the substance. English is useful since it is the language of business and government in much of the world, but especially in America, there has always been great tolerance in its misuse, especially since America has always welcomed (or at least, tolerated) immigrants, and since American culture has always been welcoming to the “Horatio Algers” working their way up the economic and social ladder.
Under the Muslims (in this case, the Ottoman Empire, since we are talking about Eretz Yisrael n the pre-zionist period)we had a status somewhat better than, for example, Blacks in America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, 1865-1954 period, (and much better than Jews in most Christian countries who had fewer rights and were subject to frequent violence, excluding America which has not been a “Christian” country since 1789). There was no forced conversion (unlike the zionists who try to force Yidden to become secular), we controlled our own welfare and educational institutions (the government didn’t try to restrict Torah learning), we had our own courts whose decisions were respected by the state, and we were exempt from (and in fact, banned from) military service. Those Jews who preferred a financially oriented lifestyle were allowed to do so without having to adopt a non-Jewish lifestyle, and those whose primary concerns were Torah and Mitsvos were unmolested. And there usually was peace in Eretz Yisrael (except for the time Napoleon invaded).
Benjamin: The gemara(s) are in Jewish dialects of Aramaic, which has almost identical grammar to Hebrew (as is true of most Semitic languages), and is as close to Hebrew, as for example, French is to Spanish, or Russian to Polish (if not Ukrainian). English is an Aryan language with radically different grammar than a Semitic language; look at the verb tenses, in a Semitic language there is no present tense which is why we use a noun pretending to be a verb to indicate the present, so if you say Ha-Shem created the world in English it means it is a “done deal” and the Ha-Shem created the world sometime in the past, but in Hebrew you are saying it was an action started in the past but continues to the present, or if we say that the Bayis Sheini will be built in the future, in English that means sometime in the unknown “yet to come” but in Hebrew it means it will be built starting in the present and continuing into the future. It is interesting to note that while serious frum books were written in Aramaic and Arabic, none were ever written in Greek, Latin, Ladino or even Yiddish. While many people lack the academic training to access the “real stuff” of Yiddishkeit and have to settle for reading about Yiddishkeit in a foreign language, they need to remember the goyish proverb “translators are traitors”. One needs to consider why over the last few millenia, Jewish communities whose scholarship was in a foreign language (such as Greek or German or English), tend to assimilate.
Humash, Talmud, Zohar, ShaLo”H (Shnei Luchot ha-Bris), Kedushas Levi, etc. — Books, including translations, in goyish languages, such as the one we are using now, tend to be watered and highly influenced by whatever theories are in vogue among the goyim, the theory being that those who can’t learn from the original materials probably shouldn’t be given access to the real stuff