It was the literary critic Mary McCarthy who once said of famed author Lillian Hellman that “everything she writes is a lie including ‘and’ and ‘the.’

” In the case of a recent New York Times piece by Joseph Berger about conflicts between New York City’s government and its fervently Orthodox communities entitled Out of Enclaves a Pressure to Accommodate Traditions I’m pleased to confirm that the words “of” “a” and “to” in that title are indubitably true.

As for the rest well let’s see: My Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary defines “enclave” as a culturally distinct unit enclosed within foreign territory; so do the ultra-liberal Upper West Sidestomping grounds of many of the Times’ editors qualify as an enclave? For that matter much of the gorgeous mosaic called New York is comprised of ethnic or racial or class-based enclaves of one or another sort — Bay Ridge and Bedford-Stuyvesant and Rockaway Beach and Flushing and Brooklyn Heights and on and on — so why use the term at all? Unless of course the point is precisely to intimate a sense of the foreign the exotic the not-quite-American nature of particular enclaves called Williamsburg and Boro Park and the un-American activities — a phrase of which another McCarthy was once quite fond — in which their inhabitants are purportedly involved.

The bulk of the article you see breaks an apparently unprecedented story: There actually exists a group ့— let’s coin a phrase: a “special interest group” — that has real communal needs uses democratic processes like bloc voting petitioning politicians and taking legal action to address those needs. Simply unheard of isn’t it? Not really considering that every imaginable ethnicity industry and union in this city has been doing all this and more since time immemorial and the American political system is almost synonymous with the terms “special interest” and “lobbying.”

But somehow when the “ultra-Orthodox” do it it’s called “pressure.” Headaches and abscesses cause pressure which we seek to relieve with pain-killers or puncture and drainage.  

And finally there’s “traditions” a term that brings to mind nothing so much as the drawings of dancing chassidim that undoubtedly grace many a living room wall in the secular Jewish enclave in Westchesterthat the writer calls home. Traditions are sentimental but essentially meaningless and dispensable things — think Tevye der Milchiger that lovable simpleton asking “How did this tradition get started[r1] ? I don’t know. But it’s a tradition.” And all the “ultra-Orthodox” Tevyes really ought not to be “pressuring” the city government over mere traditions.   

The article’s author Joe Berger is actually one of the more decent and fairer writers on the Orthodox beat[r2] . Yet here he summons the estimable Samuel Heilman theQueensCollege sociology professor for whom “ultra-Orthodox” Jews are a veritable meal ticket to inform us that “no one can deliver votes like a rebbe can.” Well there are some union bosses and political precinct captains the professor should meet and after that he might want to be introduced to some pastors and other “leaders” in the black community. For irony it’s hard to beat the spectacle of a sociology professor holding forth on others’ political uniformity when his chosen line of work the professoriate votes in the single most monolithically liberal fashion of any field (Gross and Fosse 2010) and his specialty sociology is by far the single most knee-jerk-liberal one within the professoriate. (Cardiff and Klein 2006)

Discussing Williamsburgwomen’s quest to have a female lifeguard on duty for their women-only swim time at a local municipal pool Berger informs us that this stems from their “need to abide by their tribe’s traditions of modesty.” How many things can one nine-word turn of phrase get wrong? Let’s unpack them: a) “need to abide” — in the media religious folks and women in particular don’t follow religious law because they actually want to believing it’s true and deeply beneficial — in this case to avoid replicating the moral swamp out in Times-land — but because they’re bound by unbending communal dictates; b) “their tribe” — I understand this word is not used in the literal anthropological sense but here I apply the First Law of Media Substitution i.e. try the word out in a sentence involving “minority” communities and if the writer wouldn’t dare use the term for them he ought not to use it for us; and c) “traditions” — once again this triggers the playing of the Fiddler score in the minds of the thousands of people who made this article No. 1 on the Times “most read and e-mailed” list the day it appeared. But it’s not a mere tradition the Orthodox Jewish version of rolling Easter eggs; it’s the law.

The article is sprinkled with foreboding phrases like “more confrontational approach” “conflicts … seem to be multiplying” and “increasing tensions with government authorities.” But the tensions and conflicts the piece mentions aren’t primarily due to the growth of chassidic numbers and influence because “families have an average of six seven and eight children.” After all the election-time ritual of politicians showing up at rebbes’ tables around election time with satin skullcaps perched atop their heads and hats in hand has been taking place for many decades.

What has changed is that of lateNew York City’s administration has been in prosecutorial overdrive a governmental nanny on steroids itching to create controversy and contrive crimes where none exist. The men and women who sit separately on the B110 Boro Park-Williamsburg bus were bothering no one. The request for a female lifeguard at a women’s-only swim session (which itself appears to have bothered no one) seems altogether reasonable the musings of a parks official about an Establishment Clause violation notwithstanding. And of the city’s suit againstWilliamsburgstorekeepers for posting dress codes American Jewish Committee general counsel Marc Stern says that “we know of no evidence of discrimination by any of the store owners ” yet “there’s lots of evidence of discrimination by the City Commission on Human Rights which seems to stereotype chassidim.”

All this is not to say our community doesn’t have its own accounting to make. We are beholden to the malchus shel chesed whose citizens we are and when we maintain too high a profile and certainly a confrontational one we imperil our very existence in galus. We must cultivate a happy medium between two contradictory attitudes both of which tend to get us in trouble: Feeling too comfortable and intoxicated by our “rights” here; and feeling as if we’re back inEurope with hostile locals and secret police making subverting the law a necessity for survival as it was then.

Nor am I at all convinced that Eric Rassbach counsel for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and a non-Jew is correct that the City seeks to “suppress Orthodox religious practices … [because] the future of Judaism inNew York Cityincreasingly appears to be Orthodox.” I just don’t think there are embittered secular Jews lurking behind every regulatory edict just liberal social engineers of many faiths.

But that’s not to say many secular and heterodox Jews don’t see the demographic handwriting on the wall. Just the other week Adam Kirsch a fellow who since last summer’s Siyum HaShas has been “reading” the Talmud and writing a weekly column about it discussed the Cutim[r3]  a sect whose Jewish status is debated in the Gemara. Then he wrote something so honest that surely many others have thought it:

All this made me wonder as I have many times before in reading the Talmud what the rabbis would make of the situation of American Jewry today … [T]he vast majority of Jews — unaffiliated Reform and even Conservative — have effectively cast off rabbinic guidance and have decided to invent their own Jewish customs…. The compromises of American Jewish life are legion.

Would these customs earn the rabbis’ respect…? Or would we seem to them like Cutheans…? If as I suspect it’s the latter perhaps we could respond as the Cutheans would have that our Jewishness is not a defective version of the rabbis’ but an original creation with its own integrity.

But then the rabbis could point out that the Cutheans have all but disappeared along with the Karaites and all the other Jewish schismatic sects while rabbinic Judaism remains. It’s impossible to read the Talmud as a modern American Jew especially a secular one like me and not wonder whether that argument trumps all the rest.