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s some readers may know the New York City Human Rights Commission (HRC) suit against seven Williamsburg shopkeepers was settled a few weeks ago just as the trial was about to begin. Under the settlement the HRC dropped its demand for a $75000 fine — a figure it later claimed its attorneys mistakenly substituted for $7 500 — against each of the store owners for posting signs requesting modest dress in their stores. The court told lawyers for the two sides to negotiate acceptable language for future signs that will make clear that everybody is welcome “which ” said defense attorney Jay Lefkowitz “was the reality” all along anyway.

At an earlier stage of the case the judge had told the HRC that it could only win if it could prove the signs used “code words” to keep nonreligious Jews and non-Jews from shopping in the stores. So it commissioned a survey designed to demonstrate that the non-Orthodox public would find the signs discriminatory. The shopkeepers’ defense team set about creating its own alternative survey.

But the HRC’s own survey found that a plurality of respondents didn’t think the sign would make anyone feel discriminated against on the basis of religion although a higher number said they saw the signs as discriminating based on gender. For its part the defense’s survey produced very different results with 87 percent of respondents believing the signs weren’t problematic at all.

“The trial” wrote Mark Hemingway in the Weekly Standard “was shaping up to be a matter of dueling witnesses and dueling surveys.” But while “the defense team representing the Jewish business owners… was to present the head of the research firm that conducted its survey to testify to its scientific validity… the Human Rights Commission offered no expert to testify on behalf of its survey. With no attempt to demonstrate the scientific validity of its survey the commission would likely be laughed out of a real court of law…. The next day the administrative judge informed the Human Rights Commission that its case was remarkably weak and that it might want to settle.”

Although the HRC had no plans for testimony regarding its survey’s validity it had planned to call to the stand a spokesman of sorts on behalf of the survey respondents who found the signs offensive. And who was that to be? One Joshua Wiles a public school teacher in nearby Bedford-Stuyvesant. The day before the trial the Weekly Standard ran an exposé on Wiles showing he’d been arrested at an Occupy Wall Street demonstration and that his Facebook page featured statements accusing the Israeli government of targeting innocent civilians and assassinating children.

I found another news item about Wiles to be even more interesting. It was an old interview with him at the lower Manhattan site of Park51 the Islamic mosque that stirred great controversy several years back when it announced plans for building several short blocks away from Ground Zero. Wiles who sold handmade T-shirts at the site featuring “Peace through Understanding” on the front and “Support Park51” on the back was quoted as saying “They have a perfect right to build this mosque if they come up with the funding. If they’re intimidated and have to move that’s a loss for those who want to freely exercise their rights in this country.”

That reminded me of a woman’s first-person account in Tablet magazine last June of her and her husband’s experiences going about in public after moving into the Torah world:

On my first and earliest foray into “public scarfing”… I wanted to be as comfortable as possible so I wore a soft but voluminous headscarf and a cotton ankle-length skirt. As I boarded the bus a woman a few years older than me (a Jewish college professor I found out later) offered to help me carry my overnight bag. She practically escorted me to a seat and sat down in the aisle across from me. Then she introduced herself and a short while later launched into a confusing apology about American bias against Muslims assuring me that in her classroom she told the truth about Palestine. I smiled and reached out my hand to shake hers telling her that I wasn’t Muslim but Jewish and I was wearing a head-covering because I was Torah observant.

She refused my hand and turned away ignoring me for the rest of the trip.

In other words: For Yemen tolerance even love; for yenem disregard even scorn. How sad.

Commenting on the resolution of the Williamsburg case Harvard law professor Noah Feldman wrote in his Bloomberg opinion column that the shopkeepers deserved to win on the claim that their dress code was indistinguishable from those in courthouses and upscale Manhattan restaurants such as the Four Seasons with which HRC seems to have no problem. But he continued the defense also

asserted a First Amendment religious liberty claim: They said the shop owners had been targeted for enforcement because their dress code is religiously motivated. In essence they accused the Human Rights Commission of discriminating against them….

This argument is dead wrong. The law against discrimination is a neutral generally applicable law. It doesn’t target any discriminator in particular; and it doesn’t care about the underlying motivation…. Provided they were promoting modesty and not discriminating the Satmar Hasidim should have won their case. But not because the First Amendment says so.

Surely Mr. Feldman’s legal credentials trump mine (a Fordham Law constitutional law medal notwithstanding) but I believe it’s he who is mistaken here. The religious freedom claim the defense spoke of — contra Feldman it never asserted it in court but only alluded to the future possibility of doing so — would have been based on a claim that the city’s antidiscrimination law had been selectively enforced based on the religious beliefs of the violators.

Feldman is correct that generally applicable laws may be enforced to restrict discriminatory behavior by religious actors — but only when those laws are also enforced generally. But by comparing the Four Seasons dress code with the one in Willy we see the claim of equal enforcement is… downright silly.

MAYBE LATER I had noticed a piece by columnist Megan McArdle in the Atlantic called “Why Writers are the Worst Procrastinators” but I didn’t stop to read it. I had after all a column to write and the deadline was just hours away.
Later that evening though I did begin reading it: “Like most writers I am an inveterate procrastinator.” Harumph! Speak for yourself. It continued: “In the course of writing this one article I have checked my e-mail approximately 3 000 times made and discarded multiple grocery lists… and Googled my own name several times to make sure that I have at least once written something that someone would actually want to read.” By now my reaction had changed to: Has this woman been to my house without my knowledge?
Her thesis in brief is that most writers excelled at writing from an early age and thus came to assume that only natural talent brings success not hard work and learning from one’s failures. As a result they freeze at the prospect that what they write won’t be good enough with every new article a litmus test of their talent. It is only “as the deadline creeps closer ” she writes that “their fear of turning in nothing eventually surpasses their fear of turning in something terrible.”
It’s an intriguing theory and frankly hits a bit too close to home for comfort. But I also feel that there’s more to procrastination than just fear of failure although I’m waiting until my schedule eases up a bit to explore this more. Maybe in the summer.
Ms. McArdle has just written a book on the idea that “failing well” is a key to success and that’s this article’s premise as well. She cites Carol Dweck a Stanford psychologist who has spent her career studying failure.
“As you might expect failure isn’t all that popular an activity. And yet… while many of the people she studied hated tasks that they didn’t do well some people thrived under the challenge [because] when they were failing they were learning….
Dweck [came to realize that] the people who dislike challenges think that talent is a fixed thing that you’re either born with or not. The people who relish them think that it’s something you can nourish by doing stuff you’re not good at.
I’ve touched on the topic of failure before but to my mind it’s such a central issue that it’s worth exploring further in this space. Hopefully sooner rather than later.