
Call Me by My Name: Deborah Abrams Kaplan - verbify
https://lettersfromnj.wordpress.com/2019/04/11/call-me-by-my-name-deborah-abrams-kaplan/
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comunii
What private religious groups do in their own publications is one thing,
what's more concerning, and evident from this story, is the way some parts of
Wikipedia are mostly run by fringe groups and operate under their own rules.

I have seen other examples of this in the past. Pages about Hasidic rabbis
will mention miracles they performed as undisputed fact, and will not mention
facts about them that may be unflattering.

~~~
baud147258
Do you have any link to such pages?

~~~
Balgair
Not OP, but the biographies of rabbis do seem to not conform to the wikipedia
standards. I've just done a very cursory look over a smidge of the pages, and
nothing that the OP mentions is occurring, per my very brief look at it.

That said, the style and tone of some of the bio pages isn't really the best.
It is Wikipedia and you should assume that these lesser visited pages should
not be super well polished. The talk pages seem to be pretty sparse as well.
Though there is not be evidence of an 'agenda', the sniff test isn't really
passed either, but you could say that of nearly any less popular page:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbi_Meir](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbi_Meir)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moshe_Leib_Rabinovich](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moshe_Leib_Rabinovich)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dov_Ber_of_Mezeritch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dov_Ber_of_Mezeritch)

That said, OP's claims are a bit incredulous and I would also like to see the
pages myself.

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greedyloo
Those little stances against segregation are necessary to humanity advancing.
Also better when you do it with sarcasm !

~~~
appleflaxen
Completely agree about your humanity point, but completely disagree about
sarcasm.

I personally use sarcasm far, far too often. And when I sit back and reflect
on those times, I am completely certain that it never advances my point
farther (vs. the same point made without sarcasm), never makes my point seem
more clever, and never makes my point seem more funny.

So why do I continue to do it? Honestly, I don't know. It is a completely
valueless communication strategy, and I continue to use it. The best answer I
have is that it's a self-protection mechanism, which seems better-armored
against a hostile audience than if I made my point with sincerity. So I,
personally, will try to do better. But I would also caution anyone with less
entrenched habits to consider carefully whether sarcasm is a useful rhetorical
tool.

~~~
pcl
I frequently find myself in the same boat. Growing up, my mom always told me
that sarcasm is the weakest form of humor. When I'm about to say something
sarcastic, I try to remember that advice and come up with a better turn of
phrase.

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mikorym
I think that modern religions and the way they learn to part with certain
medieval ways is critical.

The Jewish religion has been arguably successful with this, producing
_exceedingly_ prestigious scientists and mathematicians.

The risk is always the "fundamental" factions.

~~~
appleflaxen
I disagree that their _religion_ produced them.

Their genetics and their environment did, to varying degrees, but religion is
only one small aspect of the latter.

What's your basis to assert that it is the most important factor?

~~~
llamaz
I'm not sure if genetics play as great a role as culture. IMO there is enough
genetic variation in all cultures to produce Einsteins, but some cultures are
able to cultivate that potential better than others.

You can't separate culture from religion, but culture is distinct from
religion.

I'm actually really mad at Jordan Peterson for answering the Jewish Question
and giving it a platform. I assume that's where you got your opinion from, but
if you didn't, many will agree with you because of JBP.

~~~
chongli
It's almost certainly genetics. Ashkenazi Jewish people have been a persecuted
subculture for centuries, long before the Holocaust. There are a remarkable
number of genetic disorders that are extremely common among Ashkenazi Jews
that are extremely rare in everyone else. This points to very strong genetic
similarity. Scott Alexander [1] has a lot more on this topic.

[1] [https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-
consid...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-
as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/)

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bjourne
It's odd that if Muslims want to separate their boys and girls from a young
age we think it is horrible and abusive. But if Christians or Jews do the
exact same thing, we are fine with it because we must respect their
traditions.

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jhanschoo
Do we, really? If we learned that such a practice was widespread in a
Christian or Jewish community, it would count disfavorably in the esteem most
of us have of them, and this surely must be the case for us who have read
about the bus segregation in the article. In addition, poor opinion we have of
certain Muslim countries with gender segregation is due not only to this but
also of many other rights violations in the news. If one should learn of such
a practice in a community in the US, we'd feel that they should nevertheless
share many values with us as when compared to a Muslim community in the US,
and that sharing more values than a community in a Muslim country; the
disparity between our esteem toward Jewish communities and Muslim communities
in the US coming from their greater historical presence in the US. I shall not
comment on whether such is warranted.

And since I had only recently of it, gender segregation is quite alive in
significantly many Israel Jewish communities.

~~~
bjourne
But such practice _is_ widespread in some Christian and Jewish sects! I'm not
making stuff up.

> the disparity between our esteem toward Jewish communities and Muslim
> communities in the US coming from their greater historical presence in the
> US. I shall not comment on whether such is warranted.

No, perhaps you should not comment on it. Because defending the disparity is
defending racism. Segregating children by gender from a young age is child
abuse no matter what the religion is. That we accept Christians and Jews doing
it to their children but not Muslims is pure hypocrisy.

~~~
jhanschoo
> But such practice is widespread in some Christian and Jewish sects! I'm not
> making stuff up.

I agree, and I think it counts against them to the rest of us. For example,
many of us do not think highly at all about cultish Christian sects.

> Because defending the disparity is defending racism.

Indeed. What I'm trying to do here is model how the notion can come about,
simply by being ignorant and not by any directed racist thought against any
one group. That is, even if the only discrimination we receive from our
environment about the various communities were our frequency of interaction
with these respective due to proximity and integration, we are inclined to
this notion. The post I was responding to was in general attitudes for the
general population; and I assume that people are generally ignorant about
religious communities in their own country and in other countries. Hence how
this ignorance leads reasonably to a notion.

In addition, I don't think it is necessarily racist to have such an opinion,
especially if one also understands that it is likely to be horribly
misinformed and comes from ignorance. It becomes racist only if you choose to
act on the notion, or communicate it without also communicating that the
opinion comes from ignorance. Rather, the responsible thing to do is to
perform adequate due diligence to form an educated opinion on it once your
opinion on the matter becomes of importance to anything.

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microcolonel
Okay, you have your copyright. The exact strictures of the religion are
considered important by these people, so if you're not willing to follow those
strictures, you're just not part of the same group. No harm, no foul.

If you don't want to cut your son's genitals, you'll also not be welcome in
the same way.

Edit: to be clear, I agree with the way that Deborah resolved this issue. But
I'm just not sure how she could take offense, but continue to follow all the
_other_ common orthodox Jewish rules/interpretations on the basis that she
hasn't personally been offended by them. It seems like a bit of a shallow way
to decide what rules are appropriate.

~~~
Geeek
As someone who grew up Hasidic (and spoke only Yiddish until 17) I am also not
sure what the article is attempting to do here.

Is she trying to bring attention to the sexist attitudes of the Hasidic
community? They wanted something, she wanted something else, they paid as per
the new conditions. End of story.

~~~
celticninja
Is there anything wrong with highlighting the sexism of the Hasidic community?
Shouldn't religious intolerance be called out wherever we see it? All sexism
is bad, regardless of its root cause.

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Veen
I'm entirely on Kaplan's side in this, but the way you express it gives me
pause. "All sexism is bad" is true from my perspective, but it clearly isn't
true from the perspective of the community concerned.

In the interests of pluralism (not relativism), I don't think it's a good idea
to attempt to universalise social norms in that way.

~~~
roel_v
"In the interests of pluralism (not relativism)"

Honestly asking as I hadn't seen anyone side-stepping the moral
absolutism/relativism question in this way before - where is the line between
'pluralism' and 'relativism'? At what point does 'accepting' an alternative
set of morals become 'condoning' them? (again I'm not arguing a side here and
I'm not asking in an attempt to tease out a standpoint I can attack - I'm
interested in arguments from both sides)

~~~
Veen
What I have in mind is cultural pluralism. Take the US; most people accept a
certain set of political norms: democracy, the constitution, a republic-style
political system. But people who accept those basic norms and institutions can
have a wide variety of cultural and political beliefs. They can be left wing
or right wing, Orthodox Jew or atheist, patriarchal or egalitarian. But they
all accept the basic US framework and recognize that people with differing
beliefs have every right to freedom of conscience and lifestyle.

It's not relativism because I wouldn't claim that every group or culture's
norms and practices are equally right. I might think some of them are
completely wrong. But I do hold that, so long as their wrongness doesn't go
against the core norms and institutions of the nation, then we live and let
live, with the caveat that people are also free to leave their communities and
join others.

So far as I can see, this is the only pragmatic way to organize things, since
people are going to disagree about important things and we all have to live
together.

~~~
saalweachter
I think it's important within the pluralist framework to also recognize that
we require conformance from all groups in more than just the small core. We
require all groups to be law-abiding in action if not thought. Part of the
democratic ideals is that if The People make a law, everyone will follow it,
even as they campaign to change it. (Which glosses over some legitimate forms
of protest, but this is an internet comment, not a book.)

Whether there are laws on the books that could be applied to this case, or
whether there should be, I am not a lawyer or a politician, but American
pluralism doesn't require blind acceptance of any practice of another group,
even religious practice (polygamy, for instance?). The core of our shared
system provides mechanisms for deciding whether a behavior is acceptable,
prohibited or obligate.

~~~
jimbokun
The US Constitution places very strict limitations on what kind of laws are
allowed to enforce those “shared beliefs”.

I think this is a net positive. I believe when people advocate for expanding
the scope of what beliefs and behaviors government can enforce, they lack the
imagination to wonder what could happen if you find your beliefs in the
minority one day.

