An article by Richard Percival in the Jewish Chronicle covers a recent New York Times opinion piece that maligned the Hasidic community while discussing Yiddish. Saying that “Jewish figures have led a backlash to the piece,” Percival leads with Rabbi Yaakov Menken, Managing Director of the CJV, who emphatically rejected Stavans’ claims.

But Yaakov Menken, managing director of the Coalition for Jewish Values which advocates for Jewish ideas and standards in matters of American public policy, accused Stavans of “being biased”.

Writing for the Times of Israel, he said: “Stavans has placed his personal bias ahead of basic factual accuracy, as he tells his readers that ‘They [the aforementioned ‘ultra-Orthodox’] aren’t multilingual, as secular Yiddish speakers always were.’ A blithering idiot could do no worse.”

He later added on Twitter: “With this statement alone, Stavans demonstrates he has absolutely no knowledge of the field regarding which he pontificates.

“The overwhelming majority of Yiddish speakers are multilingual. This means, not incidentally, that they are vastly more likely to be multilingual than readers of the @NYTimes or students at @AmherstCollege.”

Another day, another compellingly ignorant, backwards, and pejorative piece from the @nytimes.

The fact that the author, in this case, is @IStavans, a Professor at @AmherstCollege, only makes the pejorative ignorance more embarrassing. A short🧵https://t.co/6Pq2kIN5jR

— Rabbi Yaakov Menken (@ymenken) September 3, 2023

Percival continued by covering several other criticisms made by Rabbi Menken and others.

See the full article in the Jewish Chronicle

Photo Credit: JavierDo on Wikimedia Commons