Call Me by My Name: Deborah Abrams Kaplan | Hacker News Reader

Call Me by My Name: Deborah Abrams Kaplan

lettersfromnj.wordpress.com

92 pointsverbify67 comments

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.

Do you have any link to such pages?

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/Moshe_Leib_Rabinovich

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.

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

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.

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.

It is almost certainly for self-protection. Responding seriously in response to someone's sarcasm or snarks is a fool's endeavor. The person doesn't care and their only interest is to score cheap laughs at the cost of lowering the level of discourse.

She did what she thought was justice, and I agree it is. I did not detect any sarcasm in her post, and it's better because of it.

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.

Interesting because in a way the Islamic faith has been dealing with the opposite problem.

During the Medieval era a lot of the most prominent scientific discoveries in Europe were done by Muslim scholars in a wide variety of fields.

However the modern radical approach to the religion has definitely resulted in many scientists having to abandon their countries and faith due to a variety of reasons.

The medieval Arab world was the inheritor of a Greco-roman culture that they initially ruled with a light hand as a aristocratic minority. As the Arab and eventually Turkish culture asserted itself and turned inward those remnant disappear. By the time modern fanaticism rose, that brief flourishing had been gone for at least 500 years.

I know this is true at least from a mathematical point of view. The common knowledge case is the conic sections that were discovered during this time. But like the library of Alexandria, our historical knowledge has the infortunate property of being limited by extant texts.

I wouldn't credit the religion ( fundamental or not ). After all, much of modern science was created by "fundamental" priests, clerics, adherents, etc ( from copernicus to newton to mendel ).

Rather, the jewish scientists benefited from living in wealthy colonial europe which provided opportunities ( though there were anti-semitic roadblocks as well ) for research.

There is a reason why most of the prominent jewish scientists are from germany, britain and US. You need wealth, infrastructure and research instutions.

Jews in the middle east, china, africa, etc haven't as much due to instability, lack of wealth, infrastructure, etc.

The same goes for chinese scientists. The US has produced a couple of chinese noble prize winners ( in sciences ). China has produced none since they were going through colonization and the unstable post-colonialism periods. Now that they are getting wealthier, developing infrastructure, etc, I'm going to guess that in the next couple of decades, china will produce a few noble prize winners.

Science, like art, is a "liberal" pursuit which stems from ancient greece where the wealthy "liberals" had time to think because they were free ( liberal ) from work because their slaves did most of the work. In modern times, excess wealth is a prerequisite for most research. When you or society is desperately trying to survive and feed its people, nobody has the free time for "liberal" pursuits.

I don't know about the others, but Kopernik was hardly a "fundamental" priest. He organized the defense of Prussian towns who sided with Poland against a Teutonic Knights army who had the permission of the pope to "baptize" these "pagan" lands.

Polish/Prussian side (which Kopernik supported, even including participation in the defence of the besieged city) argued that pagans had the right to live and defend their land, and that faith alone is not a sufficient justification to conquer foreign countries.

And it's not even sure if Kopernik was a priest at all. He was a canon at Frombork Cathedral, but at the time you didn't have to be a full-blown priest, he could have just been a deacon or even a subdeacon (and that's the currently favoured theory).

> There is a reason why most of the prominent jewish scientists are from germany, britain and US. You need wealth, infrastructure and research instutions. Jews in the middle east, china, africa, etc haven't as much due to instability, lack of wealth, infrastructure, etc.

Thanks for mentioning not all Jews are European. Most Jews in Israel, for example, are not European. Nearly the entire ancient communities of Iraqi, Yemeni and Persian Jews are almost in Israel. If not for modes of dress (and even then), the casual foreign observer would often not easily tell apart Jew from Arab in Israel. At least, I often cannot.

They are higher risk, but sometimes come with great rewards too. I'd say Martin Luther King was pretty fundamental, as was Gandhi and a bunch of other people I have to credit with doing a lot of good.

Fundamentalism is not a appropriate term for the sort of leadership that King and Ghandi gave. Fundamentalism has come to mean a preoccupation with obeisance to formal rules, taken literally.

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?

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

Did you read the article? It's about not being fine with it.

I feel like bjourne is referring to the hypocracy that society commonly accepts the Jewish practice, whereas the Muslim practice is generally rejected.

I don't think bjourne is suggesting that Deborah accepts the practice.

Where is the example of "society commonly accepting the Jewish practice?" Not hn society, as you can see in the thread. Not Jewish society, as you can see in the article.

In any case, this is not a Jewish practice. The practice in this article is specific to certain hasidic sects, within the haredi minority... And very few outside of the haredi minority are accepting of sexism within the community. It's a big point of conflict.

I didn't say it was a "Jewish practice" it was darylfritz who misunderstood. The practice is common in the Hasidic minority as a result of society accepting people shoveling religious dogma down their children's throats. Except for Muslims having their girls wear veils which "society" has a problem with. But society shouldn't be accepting religious indoctrination of children from anyone.

Which society are you talking about?

Any society allowing parents to put their children in religious schools.

My use of the phrase "Jewish Practice" was taken from the article. I didn't mean anything additional by it.

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.

You say the phrase "exact strictures of the religion", as if there aren't an untold number of different ways to interpret a set of religious texts that are in many places explicitly and intentionally ambiguous.

I said strictures, not scriptures. They don't need to read any scripture again to know the rule about women's names they seem to be employing. It is a very, very common rule that certain groups of Jews follow, and they don't need to justify it with an interpretation of scripture every time.

Yes, but you also described it as the strictures of "the religion", as if there is a single monolithic Judaism that universally follows that rule.

She disagrees with the way they operate; she doesn't need to justify herself either. They were able to come to a satisfactory business agreement regardless.

I think what I'm responding to is that your circumcision comparison made it sound like you're suggesting she's somehow "less Jewish" or an outsider to Judaism, when in fact the specific thing she's disagreeing with isn't a universal part of the religion.

> Yes, but you also described it as the strictures of "the religion", as if there is a single monolithic Judaism that universally follows that rule.

I don't see why this has to degrade to an argument of semantics, but here we go.

Just as if we were talking about Hokkien, we could talk about "the language" Hokkien, despite the fact that you could say "the language" and mean Chinese (which may include Hokkien) in some other context. Right now we're talking about this specific publication's circle of association. They clearly have different religious rules than Deborah, but she is still Jewish.

> I think what I'm responding to is that your circumcision comparison made it sound like you're suggesting she's somehow "less Jewish" or an outsider to Judaism

She is, in relative terms, more of an outsider to this specific publication's Judaism than somebody who would agree with their first offer (assuming they still hold the view that their first offer was preferable).

>The exact strictures of the religion are considered important by these people,

Sounds a bit ironic to tolerate using work from a woman without being willing to give her full credit then. Maybe they should get pictures from a male photographer next time.

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.

They weren't the photographer's "new conditions". The original agreement said she wanted credit for he photos with her full name. Quite reasonably in my opinion, especially given the zero price offered under those conditions.

After having agreed, and right towards the end of the publication process, the editors refused those originally agreed conditions. They paid according to new conditions imposed by them. (Apparently with poor grace on the part of the editorial communications, but with at least outward signs of professionalism and good manners on the part of the author.)

End of story, sure. But it was an interesting story none the less. I'm glad she told it (and appreciate whoever posted it here).

After having agreed, and right towards the end of the publication process, the editors refused those originally agreed conditions.

From my reading of the article, I don't think this is accurate. The original agreement was between an independent writer and the photographer. The editors had never agreed to publish her name. While I strongly disagree with their editorial policy, I don't think it's fair to consider them bound by an agreement made by a third party without their consent.

Yeah - fair call.

From the photographer's point of view though, she'd negotiated a deal with the author.

That deal was then rejected (by the author's editors, who the photographer had no agreement with), and a new deal had to be negotiated. That should have always been a problem between the author and the editors (which is sounds like is where it ended up, with the author paying the price of the newly negotiated deal).

Going back to the photographer and asking nicely if she'd reconsider the details of the attribution is reasonable - but the editors pushing back when she said "no" with "WE APPRECIATE YOUR UNDERSTANDING OF THIS ISSUE (KNOWING THAT NO OFFENSE IS INTENTED ח”ו). THANK YOU" is, at least in my opinion, offensive - perhaps not maliciously/intentionally so, but certainly obliviously careless in assuming their religious traditions need to be understood and accepted by everybody else.

I think the end result was appropriate. I'm less certain the manner in which it was arrived at wasn't poorly handled and an attempt to pressure the photographer into a worse deal than agreed upon - even though that deal was "zero dollars, just credit me by name".

What they wanted was unreasonable by her standards, and she said so. The end of the story is not the transaction because our interactions with other people are not governed by exclusively transactional concerns, even when they are in large part transactional in nature.

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.

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.

"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)

> At what point does 'accepting' an alternative set of morals become 'condoning' them?

As far as I can tell, those words mean practically the same thing. "Condone" is modernly generally only used in the negative sense, and thus people may be confused into thinking it means something akin to "endorse" or "support". In actuality it means something much more akin to "tolerate".

"pluralism" and "relativism" are harder words to nail down. One way might be to say the relativism says that all moral systems are equally valid while pluralism says that there are more than one valid moral system.

Here, I think "pluralism" is being presented as its own moral virtue (rather than as a philosophical stance): tolerance of other moral systems and beliefs is good.

> pluralism in general tries to leave people alone to pursue their own ends as long as they’re willing to play nice with others. Part of playing nice with others for pluralism is not trying to coerce others into adopting your truths, values, and ethics, even if you think you’re right and the other party is wrong. That live and let live attitude may be the same practical result as relativism, but it is reached by starting at a different philosophical standpoint.

http://blogs.bu.edu/dscott/2011/06/24/pluralism-vs-relativis...

So I guess the point being made is that while a lot of sexism is bad, especially where it is imposed unwillingly, there there may be acceptable sexist moral systems that limit that sexism to voluntary participants of that moral system.

However, the choice of voluntary participation in the moral system is usually suppressed in sexist moral systems which makes them unacceptable from a pluralist stance.

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.

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.

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.

Some might feel that not giving complete credit to a woman because she is a woman goes against the core norms and institutions of modern civilization.

Yes, some might, which is why I specified that people must be free to choose their own culture, and, of course, people must be free to speak their mind.

But the price of living in a society with diverse communities is that we occasionally have to hold our noses when people embrace shitty ideas. In fact, we have to defend their ability to do so.

Again, why is this being downvoted?

Sexism should be highlighted. Many of the comments here are trying to rationalise injustice.

Some people think sexism is only bad when Christians do it. Other religions have their reasons, of course!

No, it's good. But it wasn't clear to me, especially since an article purely focusing on sexism within the hasidic jewish community doesn't usually make it to the front page of HN.

It was, in my view, an article about where copyright and ethics meet. An interesting take.

I hear you. Still a very subtle take on things.

I think the point of the article is that taking away someone's identity because she happens to be a woman is something that she has the right to oppose, especially if she is that woman. Also, they were dishonest.

Personally, I would side with her view regardless of what kind of religion or publication type it may be.

So again, is she trying to bring awareness? Is she trying to show how she morally disagreed with something and then...nothing happened?

I am no longer Hasidic and I absolutely side with her stance regarding the name used but I still do not understand the point of the article.

I mean, this is a short blog post on her personal blog, right?

I don't know if there's that much more to it than "here's an interesting story that happened to me, including being happy to tell you about how I was able to donate $500 to some good organizations".

It’s pretty clear the author is Orthodox, so this is within her community. That said, many forms of Orthodox Judaism aren’t far off from what we would call “radical Islam” when it comes to their views on women (they don’t wear an abaya, but many wear wigs and full-body covering).

She is not, she clearly identifies herself as part of Conservative Judaism.

Yeah, exactly. I have more than one (female) Orthodox friend and they’re constantly having to stand up to elders within their own communities for respect. The older generations still believe women shouldn’t work.

Disagreement with orthodoxy is heterodox. You can't be orthodox and heterodox at the same time, that makes no sense.

You can be mostly orthodox except for one practice. Absolutism is hard.

Why is this downvoted? Seems pretty much on the spot.

Because the author writes that her synagogue is a member of the Conservative movement, which is not the same as the Orthodox movement? It's not so much "pretty clear" as it is "wrong."

Ah, thanks for clarifying! I'm not familiar with the many facets of religion, so thanks for the help?

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