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.
And since I had only recently of it, gender segregation is quite alive in significantly many Israel Jewish communities.
> 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.
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.
I don't think bjourne is suggesting that Deborah accepts the practice.
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.