The map of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s shutdown in Brooklyn can be perfectly correlated to the Orthodox Jewish community in the borough, and that is by design. In a video appearance, the governor has pegged spiking cases on the shoulders of only one community within the city: Orthodox Jews, and he linked the surge in the virus to the religious practices of Orthodox Judaism. In a public address, Cuomo explained, “We’re now having issues in the Orthodox Jewish community in New York, where, because of their religious practices, we’re seeing a spread.”
Through words and actions, the governor has shown that he views Jews as vectors of disease, and his mitigation strategy for the virus rests on shutting down the religious practices of Orthodox Jews.
Infection rates in the area are going up, and so the governor has decided to shut the entire area down: schools, stores, etc. Despite the fact that retail and education have not been tied to these spikes in cases (which have not resulted in nearly the numbers of hospitalizations and deaths we saw in the spring), the state punitively took action against only one entire area, those populated by Orthodox Jews, locking it down in its entirety.
In a recently released half-hour audio clip of a private phone conversation between Cuomo and rabbis in the community, we hear Cuomo say this:
On Friday, it was announced that a school in Brooklyn, Bais Yaakov Ateres Miriam, decided to push back against this fear-based response by the governor and demand its right to reopen safely, filing a lawsuit with the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. The complaint on behalf of the Bais Yaakov school with the District Court for the Northern District of New York tasks the court to allow the school to reopen immediately and is the first of its kind, but should hardly be the last. In its briefing to the court, the Becket Fund explains, “Fear is not a compelling government interest, and—even in a pandemic—constitutional rights deserve better than a hatchet job. That is particularly true where the government admits public health is not in jeopardy.”
Despite the rising infection rate and the reopening of the school at the beginning of the year, the school has seen zero cases of the virus among its students or staff. The school has proven its ability to operate safely, and Becket is rightly fighting for it to continue to do so.
In an opinion piece for the Atlantic, Brown University economist and noted writer on the intersection of parenting and data Emily Oster laid out the data-driven case for keeping schools open. She explained, “We are starting to get an evidence-based picture of how school reopenings and remote learning are going (those photos of hallways don’t count), and the evidence is pointing in one direction. Schools do not, in fact, appear to be major spreaders of COVID-19 … Democratic governors who love to flaunt their pro-science bona fides in comparison with the anti-science Trump administration don’t seem to be aware of this growing body of evidence … New York Governor Andrew Cuomo claimed that businesses were not ‘mass spreaders,’ as opposed to schools, and subsequently announced that he would close schools in hot-spot areas.”
School closures disproportionately hurt lower-income children, as hauntingly evidenced in a piece in ProPublica this month. But Jewish children are, like all children, experiencing more negative effects from school closures. One could argue the harm to their mental and physical health is worse with closed schools than they would face with a potential COVID-19 infection. Writing for the Washington Examiner magazine this week, I summarized the concerns of pediatricians across the country dealing with crushing mental health effects and weight gain related to school closures.
The most well-known cases Becket has argued are largely in defense of the religious liberty of individual Christians and institutions, famously the Little Sisters of the Poor case related to the Obamacare birth control mandate and a Catholic religious order. Arguing on behalf of a Jewish organization isn’t new for the firm, but it is certainly outside of its normal scope of practice. The glaring targeting on the basis of religion is what makes this case tailor-made for the firm, which argues that the Jewish community has been singled out as a scapegoat during the pandemic, explaining in its complaint, “The eight ZIP codes covered by the Commissioner’s September 28 order corresponded with predominantly Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods. The order did not apply to six ZIP codes from Governor Cuomo’s list that had comparable or higher positivity rates and positive tests, but that did not correspond to predominantly Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods.”
Ultimately, Cuomo and de Blasio can feel however they want with regard to their “fear” of the virus. But that “fear” should not grant the emergency powers involved with closing entire ZIP codes, especially institutions within those ZIP codes with no established link to the spread of the virus. If schools feel that they can reopen safely, they should be granted the permission to do so. The emergency powers granted by the people to government officials regarding this pandemic should not be in place in perpetuity. It’s clear that the decision to shut entire ZIP codes wasn’t one based on science but on discrimination — and, in Cuomo’s own words, fear.
Fear should not dictate religious freedom, education, or public policy, and the courts must reassert that irrefutable truth.
Bethany Mandel (@bethanyshondark) is a stay-at-home and homeschooling mother of four and a freelance writer. She is an editor at Ricochet.com, a columnist at the Forward, and a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog.
