Frieda Vizel seems to fancy herself an amateur anthropologist, yet she often appears to have little understanding of the underlying values, sensitivities, and social dynamics that shape cultures and communities, including the one she grew up in.
I have spoken about her in previous posts
She recently expressed surprise at the backlash she received for posting an interview with Gittel Schwartz, a former Satmar woman who left her community, married a non-Jew, and had a child with him.
What seems to baffle Frieda is that the criticism did not come only from religious Jews. Even many secular Jews found the interview and the way it was presented troubling.
Right from the start, Frieda, who is usually an engaging and insightful commentator, manages to be remarkably irritating by repeatedly pronouncing Gittel's name as "Ge'tell."
What is that about? Is she deliberately trying to make Gittel's name sound more non-Jewish or more palatable to her largely non-Jewish audience? If so, the choice comes across as contrived and unnecessarily dismissive of the name's authentic Yiddish pronunciation.
I would suggest that before Frieda studies anthropology, she spend some time studying Jewish history.
Does she know about the Crusades, when entire Jewish communities were massacred by Christian mobs with extraordinary brutality?
Does she know that Jews were expelled from England in 1290, from Spain in 1492, and from Portugal in 1496, simply because they were Jews?
Does she know about the Chmielinski massacres of 1648-1649, when tens of thousands of Jews were murdered during the Cossack uprising in Ukraine and Poland-Lithuania? In Jewish historical memory, these events are remembered as one of the greatest catastrophes to befall the Jewish people before the Holocaust.
Does she know about the Uman Massacre of 1768, when thousands of Jews were slaughtered during the Haidamak uprising? Or the Odessa Pogrom of 1821, often cited as the first anti-Jewish outbreak to be described as a "pogrom"?
And that's only the beginning. I could go on and on.
Any Jew, whether religious or secular, who has even a basic understanding of Jewish history can understand why many people would be deeply troubled by content that appears to normalize or celebrate assimilation. Given the long history of persecution, expulsions, massacres, and the constant struggle to preserve Jewish identity, such reactions should hardly come as a surprise.
Jews make up 0.2% of the world's population, when we lose one single Jew, every Jew religious or secular that has any inkling of their beautiful rich heritage mourns that loss, because that Jew is now lost forever amongst the rest of the 8,3 billion people worldwide. And even though Gittel's child is halachically Jewish, the chances of this child marrying Jewish, hovers around zero percent!
What Frieda Vizel and Gittel Schwartz seem not to understand is a simple truth: actions have consequences. When you publicly promote ideas or life choices that many Jews view as undermining Jewish continuity, you should not be shocked when people respond with criticism or outrage.
