This sort of ill-intentioned generalizing is terrible, as nearly all sentient people—Jew and non-Jew alike—would agree. But disturbingly, a not-dissimilar tactic is employed by some Jews against a subset of their own: haredim, a non-judgmental term for those the mainstream media tend to call “ultra-Orthodox.” In a sense, the haredim have become the Jews’ Jews.

***

This has been a problem in the media for as long as I can remember. A decade ago, I wrote a lengthy article on this subject for Moment magazine titled “Open Season on the Orthodox.” It turned into a cover story, for which the editors created ingeniously hilarious art: It showed a stack of “Weekly World Inquirer” tabloids with covers trumpeting the imaginary weekly’s latest revelations, among them “Orthodox Rabbi’s Two-Headed Alien Love Child!” (with the subheadline “Offspring ‘Not Jewish’ Rabbinical Court Rules”) and “El Niño: Orthodox Plot!”

The article was of course more serious. It presented a crowded rogue’s gallery of what I believed to be biased reportage—examples of egregious suspension of journalistic norms, subtle media misrepresentations, and outright fabrications—about haredi Jews. Like any writer, I fantasized that my words might actually effect meaningful change. And like most fantasies, mine didn’t much penetrate reality. Haredim as a group continue to be unfairly maligned—and pilloried for their principles.

By defending halachic standards regarding conversion in Israel, we are portrayed as small-minded; for seeking to preserve traditional Jewish norms for public prayer services at the Western Wall, we are condemned as mullahs and women-haters; for taking Jewish law and custom seriously, we are sneered at as backward. When a group of haredim in an Israeli town try to preserve their particular style of education, they find themselves branded racists. A New York Times op-ed declares, without basis, that haredi rabbis in Israel have decided that “almost no one” is Jewish and calls unnamed haredi rabbis “demonstrably corrupt.” A respected Jewish columnist characterizes Israel’s religious courts as a “rabble of rabbis … a counterfeit product, pretenders to a piety they daily demean.”

There is nothing wrong with making a case for multiple conversion standards in Israel, for a variety of public prayer service styles at the Western Wall, for denying a particular community the right to mold a government-supported school in its own image, or for the separation of religion and state in Israel. Differences of opinion are fine. But vilification isn’t. Name-calling is not an argument.

The hardy weed of anti-haredi animus easily spreads to even more mundane reportage. When a social activist claims, without producing a shred of evidence or a single witness, that she was assaulted in a public place in broad daylight by a haredi man because of tefillin marks on her arm, the alleged assault was widely reported as established fact. When a group of Israeli teens on a school outing accidentally caused a forest fire, a well-known blog implied that the blaze had something to do with the fact that the school was haredi. A national Jewish newspaper publishes a comic strip featuring wild-eyed, grotesque depictions of religious Jews, cynically disparaging their desire to share Torah with other Jews.

I don’t believe that such things—well, the comic strip excluded—are done with conscious intent to demonize. The writers and editors who allow anti-haredi sentiment to inform reportage do not consider themselves prejudiced, even subconsciously. But, as Slate’s William Saletan has insightfully written, “There’s a word for bias you can’t see: yours.”

***

But, perhaps even more sadly, the media’s bias against haredim dovetails with—and encourages—individuals’ personal prejudices.

Truly objective observers of the haredi world—the fairest ones are, not incidentally, more often non-Jews—are often struck not only by haredi insularity and ritual observances but by the community’s refinement of spirit, generosity, and good will. If the previous sentence elicited a cynical smirk, that only testifies to the power of the misconception-mongering.

But cynicism cannot obscure facts. Whether judged by objective criteria or by simply observing life at street level, the haredi community is very different from the image of it that exists in many media and minds. Even a quick perusal of the pages of any haredi newspaper or magazine, of which there are several these days, should be enough to open minds. They cater to their readers, of course, ignoring most of contemporary popular culture that imbues the contemporary American scene. And they are empty of the sort of gossip and scandals that titillate readers of more mainstream media. But the window on the haredi world they provide opens on a scene very different from, in some ways diametrically opposed to, many people’s preconceived notions.

The percentage of haredi income donated to charity is formidable, particularly impressive in light of the many observance-related expenses (educational and otherwise) that Orthodox Jews shoulder as a matter of course. The number and scale of haredi efforts aimed at comforting the sick and bereaved, feeding the hungry, or providing other social services to Jews in need—haredi or not—is astonishing. No small number of non-observant Jewish New Yorkers have been introduced to the Satmar community, the large and influential Hasidic sect, when visited in the hospital by its ladies, bearing good wishes and hot kosher food.

Are there then no haredim who are miserly, insufficiently sensitive to the needs of others, or even—how shall we put it?—ethically or morally challenged? Of course there are. And we hear and read about them regularly. We have witnessed truly abhorrent behavior by members of the haredi community over recent years, from what law texts call “moral turpitude” to child molestation to financial shenanigans to outright thievery. And innocent, truly religious haredim are deeply shamed by the hypocrites and criminals among their population. Although not every ugly story turns out to be true, enough have passed the smell—and even the legal—test to convince us haredim that we have much work to do to impress on every member of the community the import of the fact that the Torah governs every aspect of a Jew’s life.

And we haredim can even understand, in light of the scandalous behavior of some, why other Jews view us all with suspicion, or even worse. But, as with Jews in general, the difference between prejudice and perceptiveness lies in whether one chooses to focus on a selected ugly sample or on the overwhelming majority of a group’s members, those we don’t get to read about.

I don’t believe that anti-haredi bias is truly analogous to anti-Semitism. The latter is visceral and evil; the former just misguided. Most Jews who assume the worst about haredim may be puzzled, frustrated, discomfited, annoyed, rattled, or embarrassed by us (or some of us). But they don’t really hate us. I believe that every Jew, in his or her heart of hearts, loves every other Jew. It’s just that—well, to reference a contemporary poet: Just because you love someone doesn’t mean you like them all of the time.

It would be nice if all Jews were always both lovable and likable. But in this imperfect world, that may not come to pass. What we can all do, though—and this applies to us haredim as well as others—is to resist, as best we can, the evil inclination to indulge in generalizations, assume the worst, or vilify our fellow Jews.

It’s a tall order but a timely, urgent one.

Rabbi Avi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America, a national Orthodox organization.

Although we’ve never met, I’d like to take this opportunity to congratulate you for your pending purchase of Newsweek magazine.

I’m not assuming you’re hearing much by way of congratulations these days. After all, everywhere you turn, you come across another report of the magazine industry’s nearing demise: Circulations are down, advertising is down, U.S. News & World Report has abandoned its print edition, 279 magazines folded in 2009 alone, and TV Guide—a magazine that once boasted the highest circulation in the country—was sold for $1, the same price you paid for Newsweek. And yet, you chose to enter the industry at this tough time, and I won’t be surprised if some in your circle tried to talk you out of the move.

As one who has devoted his life to writing for, editing, and publishing magazines—including 30 years as editor and then publisher of The Nation, and now as chairman of Columbia Journalism Review—let me try to put your mind at ease. Magazine journalism, Mr. Harman, isn’t busy dying, it’s struggling to be reborn. And now, as it was in the golden age of magazines, it would likely be us Jews who’ll revolutionize this essential industry.

Jews, after all, have always had a special place in their hearts for magazines. Even at this difficult moment, there is Nadine Epstein’s Moment (“the independent national Jewish magazine”), there is Commentary, there is Tikkun (the anti-Commentary), there is The Jewish Review of Books, there is Lilith (“the American-Jewish feminist magazine”), there is Jewish Frontier (for organized labor), and for young, Holocaust-mocking hipsters there is even Heeb, along with many, many others. If you’re reading this letter, you’re surely also aware of Tablet Magazine, which represents, along with jewcy.com and several other Web sites, innovative attempts to carry on the magazine tradition on a new technological platform.

As you walk into Newsweek’s offices, and as you wonder in which direction to lead a great American magazine, let me share with you a bit of good advice I once received from an unlikely source. Although I disagreed with the late Irving Kristol, the so-called godfather of neoconservatism, on many things, I think he was onto something almost existential when it comes to magazine publishing. “A lot of New York intellectuals”—which is to say, Jews—“have roots in Eastern Europe, where, unlike in England or France, there was no tradition of civility,” he told me once when I was interviewing him about intellectuals and magazines. “In England or France, you operate within a framework of existing institutions. In Eastern Europe, we wanted to change existing institutions, to improve them. The Cossack was the existing institution, so ideas were more important than institutions. That is why if you disagree with someone, you stop talking to him and start your own magazine.”

I would add that, whatever one thinks of the neoconservative movement, one must concede that, for better or worse, it would not have come into being had it not been for magazines like The Public Interest (co-edited by Kristol), which in effect launched it, and Norman Podhoretz’s Commentary (now edited by his son, John), which nourished it. Most likely, you have no designs to turn Newsweek into an ideological organ; but you would do well to heed Kristol’s advice, and perceive of your magazine not just as a source for news but also as an institution for the manufacturing and dissemination of ideas.

Having sat on the publisher’s chair for enough time myself, however, I can guarantee that if you go on talking about ideas, someone is going to try to tell you that magazines have no place in the Internet’s age of immediacy. Simply remind these gloomy folks that the year’s biggest political story—the fall of the general who wouldn’t shut up, Stanley McChrystal—was caused by a magazine, Rolling Stone, one of the few media organs that still permit reporters to hang out with sources for long periods of time, and that still allocate 7,500 words or more for a worthwhile story. I’d like to see a Web site, or even a newspaper, have this kind of patience.

I am tempted to end my letter by citing any number of examples from the past glories of American magazine journalism. I’m tempted to remind you of Ida Tarbell’s exposé of Standard Oil Co. in McClure’s at the turn of the last century, of John Hershey’s “Hiroshima,” Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” and Hannah Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem” in The New Yorker. But instead, allow me to end with an anecdote that neatly captures what magazines, at their best, can do, and why we need them now more than ever.

Some years ago, when I was helping to put together a group of small shareholders to invest in The Nation, I was making a pitch before a group of well-wishers assembled by my friend Stanley Sheinbaum in his Brentwood, Calif., living room, when a middle-aged woman raised her hand and said, “Count me in. I can’t not invest.” When asked to say more, she told her story. Her father, she said, used to go to shul every Saturday with his father. And his father would sit there with a copy of The Nation on his lap, reading while the rabbi spoke. Why, her then-9-year-old father asked her grandfather, are you reading while the rabbi is talking? “Because,” said her grandfather, “what he is saying up there, I already know, but what this magazine is telling me down here, I don’t know.”

This, Mr. Harman, is our past. It is up to you to make it our future, as well.

Then there’s Y-Love, the Orthodox African-American rapper, who recalls seeing “a TV commercial that said ‘Happy Passover from your friends at Channel 2’” when he was a wee boy of 7. It blew his mind so utterly he subsequently proclaimed, “Mommy, I want to be Jewish.” Is that all it takes? Golly—imagine the mess that could’ve been avoided had Ogilvy & Mather been around during the Crusades.

The New Jewish Convert [Moment]

*For inspiration check out this not-quite-haiku from Tablet’s resident rhymester, written circa age 10:

Haiku About Freedom

I like to be free
You can do what you want
You can study Torah