JustASC

David Klinghoffer, the conservative pundit who famously charted his embrace of Orthodoxy after having grown up an adoptee in a Reform home, blogs this week about what he is calling “provincial Orthodoxy” – that is, Orthodox communities thriving away from the major metropolitan areas.

His brief post is an unusually negative protrayal of urban Orthodoxy (coming from an Orthodox Jew, that is):

Most Jews who know anything about Orthodox Judaism associate it with major population centers like New York, Baltimore, Miami, etc. The truth is that almost all the negative stereotypes linked with traditional Judaism stem from such places.

He writes about the “whole alternative universe of Orthodox Judaism” found in Seattle, San Diego, Portland, Sacramento, Atlanta, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh:

[The] Orthodoxy in such places is quite different from what you find in New Jersey, Long Island, and so on. It is thriving and dynamic, accepting and diverse, enthusiastic for tradition in surprising ways, and largely undocumented. It’s also a lot more attractive, at least to me.

Notably, it consists of a very heavy representation of converts and baalei teshuva, Jewish returnees from secularism, rather than FFBs, the frum (religious) from birth….

The hostility and lack of understanding that liberal Jews associate with Orthodoxy isn’t to be found here.

What Klinghoffer is suggesting, of course, is that big city Orthodoxy is a breeding ground for hostility and intra-communal strife. Interesting to hear this coming from an Orthodox Jew.