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Behind the Aegis

(53,833 posts)
Tue Dec 9, 2014, 04:29 AM Dec 2014

Ryan Gierach Raises Rabbi’s Ire by Blaming Jews for ‘White’ Hollywood

THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP!

Ryan Gierach has stirred controversy by implying on his local blog that Jews are responsible for the relative lack of African-American people in West Hollywood.

In a long and rambling essay, Gierach calls on the City of West Hollywood to take action to increase the percentage of African-American people who live in WeHo. The city’s 2013 Community Study reported that three percent of the West Hollywood residents identify as black or African-American.

But what provoked an angry reaction from Denise Eger, rabbi of the Congregation Kol Ami Synagogue, is Gierach’s contention that that migration of Jews to West Hollywood is a factor in the city’s lack of racial diversity.

“… The supposed ‘universalist ethics’ of Judaism argues against the inclusiveness suggested by the liberal or progressive label,” Gierach wrote on WeHo News, his opinion blog. “The history of the Jewish people shows it is a closed in-group with a singular moral outlook and very different moral standards for in group members and out group members.”

Rabbi Eger, in an email message to Gierach that was copied to various civic leaders, said: “I have some grave concerns about what you wrote. It is frankly verging on anti-Semitism and a complete lack of understanding about Judaism, Jewish immigration patterns to this country and city and Jewish history.”

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Gierach, who is white but whose partner is African-American, founded WeHo News in 2005 and describes it as the most-read local news site covering West Hollywood. That assertion isn’t substantiated by analytical services, which rank it substantially below WEHOville.com, which Alexa analytics shows as outranking it by a factor of six, and other websites and blogs that focus on WeHo.

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This is the original article which is addressed in the above article. All I can say is Hey everyone, let's be more inclusive by tearing down another minority!
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