During the final days of Passover, 15 Hasidic-owned houses in Val Morin were vandalized, in what the Sûreté du Québec, incredibly, is still unable to classify as a hate crime. As reported in The Gazette April 16, anti-Semitic graffiti and swastikas were spray-painted in some of the vandalized homes in a Laurentian township with an unfortunate history of tensions between its year-long, mostly French Québécois residents and its Hasidic summer dwellers.
Speculating on the causes of the outburst, a spokesman for the Hasidic community was quoted by The Gazette as observing:
“There’s a lot of anti-Jewish stuff in the media.”
Indeed! Rather than reporting this troubling incident, on Sunday, April 15, the final day of the vandalism spree, Le Journal de Montréal inaugurated an extensive and explosive three-day “exposé” of Quebec’s Hasidic community. This first instalment in the series focused on those who had left the Hasidic community. It also presented highly dubious demographics about the Hasidim, portrayed in all three articles as somehow threatening the social fabric of Quebec’s modern and “enlightened” culture of “laïcité.” Ignoring the inconvenient statistical data that estimate Quebec’s Hasidic population at no more than 10,000, Le Journal doubled the numbers to 20,000. This highly inflated statistic enabled the paper to announce a projection obviously intended to alarm readers: that the Hasidic community would burgeon to 49,000 by the year 2020.
In the next day’s particularly nasty instalment, on education, the Hasidic school system was portrayed as presenting a clear and present danger to Quebec society and culture on account of its allegedly widespread violations of provincial educational requirements, particularly concerning language. Employing such pejoratives as “illiterate” and “medieval” to depict them, the series’ author, Émilie Dubreuil, repeatedly alleged, absurdly, that the large majority of Hasidic men speak not a word of either English or French. The front-page, black-banner headline blared: “Toujours pas d’éducation de base,” while inside the paper the articles led with the accusation that in all of Quebec, “only Hasidic children study in schools that violate Quebec law.”
The final spread, in Tuesday’s paper, ostensibly about love and marriage in Hasidic life, was by far the most salacious and derogatory. Rather than explain the profound sexual modesty espoused by Hasidism – not unlike that taught by Islam – Dubreuil saw fit to focus on Hasidic teachings regarding masturbation (which she somehow failed to note are almost identical to those of the Catholic Church) and oral sex.
Errors of fact and interpretation abounded on every one of the series’ seven full pages. The author herself remains in the dark, even about the very basics. So poor is her knowledge of her subjects that, in the course of her investigations, Dubreuil didn’t even manage to learn that Hasidim is the plural form of Hasid, and so she regularly referred to “un Hasidim” and “le Hasidim.”
Reaction to Le Journal’s insulting exposé was predictable enough, and reached rock bottom in an interview by 98.5 FM Radio host Benoît Dutrizac last Tuesday. Having laughed out loud, on air, at Dutrizac’s mockery of Hasidic males’ imagined sexual choices and performance, Dubreuil herself seemed to be taken aback by his extreme language. Responding to Dutrizac’s comment that he was “revolted” by the Hasidim’s sexual standards, Dubreuil suddenly pleaded journalistic objectivity; but this ethical standard did not deter Dutrizac from observing, correctly, alas, “this revulsion was not only my reaction to the articles, as I think it will be the reaction of very many who read them.” Just imagine the public outcry that would have certainly ensued had Dutrizac proclaimed on air his revulsion at the gay community’s sexual mores!
The interview then turned to speculation as to the reasons for Hasidic suspicions of the outside, Gentile world. Dubreuil mentioned the fact that almost all the Hasidim of Quebec are Holocaust survivors, or their descendants, and to this day collectively traumatized by that tragedy – to which an agitated, and stunningly ignorant, Dutrizac angrily responded: “Oh come on, they are still going on about the Holocaust? Generations later it affects them? Really? We’re in 2012! No one in Quebec is leading Jews to the crematoria!”
Tuesday’s Journal de Montréal carried this headline: “Communauté Hassidique: Des Amours Regimentées.” At the bottom of that same front page, referring to the violence perpetrated by student activists at Quebec government offices the previous day, was the caption: “Stupide et dangereux.” Those precise words best describe the paper’s ignorant and incendiary coverage of the Hasidic community.
Allan Nadler is director of the Jewish Studies Program at Drew University in Madison, N.J., visiting professor of Jewish Studies at McGill University and interim rabbi of Congregation Beth El in Town of Mount Royal.