Jew or not, a crook's a crook

'How can a religious person justify being a slumlord?" asked the cover of the Dec. 8 issue of The Village Voice. This piece, which featured interviews with me and other Jewish leaders, considered the presence of religious Jews among the worst slumlords in New York.

If the article was provocative, the responses in online comments were downright incendiary. Most fell into two categories. Some commenters took advantage of this opportunity to vent their own hateful anti-Semitic filth ("The narrative of the 'Holocaust' is not supported by the forensic evidence"). Others complained that The Voice's decision to run the article was, in itself, anti-Semitic. ("For The Voice to put up this horrible front-page picture is equal to what was done by the Sturmer in Nazi Germany.")

Both responses miss the essential point of the article: Some Jews, including rabbis and even Orthodox rabbis, are calling out co-religionists who engage in exploitative behaviors. Anti-Semites may claim that all Jews are greedy and self-involved, but their message falls flat with an audience aware of rabbis who base their arguments and legal rulings against slumlords on Jewish sources.

Meanwhile, those readers who cry anti-Semitism must explain why The Voice chose to feature sympathetic religious Jews who are appalled by religious slumlords.

I chose to be interviewed for that article because I, as a rabbi, feel obligated to speak out when other Jews mask hateful or criminal behavior with outwardly religious identities. I am pained when I meet people who believe that all religious Jews are slumlords or tax evaders. I alone cannot change this perception, but I can offer a different model - a rabbi who draws on Jewish tradition to preach our responsibility to all people. If I do not speak out, I allow anti-Semitic stereotypes to fester.

Some have asked: Why air dirty laundry in the pages of secular newspapers like The Village Voice and the Daily News? Why not conduct an internal conversation in Jewish newspapers? First of all, in the Internet age, the boundary between public and private has largely disappeared. Jews no longer have secret conversations in Yiddish in the pages of the Forverts. Now, Jewish newspapers are accessible to anyone with a Web connection.

Furthermore, far more Jews read The Village Voice, the Daily News and The New York Times than their local Jewish paper. Like other ethnic and religious groups, Jews can now have communal conversations in the secular media.

More to the point, the "dirty laundry" of Jewish slumlords is already public. Every time a man in a black hat and coat refuses to turn on the hot water, allows rats to run through an apartment building or ignores a city violation, his tenants make assumptions about Judaism. By telling a secular newspaper that Jewish law requires landlords to make their rental units habitable, I am simply publicizing a different interpretation of Judaism. I am not revealing secrets about Jewish slumlords - these slumlords have already revealed themselves.

Many have asked whether Jews make up a disproportionate percentage of slumlords. I can't answer this question without spending months sorting through tens of thousands of property deeds and housing violations. Nor am I interested in the answer. Whatever the percentage might be, I will speak out as long as there is a single slumlord who claims to be a religious Jew.

I expect other religious and communal leaders to do the same. The fact that rabbis and Jewish businesspeople are willing to condemn improper behaviors among Jewish landlords should inspire Christian, Muslim, Hindu and other leaders to do the same - as many already do. Jews in black hats may be the most noticeable of the religious slumlords, in part because they play into anti-Semitic stereotypes that observers may already hold. But I have no doubt that other New York City slumlords regularly show up in church, mosque or temple.

I also invite us to celebrate those landlords whose religious traditions inspire them to behave like mensches, as we say in Yiddish. I hope that the public discussion of Jewish slumlords will provoke responsible Jewish landlords to speak publicly about the relationship between their religious beliefs and their honesty in business.

In America, religion is a matter for public debate. Religious leaders of all persuasions therefore bear responsibility to speak publicly about the attitudes and behaviors of members of their denominations.