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Notes -
Chabad is a wildly influential center of Jewish culture in America. There are Chabad houses on many major college campuses and they influence Jewish culture at large. There are 2900 Chabad “houses” of influence in America. Their official membership is not the extent of their influence. This is something I ought to have clarified in my comment, which is my mistake. Just quoting from the Wikipedia, which you are free to disagree with but hopefully for a reason,
Yes, that Alan Dershowitz. We’re not talking about a few devout Amish-like Jews. Chabad has huge, growing influence on the Jewish world.
Further reading
https://yasha.substack.com/p/the-weird-world-of-chabad-an-influential-a54
https://m.jpost.com/opinion/pew-us-jewry-is-shifting-profoundly-chabad-is-on-rise-669549
Does Chabad influence Jewish beliefs about Gentile souls? That purported inherent Jewish contempt for Gentile souls was the bailey, right? I thought "You can find such awful beliefs in one subsect's founder's centuries-old book" was a small motte to retreat to, but "The sect gives Jewish college kids community centers and only 84% of Jews aren't 'semi-regular' service attendees" is a motte so tightly walled in I can't even find a window from which to see out. Wait until you hear about the Salvation Army.
Even the "network of camps" stuff needs fleshing out. I went to (Christian) religious summer camp at one point as a kid. We never got an "unbaptized babies end up in hell" lesson there, though, despite it being fairly fundamental to the denomination's roots. Do Chabad camp attendees get the adults' "Gentile souls are crummy" lessons, or is "eh, gloss over the creepy stuff in front of the kids" a common trait?
We did get the "Abraham was great for being willing to kill his son when the voices only he could hear told him to" lesson occasionally in (again, Christian) church. Likewise for Noah's Ark and non-Noahs' Watery Graves, though that was treated as more parable than literal. I also reached the "Moses getting chided by God for not quite being genocidal enough" parts when reading the Bible by myself. There is indeed lots of really awful stuff in actual Jewish scripture! The catch is that it got eagerly adopted by billions of Christians, too, because "form moral judgments independently" and "treat all human life as equally sacred, yes even some of those outsiders" haven't been very popular among any groups. That Chabad book actually predates the last time some Christian authorities hanged a man for heresy! ("according to Ripoll, it was not necessary to hear Mass in order to save one's soul from damnation"? String him up, for that?) The claim that Judaism has "moral quandaries" is impossible to argue against, but suggesting that it's somehow special in this respect can't be done without ignoring all other human ideology, and then picking out one subsect to speak for a whole is like a willful rejection of all the tragicomedy of religious belief, Jewish belief in particular.
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