Orthodoxy’s Cancel Culture

A few months ago, a scandal rocked the ḥaredi world. Chaim Walder, a psychotherapist and prolific author of books for children and young adults, was found to have committed sexual assault. Some of his victims were underage, and another was his patient. Walder was not a household name outside of haredi circles, but within them he was not merely a trusted authority, but something more akin to a celebrity. As one astute observer put it, his public persona combined Mr. Rogers and Dr. Seuss. An immensely popular writer admired by young and old, Walder revolutionized ḥaredi children’s literature and wrote an influential weekly newspaper column aimed at adults. In December of last year, after a court of Jewish law publicly confirmed the merits of the charges against him, he killed himself. Hundreds of haredim turned out for his funeral, where distinguished rabbis eulogized him. Countless others from the same communities looked on the public honoring of a disgraced figure with horror.

A recent item in the Jerusalem Post about the aftershocks of the Walder affair got me thinking about one particular detail, and how it relates to current afflictions of American culture. On November 16, when the scandal broke, the Brooklyn-based Eichlers Judaica—one of the largest stores of its kind—released a statement saying that it would no longer carry Walder’s books on its shelves. The decision prompted a comment on Twitter from Elliot Kaufman, the letters editor of the Wall Street Journal: “allegations against the writer [lead to] his books taken off the shelves. A very worrying trend.” He added that he sees “art differently” than those who think books shouldn’t be sold because of their authors’ misdeeds.

Kaufman’s observation should be put in the broader framework of the current culture war. As a general rule, I agree with him. We shouldn’t stop reading Jean-Jacques Rousseau because he abandoned five of his children, or Fyodor Dostoevsky because he was an anti-Semite. We would live in a greatly diminished world if all books written by scoundrels or criminals were removed from the shelves. Sometimes sinners, having seen into life’s shadows, may even make better storytellers.