Restaurants, Schools, Nonessential Business To Shut Down In Midwood, Sheepshead Bay, Gravesend

Southern Brooklyn is getting shut down on Wednesday. Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that several neighborhoods will face closures even more severe than the rest of New York City. Among them are Brooklyn’s Homecrest, Sheepshead Bay, Gravesend, Borough Park, Midwood, Bensonhurst, Flatlands and Gerritsen Beach. Kew Gardens and Far Rockaway are getting shut down as well.

Restaurants won’t be able to offer indoor or outdoor dining. All nonessential businesses, already on the verge of bankruptcy in many cases, will be forced to stop all operations. No more schools, public or private.

Most of these neighborhoods are predominantly Jewish, though non-Jewish Gerritsen and Bensonhurst are also on the list as well due to their proximity. Most Jews in these areas as a whole are not Orthodox.

The treatment of Jewish neighborhoods, which have repeatedly been called out with a reference to their Jewish character, has been in stark contrast to the way the Mayor treated an outbreak in the black community, which at its peak was far more severe than in any majority-Jewish neighborhood. That outbreak was blamed strictly on racism and any other concerns such as rates of obesity and social distancing compliance was dismissed as crazy rantings of white supremacists. Nor did the Mayor (or anyone else) take any action when BLM demonstrations were followed the week after with a sudden large spike of COVID-19 cases across the United States. De Blasio went so far as to declare his pride that his daughter demonstrated, and he even participated in activities that violated social distancing rules to promote his own ideological beliefs.

However, a very minor spike in Brooklyn (see the official graph from nyc.gov above) is now resulting in the City coming down on the Jews – across various, diverse Jewish communities from the ultra-Orthodox to the ‘bacon on Saturday morning’ Jews – with a ton of bricks, along with dog whistles and even directly anti-Jewish statements that make it clear that the Jews are our misfortune.