Conducting yourself as a G-d fearing yid is our obligation, it has nothing to do with the Catskills. You mean to tell me all of the behaviors that allegedly happen/are grossly over reported by the non-Jews only happen upstate? I’m in business and I’ve been screwed more by supposedly frum yidden than non-Jews.
Just to give you examples of some things that happened to my family. My mother-in-law gets pushed around in Boro-Park because she doesn’t look frum. While it’s her decision to shop in Friedman’s on her way home from work and give her business to Jews, does that make it right for a supposedly frum man to shove her out of the way without asking her politely if he can pass? Or the supposedly frum man asking her at a fruit stand on Fort Hamilton Parkway if she was the Polish Shikse that was supposed to meet him at the Park Plaza Hotel? Or maybe it’s the shopkeeper who asks his partner what to charge this shikse, not realizing my mother-in-law is fluent in Yiddish. So there are separate prices? How would we like that if Wal-Mart charged a frum tax?
Please. This all goes back to proper home training. Some love to make up things that are supposedly written in the Torah that are not. But they fail to learn that derech eretz comes beofre Torah. You can be the most learned individual in Tanach, Gemorah, Mishnah, etc. But it’s meaningless if you have no idea how to act. We have an obligation to conduct ourselves properly in this world as we prepare for Moshiach and the next world. That includes how we act with others, whether they are Jewish (regardless of their particular minhagim) or non-Jewish.