In its 40th anniversary edition, the New York magazine was published an article titled “Assimilation and Its Discontents – How success ruined the New York Jew.”
The writer David Samuels had this to say about Chabad:
“… it can be argued that the growth of the Brooklyn-based Lubavitch movement is the most significant development in Jewish communal life in the last 40 years.
“But the success of Lubavitch may equally be understood as a mark of a larger collapse: The Lubavitchers have succeeded by filling the spiritual and institutional void left by the disintegration of the traditional infrastructure of Jewish life in New York City.
“The modern Orthodox community, with its arid pseudo-intellectualism and high-priced schools, is an unlikely wellspring of Jewish revival. Reform and Conservative Judaism look increasingly like relics of the nineteenth and twentieth centures, respectively.
“It’s an open secret in the Jewish community that the galaxy of Manhattan-based Jewish organizations with impressive-sounding names like the World Jewish Congress exist for the most part only on paper.”
I find it quite surprising that they say the traditional infrastructure of Jewish lif has disintigrated in NY. Chabad is not nearly the largest of Orthodox communities in NY. NY is famous for the largest jewish communities aside from chabad.