Ohr chodesh, you are wrong. A heimishe yid might or might not believe in Daas Torah &/or have a strong mesorah. Shticky there’s nothing sad here, because most people know that heimish doesn’t mean superior or more frum. Heimish people have parents or grandparents who came to America from Eastern Europe (Poland, Hungary, Romania, what used to be Czechoslovakia) after WWII. They still preserve some of the behaviors, minhagim, recipes, and Yiddish vocabulary of their ancestors, but they pick and choose which they like best. As an earlier poster pointed out, they may insist on mitzvah tantz as if it is halacha l’Moshe mi’Sinai, but discard most or all of the chassidishe levush (shtreimels are so uncomfortable in the heat). It’s always interesting to notice at weddings how many heimish mitzvah tantz families, have both parents walk the chosson and kallah to the chupa, instead of the two fathers walking the chosson etc as their heimish grandparents most certainly did. In the sense that we realize that the closer the Dor is to maamad Har Sinai the greater it is, and therefore our ancestors’ minhagim are precious and it is our duty to preserve them, we can say that heimishe people are good people. I find it is a beautiful thing to hear children sing zemiros Friday night that their great-grandparents sang before Churban Europa. On the other hand when we notice that heimish people may cling to their potato kugel and galleh with a tenacity not quite matched by their insistence on maintaining the zeideh’s nusach tefillah or attachment to his sefarim, they might make us laugh, or raise an eyebrow here & there.
